World: New Life for the Liberals

From the platoons of perambulators marshaled on Llandudno’s pier last week, it looked as if a baby contest were in full swing. In fact, the prams’ owners were visiting the wind-whipped Welsh resort for the Liberal Party’s annual conference, its biggest and most closely watched gathering since the war. Though it has been fashionable in Britain to dismiss the Liberals themselves as political babes-in-arms, last week’s conference showed that the resurgent party not only appeals powerfully to the young—hence the youthful parents with their prams—but that it has also developed a new maturity that may well make it a force to be reckoned with at Britain’s next general election.

Less Self. Of the 1,456 delegates packed into the pier pavilion, the great majority come from Britain’s “new middle class,” an expanding tier that reaches from skilled workers to professional and managerial classes. It is this segment of society that has been hardest hit by the Conservative government’s white-collar wage restraints—the “pay pause”—while staunchly resisting the Labor Party’s archaic doctrines and chronic schisms. Though they have made dramatic gains in by-elections during the past year, the Liberals have been dismissed as a party of protest that is still in search of its real identity. Damned by the Socialists as “traitors to the working class,” its leaders were decried by Tories as “faceless peddlers of politics with a pretty little trinket for every taste.”

In fact, since the Liberals are not hobbled by extremists of the far right or left, the parade of young speakers at Llandud-no last week offered fewer panaceas and more constructive policies than either majority party usually adopts at its conferences. Under black, orange and white banners proclaiming TAKE BRITAIN AHEAD, delegates listened earnestly to well-researched proposals for liberalizing Britain’s class-ridden educational system, for stepping up its sluggish economy and broadening the base of society (2% of Britain’s adult population still owns 46% of all personal wealth). Delegates jabbed repeatedly at the spiritual and material lags of the affluent society. “We need,” said Liberal Candidate Harold Haigh, “less self and more self-denial.”

The Liberals made the most of the fact that they have supported Britain’s membership in the Common Market since the birth of the European movement in 1948 —while Labor is still dithering and doddering over the issue. Said one speaker: British failure to enter the Market “will be a victory for the old against the young, for the insular, the blind and the prejudiced—and for Mr. Khrushchev.”

Some Liberal policies are shared by Labor—notably their conviction that Britain should scrap its costly, prestigious’ Hbomb arsenal in hopes of halting the spread of nuclear weapons. In the past, party officials have seriously discussed pooling forces to put up “Lib-Lab” candidates at the next election. However, Liberal Party Leader Jo Grimond last week took full advantage of the Socialists’ disastrous disarray on Common Market membership. Pressing home his bluntest attacks yet on Labor, Grimond declared: “The Labor Party is losing its soul—just as the Liberals are gaining their feet.”

Wedded to Work. If the Liberals do get back on their feet after more than 40 years in eclipse, it will be almost entirely through Grimond’s leadership. A ruggedly handsome man with a wayward lock of grey hair, Grimond, 49, is not so much a policymaker as a popularizer with a flair for making the party’s traditional championship of free enterprise and individual liberties seem timely to young citizens of Britain’s welfare state. Grimond (pronounced Grimm-ond) is a tireless organizer who shuttles up to 80,000 miles a year between London, Liberal outposts and his far-flung constituency of Orkney and Shetland, a storm-battered 20-island chain in the North Atlantic, where he campaigns by motor launch and shanks’ mare.

Like Harold Macmillan, Grimond is a Scot who attended Eton and won a scholarship to Oxford’s austere Balliol College —and, like the Prime Minister, he is wedded to his work. Grimond’s wife Laura is the daughter of Lady Violet Bonham Carter, perennial high priestess of the Liberal Party, and herself the daughter of Lord Asquith, who in 1908 became Prime Minister in the party’s last elected government. (Winston Churchill was his famed First Lord of the Admiralty.)

Though the Liberals won 1,640,761 votes at the 1959 general election (out of 27,862,708), under the British electoral system they got only six of 630 seats in the House of Commons. Since then, the party has worked heroically to build up its organization, has elected more than 1,000 candidates to local councils. They already have twice the number of parliamentary candidates (340) that they were able to field in 1959, and a vastly bigger war chest ($560,000 v. $64,000). In the next general election, probably in 1964, most experts have assumed that the Liberals will lose much of their new-found strength to the two major parties.

The experts may well be wrong. The confident, well-disciplined party at Llandudno last week suggested that it could at least hold the balance of power in an electorate that is increasingly bored with the Tories and mistrustful of the Socialists. As for the “party of protest” label, Grimond retorts: “What’s wrong with that for a start?”