Disenchanted
am a member of the Labour party and have, ever since I had a drink with him in Moscow at the time of the British Trade Fair, had a particularly soft spot for Mr. Wilson. I rejoiced when he triumphed over Mr. Brown in the leadership stakes and, of course, I rejoiced when he became the first Labour Prime Minister after Mr. Attlee.
I must, however, confess, sir, that I am now sadly disenchanted. On Commonwealth immigration Mr. Wilson's policy is more reactionary and racist than my Cambridge contemporary, Mr. Humphry Berke- ley, would ever have allowed the Tories to be. It would be impossible to imagine that any Tory would be as subservient to the Americans over Vietnam as the present administration is. As for the economy, we are told ad nauseam that the Tories left us in a mess—and they probably did. But Mr. Wilson has now been in power for ten months and he has been helped by the greatest brain drain from Oxford and Cambridge to Whitehall in history. And what do we o' get? A series of piffling little measures which—for all I know—might have been effective if applied all at once but which, coming piecemeal as they do, do nothing to help the economy or to produce confi- dence abroad. We now have a 'stop' policy of the kind Mr. Selwyn Lloyd in his heyday would never have dared to apply and yet the pound is constantly in crisis and the hard-faced men of Zurich remain unconvinced. I do not want my government to be dictated to by international bankers any more than anyone else does, but if Mr. Wilson cannot in- spire them with confidence we shall inevitably have devaluation and we shall suffer even more than we do now from the imposed adamantine hardness of our bank managers.
1 shall be faced next time with the choice of voting for Mr. Heath, whom the Europeans do not yet appear to have given up as a bad job, or for Mr. Grimond. I wonder how many other members and supporters of the Labour party feel as I do: that if our principles are going to be flouted, it may as well be done by men who will do so with conviction, sin-
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