GREAT BRITAIN: Counting Labor Out

Against the fervent and dramatic urgings of Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell, the annual conference of the British Labor Party last week voted a sensational course: to scrap British nuclear weapons, to eject Britain’s U.S. allies from airbases on British soil, to pull out of the NATO alliance and count Britain out of the cold war. The decision cracked the crumbling Labor Party wide open. It doomed the Opposition Laborites—who have failed to win the confidence of British voters in three straight elections—to further years in the political wilderness.

The vote did not speak for England, did not speak for Labor’s leadership, probably did not speak for more than 10% to 20% of the 12 million Britons who voted for the Labor party in last October’s balloting. What happened then? The Labor decision, voted in the windy Yorkshire seaside resort of Scarborough, was an outpouring of feuding and bitterness over past defeats, fed by resentment of the U.S. and inspired by the combination of idealism, fears and pacifism that always lurks among Laborites.

Deathwatch. The outcome had actually been decided long in advance, ordained by the strange way the Labor Party is run, in which labor leaders, casting a bloc of a million union votes at a time, can always outvote the so-called constituency parties, which represent the actual British voter. In union halls and smoke-filled rooms, all the big unions had registered their stands and committed their huge bloc votes last summer. When the conference chairman banged his opening gavel in the big Scarborough auditorium, only the delegates representing the various constituency parties remained free to swing their votes—and the only question left undecided was the size of Hugh Gaitskell’s defeat. Burly Frank Cousins, leftist boss of the giant Transport and General Workers Union, was driving for a million-vote majority for a neutralist policy. Gaitskell, backed by the party’s 254 M.P.s was fighting not only for his defense policy but his party leadership.

Night before the showdown debate last week, Scarborough’s hotel lounges were like death cells. Instead of the usual noisy, bantering throngs, groups in corners whispered: “Gaiters* has his resignation already written.” Next morning, as delegates swarmed into the hall, knives were out, and Gaitskell on the platform was as hemmed in by intimate enemies as Caesar among the Roman senators. It was hard to say which was the stronger mood —Ban the Bomb or Gaitskell Must Go.

Dishing It Out. Delegates wove their way down packed aisles to shout their arguments from the tribune in a haze of floodlit smoke. “If the two mad groups of the world want to have a go at each other,” roared Cousins, “we want no part of it. We talk of having friendship with Russia—and then we threaten them with the bomb.” The boilermakers’ delegate said it with metaphors mixed: “America and Russia are like two grizzly bears trying to get at each other. Let us pull out of this bear garden. Let us act as mediators between these two gorillas.” In one emotion-bogged passage, leftist ex-M.P. Ian Mikardo shouted: “I am not prepared to see my loved ones go up in radioactive dust so that we should act as a lightning conductor—as decoy duck—to draw enemy fire on our heads to divert it from New York and Chicago.” In some replies to Gaitskellites, “NATO” was spat out like a dirty word. Fiery Michael Foot demanded that imperial Britain, to avoid obliteration, should become a neutralist country “like India, Indonesia, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Ghana.”

Finally Gaitskell rose to face the 1,300 cheering, booing, catcalling delegates. Defending the Atlantic alliance against foregone defeat, he made the speech of his life. “Are we so simple,” he asked, “as to believe that the Soviet Union is not going to use the power put into its hands if you unilaterally disarm? The West must retain nuclear weapons so long as the Soviet Union has them.” Scornfully, he turned on some who argued that Britain could unilaterally disarm its nuclear strength without leaving NATO: “Would these people follow the cowardly, hypocritical course of saying ‘We don’t want nuclear bombs, but for God’s sake, America, protect us’?” And what if Britain did get out of NATO, asked Gaitskell. “The whole alliance may break up. The U.S. might wash its hands of Europe.” There was a rumble of protest from the floor and from the galleries. Snapped Gaitskell: “I know there are people who say they’d be glad to see the Americans out. They were glad to see them here in 1942.”

His face perspiring in the glaring lights, Gaitskell said grimly that he had read that this whole argument was not about defense at all but about his leadership. Amid whistling, booing and stamping, Gaitskell said that the leadership of the Labor Party is finally determined by the members who sit in the House of Commons, and that “the vast majority of Labor M.P.s are opposed” to neutralism and had made this clear to the men and women who voted for them. The hall was in uproar, but Gaitskell’s voice went plowing on: “Do you think we Labor M.P.s can simply accept a decision of this kind and become overnight the pacifists, unilateralists and fellow travelers that other people are?”

On the platform, some party leaders were on their feet applauding; others, notably Vice Chairman Harold Wilson, ambitious for Gaitskell’s job, sat immobile. On the floor, a Lancashire delegate shouted: “Eeee—’e’s dishing it out, isn’t ‘e?” Gaitskell shouted: “We will fight and fight and fight again to bring back sanity and honesty and dignity, so that our movement with its great past may retain its glory and greatness.”

The Next Rounds. Gaitskell sat down amid mingled boos, whistles and the strains of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. In the vote that followed, he lost. But the margin was nothing like the million votes the neutralists had counted on; Cousins’ anti-NATO resolution scraped through by 43,000 votes. Gaitskell carried 75% of the constituency-party votes, and next day he had the satisfaction of seeing the conference, by a lopsided vote, uphold his objection to further nationalization of industry as the primary doctrinaire goal of the Labor Party.

Tough, intelligent, determined and, now, icily angry, Oxford-trained Economist Hugh Gaitskell had saved his claim to party leadership and served notice on the somewhat chapfallen neutralists that they had won only one round. But with the intraparty fight still unsettled, the Labor Party looks as if it will not be a serious contender against the Tories for a long time to come.

* The Opposition’s nickname for Gaitskell.