Dr. Malan Plunges
The prospect that Dr. Malan may drive the Union of South Africa into dissolution increases. The resistance of Natal to the Prime Minister's resolve to override the Supreme Court is being skilfully and resolutely organised, as Senator Heaton Nicholls, a former High Commissioner for South Africa in London and leader of the Opposition in the Senate, indicated on Tuesday. That there is a strong movement in Natal for secession from the Union, but secession is not a simple matter, as the American Civil War showed. But a plan has been devised which it will not be easy to counter. The proposal is that Natal should ask that a convention of the four provinces be held to reaffirm the constitution of the Union. If the constitution is in fact reaffirmed then the entrenched clauses, which the Government is seeking to disregard, stand. If it is not then Natal is absolved from the allegiance which she gave to the Union under the constitution. Whether the demand for a convention could be insisted on is uncertain, but it would be a sign of weakness on the Government's part to refuse it. But Dr. Malan hesitates so little about adopting totalitarian methods that prediction is profitless. His latest measure, enabling any person to be declared a Communist by the Minister of Justice and required to resign from any office he may hold and abstain from all political activity, is ranging the trade unions actively against him, since certain trade union officials have been thus denounced. The Prime Minister, having defied constitutional decisions,is in grave danger of being opposed by extra-constitutional and extra-Parliamentary methods. That matters little so far as Dr. Malan is concerned; but it matters a great deal so far as the Union is concerned.
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