Foreign News: One Should Not Peel an Orange

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Outside the House of Commons another big blizzard snarled transport and set back recovery from The Crisis. But inside the chill Victorian-Gothic chamber, tempers were short and hot. The Mother of Parliaments, majestic but not stuffy, had one of her stormiest, most boisterous weeks in recent history. It went along like this:

Voodoo. There was the white-hot matter of the five ebony-black men who were to go to the gallows next day at Accra, in Africa's Gold Coast Colony, for a voodoo murder—the sacrificial killing of a friend to provide companionship in the spirit world for the late Sir Ofori Atta, high chief of the state of Akim Abuakwa (TIME, Aug. 26). Beefy Leslie Hale, a Laborite, related that four times in the last two years the five men had missed the gibbet by last-minute postponements of execution; that itself was a terrible punishment. Winston Churchill growled that the five Africans had been "subjected to torture" by "cat-and-mousing them up to the scaffold." This, he stormed, was "an affront to every decent tradition . . . a matter affecting the life and honor and the decent administration of British Government."*

Amid shouts, plump Arthur Creech-Jones, Colonial Secretary, tried to placate the members. He had no authority to grant a reprieve; but he would ask the King's representative, the Gold Coast's Governor. "Tell him!" boomed several M.P.s. Red-faced, Creech-Jones promised to send the Governor a telegram, advising him of the House's "very strong feeling in all quarters."

Plainly flustered, he stood for a moment as if expecting more debate. Instead came a sharp thunderclap from Churchill: "This is a matter of life and death; will the Colonial Secretary not get off and send his telegram now?" Creech-Jones retreated, a few minutes later slipped out and sent his telegram. (Result: the execution was postponed and Gold Coast Governor Sir Alan Burns huffily threatened to resign over this kibitzing by the House.)

"Low-Class Fascist." By then the House was deep in invective over another sort of execution—the Government's "guillotine" to speed two of its key measures (nationalization of inland transport, and town-&-country planning). Churchill stormed that the Government motion to cut off committee discussion was "strangulation of parliamentary debate . . . legislation by Government decree." Stung by ironic cheers from the Labor side, he lashed at the "idea of the government of the people, by the officials, for the party bosses," cried that "the liberties and the free life of Britain are in great danger" from Socialism.**

Amiable Arthur Greenwood, Labor's deputy leader, rose to defend the guillotine as "a new experiment resting on the authority of this House." Pink-cheeked Tory Quintin Hogg, looking like a bad-tempered baby, cried out: "Call it the Reichstag and be done with it." Greenwood thrust back: "I think all the potential Führers are on the other side."