Political Commentary
Labour : issues real and false
Patrick Cosgrove
By the time, dear reader, that you look on this copy you will know that Mr Harold Wilson has again done the dirty Derrick trick — you will know, that is, that he has escaped at one bound from the National Executive study group committee commitment to nationalise . the top (whatever that adjective means) twenty-five companies into a generalised commitment to nationalisation. I do not no know how you will regard this move — whether as another manoeuvre by the arch manoeuvrer, or as something of real and positive consequence. All I will say by way of guidance is this — do not be misled into the belief, one supported by most Fleet Street editors, that the twenty-five companies row was of any national significance.
So insignificant was it, and so light-heartedly did the Labour Party establishment deal with it before the Conference even started, that even Mr Benn was able to joke about the subject on Sunday — and joke rather well, as it happened. When the fiery Miss Joan Lestor was arguing a point about nationalisation at a meeting of the National Executive, and when it was suggested that her position might become exposed, Mr Beinn. said immediately that the Shadow Cabinet would never send the member for Eton and Slough naked into, the Conference Chamber — an appropriate echo of the past at a time when the second volume of Mr Michael Foot's biography of Aneurin Bevan is being hawked about Blackpool. The point of the anecdote, however, is to suggest the good fellowship with which Labour leaders have handled their little economic problems before the public row opened. Mr Jack Jones told Mr Harold Wilson that his massive block vote would not be used against the party leader, either to insist on the inclusion of the magic number in any nationalisation proposals, or, for the hell of it, to oppose Mr Wilson's earlier enunciated doctrine that he and his allies could veto. proposals made by the National Executive committee. Mrs Judith Hart, who chaired the sub-committee that came up with the magic number, agreed that it was largely symbolic. The National Executive, having first of all decided that it could not go along with the leader's proposal that he, it, and the Shadow Cabinet should thrash the whole thing out, then agreed to support the Conference motion that would be least specific in its nationalisation commitment. Mr Wilson promised to , lunch regularly with Mr Terry Pitt of Transport House — one of the leading nationalisation ideologists — and the row about the subject pretty well disappeared.
None of this is to suggest that the row was • never of any importance. Indeed it was; though it never had very much to do with how many companies should be nationalised. It had to do, rather, with power in the Labour Party, with the issue of who should decide policy, and with the problem of hcv to force the politicians to put a left-wing, a socialist, a Labour Party, policy on the statute book. It had to do, too, with a reaction to the Wilson Government very like the reaction to the first Macdonald Government. "The Labour Party," Philip Snowden once wrote of its early days, "had always set its face against a permanent Chairman, and had insisted that the Sessional Chairman should not be regarded as the 'Leader.' It was considered to be undemocratic. The Party must not commit one man to dictate the policy of the Party. The Chairman was simply the mouthpiece of the Party, stating its decisions to the House of Commons. The Party in its turn was expected to take its directions from resolutions of the Party Conference." But Snowden adds: "Fortunately it never worked out like that in practice." .
Nonetheless, the first Macdonald Government was widely judged a failure, and the second, ending as it did in the Leader's apostasy, was a disaster. The 1932 Conference of the Party tried to tie down future leaders, and future parliamentary Labour Parties to specific Conference commitments. Sir Charles Trevelyan, at that conference, said, "let us lay down in some such resolution as this the unshakeable mandate that they (the leadership. of a victorious Labour Party) are to introduce at once, before attempting remedial measures of any other kind, great Socialist measures . . ." The 1933 conference actually agreed to such measures anent the future of the Labour Party. But, referring in later years to the fashion in which he was not at all bound by any such resolutions Clement Attlee said, "the passage of time and further experience has led to these proposals being tacitly dropped." It led, of course, to no such thing. Just so has Harold Wilson, though with less arrogance than Macdonald, and less finesse than Attlee, stated a fundamental truth — that, though the Labour Party perenially distrusts its leaders, and perenially expects to be betrayed by them, it, because unlike the Liberals in their present guise it is a fundamentally democratic and parliamentary party, accepts the fact that a party victorious in a general election will be run by its leaders and members of the House of Commons, and not by Conference or the Party outside the House. There is a pretty well permanent running battle in the Labour Party in which the dissidents try to overthrow this rule without violating national constitutional precedent, but the Party generally throws its weight behind its parliamentary leaders, in spite of whatever disappointments it may suffer as a result of the inadequacies it discovers in them as ministers. Those who wish to sneer either at the quarrels or their
recurrence would do well to pay attention to the proposals of the alternative left wing Party, the I.iberals, to demolish the parliamentary system altogether, simplY in order to bend the will and activity of its leaders to the will and desire of a mob assembled at an annual, Conference; and con" sider whether they would like the result. Of course another Wilson government would be much more left-wing, much more socialist, than the last, not least because the JenkinsiteS would be much less powerful a second time around. But the way in Which it would be more socialist has little to do with a row about how many companies should be n a. tionalised. The numbers game simply shows the surface of an ingrained argument .about authority in the Labour Party. I said earlier that the Labour Party never became as extremist as the Liberals have, recently become because of a fundaments' and responsible respect for the national constitution. The basic reason why they have again not become extremist, and will not at this conference become extremist, is a fundamental respect for the nation itself because, in other words, of their attitude to the Coal' mon Market. The left wing which in other historical circumstances might have bayed for, the blood of Harold Wilson and his ministerial colleagues of 1964/70 because of their failure to implement socialism and get re-elected, has been brought by time to realise that the polia of renegotiating the Brussels treaty which Mt Wilson forced through last year, over the suspicions and even convictions that he did not 'really mean it, has gained such wide 0' ceptance in the country, and such wide OP" port, that it would be an inevitable con* sequence of the election of another Labour government; and might even yet be a polieY adopted by the present Conservative ad' ministration. Left-wingers who fea,r the European entanglement above all, as being destructive of the nation itself, are only too willing to let rows about numbers of corn; panies to be nationalised go by the board, all° persuade other, more narrow-sighted, le,',t' wingers to do likewise, in order that the me011,1 may not exploit divisions in the main oppoSI: tion party, to the detriment of its electors) ,chances, and thus help to ensure the con' tinuance of EEC membership. The gaunt face of Mr Gedrge Thompson at this Conference' the lack of elan in Mr Jenkins and Mrs Williams at the European meeting on Sunday night, the determination of one Brussels official to fly from Blackpool to the Continent ,for a meeting on Tuesday and return here on Wednesday morning, so as to continue What has now become a hopeless lobbying of th,e, Labour faithful in the European cause, a" indicate the truth. The Labour Party have now decided in all its most important reachea to play the national card. — but one likeIY It is possible that Harold Wilson is about to reap the reward of having endured mod] contumely. As an opposition leader the second time around he has been much criticised -less than Macdonald, more thanAttlee.He has clung on, less in the interests of himself than in the interests of his party. And he now seems about to forge Labour energy int° another winning combination, not this time, a combination certain to win because of its economic or social policies to win because of its stand on the national identity. There would be a certain rightness about a Labour Party which, throughout its history, had suffered internal division rather than become anti-parliamentary or anti-cons' titutional, winning a general election as defender of the nation itself. And if such a, result produced a radical transformation the country in its internal polity those Tones who feared and disliked that transformation would have only themselves to blame for whoring after European gods and neglecting the national interest of which they had so often claimed to be the custodians.
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