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Last week "Former Naval Person" Winston Churchill spat angry words against a high wind. The Labor government, said he, "has forced the British people to live in a fool's purgatory upon the generous grants of free enterprise, capitalist America . . . If we are to earn our daily bread in the world, it can only be through the strongest possible individual effort and ingenuity arising from conditions of freedom and fair play."
As broad prophecy, this last might turn out to be true. Churchill, however, had designed the statement for use in a by-election at Sowerby. Presumably, it was intended to win votes for the Tories. It was not likely to do so.
If Socialist Britain was a "fool's purgatory," millions of Britons were the fools. They liked it—at least they liked it better than what they thought the Tories would give them. As the anti-Socialist Economist recently said: "Instead of standing forth as the champions of wise and vigorous government [the Tories] have allowed themselves, by talking in generalities about abstract principles such as 'freedom' and 'enterprise,' to be represented as the captious remnant of a bygone social order. . . They have treated the rise of Socialism as an aberration from the normal British way of life, instead of recognizing that the Socialist ideal of the welfare state is very closely in tune with the ideas of a frustrated and war-weary nation."
Not in Britain alone, but throughout the world, the welfare state was on the rise. Even the U.S., which had a more or less undeserved reputation as the last great citadel of individual independence, was entering a new phase of its long debate over socialized services. One of the warmest issues in the U.S. at the moment was socialized medicine.
Long Way from Locke. A few weeks before Churchill's blast, Britain's new socialized medicine scheme had survived its first major test in the House of Commons. Its champion, Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health, held arrogant and undisputed possession of the field when Churchill walked out of the House (TIME, Feb. 28). This did not prove that Britain's socialized medicine plan was good medicine or good social organization. But the debate's results did prove that socialized medicine was what the British voters wanted.
In Britain, at least, there was no longer any point in warning citizens that they were selling their birthright of freedom for a mess of pottage. Bevan, the bulldog breed's new vet, could reply that Britons could eat tastier, tougher fare than pottage now that they had got new false teeth from the health service. As TIME's London Bureau Chief Eric Gibbs cabled:
"For too long 'free enterprise' seemed to mean only that the British employer was free from responsibility for his employees' welfare. Now the state comes to these undernourished men & women, provides their children with orange juice, cod liver oil and milk, sends the doctor when they are sick. These people won't listen to any man who tells them that the welfare state is a bad thing which robs them of their initiative by all this coddling. They will look at their healthier children and will call that man a liar."