Decline or Fall (Contd.)

Topic A in the House of Commons last week was still the colonial empire. Entrenched at the dispatch box, Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton faced and beat down a series of Labor attacks that were marked by their concern for the welfare of native peoples, by their antipathy toward Lyttelton and by their astonishing lack of preparation.

Lyttelton announced the first constructive program to remove the causes of Kenya's bitter war against the Mau Mau. Britain will allocate $14 million to finance a far-reaching development plan for African agriculture. The money will do far less good today, after 14 months of bloodshed, than it might have done a year ago, but at least the government's plan looked to the future. The Labor opposition, by contrast, looked only to the past.

Hands Tied. Shocked by Lyttelton's disclosure that in the last eleven months 2,821 Mau Mau--and Mau Mau "suspects"--have been killed and only 980 captured, the Socialists last week condemned Whitehall's "Shoot to kill" order against the terrorists. Ex-Grenadier Guardsman Lyttelton repulsed them in character: "I am not yet prepared . . . to allow British soldiers in these forest areas to . . . fight entirely with their hands tied behind their backs."

The Socialists got more of the same when they tried to censure. Lyttelton for his drastic action last October in forestalling a Communist coup in British Guiana. Both sides of the House had applauded his statement that there is no room in the Commonwealth for a Communist state, but the Socialists questioned his wisdom in suspending the tiny colony's six-months-old constitution. They muffed their case badly: James Chuter Ede, onetime Laborite Home Secretary, made a memorable blooper by referring to Guiana as an "island."

Mortal Danger. Lyttelton's defense was simple and eloquent: "The security of the colony was in mortal danger . . . Action, immediate action had to take place." The House sustained Lyttelton, 304 to 271; and, despite a three-line party whip, two Laborites broke discipline by refusing to vote against him.

Beaten and humiliated, the Socialists would have been prudent to retire to do some badly needed homework on colonial geography. But they pressed the fight, switching the battleground to the Protectorate of Uganda, where Lyttelton fortnight ago dethroned King Mutesa II (TIME, Dec. 14). The Socialists tabled a motion of censure: "That this House expresses its grave disquiet at the handling of affairs in Africa." Unless the Socialists developed a better brief, the Tories stood to win this one too, even though there is in Great Britain grave disquiet at the turn of affairs in Africa.

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