A Tale of Two Speeches

...Hugh Gaitskell's political career was at an end...

...By the time the delegates assemble at one of Britain's big seaside resorts in the autumn, the result is already a foregone conclusion...

...Perhaps the defeat of the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign at this year's Labor conference marks the last time the British Left will be able to hold that Britain can make the rest of the world peaceful by unilateral renunciation of military action...

...Most immediately effective in bringing it about was the emergence of a grass-roots organization, the Campaign for Democratic Socialism...

...It is non-party, but its main influence has been on the Labor Party...

...He had two advantages...

...The setting up of factional organizations has been left to those with more extreme views, while the moderates have relied, complacently as it turned out, on their control of Party policy through the votes of cautious trade union leaders...

...Within the Western Alliance Britain should use her influence further to reduce dependence on tactical nuclear weapons, to encourage positive plans for disengagement in Europe, to urge the seating of Communist China on the Security Council, and to help in building up the authority of the United Nations generally...

...They have behind them a reluctant public opinion resentful of the crisis taxation that has been imposed on them by a government which two years ago won their votes by encouraging a spending spree and allowing the rate of economic growth to take second place...

...The attitude of Hugh Gaitskell played an important role in providing a breathing space for these processes of clarification and persuasion to work themselves out...

...However narrowly the union decision may go, the whole union's "bloc vote" of all its members is then cast in that direction at the Labor conference...

...for owing to the peculiar processes by which Labor Party democracy works, Gaitskell's victory was assured by July of this year...

...Behind the conference majority stood several of the biggest labor unions, including the mammoth Transport Workers and Engineers...

...Last year, because of this curious time scale, some of the biggest unions committed themselves against the official defense policy of the Labor leadership before the details of that policy had been published...

...Members of the Campaign for Democratic Socialism changed this by proving to the normally silent moderates in the local meetings that if they spoke up they were much more numerous and effective than they had imagined...

...The British like a man who goes on fighting with his back to the wall for what he believes when all seems lost...

...And they love him even more if he wins...

...This year, the turning point for Gaitskell came with the unexpected decision of the Engineers Union to switch its Scarborough vote from unilateral disarmament to multilateral disarmament...

...He began by wanting to rewrite Labor's constitution, and since Labor in its motivation is part political party and part a secular church, this was rather like disowning Moses and wanting to chip out a new set of stone Tablets...

...First, the leader of the Labor Party is elected not by the conference but by the Labor Members of Parliament, and a large majority of these were firmly behind him...

...This took place in May...

...Much of the distrust of Hugh Gaitskell's leadership has arisen because of his handling of this problem...

...Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the British Labor Party, made the first one at Scarborough October 5, 1960, and the second at Blackpool October 4, 1961...

...If the British Parliament held mid-term elections, it is quite likely that a Labor Government would be elected this autumn...

...It set out to counterbalance the activities of the Communists in a union like the Engineers and to put the Gaitskell point of view before the delegates to the union conference...

...Normally within the Labor Party, the Left wing has been a vocal and visionary minority, while the moderate majority has been gradualist and also much less articulate, particularly at the local levels...

...But in March, although the Communists in the union mounted their maximum effort, and although most outside observers expected them to hold their position, they were suddenly defeated...

...The alternative to these policies has been put forward by a remarkable crusading body, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, together with the Committee of 100, which advocates more extreme policies of direct action and civil disobedience...

...This deterrent should not be surrendered by the West in advance of a multilateral disarmament agreement with the Soviet Union...

...Deeper lay its questioning of how a party bred of mass unemployment and mass poverty could adapt its thinking to an era of affluence...

...It numbered neither philosophers nor trade union leaders among its members...

...It has been led, therefore, to a neutralist position...

...It has inevitably attracted the support of the Communists, keen to exploit a movement that could simultaneously weaken the Western alliance, damage its ancient enemy, the Labor Party, and give the Communists greater influence within the unions...

...Directed by Bill Rodgers, a former Fabian Society general secretary, they went to work on the delegates to union locals and to the Labor Party units in the electoral districts...

...In the recent dissensions those with more extreme views have benefited from having a compulsive weakness for endless meetings and minor intrigue, while the moderates tended to be the kind of people for whom committees were a necessary chore and a spare-time activity much less enjoyable than being with their families, digging their garden^, or watching television...

...It is, however, also an aspect of the painful adjustment to the realization that Britain has ceased to be a great world power...

...There have been mass marches on Trafalgar Square and mass sit-downs outside the Ministry of Defense...

...As time passed and views became less confused on the complicated technical issues of defense, it became more and more evident that the real consensus favored the leadership...

...Behind it lies the story of ten months that saved the Labor Party...

...Friends and enemies alike agreed that they were the finest speeches of his life...

...Gaitskell's rise in popularity has been assisted by a decline in that of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan...

...Behind Gaitskell stood two-thirds of the Labor Members of Parliament...

...Both were on the same theme—the need to support the alliance between Britain and America and to reject unilateral nuclear disarmament and British neutralism...

...This revolt of the moderates and their reassertion of their role as the majority element in the Party was encouraged by Hugh Gaitskell's own conduct during the crisis...

...But their private, bitter, and fateful discussions reflected a number of factors which lay behind the fundamental shift in opinion going on throughout the labor movement...

...Both were delivered to the same audience—delegates to the Party's annual conference...

...The second speech was overwhelmingly supported...

...It was the creation of small groups of local Labor Party members in various parts of the country who felt that the Labor Party was in danger of departing from its support of collective security and multilateral disarmament...

...The achievement of the CDS was simply to show that a majority of Labor supporters shared the views of the moderate leadership...

...the Left believed that war could be prevented if Britain did not send a gunboat...

...These have attracted the adherence not only of the traditional pacifists but of many non-pacifists eager to feel that they are doing something to avert the danger of nuclear war...

...His leadership would be overthrown, and his Party would break into two or more parts...

...Indeed, one of the phenomena of contemporary British politics is that the Conservative Party and the government have appeared to be untouched by the great conflict of conscience presented by nuclear weapons, although there is a deep and genuine concern among British citizens of all political views...

...But there was an appealing and unexpected passion in the way Gaitskell announced in the face of defeat that he would "fight and fight and fight again to save the Party we love...

...Its case has been that British disarmament, by example instead of through negotiation, would persuade or shame the Soviet Union and the United States into serious multilateral disarmament...

...The position outlined in the first speech was narrowly defeated in the conference...

...As the Berlin crisis mounted, Macmillan's first comment, between strokes on the golf course, was that it was "all got up by the press...

...But the degree to which it succeeded was determined by the fact that defeat of the Labor leadership at Scarborough turned out to be a false measure of the real state of opinion within the Party...

...He was under heavy pressure to resign, and he showed courage in standing firm in the face of a great deal of personal attack...

...In a real sense the British Labor Party was saved by the handful of unknown men, few if any of them politicians, who persuaded the Engineers to support the Gaitskell position...

...The Right believed in keeping the peace by sending a gunboat...

...The memberships of both bodies overlap and their leadership includes the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the novelist J. B. Priestley, and both church and labor union leaders...

...The Suez campaign was the last fling of the British Right in advocating nostalgically that Britain could impose peace by the use of unilateral military force...

...The Engineers Union had for a long time been the setting for a bitter battle between anti-Communist officials and a national committee which the Communists were accustomed to running...

...The arguments about large-scale nationalization 'are now dropped, and it concentrates on selective public ownership and a program of planning for British economic growth to catch up with its European competitors...

...In any case, the very success of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in persuading the Labor Party to switch its line last year provoked its own reaction and brought to birth the rival Campaign for Democratic Socialism...

...When the vote of October, 1961, was announced, the same commentators observed that the Labor Party was more united than for many years, and that Gaitskell's personal authority, both in his Party and among the public, was higher than ever...

...The influence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and of some of its more extreme fringe bodies has been exaggerated abroad, but it remains true that it reflects a widespread concern in Britain over the dangers of the nuclear stalemate...

...At Scarborough the Communists found themselves on the winning side...

...Ahead of Britain lay twenty years of Toryism...

...But Soviet intransigence and the arrival at the White House of a self-confident young stranger have wearied and frustrated him...

...The British Communists did not bargain, however, on being invited to demonstrate outside the Soviet Embassy in protest against Russia's resumption of nuclear tests in the atmosphere...

...The Conservatives have been forced to borrow heavily from the very people with whom they are bargaining, and are thus negotiating from a position of considerable weakness...

...But there was one striking difference between the two occasions...

...Traditionally there have been two distinct centers of authority in the Labor Party—the annual Party conference, and the Parliamentary Labor Party consisting of all the elected Labor M.P.'s...

...What was the defense argument about...

...The government ran into a serious economic crisis just at the moment it was starting negotiations to enter the European Common Market...

...Second, since the tragic death of Aneurin Bevan there has been no alternative Party leader of comparable stature and capacity...

...On the major issue of Britain's role in the cold war, the Party conference had voted one way and the political leadership had gone another...

...At one point this tussle had led to the ludicrous position of the Engineers voting both ways at once in the defense argument...

...However, like Adlai Stevenson, Gaitskell has the disadvantage of being an egghead...

...The defense argument was only the most violent expression of Labor's self-doubts over its third election defeat...

...The policy of the Labor Party leadership advocates that Britain should cease trying to be an independent nuclear power and should use its influence to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to nations other than those now having them...

...All this improves Labor's electoral chances...

...For generations both Right and Left in Britain have believed that what Britain did in international affairs largely determined peace or war...

...The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has advocated Britain's unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons and withdrawal from an Atlantic Alliance still based on nuclear strategy...

...The Labor Party is still suffering from a sobering sense of hangover after its recent orgy of dissension and its narrow escape from self-destruction, but it has achieved a greater unity over both defense and domestic policy than it has known for years...

...GEORGE THOMSON, former editor of the Glasgow Forward, is a Laborite Member of Parliament...

...The British public does not love its intellectuals as it probably should, and the Labor Party has always shown a predilection for a warm heart rather than a clear head...

...Labor conference votes are largely determined by the decisions the labor unions associated with the Party take at their own annual conventions earlier in the year...

...Finally, the Labor Party was helped by the misfortunes and blunders of the Conservatives, who ran into serious economic troubles at home and a good deal of political difficulty in both Europe and Africa...

...Among the pundits of the press and television there were plenty of prophecies, varying in cheerfulness according to the temperament and conviction of the commentator, that what had been witnessed at Scarborough was the rare and melancholy spectacle of a great political party in its death throes...

...Now they were in head-on collision...

...What has been the cause of this astonishing turnabout...

...It is a matter not of rhetoric but arithmetic...

...But now a new statement of Labor's policies, entitled "Signposts for the Sixties," has been produced which was carried with acclamation at this year's conference...

...At its most articulate it has urged that Britain should cease to be an ally of the United States and should seek to become a leader of the uncommitted nations—a sort of India of the West...

...He was an old war crony of General Dwight Eisenhower and well equipped to be the President's go-between with the Russians...

...Until October, 1960, they had managed to keep more or less in step with each other...

...The vote of October, 1960, was the climax to the crisis which had been mounting in the Labor Party ever since it had suffered its third general election defeat in a row...

...But Britain should remain in a Western Alliance, sharing the protection of the American nuclear deterrent...

...They also believed the Party was becoming out of date and doctrinaire in facing up to the problems of a newly affluent Britain...

...His personal ambition as a statesman has been to make a contribution to easing world tensions...

...The respect Gaitskell now enjoys among the general public will be a powerful weapon in his hands in any future disputes within the Labor Party...