The Great Disillusion?

Off Lancashire this week the sea was a stormy, threatening grey. Grey and stormy, too, was the future that faced 1,500 Labor Party delegates, gathered in Blackpool for the party's 48th annual conference. The slogan for the 1950 elections was: "Labor believes in Britain." The question was: Does Britain still believe in Labor?

From Blackpool, TIME Correspondent

Honor Balfour cabled: "This is a conference of worried men. From back-street boarding houses to the big, red brick Cliffs Hotel on the upper-class north shore, there's a sense of disquiet, restiveness, uncertainty. Gone are the days when delegates huddled in eager groups in cafes and lounges, heads thrust forward in lively argument, eyes shining in anticipation of a great crusade. Gone are the more recent days when, flushed with new power, they sank into easy chairs and sprawled in happy discussion, secure in the knowledge that an order to their parliamentary steamroller would change the face of Britain. Today's delegates are bewildered, disappointed and fearful. The eager fire has died. The smooth confidence has disappeared. In the hotel lounge, a party leader said, 'Yes, perhaps we are facing the great disillusion.' "

The delegates had more to worry about than recent defeats in county elections (TIME, April 18). The sharp spring drop in Britain's exports threatened rising unemployment. Many economists would welcome this, on the argument that a "normal" pool of unemployed would act as a brake on trade-union demands which have been pushing up production costs and pricing British goods out of export markets. Laborite politicos, however, believed that in the present mood of Britons a "normal" unemployment of 1,000,000 would kill the Labor Party's hopes of winning next year's general elections.

Meanwhile, union members, disappointed by nationalization, were becoming increasingly hard for their government to handle. Last week, a wildcat strike of railway workers against the nationalized railway system was spreading. Liverpool dockers were out, and London truckers were engaged in a slowdown. In London, even the men who wash milk bottles had struck.

Delegates at Blackpool did not try to play down the danger. Militant Aneurin Bevan was in a somber mood when he addressed a preconference rally. Said Bevan: "Some of our people . . . appear to have achieved material prosperity in excess of their moral stature. Some of them have got what they have got too easily and they are in danger of throwing away by a few months of dissipating anarchy what we have spent our lifetime in building up."

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