Great Britain: The Road to Jerusalem

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The air was atingle in Scarborough last week as 2,000 delegates poured joyously into the windswept seaside resort for the Labor Party’s 62nd annual conference. It wasn’t just salt they sniffed on the North Sea breeze. From the elegant old clifftop hotels to the pubs where Laborites adjourned for their midmorning pints, Scarborough smelled of victory.

For the first time in their twelve years out of office, the Laborites who filled Scarborough’s three-tiered Spa Great Hall were buoyantly aware that all Britain was watching them—and the man who is expected by the majority (56%) of Britons to be their next Prime Minister. The delegates fidgeted impatiently through the first day of ho-hum oratory. Finally, at the stroke of 10 o’clock next morning, Harold Wilson rose to make the keynote speech as the new leader of the Labor Party. For a solid minute, the delegates roared and clapped their approval, while Wilson gazed vacantly over their heads, as if groping for words. His first sentence jabbed to the heart of Britain’s troubled mood. Said he:

“There’s no more dangerous illusion than the comfortable doctrine that the world owes us a living, that whatever we do, whenever we run into trouble, we can always rely on a special relationship to bail us out. From now on, Britain will have just as much influence in the world as we can earn and can deserve. We have no accumulated reserves on which to live.”

Science & Socialism. For nearly an hour, in a mixture of rolling Old Testament exhortation and terse New Frontierese, the greying, round-faced Yorkshireman described a Britain restored to greatness “not by military strength alone” but by mobilizing “all the resources of democratic planning, all the latent and underdeveloped energies and skills of our people.” The key, said Wilson, is science. He explained: “The strength, solvency and influence of Britain—which some still think depend on nostalgic illusions or upon nuclear posturings—are going to depend for the remainder of this century on the speed with which we come to terms with the world of change.”

A marriage of science and socialism, in Wilson’s vision, will ensure accelerated technological progress that can make Britain “the pilot plant of the world.” A socialist government will radically step up the training of more scientists, ensure that they are creatively employed, and staunch the “brain drain” to the U.S. by offering them the prestige and prospects for which many of the country’s ablest men now cross the Atlantic. With heavy state support for their work and more “purposive use of research,” he prophesied, British scientists will yield new products, new laboratories, new industries, new sources of world trade.

Already in the U.S., automated tool lines can produce an entire automobile without a single worker, and control computers can make decisions in one three-billionth of a second. To gasps from the audience, Wilson turned on the trade union leaders who have tried to prevent automation: “We have no room for Luddites in the Labor Party.”* The answer, he declared, is not to thwart technological progress but to keep pace with it by providing 10 million new jobs in the next decade. Said he: “These facts put the whole argument about industry and socialism in new perspective.”

When Wilson’s flat, nasal voice reached the end of his speech, the wildly cheering delegates gave him a standing ovation that lasted nearly two minutes. It was the most successful oration that Wilson had ever made, and one of the most important for the future of the Labor Party.

Up with Growth Stocks. British socialism is more Methodist than Marxist. Its leaders have always had fervent faith that in freedom and social justice Englishmen can build the New Jerusalem of William Blake’s vision. It was Britain’s hunger for a better-ordered world that swept a Labor government to power in 1945. In the wilderness since 1951, Labor has fought ceaselessly to shape the coherent contemporary philosophy that might earn its passage back to power. It did not succeed because its leaders always came up with dreary, dogmatic formulas that were remote from the everyday lives and problems of the people.

The Labor Party no longer draws its support from cloth-capped workers clamoring to be delivered from the “thralldom of wagedom,” as they called it. Its present and potential appeal is to middle-and working-class Britons who are skeptical of socialist dogma and hostile to any radical social experiments that might threaten their living standards. What they desperately want is more and better education, housing, hospitals and highways, and they fault the Conservative government for not meeting or even fully grasping their need. As a result, Britain’s mood today, said former Labor Prime Minister Clement Attlee, is once more “the spirit of 1945.”

Nationalization as a cure-all for Britain’s ills is out. What Wilson has in mind is far more selective and would extend state ownership to greener pastures. Pastures, in fact, may well be taken over by the government as part of its program to ease the housing shortage; Labor intends to buy idle building land, at market prices, for new state-owned housing projects. But its biggest prize would be the new products and whole new industries that science and socialism are to create. The state would also control the cadres of scientists and reserves of knowledge that his government would call forth. Wilson says he is content to let established industries “wither away” in private hands. “All he wants,” remarked one observer, “is the growth stocks.”

Wilson’s program for the party made him a hero among Laborites and commanded respectful attention throughout Britain. “I was afraid it wouldn’t go over,” he confessed afterward. “I am very pleased with its reception.”

Out of the Wilderness. The delegates were even more relieved by Wilson’s performance. Over the years, Harold Wilson, 47, has earned the reputation of a vain, slippery opportunist. Less than a year ago, one longtime colleague said: “I have never known such a brilliant or such an unloved man.” After Hugh Gaitskell’s death last January, Gaitskellites prayed that the party leadership would not go to “Little Harold,” as they then called him. Most of the leading Laborites who are now in Wilson’s “Shadow” Cabinet found it hard to vote for him in the party election last February. “Can you trust him?” they asked. “Gaitskell didn’t.” He won anyway. And under Wilson’s firm control, the Labor Party is more confident of victory and more solidly united than at any other time during its twelve years in the wilderness. Wilson himself is the first Opposition leader in British history to win general acceptance as the nation’s next Prime Minister even before the general election.

The British may be underestimating their other Harold, Prime Minister Macmillan, who is every bit as wily as Wilson—and in office. If Macmillan holds off the election until next June, Tories say wistfully, Wilson’s luster may have dimmed and their own limp fortunes revived. But even allowing for Labor’s proved capacity for plucking defeat from the jaws of victory, most Conservatives last week agreed that their prospects have seldom been gloomier.

Brilliant Maneuvers. Harold Wilson’s triumph went deep into the complex machinery of the Labor Party, and it was complete. Only a month earlier, Britain’s Big Six unions indignantly rejected Wilson’s plea for the “wage restraint,” that he considers essential to successful economic expansion. But on the conference floor last week, bull-headed Ted Hill, the Boilermakers’ union leader who headed the resistance, meekly announced that, in view of Wilson’s plans to boost national production, the unions had decided to cooperate after all.

The most dramatic moment in the entire conference came in the midst of a speech by Deputy Leader George Brown, one of Wilson’s most outspoken foes. Since his defeat for the leadership eight months ago, Brown and his sizable following had remained the last threat to Wilson’s dominance. Turning abruptly to Wilson in mid-speech, he blurted: “As one who was not exactly happy about the outcome, I want to say now I am happy . . .” The rest of the sentence was drowned in a mighty roar of applause that only subsided a minute later when Wilson stood up and raised Brown’s left arm in the champion’s salute. Later, standing glowing in the wings, Wilson exclaimed: “That was the act of a big man.”

Since taking over the leadership, Wilson has worked deftly to defuse the old “theological” battles over Socialist dogma that have exploded at every previous conference for a decade. While scrupulously obeying his pledge to base his policies on Gaitskell’s program, Wilson has maneuvered brilliantly to regroup the Labor Party on its responsible middle ground. Though he was elected with support from the neutralist, unilateralist left, he soon made it clear that he does not share its views and has isolated the extremists from the rest of the party. By giving right-wingers most of the choice jobs in his Shadow Cabinet, he won the grudging allegiance of the loyal Gaitskellites, who have yet to forgive Wilson completely for trying to depose their leader in 1960.

The Old-Boy Network. Even before the leadership election last February, Wilson confided to Laborite Richard H.S. Crossman that “Labor should be the party of science.” He explained: “If I get the job, I believe the party will be able to liberate the frustrated energies of thousands of young scientists, technologists and specialists who feel there is no room at the top for them under the present antiscientific Old-Boy network in industry and Whitehall.”

Most scientists voted Labor in 1945, but switched in 1959. “To win them back,” said Wilson, “we have to make them feel we take them seriously.”

In recent months, Wilson and Crossman have discussed his program with scores of scientists and educators in Britain, the U.S. and Russia (but not, apparently, with Novelist-Scientist C. P. Snow, who has graphically documented the follies of government-directed research in wartime). Finally, the night before his speech last week, Wilson retired at 11 o’clock to his $32-a-day hotel suite, spent seven hours dictating and editing, rose at 6 a.m., and was still working on it when he stood to deliver the speech at the morning session.

Guaranteed Bonhomie. Wilson’s blueprint for scientific socialism, as he expounded it to the Labor Conference, accords with the Gaitskell philosophy—but, with a significant difference: if it had come from donnish Hugh Gaitskell, it would probably have been ripped to shreds. Says Gaitskellite Denis Healey: “The intellectual way Gaitskell advanced his ideas forced many to oppose them. When Wilson says the same thing, he does it in such a way that others do not feel compelled to disagree.”

Laborites, even Wilson’s potential foes, found some goodies to applaud in his program. He mollified the far left by urging greater trade with Russia and an East-West detente that would allow Britain to funnel defense spending into research. Old-fashioned chauvinists applauded his rosy vision of a Britain made great again, and Little Englanders cheered his declaration of independence from the U.S.

As a final guarantee of bonhomie throughout the conference, party officials dusted off an obscure by-law that permits them to prohibit debate on subjects that have been “fully and adequately explored” within the previous three years. Astonishingly, they used the rule to cut off any discussion of the thorny problems of defense and foreign policy.

Thus, on Wilson’s assurance that “there wasn’t really anything more to be said,” the party that hopes to govern Britain quashed discussion of such internationally momentous issues as its proposal for gradual disengagement in Central Europe, Britain’s future relations with the Common Market, Wilson’s avowed intent to “denegotiate” the Nassau Agreement giving it U.S. Polaris submarine secrets, and other pressing questions that might lead to vote-losing disputation. Delegates could not even question Wilson’s aim to substitute “natural” ties with the U.S. for the cherished “special relationship” based on nuclear sharing. Save for a few scattered catcalls, Laborites accepted the ban without question. Asked if Gaitskell would have resorted to such tactics, Wilson replied: “No—but he would have lost the election.”

Youngest Prime Minister? “The Labor Party,” Wilson likes to explain, “is like a vehicle. If you drive at great speed, all the people in it are either so exhilarated or so sick that you have no problems. But when you stop, they all get out and start to argue about which way to go.”

In his nine months at the wheel, Wilson has driven himself at breakneck speed and plainly relishes his role. He has had conferences with many European socialist leaders, and on visits to Moscow and Washington to discuss his policies has been flattered by his hosts’ respectful assumption that he has already taken office. Cracks an acquaintance: “Harold’s having his honeymoon before the marriage.”

The courtship started 39 years ago, when eight-year-old Harold Wilson was photographed in a proprietorial pose outside 10 Downing Street; at 16, he announced his intention of some day living there. If he makes it inside next year, he will be the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Rosebery who held office from 1894-1895, and only the third to come from Labor’s ranks (the others: Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee) in the party’s 63 years. Wilson’s proudest boast, however, will be that he is the first “classless” Prime Minister in Britain’s history. A North Country chemist’s son, he went to grammar school and Oxford on scholarships, and resembles thousands of other lowlier Britons who have taken the same escape route out of the suffocating class structure. “Those of us who had educational advantages,” he says slyly in a homespun Yorkshire burr, “should not look down on Mr. Macmillan and others who had no choice but to go to Eton.”

Wilson’s lifelong hero has been William Ewart Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal who awakened Britain’s conscience to the miseries of the new industrial working class. Wilson shares Gladstone’s erudition and eloquence, and at times betrays the moral certitude that prompted a Victorian wag’s complaint about Gladstone: “I don’t mind his having all the aces up his sleeve, but I do object to his acting as if God put them there.”

Bash, Bash, Bash. Wilson’s Olympianire and searing tongue have made him the most feared Labor orator in Parliament since Nye Bevan. Wilson has described the Tory government as “that effete Venetian oligarchy,” likened Macmillan’s relations with Kennedy to those of “a seedy uncle at the receiving end of some well-chosen homilies from his wealthy, forward-looking nephew.”

On the Christine Keeler cult: “The worship of the golden calf.”* On rumors that the Tories were trying to force Macmillan to retire before the election: “If they succeed, they plan a massive campaign of destalinization and demacmillanization that will make the achievement of Nikita Khrushchev look like the efforts of a well-intentioned amateur.”

One of Wilson’s most valuable assets is a fantastic photographic memory that reaches back for years. “Ah, yes,” he will exclaim, “I remember making that point in the House on June 17, 1963. You’ll find it in Hansard, page 51.” On the other hand, he confesses, he can “never remember a face.”

Wilson solicits his colleagues’ views, delegates responsibilities more freely than Gaitskell, and is sparing of reprimands. “For every mistake,” he says philosophically, “we’ll pull off two or three victories. If only we keep bashing, bashing, bashing away, the government will feel the effect.”

Critics & Colleagues. Most of the key posts in a Wilson government would be held by talented, fiercely local Laborites who came to the fore under Gaits kell and now hold posts in Wilson’s Shadow Cabinet while waiting to take office.

> Deputy Leader Brown, 49, is Home Secretary in the Shadow Cabinet. A truck driver’s son, he is an influential, impetuous, passionately anti-Communist union leader, for five years was the party’s able defense expert.

> Defense Expert Denis Healey, 46, a Yorkshireman, is an outspoken champion of the U.S. who argues that Britain’s nuclear deterrent is a “fatal error” because its cost has forced the government to “rat” on its NATO ground force commitments.

> Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, 56, is a writer and former Oxford history don who, apart from Wilson, is the only top Laborite to have held a Cabinet post (Commonwealth Relations Secretary) in the Attlee government. Labor’s foreign policy favors seating Red China in the U.N. and making Nationalist China a U.N. trusteeship—a solution that is not acceptable to Peking or Formosa or Washington.

> Board of Trade President will be Douglas Jay, 56, another Gaitskellite, who believes that the party should de-emphasize its socialism. With the sustained economic growth envisaged by Labor, he argues, business will benefit from higher levels of savings, profits and wages.

> Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan, 51, is a wartime Royal Navy lieutenant who has proved a tough-minded administrator and was credited with persuading the big unions to go along with Wilson’s wage restraint policy.

Wilson’s two most influential and eminent economic advisers would have no official role in his government. Nicholas Kaldor, 55, and Thomas Balogh, 57, are both Hungarian-born and are known as “those evil Hungarians,” nicknamed respectively “Buda” and “Pest.” Balogh, a mercurial left-wing Oxford economist, near neighbor of Wilson in suburban Hampstead, has long been the dominant influence in his economic thinking. As a quid pro quo for restrictions on wage raises, Buda and Pest have convinced Wilson that he needs control over corporate profits and dividends and a tax on capital. Officially, Labor intends only to nationalize the trucking industry and the private sector of steel, but Wilson reserves the right to set up competitive, state-owned plants in industries that are conspicuously inefficient.

Wilson’s closest adviser is R.H.S. Grossman, 55, a lively left-wing will-o’-the-wisp who was a don at Oxford’s New College when Wilson was an undergraduate there. Wilson, who meets all his other associates at his House of Commons office, often discusses policies late into the night at Grossman’s house in shabby Vincent Square. Dick Crossman drew up Gaitskell’s social security program; and in the Wilson government he would head a newly created Ministry of Higher Education. It might better be called the Ministry for Expanding Education. Aware of the explosive demand for universities (see EDUCATION), Labor is committed to accommodate 200,000 students in universities by 1970.

Plain & High. Always a lonely man, Wilson is even more isolated as leader of the party. He sees few of his old leftwing supporters outside working hours, even declines colleagues’ dinner invitations on the grounds that it would be unfair to listen for hours to one man’s views and still enforce his 15-minute cutoff on office interviews with other associates. Men who have worked with him for decades and live in his Hampstead neighborhood have never stepped inside the modest, cluttered house at 12 Southway, where he lives with his wife Mary, a Congregationalist minister’s daughter, and their two sons, Robin, 19, and Giles, 15. Says one acquaintance: “I don’t think anybody really knows Harold. He hasn’t got any friends, as you and I mean the word.”

Wilson almost never attends a play or a concert, confesses to feeling “guilty” if he wastes even a few weekend hours on a novel. Sighs an old acquaintance: “He’s dull and devious—God, how devious—diligent and deliberate. He hasn’t got a principle in his head, except that to him the Labor Party is the ark and its policy Holy Writ.”

Wilson’s austere social life has proved a bitter disappointment to Fleet Street, which found party-loving Hugh Gaitskell’s capers a fertile source of copy. “I prefer beer to champagne and tinned salmon to smoked,” insists Wilson. “I am on the side of plain living and high thinking.” Actually, Wilson likes steak and wine as well as the next man, but he tucks into packaged custard, stewed rhubarb and canned meat with schoolboyish gusto.

Long-Distance Runner. Wilson’s grey, cold, hard traits are a legacy from a long line of North Countrymen whose radical beliefs were shaped in grim Baptist churches, where the rich and the godless were smitten in their pride. Even today, it is said Wilson’s favorite hymn is the oldtime God Gave the Land to the People. Reared in Yorkshire’s dark, satanic Colne Valley, which has never yet sent a Tory to Westminster, he recalls that “half the children in my class went barefoot.” As a child, he became aware of social and economic issues during the Depression, when his father was laid off for months at a time. Young Wilson developed a lifelong love of boy-scouting, sees its emphasis on brotherhood as another formative political influence. (Unlike Deputy Leader Brown, however, Wilson does not address acquaintances as “Brother.”)

He was head boy at his grammar school and won a scholarship to Oxford, a passionately political environment in the ’30s. Wilson, for once, ignored politics to concentrate on his books, with occasional time out for long-distance running. He won a brilliant degree in philosophy, politics and economics, captured the coveted Gladstone Memorial Prize with a tome entitled State and Railways in Great Britain, 1823-1863, which is still relevant to Britain’s rail problems 100 years later. In 1937 Wilson became an economics don at the unusually young age of 21. Another young don at Wilson’s college remembers him as “a fox terrier —full of energy, brilliant, and every now and then he’d give a sharp bark.” Wilson worked as a research assistant for the late Lord (“womb-to-tomb”) Beveridge, the architect of the welfare state and a notorious slave driver, who credited Wilson with being the “best economist I ever had.”

Moscow Trader. In World War II, Wilson shifted from don’s gown to the sober suit of a civil servant, and at 27 became chief economist for the Ministry of Fuel & Power. Elected to Parliament from a Lancashire farming constituency at war’s end, he rose swiftly in the Attlee government, at 31 became the youngest Cabinet Minister in 95 years. At the Board of Trade, he grew a mustache to look older, habitually worked 16 hours a day, and made his first trip to Moscow to negotiate an Anglo-Soviet trade pact. After some flinty bargaining with Wilson, Anastas Mikoyan exclaimed: “Ah, you see, it takes a Yorkshireman to deal with an Armenian!” Wilson, who now brags that he was “negotiating with the Russians before Macmillan was even in the Cabinet,” still speaks glowingly of “the millions of pounds” to be made from exporting to Russia.

In 1951 Wilson resigned from the Cabinet to protest Britain’s increased defense spending for the Korean war. Health Minister Aneurin Bevan quit at the same time, objecting to charges for health services. Nye Bevan, who respected his economic expertise, once told Wilson that he was “all facts and no bloody vision.” If any Laborites still held to that view last week, Wilson finally disproved it.

Indeed, Labor’s domestic program “to move Britain 25 years in the next five, industrially, educationally, socially” seemed on the whole as fresh and appealing to the public as it was clearly disconcerting to the Tories. Last week’s Gallup poll, taken before the Labor Party conference, narrowed Labor’s lead over the Tories from 13.5% to 11%, and a decrease in the Don’t-Knows column suggested that wavering Conservative voters were returning to the fold. Nonetheless, if Labor’s plurality holds up at the polls, Labor could have a margin of more than 200 seats in Parliament. The Liberals, who plan to run 400 candidates in the election, may prove an additional threat to the government, since they usually capture two Tory votes to every Labor ballot.

The Tories, who gathered for their annual conference at Blackpool this week, were begging party officials “to get them inspired.” There was no doubt about the Labor delegates’ mood as they bellowed The Red Flag (“Come dungeon dark or gallows grim/ This song shall be our parting hymn”) and hit the road to Jerusalem. The wind of change from Scarborough was infectious. “Me vote Tory?” exclaimed one Soho pub pundit. “That would be like Noah picketing the flood.”

True, Harold Wilson is still something of an enigma to the public. On the other hand, Britons may find Wilson’s grey manner and grim reputation a welcome change after the government’s all-too Old-Boy handling of the Profumo affair. “Wilson doesn’t seem very nice,” mused one Londoner last week. “Good. That’s what we need now. A round little P.M. with a pipe—and a dash of nastiness.”

* Named for Ned Ludd, a Leicestershire halfwit, whose famed attacks on machines at the turn of the 19th century helped to inspire roving bands of wreckers who blamed mechanized weaving for widespread unemployment.

* Christine bobbed back last week at a magistrate’s pre-trial hearing of perjury and conspiracy charges against her in the “Lucky” Gordon case. Gordon, one of her West Indian lovers, was sentenced to three years in jail (and later released) on Christine’s testimony that he had beaten her. After three days and three different versions of the beating, the hearing was adjourned for three weeks.