The Battle of Leyton Hall

In 1961, when the Conservative government introduced a bill to limit Commonwealth immigration for the first time in the nation's history, Laborite Patrick Gordon Walker led the Opposition's opposition. He decried the measure as "barefaced racial discrimination," warned that it would do serious damage to Britain's relations with its Commonwealth partners. Speaker after speaker rose to support him, protesting that the legislation struck at the roots of Britain's traditional tolerance toward visitors and residents of any creed or hue.

About Face. The trouble is that in the wake of the torrent of new arrivals from the West Indies, Pakistan and India before the bill was passed, the tolerance level among many Britons has become a good deal lower than it once was. Hence the fact that Labor's immigration policy has risen to plague the party--and particularly Patrick Gordon Walker. Until last October, the placid, pipe-smoking onetime Oxford history don had held a parliamentary seat from the racially mixed factory town of Smethwick. Then, during Britain's general election last October, Gordon Walker suddenly found himself in the middle of an ugly racial campaign conducted by backers of Tory Candidate Peter Griffiths. "If you want a nigger neighbor, vote Labor," read the smears on Smethwick's stone walls. Apparently plenty of Smethwickians were frightened, and although Gordon Walker tried to avoid the issue, Griffiths won in a startling upset.

But incoming Prime Minister Harold Wilson wanted Gordon Walker to be Foreign Secretary in his new government, and under the British system a Cabinet member must have a seat in Parliament. Casting about for a safe constituency, Labor officials settled on Leyton, a drab East London working-class neighborhood represented in the House of Commons for the past 30 years by a 73-year-old Labor M.P. named Reginald Sorensen. Abruptly, Sorensen was invited to accept a life peerage and vacate the constituency, and a by-election was scheduled for Jan. 21.

At first, Leyton seemed not only safe for Labor but also safe from the race issue, since only 3% of its population is nonwhite. But in politics no issue stays dormant. Gordon Walker found things complicated by the fact that last November--after reading a Gallup poll showing 68% of all Britons to be in favor of some curbs on immigration--Wilson's Labor government voted to renew the same immigration law it had fought so vigorously in 1961. Kicking off the Tories' campaign against Gordon Walker in Leyton, former Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod chortled, "I welcome, though I despise, Mr. Gordon Walker's abandonment of a cause he advocated so fiercely such a short time ago."

"De Noo Candidate." Into the imbroglio dropped the British Fascist Party, a gang of racists who decided to bring the color question into the by-election campaign with a vengeance, even though Gordon Walker and his Tory opponent, Leyton Engineer Ronald Buxton, tried to soft-pedal it. Nastily and noisily, the neo-Nazis invaded Gordon Walker's first campaign rally in Leyton, were only repulsed after Gordon Walker threw a right uppercut and Labor's burly Defense Minister Denis Healey hurled the Fascist leader, Colin Jordan, off the platform into the front row.

Last week, as Gordon Walker continued his campaign in Leyton, at least 30 burly Labor stewards guarded the halls in which he spoke. Although a massive journalistic contingent from Fleet Street was, in The Times of London's words, "ready to pounce at the drop of a swastika," no Fascists showed up--though Spoiler Jordan sent an agent in blackface to the Leyton town hall, where the interloper declared himself, in crude parody of Negro vernacular, to be "de noo candidate, Walker Gordon." And though everyone was protesting that race was not an issue in Leyton, the BBC hastily canceled a television screening of a play called Fable, which shows a future Britain ruled by colored people, in which whites are the victims of minority discrimination. Scheduled for election eve, the program was postponed for a week.

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