Dole Rout

Doul Rout

When a British workman bothers to find out who is Minister of Labor he discovers handsome, rich and epigrammatic young Major Oliver Stanley, second son of the huge-paunched, sporting 17th Earl of Derby. Major Stanley's poised and gracious mother is Bedchamber Woman to Her Majesty the Queen. His beauteous wife is Maureen, eldest daughter of the Marquess and Marchioness of Londonderry, social backers and promoters of Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald. To a Laborite the mere fact that aristocratic Major Stanley, a successful ex-stockbroker, was made Minister of Labor last year brands National Government a sham. To Conservatives nothing seems more right and proper. They assume that Oliver Stanley is briskly, but not too briskly, on his way to becoming Prime Minister.* Last week he stumbled, and swank Mayfair was pained. In Sheffield fierce riots broke out, all because the new Minister of Labor was not quite clicking.

Any stockbroker can see clearly, as Major Stanley does, the major defect in Britain's Dole. It has been administered by petty local boards. These are under ceaseless pressure from the local jobless. Obviously it would be more scientific, and it should be cheaper, to have National Government administer the Dole on a uniform, nationwide basis.

Last year a decision to act on this premise was taken not by Major Stanley, then Minister of Transport, but by National Government themselves. They steamrollered through Parliament last summer the new Unemployment Act, easily flattening Labor opposition. Sir Henry Betterton, then Minister of Labor, became Chairman of the Unemployment Assistance Board, provided for in the new Act. Presumably he would take care of any vexatious problems which might arise. It was safe to slip in as Minister of Labor the admirable young stockbroker who is Derby's son and Londonderry's son-in-law. Sir Henry Betterton, having made way for Major Stanley, was rewarded by His Majesty with the Barony of Rushcliffe.

"Sacrilege!" In the House of Commons last week Major Stanley was obliged to execute as gracefully as possible an excruciatingly awkward and painful maneuver. National Government were supposed to be advancing with their new Dole program on all fronts. The gallant Major had orders to sound a general retreat.

With unruffled Eton candor Major Stanley rose to tell the House that Britain's new Dole system, after one month's trial, has proved so unpopular with Britain's proletariat that he found himself obliged to suspend it here and now. Brave Major Stanley went further, admitted himself completely routed. In cases where the new Dole has reduced payments to individuals, he said, they would not only be upped back to their former scale but Government would give them the sum withheld last month. In cases where the new Dole upped payments, recipients not only keep what they have been given but continue to receive their increased Dole during the indefinite period of "suspension" decreed by Major Stanley. "We are dealing not merely with business or finance or intangible things," said he suavely, "but with men and women."

Last week the Rt. Rev. Rt. Hon. Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram, Bishop of London, addressed the Anglican Church Assembly thus: "I talked the other day with six of the Reddest Communists in Poplar [London borough]. Their revolution was only skin deep; all they wanted was a square deal! In dealing with these people we are dealing with men of respect and courtesy."

The Bishop then formally condemned "our economic system," laid before the Assembly a report on economic and social conditions with special reference to the Dole. "I had meetings with the leading economists of the City and you never saw such men for disagreeing!" declared His Lordship with vehemence. "I learned more from the unemployed themselves than from all the economists in the world!"

Chimed in the Rt. Rev. Richard Godfrey Parsons, Bishop of Southwark, referring to Britain's wholesale destruction of millions of herring to raise prices: "Food under our system has been flung back into the sea. I say that is virtually a sacrilege, because it is flinging God's gifts back into His face. There must come a change in the system!" However, the Rt. Rev. James Geoffrey Gordon, Bishop Suffragan of Jarrow, felt that such talk "would seriously impair the Church's credit."

Up and down the land Anglican churchmen had come out with the proletariat for what they called a square deal, and National Government, frightened last week, were trying to give it in hot haste. None too soon. Day after Major Stanley suspended the hated new Dole regulations, famed Sheffield's silver-plating and cutlery-fashioning proletariat ran amuck around the City Hall, flung brickbats through the windows when the Sheffield City Council refused to receive a delegation of unemployed demanding still more Dole, beat up nine policemen.

Significance. Canada's Dole-hungry proletariat has just terrified Canada's rich, pious and Conservative Premier Richard Bedford Bennett (a personal friend of King George) into turning his political coat, emerging as a New Deal radical (TIME, Jan. 14). Just how frightened were the Conservative leaders of National Government in London last week? They were not frightened. Neither was the average British Islander. In tradition, which Canada lacks, Britain is strong. Part of that tradition is that she is ruled by "The Families"; that even great pieces of Socialism like the Dole will be administered by gentlemen.

The blow of last week's reverse to National Government was especially heavy to young Tory statesmen like Oliver Stanley, whose family has provided statesmen since 1385. If even the Church of England is plumping for a "Square Deal" in 1935, where will these young Tories be 20 years hence, when their elders of today lie in honored graves? Just now two other young Mayfair statesmen comprise with Major Stanley the outstanding trinity of coming non-Laborite leaders:

Trinity. Aging Tory leader Stanley Baldwin, Lord President of the Council, resigned his other sinecure. Lord Privy Seal, in December 1933 to bestow it upon 37-year-old Anthony Eden, even more of a young Tory ace than Oliver Stanley. Captain Eden asks to be called "Mr. Eden" in ambitious deference to the proletariat. (Swank friends call him not Anthony but "Antony.") He is a descendant of Lord Baltimore, who condescended to found the State of Maryland.

Today Antony condescends at Geneva without loss of dignity to all sorts of people from journalists to Greeks. His career is Peace. Getting his start as Parliamentary private secretary to Nobel Peaceknight Sir Austen Chamberlain, Mr. Eden has made himself indispensable to both Prime Minister MacDonald and Foreign Minister Sir John Simon, a great lawyer who hates the League's burbling atmosphere. Last week swank cynics were saying that "Antony is safe whatever happens. Somebody from Eton will always have to make Peace." They recalled that Adolf Hitler has shaken up every Ministry except the aristocratic Wilhelmstrasse (German Foreign Office), that Lenin dared make no proletarian his Foreign Minister, picked Count Chicherin.

Mr. Eden is one year younger than Major Stanley, 38, but the National Government's third young ace, Major Leslie Hore-Belisha, a National Liberal, conceals from Who's Who both his Jewish father and his age, 36. Inferior!ty-complexed Major Hore-Belisha calls himself truthfully the "son of Lady Hore." His defensive mechanisms are magnificent. Sheer push and brains made him president of the Oxford Union, traditional springboard to No. 10. As a rising M. P. he wrote for Viscount Rothermere, buttering with press praise Mr. Eden, Major Stanley and Prime Minister MacDonald's sons, both in virtual eclipse today. Last year when Major Stanley resigned the Ministry of Transport, everyone assuming that it led nowhere, Major Hore-Belisha jumped in and as Minister of Transport has turned traffic problems into screaming headlines ever since (TIME, Sept. 10, et seq.). Cold statistics, released last week, proved that irate motorists have now smashed 35% of all the hated, traffic-slowing "Belisha Beacon" globes installed by the Major throughout London. His inspiration to replace glass globes with iron brought protests last week from borough councils that "numerous individuals are discoloring and defacing the unbreakable globes."

If motorists were the proletariat, Jew Hore-Belisha would definitely be through. Instead he emerges shrewdly as the champion of pedestrians, seemed last week to have almost as good a thing in them as Mr. Eden has in Peace.

*Reported United Press in 1932: "He has been doing brilliant things since 1925, but found it necessary to slow down, lest he arrive too early on the threshold of No. 10 Downing Street.''

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