The Iron Chancellor

For the first time in almost ten years of war and austerity, the lights of London, including Piccadilly's advertising signs (see cut), were turned up to their prewar glory. Thousands of Londoners cheered, and moppets who had never seen the show murmured with delight. This was a happy prelude to an otherwise depressing week for Britain. In the House of Commons, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps presented his 1949-50 budget. Under his severe guidance, Britain had sweated, toiled, and made a sensational recovery (TIME, March 28). Now, the nation felt, it was due for something more than the lights of London. Britons wanted lower taxes, continuation of cheap food, cheaper clothes and tobacco.

The only cheers in the House of Commons were voiced when a white china pitcher, containing orange juice, was carried in for the abstemious Chancellor to sip during his long speech. In the expectant silence that followed, the House could hear the click of the key as Cripps unlocked his dispatch case--the same battered red leather case which had held Britain's budgets since Gladstone.

Cripps began to read in a firm, precisely modulated voice, and listeners' faces lost the look of pleased anticipation. The news that the Chancellor brought forth from the dispatch case was almost all bad.

End of a Dream. Britain had a surplus of -L-350 million to show for 1948, but Cripps explained that he could not actually spend this money. It had all been used up, mostly to wipe out some of the huge national debts. The biggest items in the budget were expenditures for defense and cradle-to-the-grave social security. Cripps smashed the rosy Socialist dream that the "welfare state" could be paid for entirely by soaking the rich. The rich were now all but soaked, and it was Britain's plain people who would have to pay for their "free" medical and social services. They would pay through high taxation and higher prices.

Teetotaler Cripps made only one cheering concession: a reduction in the retail price of beer by a penny a pint. But food prices, he said, could be held down only by giving higher government subsidies to food-growers and dealers--and this he was in no position to do. Instead, he announced that meat prices would have to go up 7-c- a pound, cheese 7-c-, butter 3-c-, margarine 2-c-. Matches and telephone calls would also cost more.

Said he: "When I hear people speaking of reducing taxation, and, at the same time, see the costs of the social services rising rapidly, in response very often to the demands of the same people, I sometimes rather wonder whether they appreciate to the full the old adage that 'we cannot have our cake and eat it!'"

Writing on the Wall. Labor M.P.s, thinking of the 1950 general elections, groaned or sat stunned. One Laborite mourned: "It's the end of the revolution." A sarcastic Tory dubbed Cripps "The Iron Chancellor."

All British politicians recognized Cripps's courage in going to bat for an unpopular but economically necessary budget. But there was no getting away from the fact that it represented a crisis in Labor Party affairs, as was promptly shown by the licking Labor took in the London County Council elections (see above). For years, Laborite leaders had appeased the workers' demands for higher wages by pointing out that the Socialist government was at least keeping prices low. Now there was bound to be trouble. Said Socialist M.P. Mark Hewitson of the powerful General and Municipal Workers' Union: "I give a warning. The writing is on the wall and the footprints are on the sand. The government has either got to help or else."

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