By Way of Beachy Head
By BERNARD LEVIN SING hey this mild autumn morning for Mr. George Thom- son, Labour Member of Parlia- ment for Dundee East, and a man who clearly cares nothing for fashion. For Mr. Thomson has been speaking up, this week, for Mr. Gaitskell, and speaking up for Mr. G is a practice which has fallen into almost complete desuetude lately. Indeed, if you read Tribune (and which of you does not) you get the impres- sion that the only man these days who would be seen speaking up for Mr. G is Myself. The present silence of so many of Mr. Gaitskell's followers is not the least contemptible thing about the Labour Party—a large statement, that --and I often wonder why. I don't always wonder why, mind you. There is no mystery about the strange reluctance to support his chief displayed by Mr. Harold Wilson, for instance. That sharp little fellow has an eye for the main chance in the back of his head; he has ambitions the way some people have mice. But there are some whose motives are rather less brazenly worn upon the sleeve, and the cat appears to have got a fine collection of their tongues. Scarborough, after all, is less than a month away. Mr. Gaitskell's enemies are united (if only in their desire to bring him down) and implacable; too many of his friends ,arc becoming hard' of heiiring whenever the bugle blows.
For with the Liberals meeting in Eastbourne the week before the Labour Party assembles farther north, this is the year we go to Scar- borough by way of Beachy Head. Support for the Labour Party is crumbling much faster than many of its members realise; the drop in mem- bership of over 100,000 that the publication of the 1959 figures has just r'evealed has certainly been much accelerated this year; the behaviour of the TUC must have driven scores of thousands more Labour voters over the edge (not to say round the bend), and it would be a bad mistake to suppose that the only reason the TUC dismayed so many people was that it appeared to be standing on its head as well as its feet; Others, I dare say, were disturbed less by protedural considerations than by the quality of the nonsense talked by the representatives of those who appeared to he winning the day. The great shift of the solid core of Labour voters in the traditional Labour areas has not yet begun; but any more of this nonsense, and Colonel Lort-Phillips's heavily discouraged venture in Ebbw Vale will appear a great deal less foolhardy.
And there seems to be no intention, on the Left, of letting up on tte nonsense for a moment. Mr. Frank Cousins, after all, is now the acknow- ledged leader of the Left in the Labour Party. And Mr. Cousins is giving every sign of having gone clean off his head.
Last month he gave a notorious interview (re- printed in the Daily Express) with a Yugoslav newspaper, in which he said that the Yugoslav 'experiment,'. in which he 'believed . . . from the beginning,' was 'something nearest to what I would like to see introduced in Great Britain'; he also said that he thought that provok- ing strikes to terrorise the Government was proper, because the Government 'does not repre- sent the workers' and 'it is better that we terrorise them than that they should terrorise us.' And he ended by affirming that he did not want to become Prime Minister, because 'I want to re- main what I am, and . . . to make prime minis- ters'—and, of course, to break them; 'this goes with it too.'
This is alarming enough; for although Mr. Cousins, weighed in any absolute scale, is of no account, weighed in the relative scale of ability to affect the policy of the Labour Party he must unfortunately be reckoned with. It is all very well to point put that a brain gets more shrunken as a head becomes more swollen, but apart from the fact that many of those who are busy whoop- ing him up regard him as a model of lucidity and sagacity, if he succeeds in destroying Mr. Gaits- kelt and the Labour Party it is the effect that will have to be reckoned with then, not the cause.
So it is instructive, and in some ways even more alarming, to examine the text of his inter- view (with Mr. Ludovic Kennedy) in this week's Panorama. Mr. Kennedy was trying to get from him a straight, intelligible statement in answer to the question : is Mr. Cousins in favour of unilateral disarmament by Britain or is he not? Mr. Kennedy failed to get any such thing, and it was not for want of trying. Mr. Cousins first said that Britain could (and, by implica- tion, should) 'give a lead to the world in the exercise of securing a stable peace, if it says that it will not base its policy on, or he associated with the basing of its policy on, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons.' In N‘ cOt Mr. Kennedy with: 'Then I am right in suppos. ing that .resolution does call for Great Britain to renounce unilaterally nuclear arms?' To which Mr. Cousins, who had four seconds previouslY finished declaring that Britain should say it would not be associated with the basing of its policy on the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, replied to Mr. Kennedy's virtual repeti" tion of his own words, 'Well, if you keep using the words, of course, you'll convince yourself that you have got the right answer.' Mr. KennedY swallowed, and said, 'Well, I'm trying to get an answer out of you, Mr. Cousins—yes or no, that's the point; To which Mr. Cousins, who claims to hold one and a quarter million votes in fee at the Labour Party Conference, replied, 'You see, this isn't a question for a yes or a no.' In God's name, what then is it a question for? How do Mr. Cousins's supporters and felloW' Campaigners seriously expect their views or he' fiefs to be accorded even the respect due t° honest disagreement when he can be guilty of such flagrant misuse of words as that? How cl° they expect, when Mr. Cousins went on a feN1 seconds later to declare that Britain does of possess nuclear weapons, to be taken seriously?
We must seek more reasons behind Mr' Cousins's shilly-shallying. Mr. Cousins is a OP lateralist. He believes, for reasons which seem to him good and sufficient, that Britain should forth. with abandon all nuclear strategy, and that 1° press for this abandonment should be Labour policy. Yet he could not say so at Douglas' because he did not have a mandate from his union to say so. The conference of the Transport and General Workers' Union, which laid down that body's policy for Douglas, approved a Per fectly explicit statement. of its attitude to nuclear weapons, saying among other things that theY should be subject to political control, and 11131 they should not be used first. It wa§ therefor' quite clearly against unilateralism. Yet Cousins, by refusing to face the main que.ji°1' squarely, has let it be understood by the tali' lateralists that he is on their side (which he and by his union that he is following his mandalci In other words, Mr. Cousins knows perfectly wel that the Douglas resolution of which his votc, ensured the passing was read as calling for tiny lateral nuclear disarmament, but to square w1131 must be a very curiously bifurcated conscieno.'• he wriggles and wriggles and 'wriggles when comes to saying so.
And soon we are going through the ',s11° thing again at Scarborough. Now, at Scarborote there will be rather more people about who kil"°: the time of day; Mr. Cousins must be aske'1. necessary several times, where he stands oil issue. He must not be allowed to say that 11 not a question for a yes or no. He must say he thinks, and what his union thinks, and ably why. Then. and only then, will the 1-01'"` Party Conference have a chance to make up it is pleased to call its mind in full possession the facts. Mr. Cousins, in short, has got 10 nailed down. It would be a good idea if soul,' Mr. Gaitskell's supporters over and above George Thomson were showing a little sign coming forward with a hammer.
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