GREAT BRITAIN: General Election

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Plainly it was no wonder that George V tried, as Britons learned he did, to dissuade Prime Minister MacDonald up to the very last moment from advising (i. e. forcing) His Majesty to prorogue Parliament and throw Britain's political future into the General Election pot.

Equally plainly, Scot MacDonald and the Conservative Party (bulwark of his National Government) believed last week that the risk of social upheaval is offset if not canceled by a strong probability that the Labor Party cannot win. In 1929 the Labor Party, led by Mr. MacDonald with a united front, polled 8.416,557 votes, the Conservatives 8,669,469, the Liberals 5,260,050.

Today Mr. MacDonald, having split the Labor Party, has the solid support of all Conservatives, numerous Liberals (for he has also split that party), and finally will swing many Labor votes to a new party which he organized last week, the National Labor Party. By extremely simple arithmetic British vote dopesters could figure Scot MacDonald triumphantly returning to Parliament supported by Conservatives, split-Liberals and National Laborites who had polled together a total of from 10.000.000 to 12,000.000 ballots. But voters have a habit of fooling dopesters. Example: the last German election was called in hopes of obtaining a stable Government majority, resulted in the Hitler landslide and no stable majority (TIME, Sept. 22), thus causing President von Hindenburg to decree the Brüning Dictatorship.

Lone Star Ramsay— Characteristically the Prime Minister, Scottish individualist, did not choose last week to form a "national political headquarters" for unified command and election strategy. Conservatives had urged at the very least a "national platform"; but Scot MacDonald left his Conservative and Liberal friends to fight their battles (and his) in informal unity. His own job, as he conceived it, was to get his National Labor Party going, put some 50 candidates in the field, campaign as a National Laborite for re-election in Seaham, his old constituency (TIME, Oct. 12).