These are the British

by Drew Middleton

These men represented the old Labor Party. Bevin, Morrison, and Shinwell were hard, shrewd politicians, products of the working class they served. Cripps and Attlee were strays from the old upper middle class who had been moved to adopt socialism by the spectacle of appalling poverty among Britain's masses and what seemed to them the startling incompetence of capitalist society to solve the nation's economic and social problems.

This group and its chief lieutenants were bound, however, by a common fight. They could remember the days when there was no massive organization, when they had stood on windy street corners and shouted for social justice. They remembered the days when "decent people" looked down their noses at Labor politicians as unnecessary and possibly treasonable troublemakers.

It was inevitable, I think, that this group would pass from the leadership of the Labor party. When they did, however, the party lost more than the force of their personalities. It lost an emotional drive, a depth of feeling, that will be hard to replace.

Fittingly, the new leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, Hugh Gaitskell, is an exemplary symbol of the new party. He is a man of courage and compassion, intellectual power and that cold objectivity which is so often found in successful politicians. He represents the modern middle-class socialists just as Attlee two decades ago represented the much smaller number of socialists from that class.

Attlee, however, led a party in which the working-class politician was dominant. Gaitskell is chief of a party in which the middle-class intellectual element and the managerial group from the unions and the Party Organization have become powerful if not dominant.

Clement Attlee was leader of the party for more than twenty years. Gaitskell has the opportunity to duplicate this feat. But he must first heal the great schism that has opened in the movement in the last five years, and to do so he must defeat or placate the left wing and its leader, Aneurin Bevan.

Although the split within the Labor movement distresses all good socialists, it has added notably to the vigor and, indeed, to the gaiety of British politics. Aneurin Bevan was moved to flights of oratorical frenzy and waspish wit. Nor is it every day that one sees Clement Attlee temporarily discard his air of detachment and descend into the arena to entangle his party foes in the streamers of their own verbosity. It was a great fight, and, fortunately for those who like their politics well seasoned, it is not over yet.

For the quarrel within the movement represents forces and emotions of great depth and significance. In moments of excitement men and women on both sides have described it as a battle for the soul of the party. It may be more accurately described, I think, as a battle to determine what type of political party is to represent the labor movement in Britain.

Since the center and the right wing of the movement today dominate the making of policy and fill most, but not all, of the important party posts, it is the left that is on the offensive. But the left itself is not a united band of brothers. It has its backsliders and its apostates who sometimes temper their criticisms when they think of minor government posts under a Labor government headed by Hugh Gaitskell. But, personalities aside, convictions are so strongly held that there seems to be little likelihood of an end to the offensive.