MARGATE ROCK
IF the Labour Party fails to recover before the end of this year a measure of that trust and support which put it in power in 1945, it will not be for any lack of opportunities. When, in the February election, the last throw of the electoral dice kept Labour in office after the loss of seventy seats, the new Government was given a chance to show what could be done by genuine moderation and a will to unite the country. Argument in favour of an immediate second resort to the polls died away surprisingly rapidly. The short-term gains from the devaluation of the pound turned out to be surprisingly large. Political memories began to fade and Mr. Attlee and his colleagues began to settle down in the seats of office. The glaring ineptitude of the publication of the party pamphlet European Unity (which only approved such unity on Socialist terms) at the -very time when the early promise of the Schu- man Plan was raising high hopes brought Ministers to the edge of their chairs again, but within a fortnight that scandal had been smothered by the news of the North Korean aggression. By general consent, though without any very thorough dis- cussion, it was assumed that a General Election was undesir- able at home owing to the new peril abroad. Yet even this unexpected new prop for the Governinent was first weakened by their rather half-hearted support for the United Nations campaign in Korea and then indifferently kicked away when the bitterly controversial steel nationalisation scheme was thrust forward once more, three weeks ago.
After all this, the chance that the policy of moderation, which everybody wants, will come into its own at the jubilee Annual Conference of the Labour Party at Margate is a very small chance indeed. Yet it says something for the under- lying wish of the British people for national unity, for its instinctive recoil from the chasm which the Government's blind obstinacy has so recently opened up, and for the un- willingness of all decent people to write off their political opponents as rogues or fools, that the Margate Conference opened on Monday with the hope of saner ct.ounsels still just alive. It is hard to kill the conviction that the will of the vast mass of ordinary voters, including Labour voters, has been seriously misinterpreted by the Government in the course of the past few months, and so long as that feeling persists there is' still a chance that the Ministers at Margate will have sufficient sense to see the red light. It is these Ministers, after all, who will feel the weight of censure most immediately. Before long the electors must have their say again. If Mr. Bevan holds to his ambition to ee his own kind of Socialism in his own time ; if Mr. Morrison continues to woo the middle voter with fair speeches while attacking him with such violently partisan measures as the Iron and Steel Bill ; and if Mr. Attlee fails, as he has failed recently, to make the voice of reason and decency heard above the clamour of a faction fight, then the chances that Socialists will win the next election are small.
Even in the rosy atmosphere of a jubilee conference it should still be possible fur wise men to discern that, at this juncture in the Labour Party's history, reasonable behaviour will be a paying policy. " The immediate task for the whole Labour Movement,' wrote the authors of Labour and the New Society in one of their less controversial passages, " is to clarify its principles and purposes." At the moment a little ,clear thinking among Socialists would go a long way. There is certainly a long way to go. There is no room for any kind of pretence, either on the surface or in the depths of Socialist theory. Nor can all the difficult decisions be merged in a kind of single combat performed before the assembled 'hosts by Messrs. Morrison and Bevan. In any case such a contest loses something of its essential simplicity when the two champions assert that they are not fighting atoll. But it is robbed of all point when nobody in his right mind could care very deeply about the result. Let there be no mistake about it, Mr. Bevan and Mr. Morrison really do disagree on a number of important points of Labour Party policy, however much their colleagues may deny it. And that being so, some independent observers may feel that Mr. Morrison's policy of " moderation " is preferable to Mr. Bevan's Socialism at all costs. But is the difference between the two so very import- ant ? Mr. Morrison's carefully publicised moderation in apparently consistent with support for the immediate imple- mentation of the Iron and Steel Act, and there was nobody on the Labour benches who gave a more hypocritical performance than he did in the recent steel debate. Mr. Bevan's fine dis- regard for popularity with the present electorate is perfectly consistent with a keen desire to emerge in due course as the leader of the Socialist party, after a, period in the wilderness. What is at stake is not so much Present principle as future power. After all, the leadership of the party is not at present vacant. Mr. Attlee is still there. But his possible successors are facing the future.
The main difference is that Mr. Morrison would pretty certainly like to win the next election, whereas Mr. Bevan does not seem to mind if the Labour Party loses it. Possibly Mr. Bevan is the more realistic, since the chances of swinging middle voters to the Left are very small—at any rate for the next few months. Steel nationalisation at home, and the success of a policy in Korea which the Labour Government never seemed to be supporting with all its heart, must have done much to swing those voters in the other direction. An early General Election might well produce a result substan- tially different from that of last February. In fact the main hope for the Labour Party rests precisely on that restored foundation which Labour and the New Society postulates as desirable. But that foundation will not be built out of political smartness or muddled doctrine. It would be far better for the delegates at Margate to found it on the rock of the enlightened will of free men, abandoning that itch to interfere with other people's lives which has bedeviled their period of power and from which even the founding fathers in 1900 were not entirely free.
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