Foreign News: Butler in the Kitchen

• Share

(2 of 3)

Only on one big segment of government spending did the Chancellor's ax fall heavily. While the Labor benches resounded to cries of "Resign! Resign!", he slashed housing subsidies, except for slum clearances, and shelved the government's plans to build new offices for the British embassy in Washington (saving $2,800,000).

Squeezing Wives. That evening, in a television address, Chancellor Butler dryly explained why he had deliberately spread the burden. "We must consume less," he said. "It's better really to make the feel of this go over the whole field."

The reaction next day made it clear that the whole felt hurt. "Butler squeezes the wives," complained the conservative Daily Mail. The Tory Daily Express and Liberal News Chronicle were two minds with but a single pun: "Butler Raids the Kitchen." From miners and railwaymen came demands for higher wages to match higher prices. Said the Conservative Daily Telegraph, usually one of Butler's stoutest supporters: "His strategy is disappointing because he has not made any frontal attack on government expenditures."

In Parliament, the angry Socialists rose to the attack. Butler's crisis budget had accomplished what Attlee and his squabbling lieutenants could not do themselves: it united the opposition and gave them a flaming issue. A Laborites' censure motion roundly accused the government of "incompetence and neglect." The man chosen to lead the attack was But ler's opposite number: former Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell, 49, a brilliant Oxford don whose economic philosophy is so similar to Butler's own that Britons lump them together in a single word: Butskellism. Cold, handsome Hugh Gaitskell is tipped by insiders as Attlee's probable successor, and his followers were plainly expecting a rousing electoral tirade.

The Prosecutor. Gaitskell reminded his hearers of the optimistic tax-cutting budget which Butler introduced last spring, a few weeks before the general election which returned the Tories to power. "The real point of the April budget," he thundered across the aisle, "was not the incentive to people to produce more, but it was an incentive to vote Conservative." He pressed home the attack: "Having bought his votes with a bribe, the Chancellor is forced—as he knew he would be —to dishonor the check."

Gaitskell accused Butler of deliberately misleading Britons with his talk of Tory prosperity. "Always an expert on evasion, he has become an addict of the easy half-truth." The Socialist's peroration was one of the bitterest personal attacks the House of Commons has heard since the Churchill-Bevan feuds. "I bear [the Chancellor] no personal animosity,'' Gaitskell said. "But his record in this past year is frankly deplorable . . . He began in folly, he continued in deceit, and he has ended in reaction . . . Let him go to the Prime Minister and . . . lay down the burden of his office, which he is so plainly unable to carry with credit any longer."