All the way with LBJ?
Last weekend the Leader of the Opposition attacked the Prime Minister for presuming to lecture the United States on its conduct of the war in Vietnam. Certainly, Mr Wilson is in no position to lecture President Johnson— or anyone else for that matter. But Mr Heath would do well to pause and examine the con- tent of the message he has been putting out on Vietnam this past ten days.
This journal commented last week on the Opposition front bench motion calling on the Government to support the United States 'in their determination to assist the government and people of South Vietnam in resisting communist aggression'—a strangely timed declaration, coinciding as it did with news Nithich demonstrated just how far the South Vietnamese people's will to resist had been eroded. But on Sunday Mr Heath gratuitously went even further. He told the Young Con- servatives that 'we dare [not] contemplate the possibility of failure by our allies' in Vietnam (he said much the same thing about devaluation last year) because Vietnam was 'the crux of the great conflict which could also engulf us here' if the Americans were to withdraw.
Hitherto, the Tory party has modestly con- fined its attention to areas of policy over which the British government's writ runs. It is a pity that Mr Heath forgot this sensible self-denying ordinance on Sunday. By his unwise remarks be has laid himself wide open to the question—which Mr Shinwell has lost no time in putting to him—of why, if he feels
as he evidently does, the Conservatives are not urging the Government to send to Viet- nam the British troops which Mr Johnson would so like to see there. It is a question which allows of no satisfactory answer. Again, by making Vietnam (in so far as he can) into a party political issue Mr Heath has played right into Mr Wilson's hands, dis- tracting attention from the whole vast area of policy in which the present Government's blunders are largely responsible for the mess the country is now in, and focusing instead on the one issue for which Mr Wilson cannot be held responsible. And, quite unneces- sarily, he has alienated a host of floating voters, especially among the younger genera- tion, who are utterly disillusioned with the present Prime Minister and might well vote for Mr Heath next time, but will never do so if they are to be told that a vote for Heath is a vote for LBJ.
Mr Wilson regards support for American policies in Vietnam as a distasteful necessity imposed upon him by economic dependence. This is hardly an heroic posture. But if the Conservative party is now to make a virtue of the role of chorus-master to President Johnson, and thus to demonstrate that it has learned nothing at all from the collapse of Labour's attempt to maintain the Anglo- American 'special relationship' and Britain's military involvements East of Suez, then it can scarcely complain if, when the time comes, a disillusioned electorate decides after all to stick to the incompetents it knows.
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