PRE-CHURCHILL SINS OF CONSERVATISM

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 23, 27 July 1945, Page 6

PRE-CHURCHILL SINS OF CONSERVATISM

When an unpredicted landslide occurs in popular voting, sweeping away a Government with a decade of rule to its credit .or discredit, and substituting for it a clear and commanding House of Commons majority won by a party that never before has enjoyed such a privilege, two questions immediately arise: What Sins of the Ins invited this slaughter? And what virtues of the Outs have induced the voters to give them an absolute majority (independent of all parties) after their nigh twenty years in the political wilderness? To answer the first question may go a long way towards answering both. The Conser-vative-dominated House of Commons that has been dissolved recently was elected on a Conservative policy of supporting the League of Nations and enforcing sanctions against the invader of Abyssinia, Italy. The ink on the returns of that General Election was hardly dry when the Laval-Hoare Pact brake upon the world. While the British electors were voting the Baldwin Conservative Government a League-enforcement mandate against aggression, Sir Samuel Hoare as Foreign Secretary was already negotiating with the now notorious Laval (representing the French Government of the day) a proposal to appease the Italian aggressor by giving him a substantial slice of Abyssinia, to buy him off. Accused of sabotaging the Government's election policy and misleading the voters and the world in general, Sir Samuel Hoare—pleading, as a matter of expediency, that half Abyssinia was better for the Abyssiniaris than none at all and the unreadiness of other League members to support Britain in war—resigned; and the Prime Minister (Mr. Baldwin) stood up before the Commons in sackcloth and ashes. He made the best possible defence, which was no defence. This dramatic event happened within three weeks of the General Election at which the Baldwin Government secured its mandate, but no other resignations were called for. Later on Sir Samuel Hoare returned to the Conservative Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. The House of Commons thus elected on a policy that was immediately the subject of a Foreign Office recantation, revealed in the Pact with Laval, is the same House as that recently dissolved. It was accused in 1935 of being conceived in double-dealing and born in hypocrisy. Ten years later these things have not been forgotten.

Almost, immediately after the Baldwin Government had achieved this big-scale voting success, and had survived the Laval-Hoare bombshell, the question of re-armament, against the Italian and German peril, came up in the House of Commons. The Baldwin j Government carried through the House j a re-armament scheme the estimated cost of, which seemed colossal compared with the Budgets of those days. It can be charged against the Labour Opposition that it did not help, by its attitude and voting in the House of Commons, the Government's re-armament - proposals; and it can be charged against the Baldwin Government that, four or more years later, London was not saved by the re-armament scheme from being in a shockingly under-gunned condition, although at that time (the middle of 1940) the war itself had already been in operation for ten months. How the fighting spirit of the British people triumphed at last over lall unpreparation and under-prepara-I tion is now history. Another thing that evidently has not been forgotten in Britain is that pre-Churchill Conservatism and post-Churchill Conservatism are two different things. Post-Churchill Conservatism began with the disaster of World War 11. Prior to that, and right through the thirties, the relations of Mr Churchill with the Conservative Party were generally the worst possible. A byelection difference with the Conservative Party'machine over, the candidature of Mr. Churchill's son sank into terms of bitterness. At one stage "The Times" referred to the Churchills, father and son, as the Old Pretender and the Young Chevalier. In his fight throughout the thirties for military preparedness Churchill was a hundred per cent, right and Conservatism was a hundred per cent, wrong, but to many Conservatives the Churchill criticisms would have been more welcome if coming from any other Commoner. Picture, then, the Conservative somersault that underlies Mr. Chamberlain's acceptance of Mr. Churchill in the Cabinet, and Churchill's later replacement of Chamberlain as Prime Minister—a transformation inconceivable except in the clamant needs of war disaster. Post-Churchill Conservatism, so far removed from pre-Churchill Conservatism, "went the whole hog" backwards in 1940 by electing Churchill to the leadership of the Conservative Party.

The British electors, then, had before them this year a Conservative Government with a record dating back to the Laval-Hoare Pact and beyond that to the Ramsay MacDonald-Baldwin transactions. But the Conservative Government of 1945 represented a reversion. Between the years 1939 and. 1945 the Conservatives had been revitalised by two things—the party leadership and Prime Ministership of Churchill, and association in the House and in Cabinet with Labour and other party representatives who formed the National Government that won the war. When the recent reversion was made to a Conservative ("caretaker") Government for the purposes of the General Election, the Conservatives hoped, that their retention of the revitalising influence of Churchill's leadership would win them the confidence of a short-memoried electorate. But they hoped for too much. Even the mana of Churchill—the still potent rescuer of Conservatism in 1940 —could not save the party that had once shunned him as a prodigal son, and only offered him the fatted calf under the duress of the war he had vainly warned against. British electors have permitted a great military genius to save Britain, the Empire, and the world, but now will not permit him to save the Conservative Government, whether it be the Churchill "caretaker" Government or the old Conservative Party of Baldwin-Chamberlain leadership. The conclusion forces itself that the Sins of the Ins, punished by the electors, are not Churchillian sins, but those of the Old Conservatism that have seemed to live again in the "caretaker" Government brought about by a pre-election reversion to a party status recalling the not-forgotten past. In voting as they have done, the British

electors have, looked forward as well as backward. Their backward glances at the thirties have caused them to distrust the Conservatives' future adherence to present Conservative promises of domestic reform and social betterment; and as the planning promises and betterment ideas of Labour are not presented to the electors in the form of extreme Redness, the electorate as a whole has decided to give Labour its first absolute majority opportunity to legislate on its own independent responsibility.

In the history of British democracy, this is an event of critical importance. And the same remark may prove to be true concerning Britain's future influence in foreign policy and world affairs, but that is another story, surrounded with unpredictable possibilities.