Labor's New Optimism

...the compulsory prices and incomes policy...

...For Harold Wilson's government, this has been especially hard...

...the "mini-budget" of November 1968...

...PRAGMATISM IS NOT ENOUGH' Labor's New Optimism By David Marquand London For the time being at least, the combination of summer weather, the discovery that for some years the Board of Trade has been undercounting annual British exports by some $360 million, the government's 13th-hour compromise with the Trades Union Congress (tuc) over trade-union reform, and a five-percentage point drop of the Tory lead in the opinion polls, has created a mood of near euphoria in the Labor party...

...Conceivably, Britain will be earning a massive balance of payments surplus...

...As such, it has a duty to take part in the struggle to convince a generation which has forgotten the lessons of the 1930s and '40s that the alternative to ordered progress is not revolution but reaction...

...The arguments of three months ago have been buried in an outburst of fraternal amnesia...

...Under the stress of events, it was forced to scale down its ambitions and abandon some hopes...

...In the campaign for the next election, which for all practical purposes has now begun, there will be strong internal pressures in the party to damp down all arguments, to avoid tackling difficult issues or upsetting powerful vested interests, and to concentrate at all costs on winning back traditional Labor voters by appealing to traditional loyalties in the traditional way...

...the public expenditure cuts of January 1968...

...All over Western Europe and North America, the hopes once evoked by such varied figures as Adlai Stevenson, Hugh Gaitskell and Pierre Mendes-France have now dissolved into dust and ashes for an alarmingly high proportion of the radical intelligentsia...

...To the extent that rational prediction is possible, however, two David Marquand, a Labor MP, contributes frequently to these pages...

...What is the best structure of local and regional government in a small and overcrowded island, faced with great inequalities between rich and poor regions...

...As the British political scientist Peter Pulzer put it recently, this is a bad time for Mensheviks...

...How can the problem of poverty be tackled in an affluent democracy, where the interests of the comfortable majority directly conflict with those of the poor minority...

...The danger, ironically, is that the current optimism here will prevent this...

...With all its faults, the British Labor party is still one of the strongest and most influential Menshevik organizations in the world...

...Finally, how can a public sector that accounts for almost half of the Gross National Product be subject to effective democratic control and economic discipline...

...Parties of the Left cannot?and particularly not at a time when the democratic Left is in greater peril from extremists on its flank than it has been since 1945...

...To do this, it will have to reexamine its basic beliefs in a way it has shirked doing since the tempestuous days of Hugh Gaitskell...

...Labor went into office with a reasonably clear conception of what it stood for and wanted to achieve...

...and Labor's present mood is in every way more desirable than the previous exaggerated pessimism...

...A surplus would not, of course, guarantee a Labor victory, but it would undoubtedly make it a good deal more likely than most Labor MPs thought possible just a few months ago...

...It was bitterly unpopular in the party, which had always denounced "taxes on the sick...

...Consequently, policies which were in fact correct have often looked like concessions to hostile circumstances, and decisions which were entirely compatible with the party's fundamental principles have been all too easily misrepresented as surrenders to the enemy...

...the struggle over trade-union reform during the first six months of 1969...

...While the importance of ideology can easily be exaggerated, it is even more dangerous to underestimate its significance...

...Traditional British pragmatism, like its American counterpart, is a luxury only a great power can afford...

...Parties of the Right can do without general principles...

...Second-class powers have to cut their coats according to their cloth, which inevitably raises questions about the purpose the coat is to serve...

...Labor cannot possibly rekindle these hopes all by itself, yet it undoubtedly has a contribution to make...

...Good morale is, to be sure, much healthier than bad...

...Perhaps because of this, the government did not take the opportunity to redefine the role of charges in what was bound to remain a largely free service...

...Such a course would be a tragedy—not only for the wider ideological considerations discussed above but for more practical ones as well...

...If the Labor party is to provide an effective government—or for that matter, an effective opposition—in the 1970s, it will have to formulate coherent answers to these and similar questions...

...And since it can be further argued—albeit incorrectly—that thinking out a strategy would actually be counterproductive elec-torally because it would divide the party and give hostages to fortune, the temptation might prove irresistible...

...Parties in power always find it difficult to subordinate tactics to strategy, or to ask fundamental questions about the purpose of their day-to-day policies...

...They are highly practical, and highly urgent...

...But because the pressure was so much more intense than usual, it has not been able to articulate more realistic aspirations...

...In the end, however, it would go a long way toward depriving Labor of any chance to govern the country effectively, or to talk sensibly about national problems...

...All of them raise fundamental issues of value, and none can be solved satisfactorily by muddling through...

...Since 1966, the party's intellectual and emotional energies have been absorbed to a quite extraordinary extent by a series of pressing crises: the deflationary measures of July 1966...

...First, British politics will continue to be dominated by the balance of payments issue, and the outcome of the next election will be decided, most of all, by what happens in this field...

...The reimposition of charges on National Health Service prescriptions, to take another example, took place in a kind of intellectual vacuum...

...As a result, the party—and still more, the government—has had no time to lift its eyes from the terrain immediately ahead to more difficult horizons...

...In one way or another, they will have to be answered—if not by design, then by default...

...the devaluation of November 1967...

...These are not remote or academic problems, dreamed up far from the sound of political gunfire by some university professor...

...What price should Britain pay for membership in the Common Market—both economically and in terms of its traditional relationship with the United States...

...But where only three months ago the party was so miserable it could not look ahead, now that success at the next election has started to seem possible again it may concentrate so hard on winning that it will forget the need for a strategy to follow the victory...

...the huge taxation increases in the 1968 budget...

...It was welcomed by most Labor supporters—but merely as a way of cutting defense expenditures, not as a heaven-sent opportunity to think out a coherent foreign policy for the first time since the end of World War II...

...Conceivably, the international monetary system will have collapsed in another speculative crisis...

...To be sure, no one can know what the result of the next election will be, or what issues will determine it...

...Yet there are dangers in Labor's current mood...

...In many ways, this mood is justified...

...Victory in the next election, which must be held by March 1971 at the very latest, seems possible again —and in some quarters, probable...

...Thus, the critics were allowed to win the argument, even though they lost the vote, and the existing obstacles to a thoroughgoing attempt to reformulate Labor's attitude toward social services were reinforced...

...Conceivably, Britain will be engaged in negotiations to join the Common Market before the campaign begins...

...The lesson of the last five years of British history—indeed, of the last 50—is that pragmatism is not enough...

...things are reasonably clear...

...Since it can be argued correctly that the best strategy in the world is useless without the power to carry it out, the inclination to focus exclusively on winning will be all the greater...

...Conceivably, its last hopes of economic recovery will have been destroyed by an American recession...

...Second, although the government's postdevaluation economic strategy has worked much more slowly than hoped, the chances of obtaining a balance of payments surplus next year are reasonably good—provided Washington does not get so carried away by its fight against inflation that it forgets the dangers of excessive deflation are even greater...

...No sooner has one crisis ended than another has begun...

...The abandonment of the east of Suez policy, for instance, was not accompanied by any serious redefinition of Britain's place in the world...

...But the only practical alternatives to Men-shevism are a poor-white backlash a la George Wallace or Enoch Powell on the one hand, and stuffed-shirt complacency a la Nixon or Pompidou on the other...

...For the British Left, the central question is whether Labor has learned that lesson and is prepared to apply it during the last year of its current term in office...

...This approach would probably keep the party alive as an electoral machine, and might even return it to power —though that is more doubtful...

...There is a possibility, therefore, that in this important respect the optimistic mood of today will have the same result as the pessimism of three months ago—though for the opposite reason...