Great Britain: Gaitskell’s New Grip

For the past two years, Britain’s Labor Party has sounded more like a waterfront quarrel than a loyal opposition. With the Conservatives’ third straight electoral victory, deep doctrinal differences sundered Labor, scared off its potential majority, and let the government go virtually unchallenged. Last week Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell resoundingly quelled the civil war in Labor’s ranks, scoring a personal triumph that was also reassuring to the U.S. and the West.

No Neville. Gaitskell asserted his new grip on the party at its annual conference in seaside Blackpool. Just twelve months after jeering left-wingers had scuppered a Gaitskell-backed resolution supporting Britain’s obligations to NATO and the Western Alliance, the party leadership last week submitted an almost identical motion. In its defense, Gaitskell argued lucidly that a neutral, unilaterally disarmed Britain could only encourage Russia’s “more aggressive elements” and “prove profoundly dangerous for world peace.” To the left-wing slogan “No War over Berlin,” Gaitskell replied forcefully that World War II had broken one year after Neville Chamberlain shrugged off Hitler’s rape of Czechoslovakia—”a small nation that didn’t matter very much.”

Labor adopted the defense resolution by an overwhelming majority (4,526,000 to 1,756,000), rejecting with equal finality a neutralist proposal by Left-Winger Frank Cousins, whose venomous attack on party leaders was silenced by a barrage of slow handclaps. Despite passage of an inconsistent but relatively unimportant resolution opposing U.S. missile bases in Britain, Gaitskell had dramatically vindicated his 1960 vow in the midst of defeat: “We will fight, and fight, and fight again.”

No Impatience. Gaitskell, a onetime economics don, also won on domestic issues. With adoption of his moderate, modern social and economic program, he routed the party’s Marxian “fundamentalists,” offered Britain’s prosperous working class a package that was hardly more radical than the Tory platform. Over opposition from Laborites who fear that nationalization of British industry may be impeded by capitalist competition, Gaitskell clinched his victory by blocking a mischievous resolution opposing British membership in the European Common Market, and substituting a heavily conditioned but practical endorsement.

Labor’s escape from the wilderness coincides with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s steady decline from his 1959 popularity peak, when prosperity, his confrontation with Khrushchev, and a top London advertising agency all burnished the image of “MacWonder.” At their lowest ebb since the election (“this valley of sluggishness,” Gaitskell called it), the Conservatives are trailing five full points behind Labor’s Gallup-estimated hold on 37-5% of the population. Few expect a general election much before the government’s term runs out in 1964. But Hugh Gaitskell, as his foes ruefully testify, is an infinitely patient man.