Foreign News: Fire & Suet Dough

Labor Party leaders met for their annual conference last week in a mood of breast-beating, recrimination and bitter division. The party had suffered a crushing defeat, its leader was aging and ailing, it was angrily divided between moderates and left-wingers. Before the delegates was a 30,000-word report documenting its failures. “We are an aging party . . . We are entirely failing to appeal to youth.” But the whisper that went round the bars of Margate with the greatest insistence was: “Clem must go. If he won’t go himself, someone will have to tell him.”

But Clem Attlee, who at 72 has been Labor’s leader for 20 years, sat calmly pulling at his pipe, while Bevanites and moderates raged at each other. Said one delegate: “I see both sides. Some of the union bosses are ruthless and overbearing. Some of the left-wing delegates are ambitious and influenced by the Communists. We must have a leader powerful enough to reconcile and lead both wings.”

Jolly Old Electorate. From the outset, it was clear that the moderates were in firm control. Fractious Nye Bevan noisily challenged Hugh Gaitskell, whom he considers his chief antagonist and rival, for the post of party treasurer. Gaitskell won by a 5-to-1 margin. The defeat seemed only to inspire Bevan to new onslaughts. He charged that the party has become dominated by the huge trade unions. Labor’s answer to the Tories, he shouted, should be not change but a return to the old hellfire Socialism and nationalization of almost everything. “You are not Socialists!” he thundered.

Up jumped spry old Herbert Morrison, his near-white cowlick standing up more jauntily than ever. Now that his chance was coming to lead, Morrison was not going to let anyone out-Socialize him. “My test of a person on the left is what he gets done,” he snapped, and pointed out that he had brought in the first public-ownership bill back in 1931. The Bevanites howled with rage. Morrison persisted: “You have to consider the jolly old electorate and what it will swallow. The British are not going to take in one election program the public ownership of all industry.”

Hugh Gaitskell, whom many of the hornyhanded old Socialists consider too academic as a candidate for leader, seized the chance to show some ginger. “I am a Socialist because I hate and loathe social injustice, because I hate the class structure that disfigures our society, because I hate poverty and squalor!” he cried. “Nationalization is a means, and not an end in itself.” The delegates, surprised at such spice, roared an ovation.

A Fat Lot of Fire. Between times, the delegates uncertainly considered the future. “Labor’s afraid of prosperity,” warned the miners’ Sam Watson. “Maybe we did found the party out of bitterness and hardship, but those days are gone. Our task now is to learn to enjoy plenty.” The party executive’s best proposal was a three-year study to shape policy on specific problems. “That’s a fat lot of fire to take home to the boys,” grumbled one delegate. “Lump of suet dough, that’s what I call it.”

The bitterness between the factions took up so much time that the conference never did get around to debating much of anything else. Attlee’s personal choice was his old friend and onetime Colonial Secretary Jim Griffiths, a popular, trouble-soothing Welshman out of the mines. But the party was more likely to choose Deputy Leader Morrison or up-and-coming Hugh Gaitskell. Even Attlee himself felt, for his own reasons, that “Clem must go.” At week’s end he told one Labor leader in strictest confidence: “I will go at the end of the month.”