BRITISH LABOR'S DILEMMA
Thomson, Morgan
BRITISH LABOR'S DILEMMA by MORGAN THOMSON London T HE BRITISH LABOR PARTY, defeated for the third time running in a general election, is engaged in a heart-searching reappraisal of its...
...How can they be won back...
...The enemies of Labor widely prophesied that in defeat Aneurin Bevan would reopen the struggle for leadership with Hugh Gaitskell, a struggle which deeply divided the party from 1951 to 1956...
...Gaitskell's address provoked a bitter wrangle in Labor Party ranks...
...In January, 1957, Macmillan inherited from the ailing Eden a demoralized party which was later to suffer resignations of a number of its most powerful personalities...
...A good deal of the argument centers round two questions—the nationalization of industry—particularly steel...
...Super-markets are springing up, and there is a buying boom in refrigerators...
...There will, however, be trade union efforts to make their own machinery more modern and effective for dealing with wildcat strikes which brought Labor a lot of electoral unpopularity...
...The important fact is that Britain has crossed the threshold of the affluent society...
...But during the last few years big business has run a lavish advertising campaign against nationalization...
...In the prosperous areas around London and Birmingham—the Detroit of the British auto industry—it was significant that the tiny Liberal Party for the first time began to take more Labor votes than Conservative votes when it intervened between the two big parties...
...It ought to be, 'You've never-never had it so good,' " wisecracked one heckler at an election meeting...
...The actual difference between the election problems of the two parties on public ownership was therefore a comparatively recent one...
...The special conference broke up with delegates "fighting like Kilkenny cats," Drew Middleton reported to the New York Times...
...Although he argued that he could not agree "that we have reached the frontier of public ownership as a whole," he went on to say: "It's no use waving the banners of a bygone age...
...Instead, Bevan has accepted the post of deputy leader to Gaitskell, whose personal position has been strengthened by a brilliant TV election campaign which turned a new and relatively unknown political leader into a national figure...
...He himself—undoctrinaire about nationalization—is a deeply idealistic Socialist...
...The young married couples with small children on the new housing estates were breaking away from the traditional working-class loyalty of their parents...
...Gaitskell will need all his new authority for steering his party through these uncharted waters of greater prosperity...
...At the same time there is pressure for a big public relations effort by the unions to match private enterprise and to get themselves across to the public as a responsible, constructive force...
...He faced an economic recession which he decided to ride by creating the highest postwar level of unemployment and by putting up the rents of millions of homes where there was still government control...
...Its 40-year-old constitution expresses a belief in "the common ownership of the means of production...
...It poses for the party the whole question of the picture of itself it sets out to give the increasingly affluent British electorate...
...The answer is that the Conservatives succeeded in reversing the recession in nice time for the election, and Harold Macmillan won the election on the simple slogan of "prosperity" —to which he added the shrewd postscript, "Don't let Labor ruin it...
...and the close association between the Labor Party and the trade unions...
...British Labor is, therefore, tackling the task of inspiring a majority of the electorate with a modern and meaningful picture of their party in a Britain which they are painfully aware will never—since October 8, 1959—be the same again...
...Yet the tide turned dramatically...
...You've never had it so good" was an election-winning Conservative catch-phrase...
...One of the basic theories of Britain's two party system is that the political pendulum swings at regular intervals and replaces Government with Opposition...
...The 1945 Labor government set up state corporations with monopoly powers in basic industries or utilities like coal, steel, transport, electricity, and airways...
...BRITISH LABOR'S DILEMMA by MORGAN THOMSON London T HE BRITISH LABOR PARTY, defeated for the third time running in a general election, is engaged in a heart-searching reappraisal of its whole political position...
...That prosperity was the key to this election is proved by the fact that Labor gained seats in areas of older and declining industry like Scotland and Wales where there is local unemployment running two to three times what it is elsewhere...
...Now everyone does it...
...This does not make an anti-Labor landslide...
...Yet the Conservative government has far from a popular record of administration behind it during its more than four years of office...
...Buying on time—what the British call the "never-never"—used to be frowned on as improvident and not quite respectable...
...It divided the country deeply over Suez and presented the voters with a billion dollar bill for a military campaign that was a muddle and a failure on all counts...
...Gaitskell believes that Labor must stand for both maximizing and civilizing prosperity—making sure that there is full employment and that the under-privileged at home in Britain and the hungry and illiterate in Asia and Africa have their fair share of expanding production...
...Aneurin Bevan, deputy leader of the party, rejected the Gaitskell position on nationalization...
...Some influential Labor voices now argue that Labor should recognize that the voters are against further public ownership and that the party should announce firmly that it accepts the present frontiers between the public and private sectors...
...We don't aim to nationalize every private firm or to create an endless series of state monopolies...
...Many of the workers who used to cycle to work now drive in their own automobiles...
...Further large-scale nationalization, he said, "is absolutely inevitable...
...In an address before a special Labor Party conference called in late November to assess recent defeats, Gaitskell seemed to back away from nationalization...
...THE EDITORS...
...In this election Labor proposed no fresh public ownership but only the re-nationalization of steel and road haulage...
...Traditionally it has been the party of the working-class crusading against poverty and unemployment...
...This is therefore much more than an ordinary election defeat for Labor...
...A number of features of modern life hitherto regarded in Britain as distinctively American have made their appearance on this side of the Atlantic in the last half-decade...
...And unemployment remains a problem of localized areas that are mainly pro-Labor in any case...
...Others argue that this is sacrificing principle to expediency and will make the party's electoral position worse instead of better...
...The Conservatives denationalized only steel and road haulage (and not all of them) and left the rest in public ownership...
...But the Labor Party's trouble is that the pendulum has stuck...
...Prosperity has produced new adherents to the built-in snobbery of the British people...
...One of the striking things about these arguments which go right to the center of the very nature of the Labor Party is that they are being conducted without any clash of personalities...
...This campaign gave the public a caricature of Labor as the party of wholesale nationalization and bureaucratic state control—and it certainly had its effect...
...Blatant poverty has now disappeared except among some groups of the elderly, the widowed, and the chronic sick...
...Labor still commands 12,216,000 votes against 13,336,000 for the Conservatives, but its voting support has dropped by 1,800,000 since 1951...
...Yet there is no likelihood of the close and historic links between the Labor Party and the trade unions being broken...
...MORGAN THOMSON, former editor of the Glasgow Forward, is a Laborite member of the House of Commons...
...The trade unions are not popular with British public opinion at present, and although 5,500,000 trade unionists pay Labor Party dues through their unions, a substantial number of trade unionists voted Conservative...
...He believes that Labor can appeal to the young by giving them educational and job opportunities on a wider scale than the Conservatives who still distribute many of the community's key jobs along the "old boy" network of aristocratic connections and having attended the right sort of expensive school...
...In economic theory Labor is a Socialist party...
...Nationalization, he said, in the face of shouts of protest from among the 3,000 delegates, should not be regarded as "the be-all and end-all of the movement...
...Commercial advertisements have been allowed for the first time on the screens of millions of new TV sets...
...Credit buying has soared to unimagined heights...
...Up to 15 months ago all the public opinion polls showed Labor with a big lead...
...In economic practice Labor has been pragmatic about public ownership—as indeed the Conservatives have...
...At this rate," one member of the National Executive said, "the Tories will be in power for another 10 years...
...But this merely underlines the fundamental dilemma in which the Labor Party finds itself...
...There are also some (mainly outside Labor's ranks) who say that Labor and the trade unions should separate and become like the Democrats and the AFL-CIO in their relationships...
...The political hat-trick by the Conservative government under the leadership of Harold Macmillan is a record unique in British politics, but even more significant is that it has increased its majority each time until now it has a comfortable margin of 100 votes in the House of Commons...
...A significant number of workers now regard themselves as joining the ranks of middle-class car owners...
Vol. 24 • January 1960 • No. 1
