"Even If You Win, You'll Lose"

In his seven years as leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell has fought hard to make the squabbling, divided socialists fit to govern. Last week, for the first time, he finally won the support of a virtually united, confident Labor Party. But he did so by taking a shortsighted, narrow-minded stand on the vital issue of British entry into the Common Market--a stand that ranges Gaitskell alongside the most abject left-wingers in his own party and the most bullheaded jingoists on the Tory side. As he prepared to lead his party into a general election that may be less than a year away, it looked as if Labor had already forfeited its chance--if not its right--to return to power.

Road to Isolation. Long before last week's annual Labor Party conference, there had been signs that Gaitskell, after a year of increasingly uncomfortable fence-sitting, had decided to come out against the Common Market. But as he rose in the vast seaside sports stadium at Brighton, he astonished his socialist "brothers" by the passion of his 84-minute speech. The middle-road intellectuals and union leaders who have shared his views and fought his battles sat back in ashen-faced disgust as Gaitskell, longtime champion of NATO and other internationalist policies, piped the party down the road to timorous isolation from Europe. Hugh Gaitskell's fiercest foes, the leftists who still repeat the late Aneurin Bevan's taunt that he is "a desiccated calculating machine," led tumultuous rounds of applause for every backward step he took.

"Are we forced to go into Europe?" cried Gaitskell. "No. Would we necessarily be stronger economically if we go in, and weaker if we stay out? No." On strictly economic grounds, argued onetime economics don Gaitskell, "the argument is no more than evenly balanced."

Remember Vimy Ridge. Sounding even more antiMarket than the Commonwealth Prime Ministers last month, Gaitskell argued that British entry "means the end of Britain as an independent national state. It means the end of 1,000 years of history. It means the end of the Commonwealth. For how could we serve as the center of the Commonwealth when we had become a province of Europe?" More and more resembling a Tory empire-firster, Gaitskell drew massive applause by reminding the party of the Commonwealth's support in two World Wars. "We at least," he intoned, "do not intend to forget Vimy Ridge* and Gallipoli."

Gaitskell wound up by demanding a general election if the Labor Party, as "the alternative government of the country," decides that the final safeguards for Commonwealth trade are inadequate. Though his speech neither endorsed nor rejected the threat, left-wing firebrands have warned that if Labor comes to power after the Tory government has already brought Britain into Europe on unsatisfactory terms, it might even take the unprecedented constitutional step of repudiating the agreement. Nonetheless, Gaitskell insisted piously: "We do not close the door. Our conditions can still be met. I still hope for a change in heart in Europe that will make that possible."

Back from the Wilderness. This was poppycock. Gaitskell's "conditions" were either impossible or meaningless. He professed to want better entry terms for Britain, but he knows well that the terms so far agreed to by the government add up to the best possible deal that could be obtained from the Six. Next, Gaitskell said he wanted a more precise spelling-out of certain agreements, but he knows that they cannot be detailed as yet because they involve complex policies, notably on farm prices, which the European Community itself has not finally formulated. Sighed a Labor frontbencher: "Hugh has already rolled up the map of Europe."

To many, Gaitskell's move seemed like unalloyed opportunism, even though his friends--until last week at least--have always maintained that "Gaiters" is a man of incorruptible integrity. Opportunist or not, Gaitskell is now convinced that after eleven years in the wilderness, the Labor Party can ride back into power on a tide of opposition to the Common Market. Though a Daily Telegraph Gallup poll reported last week that 46% of Britons will support Britain's Common Market membership if it is in the nation's best interest--a gain of 2% since the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conference last month--Labor believes that the anti-Marketeers will ultimately include the 24% don't-know vote.

Comfort for Communists. The outcome of Gaitskell's gamble is largely up to the government, which can wait as long as two years before calling a general election. Harold Macmillan's present aim is to wrap up Britain's membership terms around the New Year and open the package for debate in Parliament early next spring. If the Tories and the Market-minded Liberal Party solidly favor admission on these terms, the government will put through a bill passing them into law and call an election in late 1963 or early 1964, while the nation is still buoyed up by Macmillan's "great adventure." Alternatively, if the price of admission threatens to disrupt the Tory Party and stirs a loud enough outcry from country and Commonwealth. Macmillan is prepared to take the issue to the nation rather than invite later repudiation of its agreements by a Labor government.

The battle was joined. Gaitskell's words had hardly fluttered into print when Macmillan. setting a prime-ministerial precedent, issued a 5,000-word pamphlet stating his own arguments for joining Europe. Dismissing Gaitskell's plaint that Britain will be a mere province of Europe, the Prime Minister retorted that joining the Continent will "not alter the position of the Crown, nor rob our Parliament of its essential powers, nor deprive our law courts of their authority in our domestic life." The government, meanwhile, may actually benefit from Gaitskell's retreat from Europe. It should push many Tory waverers back into line at the Conservative conference this week, and will cost Labor much of its hard-won support from younger voters: no issue in modern times has so clearly ranged the sedate and the mediocre against the able and mettlesome.

A prophecy was recalled: alarmed by Gaitskell's strictures against the Six in Brussels last July. Belgium's Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak. one of the Common Market's founding fathers, told him: "Even if you win with this position, you'll lose three times over later." Said tough, astute Herbert Wehner. deputy chairman and top ideologist of West Germany's socialist party last week: "What happened at Brighton is the kind of thing that keeps Soviet hopes alive that the West can be divided after all."

* Another politician who remembers Vimy: Prime Minister Harold jNIacmillan, whose Guards regiment was all but wiped out at nearby Loos.

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