GREAT BRITAIN: The Confident Tories

“I do not believe that Socialism in this country can survive a third consecutive defeat.” Those words from bubbly Conservative Party Chairman Viscount Hailsham were just what the Tories had come to their annual party conference to hear-hear. Four thousand delegates, gathered in seaside Blackpool, cheered Hailsham as he continued: “I do not mean to suggest that the Labor Party would disappear, or even that it would necessarily stop calling itself the Socialist Party; but the evil, factious specter of democratic socialism, that contradiction in terms which has dominated and befogged the political thinking of 30 years, would finally have been done away with.”

The Conservatives, so divided and despairing after Suez, were now full of expectations of victory at the next election (possibly next spring). The pound sterling was strong, the country prosperous, and their Prime Minister popular. Unlike Laborites. who air their disagreements in public, the assembled Tories debated only 16 of 447 resolutions submitted. Economics, foreign affairs, defense and colonial affairs were covered in one day without interfering with tea breaks. The Tories had taken over the Welfare State, and even had a few amendments to offer: a big national pension scheme, financial assistance for poor young people trying to buy houses, a five-year plan for bigger and better schools.

On the final day they cheered their leader. Harold Macmillan. as no other Tory save Winston Churchill had been applauded in many a year. He had a new slogan to offer them (“The right to earn, the right to own, the right to save”), and on the subject of friendship with the U.S. struck a markedly different note from Labor’s. On Formosa, he said: “We can best serve British interests if on the basis of our friendship [with the U.S.] we give our honest advice in private consultation, rather than yield to the temptation of public recrimination or nagging.”