"After the Flesh"

To the 1,255 delegates at the Labor Party's 46th annual conference last week, seaside Margate looked like a dream coming true for every British working man and his family. The sparkling air smelled as clean as lavender, and the tulips were out in golden profusion. Margate was something every Briton should have more of, and wasn't that what the Labor Party was after?

Or was it? The delegates at Margate did not seem to know just what they wanted. Was it more power for the workers, or more planning by the state? The two visions conflicted more sharply than ever. If any people could achieve "democratic socialism," Britons could; but British Laborites, for all their genius for compromise, were caught in a somber contradiction that not even Margate's salty breezes could blow away.

Old Business. A minor sample of the dilemma was presented by salty old (75) Mrs. E. M. White of Radlett, an old-line suffragette, who rose to remind the delegates that Laborites had been advocating equal pay for women for the last quarter of a century. Mrs. White had to stand on tiptoe to reach the microphone, but when Chairman Philip Noel-Baker flashed his red warning signal she stayed on the rostrum as tenaciously as a suffragette chained to a Downing Street railing. "People who accept principles without applying them can be called unprincipled," said Mrs. White. "Don't have any nonsense about embarrassing the Government. . . . We are not to be a herd of yes men and women."

The Labor bosses on the platform agreed with Mrs. White in principle, but pointed out that the national planning would be strained by the -L-50,000,000 required to raise women's wages to the level of men's. But Mrs. White's recommendation was carried, 2,310,000 to 598,000. Contented, Mrs. White toddled back to her boardinghouse, put on her slippers and puffed away at a pipe filled with her favorite tobacco, Parson's Pleasure.*

New Business. The real trouble, democratic socialism's fundamental flaw, was exposed when fat Will Lawther, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, demanded, with his chins quivering, that the Government set higher wages for miners and exempt them from income taxes. Another resolution from the planning-minded side demanded that the Government "regulate the distribution of manpower between essential and nonessential industries and . . . exercise the strictest control over the entry of men and women into non-productive employment."

Up to the rostrum marched Arthur Deakin, who succeeded Ernest Bevin as general secretary of the huge (1,250,000 members) Transport and General Workers' Union. There was fiery anger in his flict which wrecked Karl Marx's First International.*

This planning v. freedom conflict added fuel to the long-smoldering ill will between trade unionists and those they call the "bloody intellectuals." The intellectuals--Britain's planners whose end-all is the Socialist State--have carefully avoided roiling the trade unionists, because Britain's unions supply about three-fourths of the Labor Party's members.

The planners know that they cannot blueprint an economy for Britain without "planning" labor as well as industry. But at Margate they ducked the broader issue raised by Deakin, and acceped the miners' resolution although many an old trade unionist shook his head and glowered.

No Business? Next day brought a more sensational but not more important fight. Ernest Bevin arrived at Margate to defend his foreign policies. But first he had to hear a couple of "bloody intellectuals" criticize him. Bucktoothed, Communist-lined Konni Zilliacus and tall, handsome Richard Howard Stafford Grossman were unusually restrained: they did not make an all-out attack on Bevin to his face. Ernie Bevin, a massive man, sat impassively like a Buddha, his slanting eyes glinting behind his heavy glasses, and smoke curling from a cigaret.

Finally, he rose ponderously and waded into a patient review of foreign policy. He touched on the Truman Doctrine: "I think America did right to step in" when Britain stepped out of Greece. He turned on the Grossman group of rebels, punched his meaty hands together, turned his voice into an angry shout. When he was in the U.S. getting wheat for Britain, he said, "I was stabbed in the back." He added: "I grew up in the trade unions. I was never used to this kind of thing."

Margate last week was also aware of two non-members of the Labor Party who might gain in strength if democratic socialism failed to work. One was Winston Churchill, to whom the Tory Margate town council last week voted the freedom of the city. The other was Arthur Horner, the little (5 ft. 3 in.) general secretary of the Mineworkers' Union. An avowed Communist, Horner is all for a Government "wages policy." Last week Herbert Morrison, busily trying to conciliate the warring Laborites, ran into Horner on the seafront. Morrison wagged a finger and said archly: "Arthur, you've no business in Margate." Retorted Horner: "You'll see."

What would be the outcome of these broils between materialists of various sects and persuasions? Perhaps the best prophecy was uttered by Labor's Prime Minister Clement Attlee as he rose on Whitsun morning in the old church of St. John the Baptist, overlooking Margate. In the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Attlee was asked to read the lesson. In his light but curiously penetrating voice, Attlee intoned: "For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die: but if ye through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."

*Britain's Ministers no longer smoke at Cabinet meetings, an earnest to their pleas for Britons generally to cut down on smoking (TIME, April 28). At Margate most of them puffed away, but Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton tried to set a dollar-saving example by refraining. He had an embarrassing moment. When a young girl tried to hand him four packs of cigarets, he waved her away, said: "Not here, not now--see me outside."

*The two bewhiskered giants of 19th Century socialism, Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, split over the issue of compulsory state planning v. the free action of voluntary associations of workers. Said Bakunin in 1872: "Marx is an authoritarian and centralizing communist. He wants what we want: the complete triumph of economic and social equality, but he wants it in the state and through the state power, through the dictatorship of a very strong and, so to say, despotic provisional government, that is, by the negation of liberty. . . . We want the reconstruction of society . . . not from above downward . . . but from below upwards. . . ."

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