BRITISH LABOUR PARTY DISARRAY A THREAT TO DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS?

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31986, 13 May 1969, Page 16

BRITISH LABOUR PARTY DISARRAY A THREAT TO DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS?

IBy

H. B. BOYNE.

political correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph." London.)

(Reprinted from the "Daily Telegraph” by arrangement.)

Sensible Conservatives, I find, are not rubbing their hands in glee over the cun-ent crisis in the Labour Party. On the contrary, they are worried because they see in it, like student revolt and the May Day strike for blatantly political purposes, a threat to democratic institutions.

They do not need this sort! of thing to help them win the next election. Even the most cautious of them consider it! as good as won, short of a phenomenal reversal of public opinion within the next 18 months. But they have no wish to- inherit ■ a situation in which Parliament would be unworkable against an Opposition of rootless, faithless anarchists; or, perhaps still worse, to face the task of controlling the semiFacist backlash which eould be the national reaction to that kind of Opposition.

So there is little comfort to be gained by opting out of concern for Harold Wilson’s troubles. They concern all of us who believe the Parliamentary system to be Britain’s greatest contribution to civilisation, and who abhor seeing it put at risk by a combination of syndicalist trade union, officials, politically motivated shop stewards, Communists who see in chaos their only hope of power and fellow-travelling Lefties who would be Communists if they had the guts to be anything but opportunists. Hard To Depose As Sir Alec Douglas-Home has rightly perceived, merely getting rid of Mr Wilson would solve nothing. Can you imagine Jim Callaghan riding the witless tiger the Labour party seems to have become? Or Roy Jenkins? Or Michael Stewart, in whom some try to discern the Attlee of the 'seventies? Or Denis Healey, for my money the only Minister in sight to combine high intellect with leadership potential?

The lobbies may buzz with whispers of plots and round robins, Parliamentary private secretaries may buttonhole journalists on behalf of this rival or that But no Prime Minister in office is going to be easily deposed unless his party is overwhelmingly determined on one particular candidate to succeed him. No Prime Minister in good health, one amends, remeritbering the grave illness which struck Harold Macmillian only a few hours after he had made his Cabinet accept the fact that he was there to stay. So far, Mr Wilson’s doctor has had nothing more serious to treat than a touch of the collywobbles. A Sapping Operation Mr Callaghan has undoubtedly conducted a patient sapping and mining operation, starting from his urge, which seemed inexplicable at the time, to become the Labour partv’s treasurer as well as the nation’s. That gave him a firm base in the party on which to build. He has used it skilfully to ingratiate himself with the trade unions, first by publicly dissociating himself from the “penal” provisions of the prices and incomes legislation and then by gaining credit for toning down the strike-curbing bill.

If Mr Wilson has any one challenger to fear, it is probably honest, sunny Jim. But Mr Callaghan’s proven talent for evading the odium of policy decisions to which he originally assented does not necessarily equip him to clean up the shambles which Labour’s mismanagement and indiscipline have created at Westminster. That is still, as I see it, a job for Mr Wilson, who can at. least be trusted not to try to save the Labour party at the expense of the Parliamentary system. Loyal Ted Short did his leader an ill turn by choosing the inapposite occasion of a Royal Academy dinner to laud his “courage, integrity and humility.” The impression that he is vain, tricky and panicky is now so widespread that to praise him for the opposites of those qualities sounds almost like satire. Yet I remain convinced that

■ Mr Wilson, fault him as you iwill, considers himself a servant and trustee of the House !of Commons! No Government of which he is Prime Minister will introduce in peace-time a Bill to prolong its own life by extending the Parliamentary quinquennium. There are others on the Government benches of whom that could not be said. One of the extraordinary things about the present situation is Mr Wilson’s unshakeable conviction that Labour is going to win the next election sometime before the spring of 1971. I should not be surprised if he is now the only person in the Parliamentary Labour party, let alone the Cabinet, who genuinely and sincerely believes this. • Acceptance of the inevitability of defeat is, of course, the reason for flouting the Whips and spurning the leader. Expulsion from the party ceases to be a sanction if you have no hope of being re-elected anyway. Nor is there any point in keeping sweet with a Prime Minister

Reviewing the disarray of the Government benches in the House of Commons, the political correspondent of the “Daily Telegraph,” London, argues that Mr Wilson’s “credibility” is not necessarily exhausted.

who is soon to lose his power of patronage.

These are caddish things to say. But 1 fear the present Parliamentary Labour party contains a disproportionate element of self-seeking cads. They became candidates in the cool, calculated hope of personal advancement; they were hailed as the most brilJiant young entry of modern time; and they are not fit to lick the boots of the solid, humdrum* Labour backbenchers I have known for nearly 20 years.

Mr Wilson’s faith in an electoral miracle is founded on the simple proposition that his Labour Government has done its very best for Britain and that the British people, the fairest and most percipient democrats the: world has ever known, will fecognise its achievements when the moment of truth arrives. Assuming he retains the leadership, he will make it his business to ensure that achievements do not go unnoticed and that failures are forgotten or glossed over. Seiling Campaign His abilities in this direction are certainly not underrated by shrewd publicists in the Conservative party. Once Mr Wilson has privately decided on the timing of the election, they expect to see him begin “the kind of television campaign that can sell refrigerators to Eskimos.” They now believe, as Cabinet trusties like Ted Short have believed all along,

that the Prime Minister made a big mistake two years ago when he accepted well-meant advice to keep off the screen lest he become “overexposed.” This is one mistake Mr Wilson will be only too ready to admit. I fancy we shall see much more of him on television In the next 18 months, and his party may discover that his credibility is not too far gone to be retrieved.

A case could be made for saying, though I would not expect many Conservatives to believe it, .that Mr Wilson for the last three \years has put national interests before party interests. At all events It would be hard to convict him of having pandered to his supporters. The decision to bring in an Industrial Relations Bill is only one of several instances in which he seems to have positively gone out of his way to offend their susceptibilities. Nothing could have been easier, for example, than to rush through the Commons, and in time force over the Lords’ heads, a short, sharp

Bill abolishing the delaying powers of the Second Chamber. Yet even now. amid the ruins of the strictly constitutional reform which was designed to have all-party support, Mr Wilson has quixotically refrained from committing himself to what most of his party clearly want. Whip’s Persuasion Perhaps Bob Mellish [the newly-appointed Chief Whip], who is well aware that a good Chief Whip sometimes has to be tough with his leader as well as his followers, will be able to persuade him that a little of what they fancy can do the party good: for instance, the substitution of something even less rigorous for the so-called “financial penalties” in the Industrial Relations Bill.

For Mr Mellish. I dimly recall, has himself been in trouble with the Whips in his time. He was one of several Parliamentary private secretaries who were instantly dismissed in 1949 for taking part in a revolt on the committee stage of the Government of Ireland Bill. And he was in very respectable company, with Lord Beswick, now Chief Whip in the Lords, and Mr J. P. W. Mallalieu, now Minister of State for Technology. Which serves to remind us that Clem Attlee, like Harold Wilson, had great difficulties with the party—yet scraped through an election the following year.