Great Britain: The Loss of Luton

The booming automobile-making town of Luton, Tory Party Chairman John Hare declared recently, is “a microcosm of the Britain we are building.” If so, it may be the Socialists who will take over the construction job. At a by-election last week in Luton, 30 miles northwest of London, voters elected a Labor M.P. for the first time in 13 years, turning the Tories’ 1959 majority of 5,000 votes into a thumping 3,749-vote margin for Labor. The switch, pronounced Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson triumphantly, was clear proof that “the Conservative government has totally lost the confidence of the country.”

Next day the Tories had one to talk about, when ballots were at last counted after another by-election in the sprawling Scottish constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire. There, in one of Britain’s safest Tory seats, Tory Prime Minister Lord Home—now plain Sir Alec Douglas-Home—won a seat in the House of Commons. His 9,328-vote margin exceeded his party’s most buoyant expectations. What’s more, in the course of 72 speeches and a hectic eleven-day campaign, the former peer proved that he is a vigorous, tough-minded politician who seems well-equipped to hold his own in parliamentary free-for-all.

He will have to. In the kind of marginal seat that matters most, like Luton, Tories are faring badly. What troubles the Tories is that Luton is a sign of Tory affluence, with industrial payrolls that have boosted wage levels 20% above the national average. Luton has a bigger-than-average share of the fast-growing middle class that has kept the Conservatives in office for twelve years.

Labor Candidate Will Howie, 39, a neat, bespectacled civil engineer, won out over Tory Sir John Fletcher-Cooke, 52, a tweedy, mustached former colonial administrator, by promising Luton the new schools, housing and industrial expansion that Labor is pragmatically building its election hopes around. Before returning to London for Parliament’s reopening this week, Douglas-Home, the new M.P. for Kinross, remained professionally optimistic: “Luton was the last page of the old chapter. Kinross is the first page of the new.”