Britain's Personality Contest

...The trade deficit has been cut, but the pound is still wobbling, Britain is up to her ears in debt to the international banks, inefficient industries and restrictive trade unions are still being coddled, and rising wages threaten to spark a new round of inflation...

...Only Harold Wilson has the answer to that one, and if he knows, he is not telling anyone...

...Today even the Conservative Daily Telegraph praises Wilson as a natural leader: surely the ultimate tribute to the Prime Minister's remarkably successful exercise in image-making...

...Most of the credit for Labor's striking victory goes to the old fox himself...

...WILSON'S VOTE OF CONFIDENCE Britain's Personality Contest By Ronald Steel London Flush with the excitement of its landslide victory in the March 31 elections, Britain's Labor party faces the future with all the self-satisfaction of an outfielder who has just been signed for a lucrative long-term contract with his favorite team...

...Broadly speaking, if you wore a soft hat and had dirty hands you voted for Labor...

...But if Britain prefers to keep her basic commitments across the Atlantic rather than jumping across the Channel, what happens to the "little Europe" already in a state of disarray and reeling from General de Gaulle's latest blow to NATO...

...In that sense, the election was not a contest of Right versus Left, for the only place such categories apply is within the parties, not between them...

...It was Heath, on the other hand, standard-bearer of the Tory Establishment, who during the campaign sounded the trumpet of radical reform, blasted orthodox methods and vested interests, and suggested a dramatic new approach to foreign policy...

...And Heath could not trumpet free enterprise either, since the Tories themselves have become fervent supporters of the welfare state...

...Today all that has changed, and as a result of the social revolution that has been going on in Britain ever since 1945, the two parties have moved closer and closer together, until now there is virtually nothing that separates them except some old rhetoric hauled up from time to time by diehard purists of the far Right or far-Left...

...To the British electorate, which has seen the soothing public manner on television, but not the ruthless political manipulator in Parliament, Harold Wilson is not only a master of politics-he is somehow above politics...

...The division between the parties even on the issue of class is becoming an increasingly artificial one...

...In practice, however, the Labor party is not so much leading the struggle for a more fluid society as tagging along behind it-a rather elderly suffragette distributing Beatrice Webb's leaflets to Mods and Rockers...

...Nor, despite a great deal of flurry and the promulgation of lengthy manifestoes, has anything yet been done to provide a serious remedy for the country's grave economic problems...

...He may have five years in power, but he won't have five years to answer that question, nor many of the others facing Britain today-and unless he shows a good deal more imagination and daring in the next 17 months than he has in the past 17 months, Britain and her allies may be in for a hard ride...

...The Tories, for all their weakness for noblesse oblige, are in many ways less class-conscious than are the Laborites, and in naming Edward Heath as party leader they deliberately chose someone whose working-class origins are just as impeccable as Harold Wilson's...

...The election was not fought over issues-scarcely a single issue was raised, except for the price of bread in the Midlands, or the shortage of super-highways-but over men, and in that contest Edward Heath was clearly no match for the cunning and skillful Prime Minister...

...policy in Vietnam in words that must have warmed the cockles of Dean Rusk's heart...

...Rather it was a question of fitness for national leadership, and here Harold Wilson not only beat the Tories-he took over their old role...

...Planted square in the middle of British politics, Harold Wilson no longer even scares the Tory Rightwing, because they are convinced that he is not really a Socialist at heart-and they have the record of the past 17 months to prove it...

...With the enormous bulk of Harold Wilson pre-empting the center and spilling over to the moderate Right and the moderate Left, Heath's own ground was cut out from under him...

...Where he began two years ago trying to convey the image of a radical reformer on the Kennedy model, he has now settled into the far more comfortable and better-fitting role of a British Eisenhower...

...He could not be the voice of the responsible Right, thundering the perils of Socialism and praising the virtues of the open market economy...

...In the past, despite a plethora of outstanding Parliamentary leaders, the central reality of British politics was that there were two clearly defined parties representing two clearly-defined political philosophies...

...If young people are attracted to Labor rather than to the Tories, it is because Labor's heart is in the right place even if its vocabulary is 40 years out of date...

...Heath was no match because there was nowhere he could put his feet...

...Nobody is more aware of this than the British middle-income voter-which is why the Laborites are now enjoying such a formidable Parliamentary majority...

...But if Labor has solved none of Britain's chronic problems, it has kept them within bounds, and has not added any appreciable new ones...

...Will Germany, now elevated to the rank of America's favorite partner on the Continent, be allowed to dominate western Europe as a result of a de facto British abstension...

...This alone is a point in its favor, particularly in a country where a feeling for fair play runs high, and where most people believe that 17 months in office is not long enough for Labor to show its true mettle...

...It is, in fact, a bit of a shock to discover that this cozy, tubby, pipe-chomping grandfather figure is barely 50 years old and is the youngest Prime Minister in decades...

...What Labor wants to do is, of course, another matter, and one on which there seems to be no consensus at all, either within or outside the Labor party...

...So much for those European integrationists in Brussels who are sitting around waiting for Britain to join a politicallyfederated continent...

...There is, to be sure, its philosophical commitment to greater social equality, which is particularly appealing to young people who feel little of the class consciousness that is inbred in their fathers...

...Indeed it was not so much a victory for Labor as a personal vote of confidence for Wilson, who managed to transform what was supposed to be a contest between two political philosophies into a popularity contest between himself and Edward Heath...

...What is important is that the cliffhanging act carried on with such skill by Harold Wilson during the past 17 months has finally come to an end...

...otherwise, you put your vote where your money was and voted Tory...

...Among these problems none is more important than Britain's relations with Europe...

...This switch in electoral emphasis from party philosophy to personal popularity is in itself a remarkable development in British politics...

...What's more, Wilson, with a skill for capturing headlines, a gift for clich?©s, and an absolute genius for creating the impression of feverish activity while actually standing still, has managed to seize from the Tories the one trump card they have always been able to count on: that they are born and bred to be Britain's natural rulers...

...But for the time being this is a peripheral problem not causing public concern...

...It was a reversal of roles that was a bit breath-taking to watch-particularly as Heath espoused a more independent diplomacy with strong echoes of Gaullism, while Wilson swore fidelity to NATO and U.S...

...Failing an extreme act of political folly or a cataclysmic national disaster, Labor is firmly entrenched in power for the next five years and has a mandate to do pretty much as it pleases within the broad and vaguely-defined framework of the national consensus...

...All those fervent campaign promises of autumn 1964-nationalization of steel, abandonment of the independent nuclear deterrent, "renegotiation" of the Nassau Pact, restructuring of the economy-have been quietly put to rest...

...Where Heath and the Tories lost out was not because people thought they represented an archaic class system, but simply because Harold Wilson convinced them he could do a better job of conducting the nation's affairs...

...He could not do this because the Labor government under Harold Wilson has been blissfully indifferent to Socialism from the minute it stepped into office in October 1964...

...Unfortunately, the election has not resolved a single problem facing Britain today, although it has at least brought a few out into the open...

...Where Heath came out strongly in favor of entry into the Common Market, Wilson warned the housewives that this would make vegetables more expensive and proclaimed, in words that could have been taken from the mouth of General de Gaulle, "we reject any idea of supranational control over Britain's foreign and defense policies...

...He has become the voice of authority and conventionality, faithfully repeating the tired old slogans of yesterday's battles, tied down to entrenched special interest groups, but conveying an impression of masterly control...

...In this judgment they may be right, but is nonetheless exceedingly difficult to tell what the Labor party today does stand for...