Political Commentary
The Task for Labour
By DAVID WATT This is a question on which a great deal turns, for the key to the present situation clearly lies in the hands of the party which is able to get up a genuine momentum first. And since the Tory machine is ticking over nicely at the moment, the problem can really be restated in the form—can Labour now recapture the initiative while the political temperature of the country is still low? Let us look at the situation from the point of view of Transport House.
As plans there are shaping, nothing will be wrong intrinsically with the Labour machine when the election proper begins. In fact, it will be considerably more streamlined than it was in 1959. Most of the errors made in that debacle— notably the gigantic blunder of the pledge on intome tax—arose from bad co-ordination. The
late Morgan Phillips, general secretary of the party, was an able and pleasant man and a model giver of election press conferences; but organisa- tion was not his strong suit. The administration under the present incumbent, Len Williams, is universally agreed to be much improved. Again, the campaign itself in 1959 was entrusted to the charge of a very competent committee run by that ancient practitioner in psychological war- fare Mr. Crossman, but since Hugh Gaitskell was away much of the time on whistle-stop tours the committee and he were at cross-purposes. More- over, there was no time to settle divergent views at Transport House in a definitive way by an appeal to the Leader's diktat. Things will be very different now.
Those who have read accounts of President Johnson's almost obsessive attitude to his cam- paign and heard Mr. Wilson outline his own plans have been struck by the similarity in the two men's determination to keep the reins of the election in their own hands. There will be no Crossman c.ommittee—but a triumvirate consist- ing of Mr. Wilson, Mr. Williams and Miss Barker, the national agent. Mr. Brown will be touring harmlessly in the provinces. Mr. Ray Gunter, who is chairman of the Organisation sub-com- mittee, will be around the place, but no one seems to know what he will do. Mr. Wilson himself, though he proposes one or two sorties Into the country, intends to stay most of the time at the centre and will take his own press conferences. There are obviously drawbacks to this scheme— the strain on Wilson, the accusations of one-man- bandmanship, the unique responsibility in case of defeat, and so on. But on the whole it is a work- manlike arrangement and should serve.
Labour's real difficulties lie elsewhere. A brief account of the Transport House view of events shows where they are likely to be. It is conceded that Labour has lost ground during the holidays. This, say the Labour leaders, was predicted by them as soon as the Prime Minister postponed the election last April and is explained by the fact that it was clearly impossible for them to spend the summer months using up all available. ammunition on the things that will really swing votes—housing, pensions, land prices, education —and they were forced to leave the running to the Government or go chasing Ombudsmen. The consequences were already seen during the final weeks of Parliament and have been compounded by fine weather and a hollow (but still super- ficially impressive) economic boom. It would be foolish to bank on some kind of miracle like an immediate balance of payments crisis but .past experience has shown that a vigorous campaign will produce a swing back to Labour. Assuming that nothing disastrous happens Labour should still win by forty to fifty seats.
It is not difficult to find the weak spots in this line of analysis. The first is clearly its treatment of the opinion polls. Labour politicians are now as sceptical of these as Tory politicians were nine months ago and, like Tories, they are more scep- tical of the ones which show them to least advant- age. Criticisms range from a crude equation of the polls with the 'Tory daily press' (which with the new and significant exceptions of The Times and the Sunday Times is undoubtedly beginning to cut out the fancy passage-work and to sound the old Conservative diapason) to more sophisticated analyses tending to show that the Gallup Poll, currently showing a six-point Labour lead, is more reliable than the National Opinion Poll with its small lead to the Tories.
Of these last, the favourites at present are that (a) NOP's way of dealing with the problem of people absent on holiday or for other reasons, distorts the poll in favour of the Tories and that (b) Gallup's sampling methods are less open to distortion than NOP's. Both these arguments have some substance. Of NOP's last sample of 3,000 only 2,256 were, for one reason or another, available for interview. But NOP claim that their researches set an outside limit of 1 per cent on the distortion which is likely to result from this. Again, while there are various classic objections to random sampling, which is the NOP method, it seems that a poll done by Gallup recently by this method as a check on its result showed an even greater Labour advantage than was pro- duced by the normal Gallup method of quota sampling. In the end, the discrepancy seems to depend much more on the reliability of inter- Viewing techniques and interviewers, and on this one pays one's money and takes one's choice. For what it is worth, I am reliably told that important pundits in the Conservative Research Department are paradoxically inclined to think Gallup nearer the mark, while some Labour experts incline to NOP. However, even if one splits the difference between them and produces a 3i per cent Labour lead, the situation of Mr. Wilson looks distinctly uncomfortable. Moreover, the appearance of the polls themselves can have nothing but a bad effect on Labour's position, since the new possibility that the Tories will win may at the least make last year's Labour convert re-examine his position.
Another dubious point in the Labour line of reasoning lies in the unstated problem of the Liberals. Not only has Liberal support dwindled to about 7 per cent (both major parties can agree with both polls on this), but at least thirty and probably more Liberal candidates have fallen out of the running since last year, many of them in southern suburban and industrial constituencies where Labour most needs a Liberal intervention. I have heard several Labour leaders propound the comforting theory that although Liberal support was filched from the Tories it will not necessarily go back from whence it came. The picture they like to draw is of a continuous progress of con- version which lands the Conservative pilgrim, after a brief sojourn in the arms of Mr. Grimond, into the bosom of Mr. Wilson. This defies belief and Labour must reckon in most constituencies that three lost Liberal voters will return to the Tory camp to every two that come to Labour.
Finally, of course, there is the question of the political temperature of the country. It is doubt- ful whether the promised swing back to Labour during the campaign can take place merely on the basis of the party's message unless Mr. Wilson has prepared the ground by demonstrating to the torpid masses that his eclipse during the summer is temporary and almost deliberately self-im- posed, and that politics in this campaign is genu- inely important and exciting. This is a demonstra- tion which must be staged at once if it is to be effective. A significant weight of importance ia attached in Smith Square to Mr. Wilson's speech to the TUC on Monday which one Labour leader compared with the traditional Democratic can- didate's kick-off to his campaign on Labour Day to the workers in Detroit. This and the big jam- boree in Cardiff the following Saturday are in- tended to set the campaign on fire. Labour strate- gists are well aware that if they fail to do this the Tory advance can be expected to continue.
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