Surgery Before Diagnosis?

To mounting speculation that Britain is headed for a general election this fall, Tories and Laborites last week gave the country a lively foretaste of the campaign to come. During a two-day House of Commons debate on Dr. Richard Beeching's drastic reorganization program for the nation's ailing, anachronistic railway system (TIME, April 5), Labor, which decried the government's plans as "political" window dressing, set up a crescendo of jeers that thoroughly rattled the Tory advocate, Transport Minister Ernest Marpies. But the noise hardly concealed the fact that most Laborites wholeheartedly favor modernizing the state-owned railways, which cost the nation $500 million in 1962 alone. They claim that Beeching's plan, which includes closing down one third of the whole system, may do more harm than good, unless it is made an integral part of a new, overall transport policy in which Britain's congested highways and inadequate air services could be expanded to absorb the extra traffic.

After admitting that Beeching's report is "a valuable contribution." Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson protested: "Surgery has preceded diagnosis." One of the most serious side effects, he pointed out, is Beeching's proposal to cut off service in big, mostly depressed areas of Wales and Scotland, where the government is trying desperately to stimulate new industry.

Wilson's main worry is that labor may ruin Labor's chances. Fearful that the proposed curtailment of service would put 70,000 of 475,000 workers out of work, the National Union of Railwaymen has called a three-day protest walkout for mid-May. Wilson, who is grimly aware of the damage dealt Labor by a crippling London transport strike before the 1959 election, attempted repeatedly last week to make the railwaymen call off their unpopular walkout, but made little headway. Prayed a Tory Cabinet minister: "Just give us that strike, and watch the votes pour into our laps."

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