Focus on Liberals in U.K. by-elections

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34100, 12 March 1976, Page 13

Focus on Liberals in U.K. by-elections

(N.Z P.A. Staff CrspdtJ LONDON, March 16

Britain’s minority Liberal Party goes into two Parliamentary byelections today amid a mounting leadership crisis and a sensational allegation that South African interests are out to destroy the party.

The party’s leader for the last nine years. Mr Jeremy Thorpe, is still under a cloud after strenuously-de-nied allegations of a homosexual relationship. The Prime Minister (Mr Wilson) has told Parliament that South African business interests and agents were behind the allegations, The Young Liberals’ former leader, Peter Hain, who is

awaiting trial on a bank theft charge to which he has pleaded not guilty, alleges a South African plot to destroy the Liberals because of their vocal opposition to apartheid. The Opposition Conservatives seem certain to retain their safe seats at Carshalton, Surrey, south of London, and the Wirral, Cheshire, in today’s by-elec-tions.

As a resuit, all interest in the polls is focused on the Liberals—who only two years ago were the big hopes of several million British voters disenchanted with the two main parties, but who are now in dramatic disarray. “If a group of politicians no bigger than a baker’s dozen cannot sort out its own affairs, how can it presume to cope with the nation’s problems?” the “Dailv Mail” asks in a leading artic' - summing up the Liberals’ plight. Compared with the Labour

Party and Conservative Party organisations, the Liberals are small fry in the British political sea, but nearly 5| million Britons voted for them in the last General Election, and, with continuing disaffection with the two main parties, the Liberals undoubtedly have a role to play. Thus, Hain’s allegation that South African interests are “bent on sabotaging the course of democratic political life in Britain” is being treated seriously. Hain himself is known as the nation’s leading antiapartheid campaigner, and Young Liberals have over the years dominated organisations dedicated to fighting the South African racial system.

The Prime Minister was careful to emphasise that he had no evidence to suggest that the South African Government was involved when he made his shock statement in the House of Commons

that private agents financed by South African business interests were involved in the Thorpe affair. Hain has gone further, accusing the South African Security Services of involvement, and saying that their purpose was to wreck the Liberal Party, paving the way for the Conservatives — traditionally more friendly to South Africa — to regain power in Westminster.

The Liberals have only 13 members in the present Parliament, but with the balance between the two main parties so fine in the last two elections, they are potentially of crucial importance.

Under the leadership of Mr Thorpe, an eloquent extrovert, the Liberals trebled their vote to 6 million between the elections of 1970 and February, 1974, and boosted their Commons seats from six to 14.

But as they reached what

Mr Thorpe described as “our take-off point,’’ and talked about winning 30 seats in the October, 1974, election, their public appeal slumped.

Since then, the Liberals have been agonising over policy and direction, although Mr Thorpe’s leadership has not appeared under challenge. But in early February, an unemployed male model, Norman Scott, alleged in a Magistrate’s Court outburst that he had had an homosexual relationship with Mr Thorpe. The Liberal leader at once denied it, but the story remained in the headlines, and last week a former deputytreasurer of the party, Mr David Holmes, said that he paid Mr Scott £2500 just before the February, 1974, election for letters which he thought would harm Mr Thorne and the Liberals. This week, the Liberal Party’s Parliamentary Whip, ithe genial, 27-stone Rochda' ; e

member, Mr Cyril Smith, blurted out that he was thinking of resigning, saying that he had not been told all, and that “at least one Liberal — not a member of Parliament — knew a lot more about the affair than he has said.”

Mr Thorpe immediately came under fresh pressure from his 12 Parliamentary colleagues, four of whom met to discuss the leadership issue last night while Mr Thorpe was having separate talks with another.

Mr Smith, who was taken to hospital this week, insists that Mr Thorpe is innocent I of all the allegations against[ him, but he has said that he; is fed up with the whole busi-I ness, and that the Liberall Party’s cause is being harmed. It is against this background that the Liberals have been campaigning in Carshalton and the Wirral, amid predictions that their candidates will do worse than they did in the last election.