The Election

Soon Britons will ballot in their General Parliamentary Election the ultimate question of which is: "Who will head 'the next administration as Prime Minister?" Though ballots will not be cast for two or three months yet--depending on the date when His Majesty declares the present Parliament dissolved--there were last week important election developments:

Apple-Cheeked Gwilym. Since all is fair in love and politics, Conservatives baited their hook to catch workpeople's votes by popping into one of the Party's showiest offices an apple-cheeked ex-coal-miner, one Gwilym Rowlands, an oldster as pink and enticing as an angler's worm.

"I am the first wage earner to occupy the post of Chairman of the Conservative Council," boasted "Old Gwilym" afterwards. "And I consider this fact an indication of the democratic tendency of the Conservative Party nowadays.

The 700 delegates of the Conservative Party Congress who had unanimously chosen Worm Rowlands as "Chairman," next chose as a "Vice Chairman" the world's biggest Steamship Tycoon, Baron Kylsant.

Conservatives have been grooming "Old Gwilym" for years in his role of bait, have twice tried and failed to get him elected to Parliament from a worker constituency, are trying again. In 1927 he championed with jovial humbuggery the Trade Dispute's Act--probably the most tyrannical piece of legislation ever passed in England to squelch strikes.

Dance of Death. "Beware the Socialists!" was the gist of a rousing campaign speech which Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin exhaled into the sooty air of Manchester. As usual, Squire Baldwin, benign scion of an old iron-mongering family, seemed comfortably content with himself and the world.

Jammed and squashed into nine large halls, some 30,000 workpeople heard the Prime Minister's husky voice, mostly from the lipless mouths of loud speakers.

"The Socialists!" warned Mr. Baldwin--and by these he meant the leaders of Britain's second largest party (Laborite) --"The Socialists with their program of nationalize major industries would stifle the spirit of British enterprise. They would reduce our people to a dead level. They would make them as marionettes dancing to the dictation of officials--a dance of death so far as progress in our nation is concerned. They would make a bureaucratic machine and drive out of this country men of enterprise in whatever class they might be, who would go to the United States or the Dominions, where enterprise and work by the individual are valued and wanted."

Leave it to the Horse! David Lloyd George laid down the platform of his* Liberal party in a "Victory Speech" to the 500 Parliamentary candidates in whom he pins his slender hopes for a comeback to Power.

Cocky as always, the little Welsh David chose to speak on St. David's Day, in a hall decked with crisp Welsh jonquils. "Stanley Baldwin reminds me," he chirped, "of a driver who finds his cart stuck in a rut and sits there smoking his pipe, saying 'Leave it to the horse'. . . .

"Leadership is not muddling or meddling. I think of the great, constructive plans of Mr. Herbert Hoover, whom the prospering Americans have chosen as their President. . . . Right now the Liberal Party is ready with plans which will reduce the terrible numbers of the workless in the course of a single year, to normal proportions, and when completed will enrich the nation and equip it to compete successfully with business rivals." Though slightly vague as to these plans, which seemed to hinge upon employing the jobless in road building and on glamorous public works, Mr. Lloyd George made the ringing assertion that "all this will be achieved without adding a penny to national or local taxation!"

Obviously such promises are electioneering tosh, but in 1918 Prime Minister Lloyd George won an election by promising to "hang the Kaiser," and today he knows that what the 1,400,000 British unemployed want to have promised them is jobs.

To those with jobs and time to ponder questions of Empire, Mr. Lloyd George appealed by begging them to turn out a Conservative Government which, he said, had hamstrung England's trade with Russia and provoked the U. S. by bunglesome handling of the Coolidge naval limitations proposal. From this the spellbinder swung through a long transition to the surprising statement that the Conservatives "made a foolish, reckless settlement of the British debt to America [in 1923] without waiting for an international settlement which would have wiped out all debts and started the world afresh!"

The platform of the Liberal Party is, in short, to promise Englishmen whatever they want, and to blame the Conservatives for unemployment, failure to meet the Coolidge naval limitations proposals, and inability to wriggle out of paying what the Empire owes the U. S. Throughout his speech Mr. Lloyd George never once suggested that he might win a partial victory--i. e., enough seats to put him at the head of a coalition Cabinet--'but thundered and boasted that the triumph of Liberalism would be sweeping and complete. Since there are today a mere 40 Liberals among the 615 members of the House of Commons, and since the Liberals have not won a single recent large election, such a victory is outside the perimeter of rational credulity.

"Just Simply Because." Though the Laborites seemed scarcely to have hit their electioneering stride, there was one piquant bit of news concerning a potent Laborite M. P., soon perhaps to become a Cabinet Minister, who was knifed in his political back, last week, by his pretty daughter. He, Arthur Augustus William Harry Ponsonby, was Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the Ramsay MacDonald Cabinet (1924) and has recently penned an able expose of War lies (TIME, Jan. 21). His faithless daughter. Miss Elizabeth Ponsonby, chirped last week, to a newswoman, "I'm going to vote for the Tories [Conservatives] just simply because I wouldn't like another Labor Government!"

"Vauncey." So-called "modern names" for British young women, noted this year in large numbers for the first time on election registry lists, are:

"Ahys" "Ineldo"

"Vauncey" "Tama"

*Ever since the death of the Earl of Oxford & Asquith (TIME, Feb. 27, 1928), David Lloyd George has'not only "led" the Liberal Party but ''owned" it, because he personally raised and controls the party fund.