Sweep to Labor

Bustling back to London the Lords and Commons met this week for their short (ten-day) session* buzzing with excitement over the results of municipal elections last week in 346 boroughs throughout England and Wales. Time & again municipal polls have shown how His Majesty's subjects would vote in their next national election for members of the House of Commons. Five years ago, in November 1928, bumbling conservative Stanley Baldwin seemed fairly secure as Prime Minister, but the Labor Party scored a net gain of 188 municipal council seats and six months later Laborite James Ramsay MacDonald won Labor's greatest victory in the general election of May 1929 and sent Mr. Bald win packing. Again three years ago the tide was seen to turn when Labor suffered a net loss of 80 municipal seats in November 1930. Scot MacDonald turned his political coat with the tide, joined forces with Conservative Baldwin, announced himself a "National Laborite" (for which he was expelled by the Labor Party) and has carried on as Prime Minister of the "National" (actually Conservative) Government since the Conservative landslide in the last general election (TIME, Nov. 9, 1931). Municipal returns last week showed a net gain for Labor of 242 seats--the largest municipal gain in Labor history, though it did not erase Labor's loss of 341 seats two years ago. Cities and towns completely controlled by Labor increased last week from ten to 25, including cutlery-famed Sheffield. Supposing Labor to be definitely resurgent--that is, supposing Great Britain to have a Labor Government within the next two years--who would step into the shoes of un-laborite James Ramsay MacDonald? Recently that brilliant British Press Pundit Henry Wickham Steed dismissed as inconsequential all the Labor leaders "because none of them seems to have the stuff of leadership in him."* But inside the Party a brisk battle to capture Labor's executive control from paunchy, do-nothing "Uncle Arthur" Henderson and doddering "Old George" Lansbury is being waged by brisk and daring Sir Stafford Cripps, an avowed disciple in Britain of the methods of President Roosevelt. When the President in effect tore up the gold clause in U. S. obligations, Sir Stafford turned the implications of this move into a popular argument that the Empire should repudiate its War debt to the U. S. ''President Roosevelt is a remarkable man!" cried Sir Stafford. "The United States has given us a lead regarding the way when a country is in financial difficulties it can get out of them." As a matter of fact Sir Stafford anticipated in Great Britain by a few months the system used by Washington's "Brain Trust" to obtain from Congress powers for President Roosevelt so sweeping that they have been called dictatorial. Labor, according to Sir Stafford as early as last January, must use any victory which the Party may win in a general election to jam through the House of Commons a sweeping "Emergency Powers Bill." If, as he expects, the House of Lords should balk at this, his Majesty must then be "ad- vised" (i. e. compelled) to create enough new peers to pass the bill and give Labor's premier Rooseveltian powers. Knowing Britain's upper classes for what they are--hard and sturdy nuts to crack--Sir Stafford fears class war over] his Emergency Powers Act, urges the British proletariat to be prepared to resist "lest British Fascism come like a thief in the night!" Nationally ready for class war, Labor's Cripps is internationally a pacifist. He induced the last Labor Congress to adopt a motion pledging the Party to refuse to support any British Govern-ment which might make war and to stop hostilities if necessary by organizing a general strike (TIME, Oct. 16). In all recent British by-elections Labor candidates have drawn their loudest cheers by restating variations of this anti-war pledge and Sir Stafford loomed last week as easily the Party's most promising comer.

*After which they will adjourn so that George V can open Parliament on Nov. 21 with the Cabinet's autumnal declaration of policy, the Speech from the Throne.

*Pundit Steed, observing that "Ramsay MacDonald . . . may be unaware how subtly and swiftly public trust in him has ebbed during the past twelvemonth" and that "Stanley Baldwin's . . . passion for self-effacement and appearance of political indolence estrange and dishearten the younger conservatives," concluded: "At no time in the past 40 years have the British people been so leaderless as they are today.''

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