POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Stick together, lads

AUBERON WAUGH

If Mr George Brown were a desiccated calculating machine, then he could scarcely have produced anything more calculated to embarrass his present leader than the famous statement of support for the Wilson-Stewart policy on Vietnam. Nor, of course, could he have timed it better. Mr Wilson's chief— not to say his only—concern since the humiliating defeat on trade union legislation in the last session has been to preserve party unity. No longer the Great National Personage on his snow white charger, fearlessly and indiscriminately dispatching with his lance both the dragon of the TUC and the windmills of the Labour left, now he is the lir or Labour leader again, distinguished only as first among equals by his possession of an even bigger heart, more life and more soul than his colleagues.

Of course, Mr Brown is not a calculating machine, desiccated or otherwise. He is just another of the landmines strewn in the Prime Minister's path. Others may go off at any moment : something might happen in Greece, or a settlement might be reached with the Argentine over the Falkland Islands; one of our germ warfare stations might spring a leak, either literal or metaphorical, or the left might suddenly wake to the fact that after five years of Labour government we still possess a nuclear deterrent; even Biafra might become an issue after Mr Stewart has been allowed to starve the next two million Com- monwealth citizens to death.

Clearly, Mr Wilson's present strategy is to re-establish the party base before setting off on his pre-election world tours, designed to re-establish him as a statesman and Great National Personage. But it is essential that the Labour party should be behind him first, or his overseas tour will appear more the an- tics of a controversial funster than a serious contribution to peace and world prosperity. After the Nixon visit in January he would probably like to go on a tour of Common Market capitals in the spring, ideally to be crowned by a visit to Moscow about a month before the general election.

Neither of the first two calls is without its threat to party unity, as both Mr Wilson and his hosts will be aware. if President Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam had been going smoothly, Mr Wilson might just have got away with the fellow-statesman act: Mr Nixon would have compared Mr Wilson to Sir Winston Churchill, Mr Wilson would have compared the President to John Ken- nedy. However, it is most unlikely that Pinkville will be forgotten between now and Mr Wilson's return and goodness knows what other revelations will emerge in the next six weeks, so the Prime Minister will have to present himself as someone who has taken quite a tough line about world peace and related problems. The extent of Mr Wilson's welcome—and with it, the extent of the operation's success in promoting the Prime Minister's statesmanlike image—will depend on the extent of President Nixon's realisation in advance of the purpose which his hospitality will serve.

A Common Market tour might well be presented as a fact-finding tour in the course of which the Prime Minister will discover what chances there are of preserving those minimum guarantees for Britain, the Corn- monwealth and EFTA on which he has always—but always—insisted as a pre- requisite to Britain's entry. His final decision—or, more accurately, the tendency of his conclusions, whether towards delirious optimism or cold reserve—will presumably be determined by the state of opinion polls in this country and the extent to which the mat- ter may become an electoral issue. In either case, he will have stolen Mr Heath's only known administrative thunder—his greater experience in Common Market negotia- tions—and have projected himself to the electorate as a great statesman at work.

The Americans are unlikely to let Mr Wilson get away with any 'honest broker' acts in Moscow. The best he can hope for from Moscow, apart from enhancing his reputation as a world statesman generally, is to come away with a firm order for three nuclear powered aluminium smelter burner heater systems and five hun- dred yards of Wedgwood Benn.

However, since Pinkville, Mr Wilson is left with the choice of offending the Americans or offending his parliamentary left, and there can be no doubt that he has chosen to offend the left, at any rate until he is safely back from Washington. Perhaps there was a tight- rope along which he might have walked, but Mr Stewart certainly lacks the agility to walk it, and would probably have ended up offend- ing both. But Mr Wilson may well have been interested to note that there is very little steam behind the left's indignation on Pink- ville. Perhaps it is the case that having swallowed an entire camel on Biafra, the left feels it is in no position to strain over a gnat which someone else has swallowed on Viet- nam, but I think the truth is that the left is no less keen than Mr Wilson on winning the next general election. So long as he does nothing which can be interpreted as a calculated insult to its amour propre, like charging the under-thirteens for school milk, the left will not make difficulties in fields of less pressing concern, like foreign affairs. Even Mr Jenkins, who is not only a prig, as I sometimes point out, but also a sadist, is unlikely to tackle school milk between now and the general election. Unlike industrial relations, it is not an area of conflict in which he can easily push Mr Wilson into an ex- posed position and then desert him.

So it really begins to look as if Mr Wilson will be able to patch up some sort of united front in time for the election. Nobody yet knows what will happen when the com- pulsory provisions of the Prices and Incomes Act lapse at the end of the year, but since Mr Diamond has already informed us (quite gratuitously) that dividend restraint will not be renewed, it seems safe to assume that the next six or seven months will be devoted to a wages scramble under the name of voluntary restraint. Nobody knows what powers will

be vested in Mrs Castle's new super-boar, combining the Monopolies Commission a the Prices and Incomes Board, When finally surfaces in June or July of next yea

Possibly its powers will be influenced by t propinquity of the general election, but %it

we know of its brief, which is to 'look abuses of market power', suggests that major weapon may, like the Ombudsman be publicity, which has never frightened an trade unionist.

In any case, the great monument 1 Labour's new unity, and to the defeat of M Wilson in his attempt to appeal over t heads of his supporters to the country

large, will be Mrs Castle's new Industr Relations Bill or Trade Union Benefit Bill it has been more accurately called. If th. Tories were capable of evoking the small amount of sympathy, they could make ha with this measure, especially in the light o the widespread unpopularity of the trad union movement. The CBI'S indignation something pitiful to behold. Things hal now gone so far that not even the cm is im pressed with the tough noises which M Castle continues to make about incom policy as a vital plank of socialist planning The entire Cabinet, with the exceptions Mrs Castle and Mr Stewart, now appears t. have swung behind Mr Wilson's oampaig for party unity. Perhaps it is only a coin cidence that these two Cabinet ministers al possess the most heavyweight team of Cisi Service advisors—certainly Mrs Castle ha' always been a fighter, and it has alwal• taken a very, very long time for Mr Stewa to grasp a new idea, as two million Biafran have learned to their cost. Whereas Mrs Castle might be able to put up a bit of a fight for her precious incomes policy if she could certain of Treasury backing, this is unlike to be forthcoming. Mr Jenkins appears have reached the decision that his economi miracle began to work at just about the time that the Cabinet and party forced Mr Wilson and Mrs Castle to retreat from trade union legislation.

Mr Stewart's intransigence would not be seriously divisive if it were confined to sup• porting massacres in Vietnam, Biafra and any other area which his incompetence em braces. These were never of any interest to the British voter, teenage or otherwise, and the idealism of the left, as I have said. is rather concentrated on winning the general election just at the moment. The judgment of history, not to say the due processes of la% and divine retribution, will catch him On that, but the voters won't. However, his Foreign Office advisors are particularly con- cerned that the Labour party should be irretrievably committed to joining the Com- mon Market before it makes way for a Con- sery ative government which will actually gel Britain in. Like so much Foreign Office thinking, this is almost grotesquely irrele- vant, since nobody who has ever studied the Labour party for more than a minute—let alone its leader—could suPPosc it capable of any irrevocable commitment However, Mr Stewart's most passionate beliefs are not easily distinguishable from whatever his advisors may choose to tell him at any particular moment—it is only occasionally that he embellishes their advice with fascinating details of his own invention. The Common Market is now the onll serious threat to Labour unity. So far as the rank and file is concerned, Mr Wilson can (I0 what he likes with their guns, so long as be doesn't try to raise the price of their but' ter.