Mr. Gaitskell on the Rack

By HENRY FAIRLIE

N event whose importance it is still impos- sible to calculate has taken place in the past week. The leaders of the two major political

parties in Britain have given their personal views on the Common Market in accents which are unmistakable and unmistakably different: Mr.

Gaitskell in his astonishing speech to the Labour Party Conference, and Mr Macmillan in a pamphlet which be has written himself.

(The last Conservative Prime Minister, I be- lieve, who published a pamphlet on a current political issue while he was in office was Balfour. It was entitled Notes on Insular Free Trade, and was addressed to free traders in his own party, including the Duke of Devonshire inside his own Cabinet. The Duke confessed to a friend that he had tried to read it, but that he could not understand it. 1 hope that Mr. Macmillan will have better luck with the present Duke.)

The speech has made it unlikely that Mr. Gaitskell will be able to avoid coming out against Britain's entry into the Common Market, whatever the terms negotiated at Brussels; equally, the pamphlet has made it unlikely that Mr. Macmillan will be able to avoid supporting Britain's entry, whatever the terms negotiated at Brussels. The probability, therefore, is that a general election will be fought—perhaps in the autumn of 1963, but more probably in the spring of 1964—on an issue of momentous political importance, and on which the two major parties are clearly opposed.

Languishing Liberals Let us begin by disposing of one obvious effect of this new situation. Politics will now be immensely simplified. As the Common Market becomes the predominant issue, and as electors recognise that the two opposed points of view are most clearly and most formidably repre- sented by the two major political parties, the claim of the Liberals to attention will languish. I am not suggesting that this will be fair to the Liberals, whose record on Europe has been a consistent one; nor that they may not still be able to upset the apple cart in some areas; but I am suggesting that, as the issue between the two main parties becomes more clear-cut, the oppor- tunity for the Liberals to gather confused and floating votes will grow less and less.

Let us turn, then, to the Labour Party. A lot has already been written about Mr. Gaitskell's speech, and a lot more will be written. It turned out much as I forecast—even Mr. Worsthorne has felt forced to abandon his new-found leader after a flirtation which was a seven days' wonder —but no one expected that Mr. Gaitskell would state his case so one-sidedly, with such ardour and with apparently so little care for the im- plications of what he was saying.

But if Mr. Gaitskell did not understand its implications, the left wing of his party cer- tainly did. The faces of Mr. Anthony Green- wood and Mr. Richard Crossman on the plat- form were filled with incredulous delight as phrase after phrase revealed how far he was prepared to go in handing himself over, hands

and feet tied, to their tender mercies Mr. Mikardo hid his face much of the time, as if it were too much for the spider actually to watch the fly entrap itself. Mr. Harold Wilson pulled the cords tighter round Mr. Gaitskell —and incidentally round himself—by leaping to his feet and proposing that the speech should be printed and circulated to party members, thus converting it into an official party pronounce- ment, although it went much farther than the agreed document; and Mr. Cousins rubbed the point in by magnanimously offering to pay for the printing of one million copies out of his union's funds.

Mr. Gaitskell's New Friends All this was public, but it is still worth re- calling. What remains to be said is that Mr. Gaitskell's new friends still talked about him in private quite as ungenerously and viciously as ever before. In a way, they were even more con- temptuous than I have known them, as anyone, indeed, would be of an opponent beguiled into capitulating the whole of his position when it was necessary for him to concede only a point or two.

The whole of his position? This, I think, is the point, which accounts for the elation of the left wing and the dismay of Mr. Gaitskell's for- mer friends. It would be too much to say that Mr. Gaitskell made a neutralist speech; but he played unhesitatingly on the neutralist feelings of a Labour Party Conference. It would be too much to say that his speech was anti-American; but he did not hesitate to stoop to the kind of slights on the Americans which for the past three years he has tried to resist. It would be too much to say that he was anti-NATO; but he could not resist any opportunity which came his way to make his point, or earn a cheer, by snubbing our NATO allies.

But even this was not all. The real political significance of Mr. Gaitskell's speech was that no one could have argued the case he put more cogently, more logically or more forcefully than he did; and what he proved was that, when the anti-Common Market case is based either on EFTA or on the Commonwealth, it leads un- avoidably to a neutralist argument.

What is immediately certain is that the left wing of the Labour Party will find ways of stretching Mr. Gaitskell on this neutralist rack during the next year. They know that they have not just won a battle over the Common Market, but that they have persuaded Mr. Gaitskell into a line on the Common Market which makes nonsense of his long and courageous battle against neutralism during the past three years.

When they begin to stretch him 'in this way and they are skilled at finding parliamentary opportunities to discomfort Mr. Gaitskell—where will Mr. Gaitskell turn for support? To Mr. Bill Carron, of the AEU, who has again and again come to his rescue in past years, but found himself this year sadly criticising Mr. Gait- skell's speech? To Mr. Jack Cooper, of the NUGMW, whose union's votes have so often been Mr. Gaitskell's mainstay, but w ho asked at Brighton whether the speech on the Common Market was compatible with NATO? To — (one of the leading union MPs) who, on being asked what he thought of Mr. Gaitskell's speech, replied in two sharp words: `F--- him'?

But this still is not all. How is Mr. Gaitskell's policy going to look by the time of the next election, when the Conservatives have exploited to the full the opportunities he has given them? The Government will not be so charitable as to let him get away on the floor of the House with his new-found attachment to neutrals on the Continent, neutrals in the Commonwealth and neutralists within his own party. The two European countries for which he had particular praise were Sweden and Austria. (Where. since he raised the question, were they at Vimy Ridge and Gallipoli?) The Commonwealth to which he. wishes to attach himself is largely a neutralist one. It is a position vulnerable from most sides.

Mr. Gaitskell's speech did, in fact, make it simpler even than it would have been for the Government to carry the day when the Common Market was debated at the Conservative PINY Conference. It may be all right for Lord

Beaver- brook suddenly to transfer his political allegi- ance to the Labour Party, as it is said he is likely to do at the next election. But it is not all right for the anti-Common Market members of the Conservative Parliamentary Party. As long as Mr. Gaitskell sat on the fence, it was pos- sible to oppose the Government's policy

with

out appearing to align oneself with the Labour Party—or do serious damage to the Conserva- tive Party. That is no longer the case.

The Real Argument

But more has happened than that. The logi- cal way in which Mr. Gaitskell's case moved from opposition to the Common Market to a flirtation with neutralism and something very like (even though he would deny it) opposition to military alliances has revealed to many mem- bers of the centre of the Conservative Party exactly the nature of the argument in which the country is engaged. Mr. Gaitskell could not have made it clearer that opposition to the Common Market would almost certainly lead to the break-up of NATO, Britain's political and mili- tary isolation and her retreat into neutralism- Nor could the nature of the supptirt which he gathered at Brighton have made it clearer that opposition to the Common Market mewls' in terms of domestic politics, uniting with —unilateralists like Mr. Michael Foot and N11% Anthony Greenwood; —those like Mr. Denis Healey who have been drawn more and more to the idea of establish- ing a neutral cordon down the middle of Europe; —doctrinaire planners like Mr. Douglas lay who still hope to continue their socialist ex- periment in Britain, alongside other socialist countries like Sweden; -- the new Commonwealth men like Mr..10" Stonehouse who wish to see Britain the centre of a Commonwealth both socialist and neutral;

—and, of course, Mr. Frank Cousins, Mrs. Barbara Castle and Mr. Tom Driberg.

It is, whatever else may be said of it, a strange company to find aboard the barge of the Ad- miral of the Narrow Seas, the Earl of Sandwich' When the issue is presented to the country. then, it is likely to find the Conservative Party almost completely united. Mr. Macmillan is all but certain, on Saturday, tc point out that the Conservative Party Conference has now accepted the principle of British entry two years running; that the debate on principle may therefore be considered closed; and that the Government can be trusted to get the best terms in the debate 'in Committee' now about to start. It is also likely that the campaign for entry will new be moved from within the party itself to the public.

In the course of this campaign over the next Year the Conservative Party will certainly broaden the issue so that the debate becomes, In effect, one between the supporters of the At- lantic alliance (from Ernest Bevin onwards) and the supporters of neutralism. If this campaign forces Mr. Gaitskell into an overtly neutralist position (this is still impossible to believe, but anything may happen after last week), or if he Is forced into another open battle with the neutralists in his own party (on whom he now depends for support on the Common Market Issue), his position would seem likely to be equally uncomfortable. He piled up six million Votes for the first time at Brighton : it has yet to be seen how many he lost in the country.

The Government's real difficulty, which is beginning to disturb some senior Ministers, is that of deciding whether to hold a general elec- tion before the ratification of the treaty or after- wards. A possible solution may, in fact, be forced on the Government by the Six themselves, who might well argue now that they will refuse to ratify before the result of the British general election is known. The general election, in other words, would be held after the signature of the treaty, but before its ratification either by the Six or by ourselves.

But this is something which will have to be played by ear. My own feeling is that the Gov- ernment should not be too disturbed by the argument that the electors expect the oppor- tunity to decide this issue for themselves. By the time the election comes, whether before or after ratification, most of them are going to be heartily sick of the argument anyhow; they will have grown used to the idea that a Government has, in fact, been acting as a Government by fight- ing for the best terms it can get; their trust in Conservative diplomatic skill—always, even ac- cording to the pollsters, one of the great ad- vantages of the Conservatives—will have been stimulated; and they will be faced with a Labour Party which would have to create a new foreign policy from the bottom left upwards.

It is not the way they arc used to reading a page.