Travel & Travail

The White House luncheon was finished, and it was time for toasts. Said the President of the U.S. with a twinkle in his eye: "Someone suggested, Mr. Prime Minister, that I begin this toast by saying: 'My good disassociates' "--a reference to Harold Wilson's "dissociating" the British government from the U.S. bombing of the Hanoi-Haiphong oil-storage areas. In reply, Wilson complimented the President on his sense of humor, then turned soberly to his most pressing problem: Britain's economic crisis. Said Wilson, grimly declaring his resolve to beat it: "If we have to fight alone, we shall. But I am confident, Mr. President, we shall not be fighting alone."

Absentee Landlord? Fighting was what Wilson had done all week. About the only place he did not have to do battle was the White House, where President Johnson listened attentively to the Prime Minister's explanation of his economic first-aid measures. Though Wilson neither asked for nor received any promises of U.S. financial support, it was clear that he still had excellent rapport with the President. Yet even the trip to Washington exposed the Prime Minister to fresh criticism at home. "The nation is becoming accustomed to waving farewell to Mr. Wilson just as things get uncomfortable," declared London's Daily Mail, recalling that Wilson took off on a trip to Moscow three weeks ago as the latest sterling crisis approached. The Prime Minister, added the Daily Sketch, "is in danger of becoming an absentee landlord."

Embroiled as he was with the trade unions, dissidents in his own party and the Opposition over his controversial plans to rescue the pound, Wilson deliberately chose to make things hotter by scheduling a debate on Labor's controversial bill to renationalize Britain's major privately owned steel companies. He apparently reckoned that the steel-nationalization issue--one of the Labor Party's surviving oldtime doctrinaire goals--would unite his divided party. But Veteran Labor M.P. George Strauss, who in 1948 piloted the Labor Government's original steel-nationalization bill through Commons, was critical of the measure. Desmond Donnelly and Woodrow Wyatt, the moderate Labor M.P.s who last year bedeviled Wilson's attempts to nationalize steel (TIME, May 14, 1965), again sniped nastily from the backbenches.

Misleading Margin. The biggest battle came with the Commons debate on the plan, which the Prime Minister had announced the week before, to freeze prices, wages and dividends while drastically squeezing inflation out of the economy by cutting government spending and raising taxes. Conservative Leader Ted Heath led a bitter, sometimes brilliant attack in Commons on Wilson's handling of the economic crisis. The government survived the no-confidence motion by a 79-vote margin.

The size of the margin was misleading, for Wilson's measures have exacerbated the Labor Party's internal feuds. Fearing massive unemployment, 47 Labor M.P.s signed a protest against Wilson's measures, and it was all Deputy Prime Minister George Brown could do to win the "reluctant acquiescence" of Britain's influential Trades Union Congress to the idea of a voluntary wage freeze.

Mandatory Measures. Wilson made no attempt to downplay the severity of his program. "We have taken steps," he said in Washington, "which have not been taken by any other democratic government in the world--steps which in regard to prices and wages no other British government, even in wartime, has ever taken."

In fact, the steps were more drastic than the Prime Minister had originally indicated. When he first explained his plan in Commons, the wage-and-price freeze was to be voluntary, and unions could hold out hope that previously negotiated wage increases would be paid out, freeze or no freeze, to the 6,000,000 workers who had them coming during the next twelve months. Last week, when the Labor government got around to explaining details of Wilson's program in a White Paper, the voluntary angle was gone. Instead, prices and wages will be frozen by law at July 20 levels for six months, to be followed by another half-year of "great restraint." Anyone found guilty of breaking the freeze or not showing "restraint" will be subject to fines ranging from -L-100 to -L-500.

The trade unions were outraged. "If the freeze is applied," said one trade-union official, "it is likely to bring about a chaotic situation in industry." "Shoddy, imprecise and dictatorial," snapped another. The T.U.C. was reconsidering the approval it had given the austerity program earlier, and there was talk that union leaders might no longer be able to keep their members in line, raising fears of wildcat walkouts that could plague Britain's already underproductive industry.

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