An Ill Wind Blows in Britain

...Significantly, the only British daily paper (apart from the Communist Morning Star) which applauded Wilson for his about-face and supports the Labor party executive's present anti-European stand is the Right-wing Daily Express...

...Like many a bankrupt politician before them, they are falling back on nationalism...

...A reader wins a prize for a poem describing ". . . the horrors foreign climes present/When Britons brave the land of wop and wog...

...The Conservatives won...

...the House of Lords enjoys greater prestige than ever...

...and George Thomson and Lord Alun Chalfont, two former junior ministers at the Foreign Office —all say that the terms are right and what the Labor Cabinet would have accepted...

...It would be misleading to press the parallel, tempting though it might be in view of Britain's little Algerian war in Ireland...

...And with poverty, slums and violence spreading like fungi, and squalor a way of life for a quarter of the nation, Britain's sociopolitical priorities surely must soon receive urgent rethinking...

...Middle-of-the-road voters decided that if Britain had to have conservatism the true-blue article was preferable to Wilson's bleached-pink imitation...

...Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson had avoided controversy during the campaign and pretended that there were no major issues left in British politics...

...2. Moderate reformers who wish to smooth over some of the jagged edges of capitalism and the British caste system, but have no desire to abolish either...

...Wilson, meanwhile, has found an issue: He has fallen in behind the popular ultra-nationalist Daily Express in opposing British membership of the European Economic Community...

...This resulted in two ghastly years of stagnation and mounting desperation, during which Britain's hard-currency reserves were tossed down the drain, followed at last by devaluation in the worst possible circumstances and two more years of freeze and squeeze...

...One Labor member of Parliament, Peter Shore, has even told New Statesman readers that it is necessary to stay out of the European Community in order to defend "British socialism...

...The vote on ecc membership in the House of Commons could conceivably open a new chapter—a fascinating one if Parliament's response is positive, a dismal one if the diehards and xeno-phobes carry the day...

...His heroes in the 1960s were Tory Premier Harold Macmil-lan and President Lyndon Johnson...

...But he carried out no other structural reforms, and the taxpayers' money was poured into incompetently run private firms (such as Rolls Royce and the Clydebank shipyards, all now bankrupt) without serious concomitant steps being taken to insure improved management and greater productivity...

...France, for example, has a bigger sector of its economy socialized than Britain, and its educational system is more democratic, its social order and public administration are more meritocratic, and it devotes more funds and effort to improving the professional status and cultural level of its workers: In other words, these and other crucial tests show it to be more socialistic than Britain, even under the relatively conservative Pompidou...

...Class differences, of diminishing importance on the Continent, are still widening north of the Channel...

...He has also been influenced by the fact that James Callaghan, a potential rival for the party leadership, has been strongly anti-eec for some time...

...As a sop to the Socialist wing of his party, Wilson renational-ized Britain's fragmented and ailing steel industry, originally nationalized by the 1945 Labor government and returned to private ownership in the 1950s by the Tories...

...But the Tory leader, Edward Heath, is a stodgy politician, lacking Wilson's talent for exploiting the mass media, and the public is becoming bored with him...

...Just over a year ago, after a dull election, the Labor party suddenly found itself short on both principles and votes...

...It has not escaped these youngsters that most of Labor's anti-Europeans are men in their late 50s or 60s who formed their curiously old-fashioned views of Europe 30-40 years ago, during the rise of fascism or World War II...

...But Wilson has now let himself be persuaded by opinion polls that opposition to eec membership may be electorally rewarding...

...Not one has proposed any alternative to eec membership that is politically and economically feasible...

...The chauvinism Labor's anti-European diehards are churning out is, indeed, uncomfortably reminiscent of the nonsense the French were fed by deadbeat politicians during the last year of the Fourth Republic...

...It achieved a substantial balance-of-payments surplus, though in a way that undermined the long-term competitive power of the economy and inflicted the heaviest sacrifices on the weakest and poorest sections of British society...

...to the editor of the Tory Sunday Express a decade ago that while carrying the banner of socialism he hoped to lead the Labor party away from socialization...

...3. A minority of Socialists whose aim is to use the Labor party as a platform for socialist propaganda and even, come the milennium, an instrument for the achievement of socialism...

...It achieved nothing for the Rhodesian Africans—at a time when the British settler regime of Ian Smith needed little more than a sneeze to topple it —and refused even to honor the United Kingdom passports of Kenya's cruelly displaced Asian minority...

...Many Socialists, disappointed by his record, stayed home on polling day...

...Thus while Wilson and his colleagues are scrabbling for applause in Britain's murkier political backwoods, they are alienating their nation's best friends on the Continent and losing touch with the young people Labor needs if it is ever to become a party of idealism again...

...The appalling mismanagement of the British economy—and of too many individual industries—that we have grown accustomed to during the last 20 years is at last under critical scrutiny...

...Anti-European, too, with xenophobic virulence, is Barbara Castle, Wilson's secretary for employment and productivity, under whose auspices both employment and productivity plummeted: She is understandably eager for a new crusade...

...British delegate John Strachey replied: "The continental Socialist parties may fret about principles if they wish...

...It struck a pathetic great-power pose "East of Suez" until forced by economic reality to retrench...

...It is an adequate comment on the present state of the Labor party that Callaghan, who, as Wilson's first chancellor, took Britain to the brink of bankruptcy, and then, as home secretary, introduced an antiblack immigration law, is still an influence on its upper slopes...

...His foreign policy was conservative, his economic policies Right-wing...

...Like the Soviet government, the Wilson administration helped Nigeria's Moslem military junta bomb and starve the Christian Biafrans...

...Of course we are...

...The Labor party is a coalition of three kinds of people: 1. Trade-unionists who provide most of the party's funds, tend to be conservative, and believe that Labor's role is to cooperate with the unions in protecting the material interests1 of the workers within the existing social order...

...One reason Right-wing Tories dislike the eec is that it is clearly evolving in an egalitarian direction...

...we are interested in votes...

...It supported President Johnson's war policy though pretending to be working for peace in Vietnam...

...At the moment Labor seems in danger of becoming the party of British Poujadism...

...He confided RAY ALAN frequently reports in these pages from Africa, the Mideast and the European continent, as well as from his native Great Britain...

...George Brown and Michael Stewart, former foreign secretaries...

...He delighted in being Prime Minister for the headlines and hoopla, the trappings and transatlantic trips, not for the opportunity it gave him of steering Britain toward socialism...

...At home, having inherited from the Conservatives a balance-of-pay-ments deficit that could have been speedily mopped up by devaluation and more effective export-promotion, Wilson refused, for chauvinistic "prestige" reasons, even to discuss reducing the dollar value of the pound...

...The aging novelist J. B. Priestley, in the 1940s a genial liberal publicist, is now a Herrenvolk buff: He writes in the New Statesman that "we British are very special people...

...But there is an end-of-the-era feeling about British affairs just now...

...Its columnist Alan Brien declares that the sweaty armpits and stale air of high summer give "an unnatural, alien, disturbing taste of what life must be like in the Common Market...

...And Britons now have the lowest standard of living in Western Europe outside Spain, Portugal and Italy (according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, they have just been passed by the Japanese...

...Hurrah for us...

...But the policy vacuum is being filled with jingoism and xenophobia...

...This is the paper that tried hardest to persuade Britain that Hitler wanted peace...

...WHILE HE was Prime Minister, Wilson applied for British membership in the eec, persuaded by his advisers that "if the terms were right" this broadening of Britain's economic and political horizon could provide a desperately needed stimulus...

...WILSON TAKES TO THE BACKWOODS An Ill Wind Blows in Britain BY RAY ALAN London AT A MEETING of the Socialist International a few years ago somebody criticized the British Labor government for its neglect of socialist principles...

...Investment and social services were cut, house-building and slum-clearance were slowed down, and unemployment was allowed to rise...

...European Socialists and trade-unionists, who are eager for Britain to join the eec, are dismayed to see British Labor men and women turning their backs on the social-democratic ideal of international brotherhood and indulging in antiforeign scaremongering...

...A few hanker after a neo-imperialist "Commonwealth role" for Britain, overlooking the fact that the former Commonwealth is racked by racial and religious strife and economic rivalries that could only embarrass and weaken Britain if it became involved in them...

...What alternative to EEC membership it would come up with, and what its policy would be on other major issues, nobody knows...

...next month), shows clearly his lack of any long-term political objective...

...In Britain—where the anti-eec majority is shrinking, according to the latest opinion polls—young Socialists have told me they are appalled by their elders' reactionary insularism...

...After six years of Labor government under Harold Wilson, the British caste system is as stultifying as ever...

...The London New Statesman, once a progressive and internationalist Labor weekly, is now viscerally anti-European...

...What "British socialism" means in this context no Labor party militant I have consulted can explain...

...During his stint as Prime Minister?from October 1964 to June 1970?he governed from day to day, with little thought of the morrow beyond keeping his Cabinet intact and himself at its head...

...Two of Wilson's more ambitious lieutenants, Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland, both formerly anti-European, then pro-European after Wilson was converted, have followed him back into the anti-eec lobby...

...and the "public" (expensive private) schools are in greater demand than ever...

...Even jingoes are beginning to realize that Britain is no longer a major influence in world affairs...

...Harold Wilson and his anti-EEC friends now command a majority on the Labor party's national executive...

...The Labor government did increase expenditures on education and —here, at least, there was consistency—unemployment relief...

...Wilson has told British workers that if Britain joins the European Community their island and jobs may be overrun by cheap Italian labor?though why Italians should come to Britain when they can enjoy higher pay, longer vacations and a better climate in other European countries, he did not explain...

...In opposition, Labor had been the party of "planning for growth"—in contrast to the Tories' reliance on hazard and the anemic British version of free enterprise...

...If Heath fails to secure parliament's approval when his bid to join the eec is put to the vote toward the end of this month, elections will almost certainly follow and Labor could win...

...Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath has successfully completed the negotiations Wilson began, and the Labor ex-ministers most closely concerned with the issue—Roy Jenkins, former chancellor of the exchequer, and his aide Harold Lever...

...contemptuous of the compromises imposed by practical politics, some of them are happier when Labor is in opposition than when it is in office...

...In office, Labor produced neither growth nor planning: In both respects Wilson's Britain came far behind Gaullist France and even Franco's Spain...

...Harold Wilson used to be a Socialist, but as his ambition and fascination with power have grown he has moved to the Right...

...Wilson's recently published book, The Labour Government 1964-70: A Personal Record (which Little, Brown is scheduled to bring out in the U.S...

...And since "President Pompidou's face doesn't seem that of a man who believes we British are very special people" Priestley is against joining the eec...