Lord Woolton's Wooing
The Liberals should be flattered by the attentions Lord Woolton on the one hand and Mr. Morgan Phillips on the other are paying them. Lord Woolton's wooing should be the more effective, for he can claim with justice that on virtually all the major issues now before the country Conservatives and Liberals think alike, whether or not they decide to vote alike. Mr. Morgan Phillips is faced with a much more difficult problem of persuasion. It may be true, as he says, that Labour embodies the old radical spirit. But Labour stands for nationalisation, of which Liberals, like Conservatives, have had mote than enough. Labour, as the recent Budget has shown, flatly rejects those reductions of Government expenditure on which Liberals have insisted no less emphatically than Conservatives. Liberals, who are by tradition individualists, must find no less distasteful than Conservatives the complacent pleasure which so many Ministers obviously take in teaching all sections of the community their business. Whether what Lord Woolton was aiming at was a formal agreement between the Conservative and Liberal organisations or the attraction to the Conservative camp of individuals among the two and a half million who voted Liberal last time is a matter of speculation. The former aim could better be achieved by discreeter methods than platform appeals. But on the individual Liberal Lord Woolton might well hope to make an impression. If a repetition of the present deadlock is to be avoided when the next election comes, it will only be by votes being cast in a different way from the February way. if enough Liberals decide that it is better to have the Con- , servatives in effective power than Labour—and most Liberals, if they were compelled to choose would probably choose that—and vote for Conservatives rather than Labour, or even Liberal, candi- dates, the deadlock will, in fact, be resolved, and a Government pledged to the Liberal tenets of less nationalisation and more economy will be installed. But Liberals will press hard for an agreement on electoral reform.
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