Harold Wilson's Op Art

...and the basic dilemma of what place there is for Britain in a world where it cannot hope to guide the U.S., but where it cannot emotionally accept the role of simply being a European power...

...The Tory rejuvenation has turned out to be a disaster...

...All this from a party which only a year ago seemed on the verge of an imminent return to perpetual Opposition-a party which, even after its spectacular by-election victory last month in Hull, musters only a three vote margin in the House of Commons...

...These are difficult problems at best, and they require political courage as well as political pragmatism, decisive action as well as optical wizardry...

...Fortunately, the predicted recession has not occurred -mostly because industry is continuing to invest despite the squeeze on profits...

...What is more, it comes from a party which has fulfilled virtually none of its campaign promises, whose left-wing cries it has been betrayed, and which after nearly 16 months in office has yet to chalk up a single unqualified success either in foreign or domestic affairs...

...George Brown's much-trumpeted National Plan for economic expansion, after Herculean labors, has yet to produce a mouse...

...Whether he can be the statesman Britain needs still remains to be seen...

...Britain's obsolescent, over-protected industries are no more capable of meeting world competition than they were before Labor took power...

...Labor is riding high and can barely contain its excitement for the elections which now seem certain to come before October, and perhaps as early as March...

...The recognition of this is a mark of Wilson's political pragmatism...

...Instead they have found one whose highest ambition is to remain at Number 10 Downing Street...

...in Vietnam and muddling vacillation in Rhodesia-that it finds morally indefensible...

...the postponement of nationalization of the steel industry into the indefinite future of Fabian dreams...

...the "special relationship" with Washington has gone down the memory hatch, but Europe is as far as ever...

...The Conservatives today are in the position of the Republicans facing the onslaught of LBI...

...The current good fortune enjoyed by the Labor party, when inspected closely, thus turns out to have little to do with the policies it has carried out...

...They want a leader who will guide them to the New Jerusalem...

...Why do they not rebel, or at least give the Prime Minister a hard time...

...the effort of Britain to play deputy sheriff to Washington throughout the unruly expanses of Africa and Asia...

...the Commonwealth is falling apart, yet the Common Market is no closer...

...After having earlier advocated the scrapping of the welfare state and a withdrawal from the bases "East of Suez" to let the Africans and Asians fight their own wars, he is now calling for British secession from the Commonwealth, an organization which he has labelled, with some justice, as a repository of humbug and hypocrisy...

...While Wilson can take much credit for the Labor party's glowing prospects at the moment, he has been mightily helped by the Conservatives, who are currently putting on a dazzling spectacle of dissension and disarray...

...subdued his opponents within the party by a combination of bribery and guile, and gave the impression of absolute command even when the foundation was crumbling under him...

...Because they are afraid of toppling the government, and for all the betrayal of their principles, prefer to be on the inside looking out than on the outside looking in...

...Determined to maintain the pound sterling at the $2.80 exchange rate, the Labor government preferred to induce an economic recession rather than accept devaluation or push through radical structural reforms...

...In Childe Harold, Super-Mac has found a worthy successor...

...Having explicitly ruled out the use of force from the beginning, he made it obvious that the Rhodesian rebellion was not a matter of principle, but a political gambit to be dealt with as the national mood so dictated...

...The most striking feature of Labors fiscal record in office is that it has been following orthodox economic policies of the George Humphrey-McChesney Martin variety, preferring recession to controls and trying to preserve the pound by inviting unemployment...

...This is why Labor's razor-thin majority has been a powerful tool in the hands of Harold Wilson, for it has allowed him to whip recalcitrant Laborites into line and to force the left-wing to accept policies-such as all-out support for the U.S...

...If Labor had a decent working majority of 75 or 100 votes, the left-wing would be in open revolt...

...Wilson is giving Britain an Eisenhower-like one...

...The party has never been so divided, so badly-led, so unpromising as a potential government...

...As it is, Wilson can tell them to stuff their consciences-which for all practical purposes is precisely what he has done...

...As a result, the liberal Tories have lost faith in him, the center moderates are thrashing around aimlessly in search of a policy, and the right is contemptuous...

...the nuclear force which he does not want to use as the basis for an all-European deterrent, but which is militarily superfluous in a close alliance with the U.S...

...Angus Maude, a party spokesman on colonial affairs, has publicly dubbed his chief's opposition to Wilson as a "meaningless irrelevance,' the right-wing Monday Club is demanding an even softer policy on Rhodesia, the leftist Bow Group is blasting Heath for his ineffectuality, and that brilliant gadfly Enoch Powell, the Tory shadow defense minister, is raising new heresies...

...and even the shelving of the do-it-all Ombudsman, who now seems unlikely to make an appearance much before Godot...

...Already there is open talk of a new struggle for the Tory leadership, with Ian McLeod, Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell once again being raised as possible contenders...

...and the rebellion of Rhodesia threatens to involve Britain in a racial conflict in central Africa that to most Britons is about as remote emotionally as it is geographically...

...Nor has Sir Alec, whose retirement from office seems to have transformed him into a statesman, ever looked so good...

...Not only has Heath failed to challenge Wilson in Parliament, he has even been unable to assert his leadership within the party...

...Not only has Labor been so far unable to put the lion it promised in Britain's sluggish economic tank, but it seems to have adopted a Tory mentality...

...Tory disarray has moved from the back benches of Parliament to the front pages of the press...

...It is an astounding performance, especially remarkable because it relies almost totally upon illusion...

...wages are rising three times faster than labor productivity...

...Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the storm over Rhodesia, where Wilson has done the absolute minimum possible to appease those who want to bring the Smith regime to heel, while following a policy of such moderation that most of the Tories are solidly behind him...

...He is an absolute master of political timing, who drowns every setback in a new initiative and appears to be on top of every situation even when he is crawling out from under the debris...

...Like Macmillan, Wilson took over power from the titular leader, in this case Hugh Gaitskell...

...the inability to formulate, let alone begin, the reform plan for the schools...

...The return to power that only a year ago seemed within the Tories' grasp has now receded into the dim future, and they are going through a bout of in-fighting and back-biting of the kind that was Labor's hall-mark during the long years of its Opposition...

...Nor has any brake been put on demand, which means that costs are continuing to rise and inflationary pressures are mounting...

...Whatever the Prime Minister's personal feelings about the morality of UDI-and it is exceedingly hard to determine what he thinks from his public statements-he has never pushed one inch further than he believes majority opinion will support...

...This failure to deliver Socialism's long-promised economic goodsnot to mention a foreign policy which has been more acquiescent to Washington than the Tories' would ever have been-has deeply troubled left-wing Laborites...

...the "independent deterrent" still consumes a giant hunk of the defense budget, but there is no independent diplomacy to make it worthwhile...

...the mysterious disappearance of the technological and scientific revolution Wilson promised...

...The best shorthand description of the present economic conjuncture,' as the normally sympathetic Economist recently pointed out, "is that President Johnson is giving America a Keynesian and Kennedy-like economic policy, while Mr...

...At the same time, the interest rate was raised to a backbreaking seven per cent...

...And majority opinion in Britain today is profoundly indifferent to whether Rhodesia becomes a black republic, a white dictatorship, or the 51st state in the American union...

...The surtax, imposed in violation of Britain's trade agreements with the Outer Seven, was designed to cut the drain on sterling by reducing imports...

...Whatever his other shortcomings, Harold Wilson is a supreme political realist...

...the cost of playing postcolonial gendarme keeps multiplying with the spread of instability from Nigeria to Malaysia...

...the inherited and assumed military commitments "East of Suez" which lead Britain to play the role of a great world power with the means of a medium-sized European state...

...Never mind that the promises bear only a coincidental relation to the performance, or that the rhetoric is barely able to conceal a rather formidable list of failures...

...prices are inching up and a new bout of inflation hovers around the corner...

...The replacement of the affable Sir Alec Douglas-Home by Edward Heath-vanquished knight of Brussels-was supposed to inject the Tories with new political sex appeal...

...Today, to nearly everyone's amazement...

...It is an excruciating discovery which left-wing Laborites are only just beginning to come to terms with...

...The important thing is that he has managed to convince friend and foe alike that he has an answer for every crisis...

...There is, for example, its White Paper on immigration, a document which, in its unvarnished aim to cut off immigration from the colored nations of the Commonwealth, even the London Times (not normally hostile to the government) frankly labelled as racist...

...The economy is virtually stagnant, despite the promises of ex-economics professor Wilson to get it moving again...

...Rather it is a result of Harold Wilson's impressive ability to manufacture silk purses out of sow's ears, and to the amazing incapacity of the Tories to furnish a responsible and effective opposition...

...It is a pity he is not displaying some of that realism toward the really serious problems that affect British foreign policy today: toward the sentimentality about the Commonwealth that Labor inherited when the Tories wrote off the Empire...

...Sir Alec, with a hefty push, stepped down, and Heath came bounding in, ready to move into Number 10 Downing Street at the first hint of an election...

...Harold Wilson has shown himself to be a skillful op artist and an impressive politician...

...Instead they have benefited from an imports surtax which, in effect, has been a subsidy for their inefficiency...

...They want a Socialist government to push through egalitarian, multi-racial, pro-revolutionary policies...

...They would like Harold Wilson to stand up to LBJ, to be at least as outspoken on Santo Domingo and Vietnam as is de Gaulle, to stop pussyfooting with the Smith regime in Rhodesia, and to make Britain a spokesman for the emerging nations of Africa and Asia...

...the stillundelivered transport plan...

...During the third quarter of 1965 wages soared seven per cent over the previous year...

...Instead of calling Wilson to task for his hypocrisy over Rhodesia, for his indifference to the approaching storm before the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and his vacillating deviousness ever since, Heath has allowed himself to be dragged down by the right-wing of his own party which opposes any action at all against the Rhodesian rebels...

...The recent three-way Tory split over oil sanctions for Rhodesia was a personal humiliation of Heath and a striking repudiation of his leadership...

...The only difference is that Wilson, unlike LBJ, has yet to chalk up a single major success...

...The sterling crisis has not been surmounted so much as it has been postponed...

...If Labor's performance has been disappointing and its style uninspiring, its bright prospects are due mostly to Harold Wilson's brilliant political one-upmanship, to his extraordinary ability to seize and stay in the headlines-issuing a public pronouncement on every issue just as the afternoon papers are about to go to press, and hustling off to international conferences whose meager results are hidden in a torrent of words...

...For him politics has become the art of the optical...

...There is the proposal that trade unions be forced to give prior notice of impending wage claims...

...The anticipated growth rate for this year is an anemic-indeed an embarrassing-one per cent...

...Ronald Steel, author of The End of Alliance, is The New Leader's roving European correspondent...

...With a genius for transforming dross into gossamer and for making random movement appear to be decisive action, he has won himself a reputation as one of the most effective British politicians within memory...

...As a prestidigitator there has been nothing to equal him since Harold Macmillan, a political wizard he resembles in more ways than one...

...the export gap has been narrowed but is a long way from being closed...

...But instead of revitalizing the Tories, the arrival of Heath has paralyzed them...