Thursday's Choice
THE first thing to be said about the elec- tion campaign that (mercifully) now enters its last week is that it is not an elec- tion at all, but a referendum. The country is being asked to say `oui' or 'non' to Mr. Wilson, and, as has been the custom in recent referenda, the answer will doubtless be `oui.' In giving that answer the elec- torate will be taking at his face value the outstanding party politician of his genera- tion, the supreme non-statesman for the age of the non-event. To those who neither travel abroad nor read foreign newspapers, he has enabled Britain to speak with a new authority in the world. To those for whom economics is an impenetrable mystery, he has set the nation on the road to solving its economic difficulties. He has increased his stature over the past seventeen months at the expense of diminishing everything he has touched, including the Labour move- ment and the standard of public life itself. He is one good reason for voting Tory on Thursday.
But not good enough. What this election ought to be about is not Wilson, but the future of Britain over the next five years. Lamentably, both parties seem to prefer to attack the trivia of the other's record. Yet few elections can have been held in which the problems ahead have appeared more formidable than they do today.
Foremost among them is the regenera- tion of the British economy, and its extrication from the morass of stagnation and indebtedness in which it is now stuck fast. In 1964 Labour rightly made this issue—faster economic growth and an end to stop-go—the spearhead of its campaign. In office—and Mr. Wilson has invited us to judge the Government on its perfor- mance—Labour has failed even more abysmally than the Tories. As the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe this week pointed out, in 1966, as in 1965, Britain's growth rate is destined to be the lowest in Europe: nor, on present policies, is there any prospect of improvement. Faced with the choice between devaluation and deflation, Labour, like the Tories before it, but with less excuse, has chosen deflation. If the effects have not yet been felt, this is only because the operation has been bungled and therefore damagingly prolonged. But with the next dose scheduled for Mr. Callaghan's May Budget, all the drearily familiar landmarks of stop-go will before long reappear.
Not that the Tories have anything con- vincing to put in its place. Only the Liberals have been frank enough to recognise that a planned devaluation is the only solution, and bold enough to say so. For all the Liberals' muddled policies elsewhere, for all their regionalist aberrations, this is a telling point in their favour.
But the Tories, at bottom, are realists. They are also Europeans. Mr. Heath has declared firmly in favour of early entry into the Common Market, and General de Gaulle has obliged by raising the duck from the dead. And if we do go into Europe, it is clear that we cannot face the vigorous competition of the Six with our present over- valued currency. A devaluation of the £ on the eve of entry into the European Com- munity—if it has not been done before— will be as essential for us as it was for the French. This is something the Tories can hardly fail to recognise when the time comes.
This is one reason why Europe is the supreme issue at this election. The other is that only in the context of Europe can Britain find the world role she has been seeking so long, a role that will at once end the financially debilitating post-imperial posturing and morally debilitating depen- dence on the United States to which this Government is so pathetically attached. The Americans themselves see this clearly, enough. Only this week a leading article in the New York Times commented that Washington should 'make it clear that Britain's economic salvation lies in Europe, not in continued American support for the pound. Bonn and London, in turn, must make it clear to Washington that con- tinued American predominance cannot save NATO, but only destroy it. The Atlantic alliance can only be restored in one way, through restoring the unity of Europe.'
Yet it is against this that Mr. Wilson has set his face. His reactionary speech on Britain and Europe repeated every mis- take the Conservatives made in the 1950s, and would have been laughable in its ignorance of European affairs if the issue were not of such overriding importance. As it is, he has given notice that no one who genuinely believes in a European Britain can possibly vote Labour on Thursday. Even if a Tory victory cannot now be con- sidered likely, it is vital that the Opposi- tion in the new Parliament is as strong and as effective as possible. A Labour landslide would be a disaster. That is why the SPECTATOR believes that its readers should vote, on Thursday, for whichever candidate, Conservative or Liberal, has the better chance of defeating Labour.
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