World: What a Labor Government Would Be Like

IT may still be a long way back to power, but every by-election and opinion poll in Britain today indicates that a growing majority of voters want a Labor government. In a far more prosperous society than the war-weary nation that elected the last Labor regime in 1945, the question is what life would be like under new Socialist leaders. Curiosity is most intense among voters under 30, who have been spared memories of the snoek (canned mock salmon), “reconstituted” eggs and whale steak of previous Laborite austerity.

Sensing that this new you-never-had-it-so-good generation is both weary of Tory rule and leary of Socialist dogma, the Labor program today emphasizes “pragmatism” and “responsibility” rather than headlong plunges into doctrinaire” experiments. The party’s catchwords, a heady blend of Gladstonian rhetoric and New Frontier pep talk, call for “a sense of purpose” to “get Britain moving.” How much of its ambitious program will actually be enacted depends on the kind of majority it can win at the polls. But there are some fair indications of what Labor aims to do.

Nationalization

State ownership of industry—which Winston Churchill called that “burglar’s jemmy to crack the capitalist crib” —is the goal most commonly associated with a Socialist administration. Tory scaremongers even claim that Labor already has a “shopping list” of 104 companies it plans to nationalize. However, after bitter argument the Labor Party has abandoned its longtime commitment to public ownership of the economy’s “commanding heights.” It plans now only to renationalize steel, which was partially restored to private enterprise by the Tories, and Britain’s trucking industry.

The Economy

A Labor government would demand broad powers to regulate the economy. It would give manufacturers tax incentives and guaranteed orders for exports, but would itself build and run pacesetting plants in any industries, such as machine tools, that it judges inadequate or inefficient. Socialist principle demands a tax on capital gains, which have been largely immune so far, and possibly even a levy on capital. In Harold Wilson’s words, Britain has a “laissez-faire, soft-center, speculative, hire-purchase, advertiser-controlled, stop-go economy.” To change this, Labor would have to transform completely the nation’s business life. Hence the Economist sees Labor’s economic aims as “at once consoling and frightening.”

To ease the nation’s critical dearth of living space and clear its squalid legacy of slums, Labor promises to commit more public funds to new housing and redevelopment, restore rent controls, and regulate new construction. Labor also aims to break the age-old power of wealthy landowners, who seldom sell property outright but give developers long-term leases on which the landlords continue to collect “ground rent.” New legislation would give all leaseholders the right to buy actual “freehold” ownership of their land.

Europe

In theory, the professedly “internationalist” Labor Party ought to be for Britain’s entry into the Common Market, probably would have backed it had Labor been in power when the issue arose. But a large segment of Labor distrusts Catholic Europe and suspects that the Common Market is a conspiracy to strengthen capitalism. Besides, many trade unionists fear foreign competition. A Labor administration might be willing to reopen negotiations for Common Market membership, but its tougher terms would make Britain’s admission more difficult even if De Gaulle’s opposition were to diminish.

The U.S. & Defense

Labor would “stand firmly” by NATO, and would happily leave the U.S. in charge of the West’s nuclear defense and abandon Britain’s independent deterrent. Admittedly, Britain would become a second-class military power, but Wilson maintains that it can remain “very important” if it develops its conventional forces. He considers Britain’s present defenses “more ineffective and inappropriate than at any time since Ethelred the Unready”—who failed to deter the Danes in 1013—and promises to re-equip and rearm Britain’s Army of the Rhine.

While the Pentagon, dreading nuclear “proliferation,” is cheered by Labor’s willingness to renounce Britain’s deterrent, this might strengthen Labor’s vocal neutralist-unilateralist wing.

East & West

Wilson proposes regular annual summit meetings of U.S., British and Soviet heads of state at the U.N., says that the proposal was warmly received when he visited Moscow this month. Labor is irrevocably opposed to giving West Germany nuclear weapons (so is the U.S.); it is equally opposed to any arrangement, such as the U.S. proposal for a multilateral Polaris force, that might ultimately give Germans a finger on the nuclear trigger. Though Anglophile Ludwig Erhard is taking over from Anglophobe Konrad Adenauer, Labor’s outspoken fear of Germany is as vehement as ever.

Labor favors nuclear-free zones and thinning out of forces to reduce tension in Central Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East. In Europe, however, Wilson insists that “disengagement should not be used by either side to upset the balance of forces.” On the Berlin question, Labor agrees with the U.S. that the Western garrison and free access to the city are essential.

Education & Science

Labor shrewdly senses that the country’s most pressing need is for a greatly expanded educational system, both to achieve its ideal of a classless society and to increase the flow of technicians, scientists and managers who are vital to economic growth on the scale envisaged by Labor. The party proposes to abolish university fees, start 45 new universities in 20 years, and greatly expand existing facilities for technical training and scientific research. “Politics,” say Laborites, “is education.”