Britain: Party Divided

The British labor unions existed long before the Labor Party. They helped create the party, continue to provide it with the bulk of its funds and its hard core of votes — and to some extent feel that they are, in fact, the party. The symbiosis works well enough when Labor is out of power and both party and unions need one another. It works less well once the party leaders don their bowler hats, pick up their dispatch cases and move into Whitehall. Then the unions naturally enough expect their reward. But the responsibilities of ruling Britain seldom enable a socialist government to do all it would like for the workingman. The result is an inevitable clash, and it has seldom been more acrimonious than it is today.

As the party assembled last week in Blackpool for its annual conference, the union men were in an angry, rebellious mood over Wilson’s tough wage-restraint policies. Said Frank Cousins, boss of the huge Transport and General Workers union, who quit the Cabinet 15 months ago to protest the deflationary measures: “We are almost at the stage of accepting that the workers are on one side and this government is on the other,”

The discontent started soon after Britain’s four-year-old monetary crisis, which has forced Wilson to undertake salvage measures that the unions claim have put an intolerable pinch on workingmen. Britain is mired in its longest period of high unemployment since World War II. Money is tight, and prices have crept upward since last November’s devaluation. Britain depends heavily on imports, notably food, and the lowering of the pound’s value relative to foreign currencies made imports more expensive. At the same time, to hold down the price of British goods abroad, the government, over bitter union protests, put through a bill limiting annual wage increases to 3.5%.

The Hard Facts. At Blackpool, Cousins was determined to put the unions’ unhappiness on record. As the first order of conference business, he introduced a motion to condemn compulsory wage and price guidelines as dampers on both trade-union activity and economic expansion and called for their immediate repeal. In answer, Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins made brutally clear, “the hard facts of life” gave Britain little choice. In 1967, he pointed out, prices increased only 2% while wages jumped 6%. “The only trouble was that we did not earn it,” he said. “Production that year went up by only about 1%.”

But the delegates were clearly not willing to endure another 18 months of “ultimately rewarding” belt tightening, as Jenkins proposed. By a margin of 5 to 1, they gave resounding approval to the defiant Cousins’ resolution. It was the first time that a party conference had split with the government on a key issue since Wilson assumed the Labor leadership in 1963. The vote was thus a stinging rebuke to Wilson personally, but it will have no immediate effect on the Labor government’s economic policies, because wage and price restraints are now the law. The vote will make more difficult the renewal of the measures when they expire late next year, but Wilson is committed to his policies. Some of their first optimistic returns came in last week, when the Bank of England announced a handsome $504 million increase in gold and foreign-currency reserves during September.

Defending the Bastions. By the time Wilson took his turn to speak, delegates were thirsting for uplift. As the Labor vote shrank in one by-election after another, men and women with lifetimes of service lost their posts as local officials on town councils and school boards. Moreover, to many fervent socialists, Wilson’s economic policies have added up to a betrayal of their lifelong principles. And yet, as head of the party, he was still the only man to whom they could turn for inspiration.

So it was not to his reasoned and thoughtful critics that Wilson spoke, but to the party’s rank-and-file faithful. “This has been a rough year for all of us in this movement,” he began. Then, without growing defensive about his economic policies, he proceeded to reel off streams of statistics designed to make his listeners feel proud of Labor’s accomplishments. Identifying their problems with his own, Wilson observed that “we have gone through a great deal together in defense of everything we stand for.” Finally, as London’s Times observed, “hamming it unmercifully, but hamming it like an old trouper,” he ended on a rousing burst of old-fashioned socialist oratory: “It is the job of every member of this party to join with their government in defending the bastions we have won from those who would seek to drive us out for their own gain. It is no defensive posture for which I ask. I charge you now to go over to the attack.”

In 22 pages of text, he had offered hardly one new thought. Indeed, much of his speech was a pastiche of cliches from other party pep talks going back 15 years. But it created precisely the evangelistic effect that he had hoped for: the delegates jumped to their feet and gave him a proloneed, heartfelt ovation. Even Dissenter Cousins joined the cheering, ready to relent a bit. “We can differ on one specific issue. But it doesn’t mean we’re not right behind the government on all else.”