REVOLUTIONISTS WITHOUT WHOOP-DE-DOO

During nearly three years as Britain's rulers, Britain's Labor Party has given up great chunks of empire--India, Burma, Ceylon. At home it has nationalized transport, coal, electric power, aviation, overseas communication and the Bank of England. It has also raised taxes and cut rations, and its popularity has taken a definite, although possibly not decisive, slump. Last week the Labor Party met at Scarborough in its annual conference to take stock of its accomplishments and chart its further aims. From Scarborough TIME Senior Editor Max Ways reported:

The sense of power and glory that was Britain and might be Britain still is not in these men. They seem too humble even for middleclass, easygoing Scarborough, and much too modest for its Grand Hotel. Yet these modest men indubitably believe themselves the architects of a greater Britain, followers of a loftier vision than Pitt or Disraeli or Churchill had.

They are constructing a workers' state, or more precisely, a trade union state. Even this is not quite precise in contemporary U.S. terms. Though the sun never sets over the lands to which their sway extends, the Labor Party looks inward. The fate of Burma disturbs it less than a housewife's complaint, and the housewife will go unheard if a shop steward is discontented.

But beneath the double covering of trade union caution and British restraint, a fire smolders. Again & again at Scarborough it flashed forth in spite of restrained notes struck by Emanuel Shinwell, the conference chairman, and Herbert Morrison, Labor's Leader of the House of Commons. Morrison called for a period of "consolidation." He indicated that party bosses were going slow on further nationalization of industry.

The delegates were not happy about all this. They did not deny their leader's assurance that British workers are better off than they had been before. But they had a rankling feeling that, in the words of one delegate, "the standard of living of those who do not have to work has not dropped in the least." Envy is not the most attractive characteristic of the British Labor Party, but it is one of the strongest. How to leave the private enterprise sector of British economy its profit motive--and at the same time get more production from British workers--was the basic problem which the Labor Party faced but did not solve at Scarborough.

"Employers in Fear." Day after day, Clement Attlee sat slouched on his spine, taking in five-minute speeches from scores of delegates, speeches for the most part well organized, lucid and obviously sincere. Behind him on the platform sat Mrs. Attlee, knitting. She likes short speeches, even when her husband makes them. Sir Stafford Cripps, whom some call an economic dictator, sat modestly behind a row of executive committee members--he is not a member of the executive--and was not invited to speak. Nor did he ask to take part.

"Nye" Bevan, leader of the militant socializers inside the Cabinet, was a very good boy at Scarborough. Bevan, who has done some wailing himself about the government's "go slow" policy, deplored the tendency to turn the conference into "a wailing wall." He said that the principle of socialization all by itself had accomplished wonders. The steel industry was booming along famously, he said, because "the workers live in hope of nationalization and the employers in fear of it."

"You Could Hear a Pin Drop." The atmosphere of the balloting for the Party executive was one of almost complete relaxation. Competition was keen but there was no overt canvassing for votes, no nominating speeches, no whoop-de-doo such as attends U.S. political conventions. When "scrutineers," as the men who count the ballots are called, walked into the lounge, not a head turned, and nobody dashed up to buttonhole them. An American who remembered glassy-eyed girls screaming "We want Willkie'' in 1940, or the mass hysteria when-Roosevelt came to Franklin Field in 1936, or William Jennings Bryan holding a prayer meeting on the floor of the Democratic Convention in 1924, had a hard time getting his bearings. In this revolution you could hear a pin drop.

On the conference's last day Mr. & Mrs. Attlee rose from their window table in the Grand Hotel dining room, and Mrs. Attlee started to walk away without the old mayonnaise jar of sugar that they had brought with them. Mr. Attlee did not forget. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and First Lord of the Treasury) clutched the jar as he walked from the room.

Surely, this was not Pitt's Britain, nor Disraeli's, nor Churchill's. It was the Britain of men who minded the sugar, of careful, decent, human men like Clement Attlee. It was the Britain of the people, made in their image, perhaps on too small a scale, but a clear likeness of their small faults and their great, modest strength.

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