Elections

"Was there ever such a lovely morn as this? Misery melts and frustration is finished. Mr. Attlee at last has named the day. The joyful day. The day of Socialism's funeral. The day when six years of miserable misrule will be gone forever ... Glory, glory, hallelujah!"

Thus last week London's Tory Daily Express greeted the long-awaited, long-deferred decision of Prime Minister Clement Attlee to call autumn elections. Britain will elect a new Parliament on Oct. 25.

Crisis Mounts. Few Britons, Conservative or Socialist, shared the Express' mood of jubilee. But practically all agreed that Tory chances for a return to power were good. Since the close vote of 1950, Labor has clung to office by a fingernail parliamentary majority (at one time as narrow as three). For months, Attlee and his ministers have been watching the gathering clouds of a new economic crisis. The old demon, the dollar gap, is back. The coal mines cannot supply the demand for fuel. Electric power shortages are developing. Millions of Britons face another dreary winter of insufficient coal for their fireplaces. The cost of living is rising toward a new high.

Economic difficulties are compounded by the government's troubles abroad, e.g., the loss of oil and prestige in Iran. Dissension rocked the Labor Party. The rebel Welshman Aneurin Bevan and other left-wing Laborites cried out against putting rearmament before social welfare.

Last week the pressures seemed to converge on Clem Attlee. Over the transatlantic phone, Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell (attending the Washington and Ottawa conferences of the Big Three and NATO Council) told the Prime Minister that the dollar situation looked blacker than ever. Then came news that Nye Bevan and his party rebels were publishing a pamphlet, "Going Our Way," inciting trade unions to break with Attlee's policies. Finally Attlee announced: "I consider that the time has now come to ask the electors for a renewal of confidence in the government ... I have therefore asked His Majesty the King, for whose speedy restoration to full health we all pray, to grant dissolution of Parliament . . ."

Brawl Begins. The Tories will not propose to undo any of Labor's nationalization measures except steel. They will concentrate their fire on rising prices, bureaucracy, the strangling of business initiative, bungling in foreign affairs. The Labor Party will claim that, if elected, the Tories will push Britain back into the worst days of capitalism. Labor will also claim that the Tories stand for a more dangerous foreign policy; Labor may benefit from the fact that a majority of the British people identifies Churchill's name with war.

At week's end, before the Scottish Labor Party conference at North Berwick, Attlee pleaded for party unity (later in the week, Bevan promised to "close ranks," support the government during the campaign). Attlee decried his Conservative opponent Winston Churchill as "a very old-fashioned politician."

In London, the old (76 years old) Tory battler gathered with party leaders to plot the strategy they hope will send them back to the country's helm. Winnie was in fine, old-fashioned form. He told Britons that the Conservatives could not promise a quick cure for the country's ills. "The road will be hard and uphill," he said. "After a rake's progress . . . the resulting evils cannot be cured by a parliamentary vote or a stroke of the administrative pen . . ."

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