British Labor's About-Face

...Clearly, a counterrevolution of such magnitude cannot be the result of accident...

...What the CDS has done—at least for the time being—is to fire the moderate members of union branches and constituency Labor parties with the enthusiasm and sense of purpose usually confined to the extreme left...

...The two most prominent unilateralists in the Labor movement are Frank Cousins, Secretary of the giant Transport and General Workers Union, and Michael Foot, a superb polemical journalist and one of the last of the great mob orators of English history...

...This is exactly what he has done—and, astonishingly, he has succeeded...

...For the truth is that the Program of the CDS is the only one which offers the remotest prospect of electoral success...

...If anything in politics is certain, a crushing victory for Hugh Gaitskell at Blackpool is assured...

...Neither man is remotely of Prime Ministerial timber...

...During the early 1950s, a majority of these giant unions was controlled by right-wing union leaders firmly allied to the leadership of the Parliamentary party...

...Now, the Opposition stands a couple of percentage points ahead of the Government...

...After a short interregnum his place was taken by the left-wing Socialist, Frank Cousins...

...These tendencies came to a head in the months before the Scarborough conference when the unilateralists managed to win over the majority of the big trade-union conferences...

...In this, of course, they are enthusiastically behind Hugh Gaitskell and a majority of the Parliamentary party...

...The swing against the Government would have occurred in any case— and with the next elections two years away, the swing may have come too soon for Labor to profit...

...At the Trade Union Congress held early in September, the unilateralist policy adopted the year before was reversed by a large majority...

...Many years ago, George Lansbury, one of the pioneers of British socialism, dismissed the claims of the British Communist party with the phrase: "That lot win a revolution...

...In the middle and late '50s, however, the situation changed...

...The Constitution of the Labor party, like that of the United States, is federal...

...Arthur Deakin, the powerful right-wing General Secretary of the Transport Workers, died...

...But at more sophisticated levels of the party hierarchy, the personal shortcomings of the unilateralist leaders were a severe handicap...

...and with the best will in the world it is impossible to visualize either of them clad in the purple...

...The faction in control of the Transport and General Workers, the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, the National Union of Mineworkers, and the National Union of Railwaymen, controls, for all practical purposes, the Labor party conference...

...In his wind-up speech during the defense debate at Scarborough Hugh Gaitskell, Labor party leader, declared that he would "fight, fight, and fight again" to reverse the unilateralist tide...

...In the past twelve months, the Gaitskellite rank-and-file has been organized for a counterrevolution by a pressure group of moderate activists called the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS...

...But the speeches supporting it were overwhelmingly neutralist in tone...

...A Gaitskellite Labor party may or may not win the next elections...

...At one stroke, over a million votes were transferred from the rightwing column to the left...

...They meant that unilateralist criticism of Gaitskell and his followers could invariably be silenced by the simple question: "Who else...

...As a result, the apparent victory of the unilateralists was, from the start, strangely unreal—like the October Revolution without Lenin and Trotsky, or the Populist Revolt without even a William Jennings Bryan...

...an anti-Gaitskellite party, committed to unilateral disarmament and wholesale disarmament and wholesale nationalization would have no chance at all...

...In the end, this fact seems bound to sink in...

...concentrates his attention on the largest states with the highest votes in the Electoral College, so the would-be kingmaker of the British Labor party must concentrate on winning over the half-dozen major trade unions whose votes, between them, easily control the party conference...

...Lansbury's comment could serve as the epitaph for the present leaders of Labor's left wing...

...Time after time a majority of the rank-and-file constituency parties, representing the party's individual members, would support left-wing resolutions—only to find themselves overwhelmed by the "block votes" of the great trade unions...

...In its place, the conference approved a resolution calling for the unilateral renunciation of the manufacture, stockpiling and basing of nuclear weapons in this country...

...To the fervent unilateralist zealots in the country this hardly mattered...

...A year ago, the Scarborough conference of the party committed what seemed to amount to an act of political harikari: The defense statement prepared by the party Executive and approved by the Parliamentary Labor party was defeated...

...The CDS is only a year old, and its future is necessarily uncertain...

...At the Scarborough conference the right and center of the party's ordinary rank-and-file made a great and possibly epochmaking discovery: that "nice guys finish last...

...Already, the electoral standing of the Labor party—helped, it must be admitted, by an economic crisis and by a "tough" budget—has improved out of all recognition...

...A year ago, the internal schisms of the party were reflected in an abysmal showing in public-opinion polls...

...But the fact remains that without a Gaitskellite victory in the Labor party, the swing against the Government would have gone to the Liberals instead...

...This improvement is by no means entirely due to the bettering of Gaitskell's position inside the party...

...The approaching Gaitskell victory at Blackpool may conceivably create a mood of euphoria in which the moderates will step back into their old apathetic ways...

...The leaders of the Campaign—Bill Rodgers, its Secretary and principal organizer, Phillip Williams, a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and the theorist of the movement, and Tony Crosland MP, the grey eminence in the background—will not be content with a merely negative victory over the unilateralists...

...and if it had been accepted as party policy, the official Opposition, representing 40 per cent of the British electorate, would have been implicitly, if not explicitly, committed to a foreign policy of non-alignment...

...During the past year they have applied this discovery with astonishing skill...

...Secure in the knowledge that the blockvote steamroller rolled as they directed, the leaders of the Parliamentary party scarcely bothered to win over the ordinary rank-and-file —either in the unions or in the constituency parties...

...They couldn't win a fish stall...

...The unilateralist resolution did not, in so many words, call for British repudiation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...

...They—and the party leadership—still have many obstacles to overcome...

...They are, for example, convinced supporters of the Common Market...

...More important still, the CDS hopes eventually to do for the Labor party what Willy Brandt has done for the German Socialists: to turn it into an undoctrinaire party of moderate reform with about as much ideological content as the liberal wing of the American Democratic party...

...They were concerned with building a new heaven and a new earth—and minor details like the composition of a future Labor government did not bother them in the least...

...Just as the wise Presidential candidate in the U.S...

...At the same time, perhaps thanks to a growing tendency of union officials at the middle levels to lose interest in Labor party affairs, the small minority of left-wing activists was able to win increasing success at the conferences of other unions as well...

...It is the best guarantee of Gaitskell's continuing to keep control of his party...

...But if this happens, it will be over the dead body of the Campaign for Democratic Socialism...

...But their chances of success look a great deal better than anyone would have dared to predict a year ago...

...Thus, when the Scarborough conference met last year its decision was already made...

...Even more important than Gaitskell's personal pre-eminence was the tactical skill of some of his most enthusiastic followers at the grass roots...

...UNILATERALISTS LOSE GROUND British Labor's About-Face By David Marquand London The chief task of the Labor party conference which meets in Blackpool this month is to set the final seal on one of the most dramatic reversals of doctrine in recent British history...

...Their aims are much wider than that...

...David Marquand writes for the Manchester Guardian and other journals...

...and although they have, for the time being, lain low on this question for tactical reasons, they can be expected to emerge from the background as the Labor party begins to debate the issue in earnest...

...The first, though not the most important, reason for this one is the contrast between the personalities and tactics of the unilateralist leaders and those of Gaitskell and his lieutenants...