Leftist enters race

Press, 18 October 1980, Page 9

Leftist enters race

NZPA-Reuter London The struggle for leadership of Britain’s Opposition Labour Party gathered pace yesterday when a Leftwinger, Peter Shore, announced that he would stand in next month’s Parliamentary party ballot. Mr Shore, who is 56, the party’s foreign-affairs spokesman and an outspoken critic of British membership of the European Economic Community, will oppose the frontrunner. Denis Healey, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and the champion of party Right-wingers. $b far, the only other candidate to succeed James Callaghan is the former Agriculture Minister, John Silkin, also on the party’s Left and noted for his anti-E.E.C. views. Battle lines were being tightly drawn for a struggle in which the Left, including

Marxists, is seen as having its best chancb yet of installing a strongly socialist party leader and possible future Prime Minister. There was no word from Tony Benn, favourite of the party’s extreme Left, who was expected to reserve his leadership bid for next January’s special party conference. . The Left has made clear it regards the November 4 ballot of Labour’s 268 members of Parliament, many of them in the political Centre, purely as a holding exercise until the January conference. The conference has been called to formulate a new system of choosing the party leader. Already agreed in principle, it will bring local party workers and trades-union block votes into the process. However, Mr Healey, who is 63, fuelled confusion over Labour’s future leadership

by saying: “If elected I will serve as leader as long as the Parliamentary Labour Party wishes." A Left-wing member, Dennis Skinner, commented: “He’s saying 'to hell with you’.” He added: “Those legweary people who get Labour elected to Parliament must have a bigger slice of the action.”

Right-wing Labour members committed to Centrist, social democratic policies, rallied to Mr Healey. One, Joel Barnett, said: “Healey is head and shoulders the best man in every way.” Mr Callaghan, who announced his retirement this week, was Prime Minister from 1976 until his party’s defeat in the May, 1979 General Election. The Conservative Prime Minister (Mrs Margaret Thatcher) need not call another General Election until 1984.