Word: rab
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Plow & Shafts. Rab survived, with a typical combination of foresight and luck. In 1941 Churchill offered him the choice of the Ministry of Information or the Board of Education, a wartime backwater. True to family tradition, Butler was deeply interested in education. But, though Hitler was then racing for Moscow, Butler also foresaw that the education job would give him a major hand in shaping Tory postwar policy. He chose education...
While the Nazis bombed London, Rab talked and planned for peace. Starting with a bill already in draft, he planned a postwar revolution in the educational system which would make primary and secondary education (up to the age of 15) free to all children. Said he: "I do not want our state educational system to become a racing stable, out only to produce overbred classic favorites. We want to produce our racers, but we also want to produce good healthy stock, frightened neither of the plow nor of the shafts...
...Rab hammered the bill through with the slogan: "Education is the spearhead of social reform." Its passage in 1944 gave him senior status in the party, and Cabinet rank as the first Minister of Edu cation. But the "Butler Act" did more. In the public's view, Rab's name no longer stood for a man of Munich, but for a leader of social reform. When the time came, Butler was the logical choice as the spokesman for the new progressive Toryism...
...Rab Butler was picked to find the answer. He took over the two chairs and one desk which constituted the Tory research department, and set to work "to wrest the initiative in the realm of political ideas from the Left." His first step was something hitherto unknown in Tory circles-he called on party members for ideas. Said Rab: "When I first knew the Tory Party, policy was brought down from Mount Sinai on tablets of stone. The faithful who waited for the tablets were often blinded by the light they...
...Crooked Atoms. The result, contained in a series of brilliant pamphlets, was to make coherent policy out of the deep distrust which Tories felt for the new Socialism. Rab replanted the sturdy old roots of Toryism in modern soil. The guiding principles of his philosophy were 1) a belief in the divine origin of the human personality, and 2) a faith in Christian ethics. Rab denied the cynical Marxist view of British history as the selfish struggle of classes; he saw it as a long odyssey of the individual toward the fullest expression of himself, in which each tradition...