Britain's Unwanted Election

...assistance, Wilson obviously thinks it imprudent to antagonize Washington...

...The public, however, has failed to share the excitement shown by newspaper columnists and political candidates...

...Socialism now seems to be a somewhat dirty word in the higher councils of the Labor government...

...More telling was Mayhew's further charge that Britain was trying to play a world role "not as a power in our own right but as an extension of American power, not as allies but as auxiliaries...

...All this came out into the open during the recent furor over the new defense budget in which Britain, while putting a $5.6 billion lid on defense spending, committed itself to a long-term police-keeping operation "east of Suez...

...Small wonder they have been eager to summon the voters back to the polls again: With a majority of that size they can stay comfortably in office until 1971...

...We intend to remain a great power," declared Defense Minister Denis Healey as he unveiled plans to hold on to the bases in Malaysia and Singapore, build a string of new ones with U.S...

...the Exchequer's office is being run along rules laid down by the banks of the City, and there is yet no sign that taxation will be used for achieving economic, let alone social, equality...

...While Enoch Powell, Reginald Maudling and Ian Macleod sharpen their knives in the wings, ready to take over should Heath go down to an ignominious defeat, Tory politicians complain in magazine articles about the "meaningless opposition" of their own leader, and Heath buzzes around energetically trying to find a single issue on which he can challenge the Labor government without sparking a mutiny within his own party...

...Above all, Heath should have a trump card to play on relations with the Common Market-since it was at Brussels that he won his notoreity...

...Wilson, the canniest politician to hit British politics within memory, never wanted a March poll...

...The collapse of the Tory opposition has been in no small measure due to the extraordinary political deftness of Harold Wilson...

...While Heath cannot be expected to chide Wilson for being a bad Socialist, he could certainly nail him to the floor for being an incompetent economist...

...His reasoning, which has turned out to be valid, is that the longer Labor stays in office, the more impression it makes upon the voters as being the legitimate government, and the better are its chances when an election is unavoidable...

...Unlike Healey, most Britons are bored with playing the role of a great power, but they do not particularly mind charges that they are behaving like lackeys of the U.S...

...Ronald Steel is The New Leader's roving European correspondent...

...On the question of Rhodesia he has been all fiery speeches and pallid actions, quite content to sweep the whole affair under the carpet if the Tories will let him-which they are quite happy to do...

...has chosen the road to deflation rather than devaluation of the pound, even though this means inducing a recession whose worst effects will be felt by low wage-earners...

...help in the Indian Ocean, keep the troops stationed along the Rhine, and buy 50 longrange fighter-bombers from the U.S...

...The latter prompted the resignation of naval minister Christopher Mayhew, who pointed out, with some justice, that the defense budget was "too small if we want to stay east of Suez and too big if we don't...

...He has been dragging his feet on the question of new elections ever since he took office a year ago last October...

...Harold Wilson knows this, too, and it seems increasingly clear that he pursues the policies he does because he believes that Britain's role as a world power lies in close association with the United States...

...Among those who are least enthusiastic of all about the forthcoming elections are the two major candidates, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath...

...He will stay on not because he is loved, and not because his policies have been very successful, but rather, in the words of the Economist, "because he has outworked all the others...

...They cannot damn Socialism, because the Prime Minister himself is indifferent to it: nationalization has been quietly buried...

...Since the value of the British pound is almost entirely dependent on the willingness of Lyndon Johnson to make loans from Fort Knox, and since Britain's military presence in Malaysia would be untenable without U.S...

...While Labor makes eyes at Europe, it still remains entranced by the world-wide role of imperial policeman it inherited from the Tories...

...If playing a world role means Britain shall be an auxiliary to Washington, then an auxiliary she shall be...

...Odd as it may seem to those who believe in labels, Britain under Harold Wilson is a good deal less socialistic than France under Charles de Gaulle...

...the public (i.e., private) school system remains sacrosanct (Lord Snow, Socialist, enemy of the two cultures and minister in the Labor government recently declared that he sends his son to Eton so that he will come into contact with his social peers...

...And it may even have similar results...

...The voters will be summoned to the polls on March 31 not because Parliament's time is up (actually it has another three-and-a-half years to run) or because there is any governmental crisis, or because the Opposition is champing at the bit-but simply because the leaders of the Labor party think the time is right to increase their slender majority in Commons...

...Although it has now been 9 months since he replaced Sir Alec Douglas-Home as party leader, Heath has yet to give the Tories the political sex appeal he was hired to provide, he has yet to convince the voters that he is a serious alternative prime minister, and he has yet to unify his own fragmented party...

...Yet instead of waving the European flag, he has played it cool, and thereby left it to Harold Wilson, of all people, to make discreet hints about bringing Britain into Europe...

...It is a harsh comment, but perhaps not a damning one...

...Nationalism has a phoney ring in Britain, even on the Right where the conservative Daily Telegraph recently asked: "What's wrong with being an American auxiliary...

...Indeed, this election gives every sign of being about as popular as the one Lester Pearson called in Canada last year when his advisers erroneously told him that the country was panting to increase his Parliamentary majority...

...has been able to pull its payments into line by the temporary expedient of imposing a surtax on exports, which is only viable so long as its trading partners refrain from retaliating...

...So long as nobody minds, so long as the Vietnamese war does not escalate into a war with China, so long as Britain can ride America's coat-tails and still not have to give up anything more than her political freedom of maneuver, so long as the threatened recession can be kept at bay, and so long as the nation continues to enjoy the stylish decadence that is one of the great charms of Britain today, Harold Wilson is likely to stay on at Ten Downing Street...

...To his mind familiarity breeds confidence rather than contempt, and had it not been for the pressure of the Labor party leaders and the press-augmented by Labor's big majority at the Hull by-elections in January-he would almost certainly have tried to hold out until next October...

...Wilson is also highly vulnerable in the area foreign policy-if the Tories were not so divided themselves that they fear to challenge him...

...Labor's rather pathetic sentimentality about the Commonwealth, its substitute for the old Empire, would also be a suitable target for Tory barbs at the government-as Enoch Powell recently showed so devastatinglyif the Tory back benches were not occupied by colonial diehards...

...As a result, the Tories have virtually nothing to campaign against...

...The reasons for Edward Heath's reluctance to face the voters are even more obvious...

...But this alone does not explain British policy, since the U.S., for its own sake even more than Britain's, would not allow the pound to sink or the Indonesians to take over Malaysia...

...To ask whether this election is really necessary is to broach the irrelevant...

...He has disarmed the opposition by seizing its own ground and by pursuing policies which-despite a few Socialist phrases thrown in to appease the party's left-wing-are scarcely distinguishable from those of the Tories themselves...

...After some 17 months in office, Labor has still to figure out a way of dealing with the sterling crisis other than by borrowing money from its friends abroad...

...THE PUBLIC IS APATHETIC Britain's Unwanted Election By Ronald Steel London With all the enthusiasm of a man preparing to visit his mother-in-law, the British are facing their second general election in a year-and-a-half...

...They may well be right, for polls give Labor a heady lead over the Tories-one which, translated into Parliamentary seats, could produce a 50-100 vote majority in Commons...

...In compensation, the bases in Aden, Cyprus, Guiana and Malta are to be cut, and the Royal Navy was told it could not have a new aircraft carrier...

...and has been able to promise nothing more inspiring on the economic horizon than a one per cent growth rate...

...Instead of disengaging the nation from its extensive overseas involvements, Harold Wilson has gone out in search of new commitments "East of Suez...

...The relationship, which is hardly coincidental, may, as some cynics suggest, be due to simple opportunism...

...In doing so he has also become the Johnson Administration's most zealous advocate for the war in Vietnam and the containment of China...