The Scarborough Conference

The agreement reached at Lancaster House a few days ago has committed Great Britain to the rearming of Germany and the maintenance of four Continental divisions as a guarantee to France. The nine-power agreement was well covered by American papers. What was not so well documented was the decision by the Labor Party, after a bitter fight and a close vote, to underwrite the government's German policy. The Labor decision was made a week earlier at Scarborough; it means that the British guarantee to France will remain basically unchanged by any shift in the present government.

The Conference was also a test of Clement Attlee's leadership of the Labor Party. Attlee and the National Executive were pledged to some form of German rearmament, while the Bevanites in the party choose this issue to make a test of Executive strength. Attlee returned from Peking to Scarborough to find a Conference agenda packed with resolutions against rearmament, the constituency parties solidly backing these resolutions, and even some of the Trade Unions, the traditional source of Attlee's strength, siding with Bevan on the issue. On the eve of the rearmament vote, the London Times, noting this Trade Union split, could report "that the result will still depend on the votes of the (Bevanite) Constituency party delegations." Bevan was making a further bid for party leadership by running against Gaitskell, the Executive choice, for treasurer.

To meet the Bevanite challenge, Attlee's main strength lay in his Trade Union support and in the high prestige he had gained from leadership of the Labor delegation to China. It is ironical that Attlee's trip, much criticized in the United States, undoubtedly helped him to persuade the Party to back American policy in Europe. His popularity was evident when he opened the Conference battle on the endorsement of SEATO. The Times reported, that, "Speaking without a text he was cool, clear and confident, and he had many things to say which his audience wanted to hear. They were delighted, for instance, with a suggestion that Chiang Kai-shek and his immediate adherents should be retired to some safe place to live their lives out in peace ... They applauded him when he said the visit had strengthened his view the People's government of China should be admitted to the United Nations."

However strongly this speech may have annoyed American politicians, it had a clear effect on Labor support for an Armed Federal Republic. "Mr. Attlee was given an ovation," continued the Times. "There is no doubt that his speech has placed him in an even better position than before to make his appeal to the delegates on German rearmament."

The next day, when Attlee did make this appeal and advanced the Executive's emergency resolution for rearmament, he was at the height of his personal prestige. The Bevanites, speaking against the resolution, raised the spectre of an armed Germany turning East to precipitate another war. Attlee, on the other hand, asked the delegates not to tie the hands of some future Labor foreign secretary with the negatives of the Bevanite resolution. By stressing the need of executive freedom he asked, in effect, for a vote of confidence in the present leadership. The Attlee motion passed, but by the slim majority of 248,000 out of some six million votes, while Gaitskell heavily defeated Bevan for treasurer.

The defeat of the Bevanites and the labor agreement in principle to a rearmed Germany has given the present government an added strength in making military commitments to the French. Further, by endorsing German arms, the English socialist party will undoubtedly strengthen those Continental socialists who have favored the plan. Already, as Bevan's influence is declining in Britain, the French socialists have started a vigorous housecleaning of the party rebels who opposed E.D.C. a month ago.