Heath’s Election Pledge To Britons

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32117, 13 October 1969, Page 13

Heath’s Election Pledge To Britons

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) BRIGHTON, Oct. 12.

The British Conservative Party leader (Mr Edward Heath) yesterday offered Britons a better life, less direct taxation and restored self-confidence if they ousted the Labour Government in the next General Election.

“Our task,” he told 4000 cheering delegates at the end of the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Brighton, “is to give back to the British people the habit of thinking and acting as a great people.” Mr Heath was given a

standing ovation lasting seven minutes at the end of a onehour speech in which he denounced the Prime Minister (Mr Harold Wilson) and his Cabinet for “deceit, cheating and broken promises," and he rallied his own party with encouragement for the election battle. No date has been set for the General Election, but it is now expected in 1970. Mr Heath recalled that the Labour Party, which held its conference in Brighton last week, had challenged the Conservatives to fight on the Government’s record of achievement

“High unemployment, record taxation and enormous overseas debt” Mr Heath said scornfully. “Fight on the record? You bet we will. We will wrap that record round them time and again, day

after day, and they will sink like a stone.”

Mr Heath’s speech was also Intended to re-establish his personal influence within his own party; it has been under considerable assault recently, particularly from supporters of the Right-winger, Mr Enoch Powell, a former Cabinet Minister who has come out in favour of ending all coloured immigration into Britain and of withdrawing Britain’s Common Market membership application. Hard-line delegates at the conference called for tougher curbs on immigration, and came within 395 votes of defeating a resolution approving the leadership’s moderate line. The ballot—l 349 votes in favour and 954 against—came after stormy scenes in which militants tried to howl down

the party spokesman, Mr Quintin Hogg. Mr Heath, apparently unruffled by this display of opposition to the leadership, also brushed aside a campaign launched by a British businessman to boost Mr Powell’s bid to oust Mr Heath. An advertisement in a Brighton newspaper carried Mr Powell’s name in letters four inches high. Mr Powell asked to comment, blandly recalled a line he attributed to Napoleon: “Nice big print, isn't it?” Mr Powell’s followers, in the debate on immigration urged that the State should help non-white settlers in Britain to return to the lands of their fathers.

At one point, Mr Hogg, normally a favourite of the delegates, found himself the

target of intense heckling and booing. Mr Hogg would be Home Secretary if the Conservatives were in power. There were jeers when he asked whether a ban on immigration would mean no French restaurants in Britain, no Italian waiters and no au pair girls. One delegate, Mr John Greaves-Holt, a prospective candidate for the General Election, complained of immigrants dragging down health and educational standards.

“You may not have lived, as I have, next to 16 Pakistanis and terrible overcrowding conditions, and you may not have had your property devalued because of the overcrowding resulting from us not stopping immigrants into this country.” he said.