U.K. LABOUR PARTY Left and Right at loggerheads

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33964, 3 October 1975, Page 9

U.K. LABOUR PARTY Left and Right at loggerheads

( N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright)

BLACKPOOL. October 2.

The leadership’s hopes for unity in the British Labour Party appear shattered today, after bitter slanging matches at the party’s annual conference, and at public meetings, between Left-wingers and moderates over the Government’s anti-inflation policies.

A furious argument ensued during a speech by a former party chairman, Mr lan Mikardo, to a Left-wing rally in Blackpool. There was uproar when Mr Mikardo, a veteran Leftist member of Parliament, criticised the trade union leaders, who, he said, had agreed too easily to pay-restraints and should have wrung greater concessions from the Government! for their members.

This brought an angry reaction from Mr Jack Jones, the general secretary of Britain’s largest labour organ-' isation, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, who had played a prime role in the wage consultations with Ministers.

Mr Jones leapt oh to the platform and berated Mr Mikardo for his remarks amid deafening shouts from the Left-wing audience. Mr Mikardo’s speech, copies of which had been circulated beforehand, was also attacked by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr Denis Healey) at a meeting in nearby Bolton. He described it as “sour and malignant abuse,” and suggested that Mr Mikardo was disloyal to Labour.

On Tuesday, Mr Healey had been ousted by a Leftwinger, Mr Eric Heffer, in elections for the party’s policy-making national executive committee, and, according to some observers, he is

still smarting from this setback to his political ambitions: he had been widely regarded as a possible successor as party leader to the Prime Minister (Mr Wilson).

Mr Mikardo, who retained his place on the executive, was named as one of the party’s Communist sympathisers in a document issued last week-end by a Rightwing pressure group within the party, the Social Democratic Alliance.

I The Left-wing’s top favourite, the Minister for Energy (Mr Anthony Wedgwood Benn), yesterday won a standing ovation at the conference for fiercely stating the case for “real socialism” and more State control in industry.

“We are not here only to manage capitalism, but to change society,” he told the delegates at the end of an economic debate. On Mr Benn’s recommendation, the conference overwhelmingly accepted a statement by the Left-wing calling for stronger planning control over British industry, involving an extension of nationalisation and “public enterprise.”

“We were not elected only to nurse an unjust and inefficient system through another crisis to give it back to the same people in whose interest it has always operated,” Mr Benn said.