Eighty years ago attention turns towards peace even as speedy victory proves elusive.

The Germans overran the British pocket east of the Rhine at Arnhem with a few survivors escaping across the river. With the US Army embroiled in a brutal battle for the Huertgen Forest to the South and a  Canadian force fighting for the right bank of the Scheldt,  the hopes of easy and early victory had evaporated. In his enthusiasm for Market Garden Montgomery had not made the Scheldt a priority although without command of the river, the port of Antwerp was nearly useless.

The British high command in the Middle East straddled military and home affairs in an ill-conceived scheme to grant compassionate home leave to married men with three years service in the theatre who wished to start a family. This attracted a flood of applications leading to a suicidally stupid and offensive revision in the scheme designed to hold back numbers: it would apply only to men of 35 years of age who had no children and could show "good reason" why they hadn't; moreover both husbands and wives had to produce medical certificates that they were willing and able to have children.

Government attention was switching to home affairs as plans for peace (and a likely general election) took the foreground. A White Paper proposed higher rates of unemployment benefit but a limit of thirty weeks on the pay-out period. Another White Paper proposed radical reform of industrial accident rules. The Common Law basis of fault and liability would no longer apply and compensation would no longer be related to earnings but to family needs instead.

Almost the last person detained as a potential threat to national security under Defence Regulation 18B, the not conspicuously sane Captain Maule Ramsay MP, was released in the face of protests from the left-wing. Ramsay's links to Tyler Kent, the German agent at the US Embassy, had been especially damning. He had continued to ask Parliamentary questions from detention and had even successfully sued the New York Times for libel, winning one farthing in damages (0.0104p). On his release he tabled a motion calling for the reinstatement of the 1275 Statute of Jewry which had expelled Jews from Britain.