Labor's Low Point

Five months after Labor's third straight election defeat, the party, rather than resolving its differences, had sunk so low that some British editorialists were asking seriously last week whether there would ever be another Labor government at all. Cock-a-hoop over two fresh by-election victories, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told a Tory rally that in view of "the folly, confusion and incompetence of our opponents," he might very well follow Sir Winston Churchill's example and resign his office after his 80th birthday--in 1974. To others, dedicated to the proposition that a lively Loyal Opposition gets the best government, the Labor Party's plight was no laughing matter. "This is not a Labor Party," said the Daily Mirror. "This is a party in labor."

Don Dropped. After last October's defeat, moderate Leader Hugh Gaitskell advanced his own reason for the disaster. Labor's 40-year-old constitutional pledge to nationalize practically everything had scared off the prosperous middle-class and working-class voters of present-day Britain, he said, and ought to be replaced by an up-to-date statement backing both public and private enterprise.

To the dogmatic leftists in the party, this was heresy, a betrayal of socialist principles; only a single commanding speech by Labor's fiery second-in-command, Aneurin Bevan, standing by his leader, kept the party conference from falling apart in November. Nye Bevan, after a major abdominal operation, is down to a scant 140 Ibs., and living in seclusion on his Buckinghamshire farm. With Nye out of action, socialist left-wingers rose in open revolt, and the party leadership split in warring factions. Instead of stumping the country like Gladstone to stir up mass support for a new Opposition policy, Gaitskell closeted himself with his intellectual friends, and when he belatedly sallied out late last month, it was to set forth his views at a few university meetings in his most pursed-lipped "if-I-may-venture-to-say-so" manner.

Three weeks ago, on the eve of the showdown Labor Party executive meeting that was to decide on Gaitskell's proposals, 44 left-wing M.P.s broke with their leader over their insistence that Britain should unilaterally renounce its nuclear bomb. One of the dissidents was Richard Grossman, onetime Oxford don. Under heavy pressure from right-wing trade unionists who have no use for the party's intellectuals, Gaitskell last week fired Grossman from his place on the Labor Party's front bench. Gaitskell also demanded a showdown on controversial Clause 4 in the 1918 party constitution, calling for the nationalization of all industry. But what emerged from the show down was a mealy-potatoes compromise that showed how split the Labor Party still is.

Draft Dropped. The 1918 clause was kept, but a modernized clarification was tacked on, and--in the evangelical language so dear to Labor--promptly dubbed the New Testament. In a phrase lifted from a speech by Nye Bevan, who lifted it in turn from a 1922 speech by Lenin, it called for "substantial enough" common ownership to give power over the "commanding heights of the economy." Surviving from Hugh Gaitskell's original draft was a line "recognizing that both public and private enterprise have a place in the economy."

"I've got 80% of what I wanted," said Gaitskell, but few agreed with him; his New Testament was hardly inspired revelation to strengthen the faithful or to convert the disbelievers. As if to emphasize Labor's decline, for the first time in ten years the Tories won the seat in the industrial constituency of Brighouse and Spenborough in Yorkshire. And in another by-election in a dormitory suburb of London, the Labor candidate finished third behind a Tory and a Liberal.

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