Red & White

_ Britain's Labor Party went to the hustings in 1945 with an election program titled, "Let Us Face the Future." Hopeful Britons swept Clement Attlee and the Laborites in with a 195-seat majority in Parliament. Last week, as Britain prepared for another general election, agile Laborite publicity men were right on hand with a new manifesto. The title this time: "Let Us Win Through Together." One of the authors wryly admitted, "It's a little long, but we needed to say all that."

The manifesto, a twelve-page pamphlet, had a red & white cover and a red & white program inside. Doctrinaire Socialists were promised a little more nationalization: sugar, cement, cold storage facilities and water supply (about a third of Britain's water systems are still privately owned). But the emphasis was on welfare, not state ownership. The greater part of the manifesto talked pleasantly of full employment, child welfare, and the "full and free development of every individual person."

The manifesto was obviously intended to catch the middle-class voters, who probably will decide the election. The Tory press, however, was not soothed by Labor restraint. "LAND TAKE-OVER FEARED" was the Daily Express' interpretation of a Labor proposal for government cultivation of unused private land. To Lord Rother-mere's Daily Mail, the Labor Party manifesto was "a blank check on nationalization"; to his Evening News, it was a "pink overall," a "pink pig in a poke" or "a great red wolf."

At week's end from Chartwell, his country home in Kent, Winston Churchill delivered the first major speech of the Conservative campaign. Just as Labor appealed to the middle class, so Churchill sought to win over the workers. He first offered his own definition of Socialism: "a mistaken political philosophy and largely obsolete mode of thought, [leading to an] all-powerful state which owns everything, which plans everything, which distributes everything." Then he laid down a red & white summary of Tory policy:

". . . The scheme of society for which [we] stand is the establishment and maintenance of a basic standard of life and labor below which a man or woman, however old or weak, shall not be allowed to fall. The food they receive, the prices they have to pay for basic necessities, the homes they live in, their employment must be the first care of the state and must have priority over all other peacetime needs. Once we have made that standard secure, we propose to set the nation free as quickly as possible from the controls and restrictions which now beset our daily life."

The voters would have to go behind the opening statements to find out where the Conservatives began and the Socialists left off.

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