The War of Jenkins' Aye

When Parliament reconvened last week following an eleven-day holiday recess, the first act of Labor Party Deputy Leader, Roy Jenkins, was to seek out his leader, Harold Wilson. In a brief meeting at Wilson's Commons office, Jenkins, 51, bluntly announced that he was resigning, both as deputy leader and Chancellor of the Exchequer in Labor's shadow cabinet. He will return to the back benches in the House of Commons and there, freed from responsibility for maintaining party loyalty, he intends to continue his fight for British entry into the Common Market; an issue on which the Labor Party is badly splintered.

Jenkins' break with Wilson was quickly followed by the sympathetic resignations of seven other members of the Labor shadow cabinet, including Defense Experts, George Thomson and Lord Chalfont. The stunning move shattered the facade of Labor unity and cast the party into its most vituperative intramural quarrel in two decades.

For Britain's delighted Tories, Jenkins' action has far-reaching consequences. It means that Prime Minister, Edward Heath's Common Market legislation is now virtually certain to pass on schedule, helped along by a Jenkins-led labor bloc of pro-Europeans. It also means that Heath--no longer plagued by the danger of defeat over EEC legislation--may call an early general election. British political observers expect that he may do so in the fall or, at the latest, next spring. If Heath can cut unemployment and show some success with his new Ulster policy, he seems virtually certain to win.

Shifted Ground. The personal battle between Wilson and Jenkins has gradually heightened ever since the Labor chief, as leader of the opposition, backed down on the position he had taken as Prime Minister and decided to fight against the terms on which Heath proposed to bring Britain into the Common Market. At first, Jenkins and other pro-Market Labor M.P.s went along, hoping to help Wilson secure a better deal for British entry.

Eventually, they became convinced that Wilson, for political reasons, had actually shifted ground and opposed entry itself. During the winter, the bickering grew sharper over what TIME's parliamentary correspondent, Honor Balfour, calls "the twists and turns of outrageous Wilson." Five months ago, the Jenkins bloc defied Wilson and party discipline and sided with Heath (TIME, Nov. 8) on a crucial vote to keep his Common Market bill alive.

Ever since, some parliamentary observers have been predicting an open break between Wilson and Jenkins. What finally brought it about was the recent effort of antiMarket Labor M.P.s to force a referendum on the Common Market, which might show that a majority of Britons were against it. Initially, Wilson opposed a referendum on constitutional grounds. After French President Georges Pompidou called for a popular vote in France, which will take place next week, and after Heath suggested the possibility of a plebiscite on the Northern Ireland border issue, Wilson again reversed his stand. He backed a proposal by the chairman of the party's national executive committee, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, that Labor support a referendum amendment being moved by a small band of antiMarket Conservative M.P.s.

Wilson apparently bought Wedgwood Benn's argument, that if the referendum amendment carried, Heath might be forced to call an election which Labor could win. The transparently political motive of Wilson's decision was too much for Jenkins, the Oxford-educated son of a Welsh coal miner, whose recent speeches have often touched on the need for Labor to address itself to the quality of British life. In a "Dear Harold" open letter following his resignation from the front bench, Jenkins opposed what he called "government born out of opportunism." Wrote he: "I want to see that future Labor governments have a clear sense of direction. This constant shifting of the ground, I cannot accept. Save in the very short term, it will be far more damaging to the Labor Party than to the present government."

Jenkins' defection threw Labor into disarray. In addition to the ranking party leaders who decided to join him on the back benches last week, several other M.P.s advised Wilson that they would stay only if the waffling stopped. Unfazed, Wilson filled shadow cabinet vacancies with anti-Europeans, and other members from the left wing of the party moved up to give Labor's front bench a leftist majority for the first time. The former spokesman on foreign and Commonwealth affairs, Denis Healey, took Jenkins' shadow Exchequer post.

With Labor dominated by its left, the party will presumably lose some of its appeal to middle-of-the-road voters in a general election. As pro-Market M.P., William Price puts it: "Any political party can sustain a few gymnasts, but a whole circus of them would be a disaster."

The Labor feud is bound to affect personalities, as well as the party. Jenkins, described by one supporter last week as having been "forced out for the ultimate political sin of being consistent," has lost, at least for the time, any chance of attaining party leadership. Labor will not easily forgive him for breaking ranks; at the party's conference next October, he may well be accused of the heresy of "elitism." In the long run, though, Wilson is not much better off. He will likely remain party leader for the time being because no successor has emerged. But it is doubtful that Wilson, having split the Labor Party so badly, will ever be able to lead it back to power.

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