Utopias & Nightmares

Prime Minister Winston Churchill tossed his derby into Britain's blistering political air and charged the Labor Party.

From Chequers, official country residence of the Prime Minister, he broadcast his first big speech of Britain's general election campaign. Cried he: "My friends. I must tell you that the socialist policy [the Labor Party's] is abhorrent to the British idea of freedom. . . . There can be no doubt that socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and abject worship of the state.

"It is not alone that property in all its forms is struck at, but that liberty in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of socialism. . . ."

The Road to Serfdom. "There is to be one state to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This state is to be arch-employer, arch-planner, arch-administrator and ruler and arch-caucus boss. How is an ordinary citizen or subject of the King to stand up against this formidable machine, which, once it is in power, will prescribe for every one of them where they are to work, what they are to work at, where they may go and what they may say, what views they are to hold and within what limits they may express them, where their wives are to go to queue up for state rations, what education their children are to receive to mold their views of human liberty and conduct in the future? The socialist state, once thoroughly completed in all its details and all its aspects, and that is what I am speaking on, could not afford to suffer opposition. . . .

"Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy and tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils. . . .

"Leave these socialist dreamers to their Utopias or their nightmares."

Conservative Credo. Against the Labor Party's program, which calls for nationalization of basic industry, Churchill set his own Conservative credo. "I stand for sovereign freedom of the individual, within laws which freely elected Parliaments have freely passed. I stand for the rights of the ordinary man to say what he thinks of the Government of the day, however powerful, and to turn them out neck and crop if he thinks he can better his temper or his home thereby. . . ." Churchill found few differences between the Conservative and Liberal Parties ("There is scarcely a Liberal sentiment which animated the great Liberal leaders of the past which we do not inherit and defend.")

This sennet on the wreathed Tory horn electrified Britons who had all but forgotten, during his five years of wartime Parliamentary speeches, what Churchill can do at the cry of partisan tallyho. Cried Labor's startled Daily Herald: "Crazy broadcast." Cried the Communist Daily Worker: "Conscienceless demagogy." Cried Labor Leader Herbert Morrison (lately Prime Minister Churchill's Secretary of Home Affairs): "Abusive scurrility." The Conservative Yorkshire Post (part owned by the family of Mrs. Anthony Eden, whose husband last week was ill of a duodenal ulcer) was solidly metaphoric: "Mr. Churchill went into action with all the flash and thunder of a battle cruiser opening fire."

Socialist Dominions. Labor's answering broadside came from mild, dispassionate Clement R. Attlee (until recently Churchill's Deputy Prime Minister). Adroitly he dodged the fact that what Churchill was indicting was the dynamic of socialism and "the socialist state . . . completed in all its details and all its aspects." Asked Attlee with patient opaqueness: "Has he forgotten that Australia, New Zealand and the Scandinavian countries have had socialist governments for years, to the great benefit of their peoples? . . . For years every attempt to remedy crying evils was blocked by the same plea of freedom for the individual. It was in fact freedom for the rich and slavery for the poor." Labor, he pointed out, planned to maintain wartime control to rebuild Britain, stabilize employment, properly utilize national resources.

At week's end Prime Minister Churchill issued to 20-page election manifesto, pledging himself to a policy of "daring" in domestic affairs. Chief points: encouragement through free enterprise of employment and overseas trade (see BUSINESS), 420,000 new homes in two years, more home-grown food, compulsory national insurance, removal of Government controls as soon as possible.

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