(See Cover) To mark an event which will put his name in the history books for generations, Clement Attlee slipped one afternoon last week into a crowded room of London's India House. When flashbulbs flared, he grimaced and ducked behind his wife. Politely, the photographers went away, and the Prime Minister who had given India its freedom stood quietly sipping his tea in the midst of an austere celebration.* At one point, Attlee chatted with Tory M.P.
Anthony Eden. They agreed that electioneering was' hard work. Attlee added: "I like my jigsaw puzzles in the evening." Despite his self-effacement, Clement Attlee's mark was all over the Indian In dependence Day tea party. The tea came in thick cups because Britain's fine china must be exported. The cream on the cakes was synthetic because Britain must keep her imports down. Under their gossamer saris, many of the Indian women present wore homely sweaters because Britain's coal must not be wasted.
In four years and five months as Prime Minister, Clement Attlee had not only given freedom to India, Burma, Ceylon (combined pop. 411 million), he had also given to Britain a new way of life. Some of Attlee's followers called it Socialism; some called it "fair shares for all"; some called it the welfare state. Winston Churchill last week scornfully snarled out another name for it: "Queuetopia." Spendthrift's End? Whatever it was, the regime of queues and 40% taxes and womb-to-tomb security had come to judgment. On Feb. 23, Britain's voters would decide whether the Labor Party should have another five-year grant of power to continue and extend their experiment.
Speaking for the Tories, Winston Churchill last week brought in a partisan but elo quent indictment: "We now approach the crisis to which every spendthrift comes when he has used up everything he can lay his hands on, and everything he can beg or borrow, and must face the hard reckoning of facts . . . With the immense aid given us by the U.S. and our dominions from overseas, there was no reason why [Britain] should not have got back by now to solvency, security and independence . . .
"This has been denied us not only by the incompetence and maladministration of the Socialist government and their wild extravagance, but even more by the spirit of class hatred which they had spread throughout the land, and by the costly and wasteful nationalization of a fifth part of our industries. 'All men,' says the American Constitution, 'are born equal.' 'All men shall be kept equal,' says the British Socialist party."-
The Labor Party election manifesto, said Churchill, contains "an effective design, or plot—for that is a truer term—to obtain power .over their fellow countrymen such as no British government has ever sought before . . ."
These were harsh words to apply to the party headed by Clement Attlee, Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill's cabinet from 1942 to 1945. By temperament, training and conviction, Attlee was as far from being either a spendthrift or a dictator as any man could be. Yet his party's record in power and its program for the future had frightened many a less partisan Briton than Winston Churchill.