LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28372, 3 September 1957, Page 13

LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE

Bevan Likely To Be Re-elected (Rec. 9 p.m.) LONDON, Sept. 2. There will be no repetition at the Labour Party’s annual conference, which will begin on September 30, of the bitter struggle

last year between Mr Aneurin Bevan and Mr George Brown for the post of treasurer of the party. Mr Bevan is expected to be re-elected this year without opposition.

The 59-year-old Welshman, who for years was involved in serious clashes with the official leadership and at one point narrowly escaped expulsion for disobeying party rules, has gained markedly in political stature over the last year.

Now Labour’s official spokesman on foreign affairs and, by implication, the next Labour Foreign Secretary, Mr Bevan has won high praise for his conduct of the party’s foreign policy in the House of Commons. Since the last conference, he and Mr Gaitskell, the 51-year-old party leader, who used to have bitter differences, have teamed with apparent amity on the Opposition front bench 'of the House of Commons.

Politicians have been speculating that Mr Bevan might at the start of Parliament’s new session late this year challenge the veteran, Mr James Griffiths, for the deputy-leadership of the party. Another widely-beld view is that he will try to consolidate his position in the important post of treasurer. Labour members are ’ awaiting the annual conference in a mood of cheerfulness, confident that the Government’s stock—as reflected by local, Parliamentary and municipal election results—has dropped to the point where a “snap” General Election would return the Socialists to power. The next General Election is still three years off. The list of candidates for the 28-member national executive shows no surprises. The governing committee is always composed of 12 trade union norhinees, five women, one Co-operative Movement representative, seven constituency party nominees, and the leader, deputy leader and treasurer. H-Bomb Ban Urged Renewed calls for the abolition of hydrogen bomb tests are made by 130 local parties throughout Britain in the final agenda for the conference issued today. The H-bomb resolutions form more than a quarter of the total to be discussed.

The Labour chiefs will meet on the eve of the conference to compress the huge mass of Hbomb resolutions into a number of composite motions enabling them to be discussed more conveniently. The local Labour parties, about 660 in number, are the political wing of the Labour Party, and provide only about a fifth of its total membership of more than 6,000,000.

Few of the unions have put forward specific H-bomb resolutions. The exception, the Amalgamated Engineering Union Britain’s second biggest—has called for the immediate halting of all further H-bomb tests by Britain, the ultimate banning of nuclear weapons and the destruction of existing stocks with effective international control and inspection.