"Getting Your Share?

In an open-air market near Manchester last week, Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, smiling in the hustings, took his stand alongside a gypsy fortuneteller's trailer, confidently told an audience of 300 tweedy housewives and white-aproned fruit vendors: "This country is better off today--better fed, better clothed, better housed--better off in every way than ever before in history." Before another knot of housewives in a shopping center north of London, Labor's leader, Hugh Gaitskell, demanded, "What's being done about spreading that prosperity among all of us?", went on to tout his party's offer of a nationwide pension plan that would enable all British workers to retire at 65 on half pay.

With voting day (Oct. 8) barely a fortnight off, Britain's 1959 general election had turned into a door-to-door battle in the 205 "marginal" parliamentary constituencies (those carried last time by fewer than 5,000 votes), where all political observers agreed the outcome would be decided. The Tories were counting on prosperity and genial Harold Macmillan's undeniable personal popularity to help them "turn the hat trick," i.e., win an unprecedented third straight general election victory. But in the marginal constituencies, where national personalities and national issues were not likely to prove the deciding factor, Labor seemed to be staging something of a comeback.

The Summit v. the Schools. In Lancashire, the closing of 72 cotton mills in five constituencies threatened to drive thousands of touchy, often Tory mill hands into the arms of Labor. In south-coast Devonport, audiences listened stonily to speeches about the summit and demanded new schools. Among the coalpits of the Tyne, in Scotland and in the Yorkshire foundry towns, pockets of unemployment threatened at least a dozen government seats. And both sides fretted over the effect of mass transfers of traditionally Labor voters from city slums to new outlying housing developments.

Another election imponderable as the race tightened was the weight of the third-party vote. "Get out and get in," cried Liberal Party Leader Jo Grimond to the candidates his party dispatched to fight in some 200 (out of 630) constituencies. The Liberals slugged hardest at the Tories' Suez failure and at "police state" colonial methods in Kenya and Nyasaland; they were also the only party campaigning for British membership in the European Common Market. Grimond & Co. did not expect to add more than half a dozen parliamentary seats to their present six, could only hope to exert real influence over the next government if the Tories and the Socialists wound up in a near draw. The real question was whether what votes they got in the marginal constituencies would be "stolen" from Labor or the Tories. The pundits' tentative guess: more from Labor.

The Milk v. the Cream. Hard as they pounded at their pension scheme, the Laborites still sorely needed a major issue to stir an emotional response to their cry: "Are you getting your share of the prosperity?" They thought they had one as London newspapers suddenly began to blaze with headlines about the strange stock machinations of one Harry Jasper and the 450-odd "companies" of which he is a director. On the London stock exchange, dealings in $55 million worth of securities associated with Jasper's name were summarily suspended; day after day scores of worried investors clustered outside the offices of a Jasper-linked building society that had apparently put more than $10 million of its capital into questionable loans.

Confident that they had found a means of playing on the shortchanged feeling that many a $35-a-week British wage earner feels as he steers his motorbike among the Rolls Royces and Bentleys, Labor's orators claimed the Jasper scandal as certified proof that "the few" were skimming off the cream of Britain's prosperity. Tory Macmillan, a veteran campaigner with a shrewd feeling for the popular mood, was sufficiently discomfited to announce that the government intended to review Britain's companies act to see whether regulations against speculative operations such as Jasper's should be tightened. Exuberantly, Hugh Gaitskell compared Britain's mood to that of 1945, when Labor's Clement Attlee scored an upset victory over Winston Churchill. And from the marginal constituencies, one Labor campaigner after another reported that if it were not for the polls, which still showed a strong though diminished Tory lead, he would predict a Labor victory.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.