Contracting Out

A disconsolate crowd of trade union leaders and Labor Party officials trailed out of the crucial debate at Britain's 92nd annual Trade Union Congress on the Isle of Man last week. "It's shattered everything we've built up these last 25 years," mourned one respected leader. "The fundamental honesty of the party's gone," gloomed another.

In one bumbling session, a thousand delegates committed British organized labor to advocacy of neutralism, to unilateral disarmament and to Britain's gradual retirement from existing alliances. Ludicrously enough, they had also voted support for a contradictory resolution endorsing Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell's June policy statement, which bases Britain's defense on the NATO alliance and its nuclear deterrent. This confused performance probably set back the Labor Party's chance of returning to power by many years, because the union groups, with their bloc votes, are the real backbone of the Labor Party.

Muddy & Muddled. The vote by the trade unionists was a symptom of how deeply demoralized Labor has become in the wake of three successive election defeats by the Tories. Neither Gaitskell, with his "if-I-may-be-permitted-to-say-so" speaking style, nor the other practical politicians of the Labor Party have provided leadership to offset the doctrinaire Socialists and pacifists that have always comprised a major element of the party from its founding. These, abetted by Communists and fellow travelers and organized by such left-wing Laborite M.P.s as Michael Foot and Anthony Greenwood, have seized on the "ban-the-bomb" emotionalism to attack the policies of the moderate leaders who have tried to keep British labor committed to Western collective defense.

By the time the union delegates gathered last week on the Isle of Man, union after Tinion had voted to commit them selves to unilateral nuclear disarmament.

At the Congress the key resolution was introduced by Frank Cousins, the leftist onetime truck driver who heads the powerful Transport and General Workers Union (1,224,000 members). It demanded "complete rejection of any defense policy based on the threat of nuclear weapons" and Britain's unilateral disarmament.

The rival resolution endorsing Gaitskell's stand seemed doomed to defeat-until twinkling little Bill Carron, leader of the Amalgamated Engineers (907,000 members) suddenly made a bid to save his old friend. His engineers were committed to vote for unilateral nuclear dis armament. But Carron proclaimed, after consulting with his delegation, that he found no contradiction between the two resolutions and would therefore cast his union's big vote for both.

The debate was as muddled as little Bill's maneuver. For the moderates, T.U.C. Secretary Sir Vincent Tewson uttered common-sense warnings: "Unilateral disarmament would break up the Western alliance. We won't achieve peace by trying to save our own skins." "There's no love or charity in an H-bomb," replied Garment Worker Secretary J. E. Newton emotionally. "I only want to live in peace." Blurted Cousins: "NATO was originally created as a defense body, but there has been a gradual deterioration of that, till now NATO has become an aggressive body."

Stumbling & Crumbling. With Car-ron's bloc of 907,000 votes. Gaitskell's motion slipped through, 4,150,000 to 3,460,000. But the anti-nuclear resolution was approved with a majority twice as big, a majority that presaged repudiation of Gaitskell's arms stand when the Labor Party conference--including many of the same people--meets next month in Scarborough.

Gaitskell may survive even that blow, since under party rules only a vote of Labor M.P.s may topple him. But whether Gaitskell stays on or not, Labor had showed itself so confused, so vigorless and so undeserving of confidence that it made itself dangerously close to a political laughingstock. And this is Britain's only real alternative party to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's Conservatives.

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