Plenty of Sleeping Pills

Captain Harry Crookshank, Tory M.P. for Gainsborough, rose last week in the House of Commons and described the condition of Britain. Said he: "There is muddle in defense, muddle in groundnuts, jmddle in newsprint, muddle in coal, muddle in housing, and now the greatest muddle of all--meat. 'Muddle, muddle toil and muddle' is [the government's] motto. The trouble is that these witches somewhere on the Whitehall heath cannot go on to say, 'Fire burn and cauldron bubble,' because there is a fuel muddle as well."

Some of Britain's sorry state was not the government's fault, and some was. That it was a sorry state, none could deny.

Electricity and gas were cut, advertising lights were out, hundreds of passenger trains were suspended, 20,000 dockers at three ports were on strike, 8,000 people had died since Jan. 1 from an influenza epidemic, and the King, his wartime savings exhausted, had to ask the government to take over -L-40,000 of his expenses.

Muddle in Defense. On the face of the record, Prime Minister Attlee's government is moving vigorously on the rearmament front. Tory critics, however, insist that the defense reality is not as good as the appearance. Last week they criticized as inadequate a government plan to call up reservists for 15-day refresher courses.

Under the surface lay a deep split in the Labor Party on the rearmament issue. A few of its members were proCommunist, more were anti-American, and still more were bemused by the pacifism which had a longtime influence on British Christian Socialism. Last week 19 Labor M.P.s signed motions calling for reconsideration of plans to arm Germany and for a world peace drive by Britain.

The Labor Party split was symbolized by the fact that Harold Lawrence, running for the House of Commons in a by-election at Bristol, is an all-out, no-arms, no-armor pacifist and the official candidate of the Labor Party, which is committed to rearmament. Attlee refused to send Lawrence the usual letter of endorsement, but his approval by the party executive committee was not revoked.

This week Attlee may face a vote on the defense issue which he might not be able to win with Labor votes alone. However, the Tories can scarcely vote against him on this point.

Muddle in Newsprint. Because of inept bulk-buying in international markets Britain's newsprint stocks have fallen beneath the wartime low. The government did not allocate dollars for Canadian newsprint until Canada, after being rebuffed by Britain in favor of Scandinavian countries, had sold its stocks elsewhere. Last week British newspapers were ordered to cut newsprint consumption 5%, reducing six-page papers to four pages once a week. A later order cut magazine supplies 20%.

Raged the Daily Express: "The British people have become the worst informed in the world . . . The government has disrupted, disorganized and almost destroyed the news services of the country."

Muddle in Steel. The government's determination to push through steel nationalization at all costs enraged the Tories.

Winston Churchill made a last desperate attempt to halt the Feb. 15 takeover of iron and steel plants. He moved: "That this House, in view of the record production attained by the iron and steel industry and the urgent needs of the rearmament program, is of the opinion that . . . nationalization ... is not in the public interest and should be reversed." Churchill called steel nationalization "a deed of partisan aggression . . . unpatriotic." A general election "cannot be long delayed, however tightly and even passionately ministers may cling to their offices."

Prime Minister Attlee, confident of labor unity on this issue, slumped like a doodling dormouse in his seat. He put in a junior minister to wind up the debate for the government. The Tory motion was defeated, 308 to 298.

Muddle in Meat. Attlee was not so confident of his majority the following night when the Tories drove home their attack on the meat shortage. The Laborites squirmed, because their unity on this point was false and their consciences were burning. The day before, in a caucus of the Parliamentary Labor Party, they had turned on Food Minister Maurice Webb and berated him for incompetence. What were they to tell their meat-hungry constituents, they asked the luckless Webb.

The meeting became so explosive that Attlee stepped to Webb's defense, bringing with him the bogeyman that keeps all Laborites awake--the ghost of Ramsay Macdonald. Would Labor split on meat, and go down to defeat as Macdonald's divided party had in 1931? The caucus was stilled into grumbling acquiescence.

In that mood they heard Crookshank, who is chairman of the Tory Party food committee, tear into them. He pointed out that in 1938 inmates of workhouses got three times as much meat as the maximum ration today. Laborites writhed as he ticked off some of the sources from which Britain's meat now comes: "Cargoes of goats arriving at Hull . . . reindeer meat from Lapland . . ." The Tory benches roared when he exposed "a considerable [government] export scheme of English meat to the U.S. ... Canada and--the Argentine!" Cried Crookshank: "In a world under Socialist administration, the U.S. sends coal to Newcastle and Britain sends meat to the Argentine."

R. A. Butler wound up the debate for the Tories. He said that the Labor ministers were "clinging . . . like huddled and bedraggled limpets to every rock, exposed to every wind and gale that blows . . . Finally, they will be swept away by one of the most human of all elemental forces--the desire to eat and the desire to live."

Nevertheless, every single Laborite present trooped into the division lobby, and the Tory motion was beaten, 306 to 298.

Heroine in Teddington. The vote did not still the clamorous disgust of the country. Even what little meat was available caused trouble. Miss Mary Olive D'Oyly, for 14 years a butcher in working-class Teddington, 93 miles from London, bustled angrily to Westminster with 32 housewife customers to see her M.P. On a previous visit she had taken a leg of ewe mutton. It was so fat, she complained, that nobody would buy it.

The Master of the Worshipful Company of Butchers applauded Miss D'Oyly: "Your courage is a lesson to us men . . ." Added the British Housewives' League: "How brave of you to take that dreadful ewe meat to the House of Commons!"

Cartoonist Vicky last week recalled Shakespeare's description in King Henry V of the night before the battle of Agincourt, as Frenchmen stood around camp fires discussing the prowess that their English foes drew from a beef diet (see cartoon). Vicky did not think it necessary to remind Britons of the Duke of Orleans' comment: "Ay, but these English are shrewdly* out of beef."

So Britain, angry and unbowed, lurched along through the Great Muddle. The nation had survived far greater crises. The unique feature of this one was that it seemed to have no focus, no great principle at stake, no end. If the clamor got too great, Attlee could always jettison Webb and agree to the Argentine meat price. Socialism was an admirable instrument for rationing discomfort and deadening pain.

Said a British doctor last week: "The strain of living conditions is making people take sleeping tablets like a second vegetable."

And, after all, sleeping tablets were free under the National Health Service.

*I.e., pointedly, markedly.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.