Crisis

George Bernard Shaw looked over his garden wall and snorted that Britain must sovietize her industries. For good measure he added that the British system of government, "described as the world's best, is actually the world's worst."

As usual, no one paid much attention to the irascible old vegetarian. But as usual his crack had an embarrassing resemblance to the truth. The truth: the British parliamentary system is undergoing one of the severest tests in its history. The issue: the opening of a second front in Europe.

Right Now. All signs last week pointed to a political crisis. The crisis did not spring primarily from dissatisfaction with the leadership of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.* It arose, rather, from the people's suspicion that they were being deceived by do-nothings in Churchill's War Cabinet, in Parliament, at Transport House. Observers found that the people, particularly younger workmen and the rising number of British Socialists, were in a mood for: 1) a dangerous display of resentment, which might take the form of a nationwide, one-hour protest strike; or 2) an equally dangerous feeling of national frustration, with leadership out of touch with the people's aspirations.

During the week Winston Churchill conferred with the King on the question of a second front. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden admitted that an overwhelming majority of Britons wanted an offensive in Europe; he promised that history would not be able to describe the British as "a little, timid people, sheltering on our island." But these moves apparently were not enough.

Within a Year. Another second-front mass rally was held in Trafalgar Square; 60,000 attended. Editor William Rust of the Daily Worker read a message from 500,000 C.I.O. workers, another ("What are we waiting for?") from onetime Cockney Charlie Chaplin. The small but vocal Communist Party, which hitherto has stuck by the Churchill all-out war policy, scattered second-front leaflets and chalked up signs all over London. A workers' band in black & red uniforms perched on the top of the Square's air-raid shelter and played the International and God Save the King. Ten munitions workers, claiming to represent 4,000 others, presented a second-front petition to No. 10 Downing Street. Ex-President Eduard Benes of ex-Czecho-Slovakia urged an immediate second front in the hope of obtaining peace "within a year." Ex-War Secretary Leslie Hore-Belisha demanded either a second front or continuous British bombing raids. But the most powerful new voice added to the clamor was that of tough Jack Tanner, president of the 600,000-member Amalgamated Engineering Union. Said he:

"It is difficult to be patient. Whatever the struggle, whatever the political considerations holding back the attack in Europe, that holding back is against both the will and the interests of the British people and of our comrades in the occupied countries, as surely as it is against those of the fighters and workers of the Soviet Union."

None could say for certain what was in Churchill's mind. A good guess was that, at least until last weekend, he was convinced that a second front, in any big sense of the word, could not be successful in 1942.

*His Gallup popularity rating in Britain last week was 78%, a drop of eight points from just before Tobruk, now precisely the same as President Roosevelt's in the U.S. Only 41% of Britain's polled subjects approve the Government's conduct of the war, 42% disapprove. Sixty per cent want a second front in 1942; 12% think it should not be tried.

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