England: A View From The Left

...Where will it all end...

...For the time being, the CND recruits to Labor are forced into alliance with Labor's old leftists—and these, it will be recalled, have in the past year won within the Party a singular victory on domestic policy...

...De jure, they have an unanswerable case...

...But there is in this country a deep and widening undercurrent of anxiety on this score, which the Labor left might one day turn to electoral advantage...

...Among those behind Gaitskell was the new Deputy Leader, George Brown, who wavered at the Party Conference (and who has never quite forgiven the Government for dropping the British missile) and many others who in other circumstances might have voted against him...

...There has been considerable discussion of the constitutional proprieties involved: Edmund Burke's letter to the Bristol electorate has been recalled...

...Who, in other words, will have to go off and form a new party—or (a possibility for certain elements of the Right) join the Liberals in some sort of alliance or fusion...

...Middleton has convinced himself, or thinks he ought to convince his readers, that the Labor party decision was the work of a small band of crackpots, out of touch with public opinion, and unlikely to have anything but limited disturbance value in British politics...

...The internal obstacles to this are very great...

...In another contest, where Labor had a chance to win (an industrial seat won in 1959 by the Tories with a small majority), the intervention of a Liberal candidate split Labor's vote as well as that of the Tory—and the latter won...

...His lack of success suggests that it won't be reunited so soon...

...Excluding the Welsh seat, Labor received twenty-five per cent of the popular vote in six contests—and the Liberals twenty-eight per cent...

...In this case, unfortunately, Britain won't be spared...

...The other is by John Roche, a Professor of politics at Brandeis University, who has written frequently on British affairs and defends, generally, the outlook of the Labor right...

...British Labor in Crisis The policy and ideological disputes that have been wracking the British Labor Party continue unabated...

...Crossman, himself, incidentally, backed Wilson for the leadership— on the grounds that Gaitskell was so far to the right that he was incapable of uniting the Party...

...Polaris-equipped Ameri can submarines will be using as a base a bay near Glasgow (named Holy Loch), and the control exercised by the British government over these ships is to be minimal...

...No doubt, but the boundary lines are shifting and not always clear, the situation is complex, and the positions of most participants in Labor's great dispute—except for some few on left and right ineradicably attached to simplistic views of the world—are not without nuance and/or ambiguity...

...Oxford is, to be sure, very much behnid Mr...

...But if logic is on Grossman's side, psychology is not...

...The fight was long, and bitter, and the fronts confused...

...He has characterized the Party's internal controversies over nationalization and defense as "arid" and "unnecessary...

...The Right, it may be said, doesn't dare propose non-action and the Left cannot think of what action to suggest: both are agreed that the old-style nationalized corporation needs to be recast...

...they will not subside for a long time...

...It can shake off that mild reformism which has attenuated the chances of using the Welfare State for an advance toward a total reconstruction of British society and which, today, is reduced in large measure to a defense of the Welfare State against the new inegalitarianism of an affluent Britain...

...Gaitskell: so responsible a figure must attract the admiration and support of many (particularly in these critical times when Labor's very loyalty to NATO, and to a genteel gradualism, has been called into question) who, if they do not vote for his party, wish it well in some more general sense...

...biased (that we expect...

...Little General Election" is a misnomer, as most of the seats were in the south and west of England...

...IT WILL BE SEEN that I have shifted from discussing the Parliamentary party to discussing the rest of the Labor party...

...And those who see no other leaders in sight, or who fear for the party's "image," or who support NATO in far more qualified fashion than does Gaitskell, have to a large extent come out for him...

...I emphasized, some lines above, the shifting nature of the dispute and my present remarks have to be read as a specification rather than a contradiction...

...It's late in the evening and I'll simply write this out until I've finished: spontaneity may bring its own rewards, and those interested can in any case refer to two of my more formal reports ("The Year Zero of British Socialism," Antioch Review, Summer, 1960 and "Ideology and Actuality in Britain," Commentary, December, 1960...

...OXFORD lath November, 1960...

...The reverberations of the affair have been considerable...

...However complex the issues and however fluid the lines, decisions have to be made in a framework set by the extremes...

...Now it is true that the Conference decision was very much ahead of public opinion, as measured by the polls, on the issue of nuclear disarmament...

...Either side might pull it off, and the decision may well drag itself out over one, two, even three years...

...After the Party Conference in October rejected the National Executive Committee's proposals on defense, two "unofficial" resolutions were passed by small majorities...

...LABOR NEUTRALISM represents not alone a pacifist tradition in the Labor party, and certainly not alone the rather benign view some of the Labor left take of the Soviet Union...

...Shortly after the 1959 electoral defeat, Gaitskell proposed to a special Party Conference that the party drop from its constitution the clause which called for the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange...

...Begun but three years ago by a group of intellectuals, at first systematically ignored and then pilloried by the press, the Campaign has mobilized some of the last residues of idealism—among people young or non-political or both—in this society...

...the Labor left still lacks the theoretical and intellectual resources at the disposal of the Right...

...Frank Cousins, the Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union who has campaigned against the Gaitskell line on defense (and on nationalization), is said to have been under constant pressure from his undergraduate children to support CND...

...One is by Norman Birnbaum, a teacher of sociology at Oxford, an editor of New Left Review and an advocate of the opinions of the Labor left...

...You say that someone else will be writing from the other side...

...In the House debate, the Prime Minister (who more and more resembles an upper-class spiv) lied on the extent of British control—Washington quickly, if inadvertently, exposed him and a fearsome row developed...

...they've been systematically ill-informed...

...Instead, what has been called the "Old Testament" was reaffirmed along with a "New Testament" more appropriate, in the view of the Labor right, to changed conditions...

...Gaitskell and his colleagues announced that they would not be bound, in Parliament, by these decisions (although they have in the past been tough with left Labor MPs who defied Party policy...

...The constitutional issue is real enough, but for our purposes not all that important...

...The press, at least, is unanimously behind Gaitskell: theoretical leftism is one thing, but a threat to Britain's place in the "free world" is clearly another...

...This past week, a "Little General Election" was fought: seven by-elections for vacant Parliamentary seats...

...But no obstacle is so great as the kinds of policy assumptions that dictate the political decisions of the Labor right...

...The row, however, was less between the Opposition and the Government than between the two segments of the Opposition...

...It is, among other things, a counterattack rooted in a long series of humiliations for the party's left—going back to the last years of the Attlee government and to the Party's bitter dispute over German rearmament in 1954...

...Patchwork will do little to convince the electorate that Labor is fit to govern...

...The other explicitly called for unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain—and the closing of America's airfields and missile sites in the United Kingdom...

...IT IS CLEAR that Labor's electoral chances, for the immediate future, have already been severely damaged by the disturbance...

...Come to think of it, however, as bad as even the respectable British press has been on this issue, you have been horribly served by the New York Times...

...The Polaris, as every American taxpayer should know, is a rocket (with nu clear or thermonuclear warhead) that can be fired from a submerged submarine...

...The current conflict inside the Labor party has mobilized fundamental and irreconcilable political attitudes...

...Some of Labor's neutralists went so far as to suggest that since they represented the views of Party Conference, they were entitled to negotiate with the Government on allocation of time for debates...

...In four of the five other seats, the Liberals displaced Labor as the second party...

...Gaitskell took something like three-fifths of the Constituency votes at the Party Conference, but he may not do that well next year—when he hopes to reverse the decision...

...EDITORS DEAR FRIENDS, You asked for a letter on the current situation inside the Labor party—from the point of view of the left...

...Below we Print two sharply variant interpretations of the crisis in the Labor Party...

...Perhaps the story is somewhat apocryphal, but it has a ring of truth about it...

...My own view is that the Left ought not to refuse the consequences of the situation: a split, which is in any event likely, may also be necessary and desirable...

...Some unions with block votes at the Party Conference may change, of course—but some may change from supporting Gaitskell to opposing him...

...No sooner had the election taken place, than the Polaris submarine controversy developed: its symptomatic character is pronounced...

...The question really is: who, in that event, will retain the Party machine and the right to the designation, Labor...

...They reflect the problems of socialists everywhere, and we of DISSENT look with interest upon the discussions involved and with concern for the health and unity of the British Labor movement...

...De facto, the Parliamentary leadership will do everything to use the Party machine not to convince the public of the rightness of Party policy, but to convince the Party of the rightness of the Parliamentary leadership's policy...

...In Wales Michael Foot, the editor of the left Labor weekly Tribune, easily won Nye Bevan's old seat...

...The one repudiated any defense policy based on the use of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons...

...The correct ratio, more or less, is about one to one...

...Behind the Party Conference on this issue was the most remarkable political phenomenon in recent British history: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament...

...These attitudes are of course connected with differing views of the possibilities in the present situation, with different assessments of the ultimate balance of forces in the British social structure and in the world outside...

...This is supposedly advantageous, since the submarines are mobile, and a "deterrent" mounted on submarines theoretically reduces the liability of civilian populations to counter-annihilation...

...And the Conference revolt against the Party leadership is not something adventitious...

...Drew Middleton's dispatches have not only been...

...Suffice it to say that in March of 1960 Gaitskell was compelled—at a meeting of the National Executive Committee—to drop this proposal...

...A few more episodes like Polaris, and he will do worse...

...RICHARD GROSSMAN, now National Chairman of the Labor Party, thinks that the result is due to the continuing split in the party and a corresponding decline of its electoral energy...

...Consider very recent events...

...This struggle, too, smolders...

...Wilson himself— so disliked in Oxford, where he once taught, that I am sure he must be a committed socialist—is not in favor of unilateral disarmament, but offered himself as a candidate with the intention of reuniting the Party...

...The Government's decision to cancel the project for a British missile has made nonsense of Labor's support for an independent British deterrent, and the new difficulties in Britain's auto and other exporting industries show that the case for further nationalization is by no means so implausible as the Labor right alleged when its present policy was formulated some four years ago...

...In one sense, Crossman is right: this month's issues may well evaporate under pressure of next month's events...

...The great changes in British politics and society seem to be generational ones, and a generation has not yet elapsed since 1945...

...What does count is that the neutralists have forced the issue...

...Few participants in the discussion are entirely impervious to reasonable persuasion—although for many a reasonable argument would be one that promised them votes and office...

...The latent centrifugal tendencies of the Labor party have now come to the surface...

...I cannot say...

...What follows, then, is my own, but you too read the newspapers...

...If the Labor left is willing to wait, to accept long years of opposition, its ultimate chances of overcoming the classical difficulties of social democracy may be very considerable indeed...

...The vote in the Parliamentary party for this year's leader was 166 for Gaitskell, 81 for Harold Wilson, and a few abstentions...

...Meanwhile internecine warfare is growing...

...Precisely: the point I wish to make is that in the party outside Parliament, Gaitskell does not lead his opponents by two to one...

...The victors at the Conference have demanded of Crossman, as Party chairman, that the Party's propaganda machine be put at their disposal to expound their views...

...It is remarkable, however, that neither side has very many concrete proposals to make...

...Nor should you think that an editor (one of many) of New Left Review necessarily speaks for his colleagues, or that a teacher at Oxford is at the center of British politics...

...For the moment, the counterattack appears to be damaging the Labor party and not the Tory Government...

...CND has brought and will bring into Labor politics a kind of militant who is on this issue single-minded, but who may later apply "utopian" criteria to the other issues dividing Labor...

...It can develop a socialism adequate to the new structural tendencies of postwar capitalism, it can •attack the sources of that creeping stagnation which has afflicted British society, it can press for a British contribution to an end to the Cold War...

...The Labor left does have a long-term opportunity...

...My own guess is that it will have to be fought out to the bitter end, to a definite and final split in the Party...