Memo to Mr Wilson

By DESMOND DONNELLY, MP

MR. HAROLD WILSON has been democratically elected the leader of the Labour Party and he is fully entitled to expect and to receive loyal support in his declared intentions of main- taining the policies and unity that are now his inheritance and which were Mr. Gaitskell's rich political legacy. Nor must there ever be a return to the deplorable campaign of vilification against any Labour leader which reached its crescendo as recently as last May Day, when Mr. Gaitskell was physically threatened in Glasgow (as was Mr. George Brown in Hyde Park).

Nevertheless, the question reverberates: where does the Labour Party go from this point? Before I can attempt to contribute one answer to this question, it is essential to ask two larger questions. What is Britain's future role in world affairs. What is the Labour Party's role in the future Britain?

Whatever may have been the arguments within the Labour Party for and against Britain's entry into the European Economic Community, the circumstances which led Britain to apply for membership will still remain apres ce francais brutal. In the last eighteen years there have been greater changes in the pattern of world affairs than at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire. The British Empire, upon which the , sun never set, has disappeared. The United States and the Soviet Union have emerged as super- Powers, trailing satellites of varying degrees of willingness behind them. The development of modern technology has made a nonsense of all previous defence concepts and it will continue to do so. Also, the increasing costs themselves of developing new technologies has reached the Point at which a nation of fifty millions is no longer a big enough base.

In Europe itself, there has been a profound human change. The European civil war, as the historians of a thousand years hence will describe it, is now over. The recent enmities are largely buried. Instead, there is the wider civil war of the inhabitants of the earth, called the Cold War. What should Britain's political course be in this staggering and changing situation? Ever since Ernest Bevin took the big decision in 1947 to follow Canning and call in the New World to fill the power vacuums created by Britain's Withdrawal from Empire, British policy has operated within the framework of Western inter- dependence. The Marshall Plan, 1947, the Treaty of Brussels, 1948, NATO, 1949, and the enlarge- ment of Western Union to include West Ger- many in 1954 followed in logical progression within the framework first envisaged by Bevin, PalmerstonWho now ranks with Canning, Castlereagh and in the line of great British Foreign Secretaries.

Bevin also always envisaged the creation of a single Europe and advocated it strongly in pri- vate in in in the immediate pre-Marshall Plan period. At that stage he still adjudged the time as not ripe for Britain's full membership. And tragically, when the time came to make the first tentative decision on British participation in the European Coal and Steel Community, Bevin's failing powers were so fully extended on the issues of the Korean War that the dying man could not take the decisive step. After the return of the Churchill Government in October, 1951, successive major opportunities of Britain joining on extremely good terms were also lost. This is not to recriminate about the recent past. It is to restate, in outline, the sequence of British foreign policy since 1945 towards its logical destination.

To be fair, it is not only the Tory Cabinets which have ruled Britain since 1951 that have vacillated about Bevin's original policies. It has to be faced that the Labour Party has done so equally and with similar lack of consistency, The reason is that, to some extent, both the major British parties have been clinging to illusions of past grandeur and old prejudices. With the Tories, its outward manifestation is the Mac- millan-Sandys defence policy of the independent nuclear deterrent. Labour's chief failing—caught up with romantic nostalgia associated with Indian independence—has been to misunderstand the nature of the new Commonwealth. And Labour has misjudged the efficacy of a British foreign policy based primarly upon the Common- wealth, placing European associations in a secondary position. Anti-Americanism has streaked both parties, whether they are Labour conference resolutions about Polaris, or Mr. Macmillan's absurd correspondence with the In- stitute of Directors, involving Philip of Spain and Mr. Dean Acheson. For Tories, it is Franco- phobia. For Labour, it is anti-Germanism. Neutralism has also threatened to capture the Labour Party and the fact that it did not do so was almost entirely due to Mr. Gaitskell's dogged courage and to the support he received from a few tough and brave trade union barons.

Although I disagreed profoundly with Mr. Gaitskell about Europe—for me, unhappily, it was the last issue, for we had agreed about so much in the preceding three testing years—he has left the Labour Party in a far better position to continue the traditional British policy of inter- dependence than Mr. Macmillan's recent Tory leadership. Labour's defence policy dovetails ad- mirably into President Kennedy's strategic think- ing. Mr. Gaitskell's political posture was firmly mid-Atlantic in terms of alliances and—even if he 'felt English' and not European, as he often told me—he was as loyal a supporter of NATO and Western Union as there was in the land. He saw, with uncompromising clarity, the ideologi- cal nature of the Cold War. He understood the brief truth that when Mr. Khrushchev speaks of co-existence, the Soviet leader means the con- tinuation of the Communist struggle for world domination by all appropriate means short of nuclear weapons.

Yet it would be dishonest to say that Mr. Gaitskell had won all the last great battles of his life. He had only reached a point of personal ascendancy in which his position was secure as far as the next election. The neutralists still re- mained implacable in their belief in flat-earth policies. The anti-Americans were still there. The anti-German cranks still won their lesser victories. For the moment—and only for the moment—Mr. Gaitskell had carried his party by his personal leadership and not because he had converted his opponents.

The issue now to be faced is whether the Labour Party continues as the committed sup- porter of the Atlantic Alliance, of which Bevin was one of the principal architects, or whether it wavers and the neutralists creep out again on to the field of internecine struggle. The Labour Party has also to decide upon its Euro- pean policy. If it is to rule, it has no alternative but to follow again the extension of the pro- European, mid-Atlantic policies laid down by Bevin between 1947 and 1949.

As far ahead as the general election, I have no doubt that these will be Labour's policies. Looking beyond I am less certain. Everything will depend upon the firmness and clear thinking of Labour's collective leadership in the post- Gaiiskell era. Of one thing I am sure—for the Labour Party to remain the leading British party of the left, it will have to become again the party of Europe, whatever may be its specific policies of associating with Europe. Only in this way can Labour hope to adopt a position in Govern- ment whereby Britain's international influence is still an important factor in the Western alliance. In short, as. Mr. Wilson has rightly said: no neutralism! The neutralists will have to suffer in silence or look elsewhere. Instead, there has to be an overall policy of repairing the alliances that the Tories have jeopardised since Suez.

The second question now arises: what is Labour's role in the future Britain? Mr. Gait- skell's great achievement was to force the Labour Party to face issues it wished to avoid, from unilateralism to Clause 4. There could be differ- ing views, on Mr. Gaitskell's side, about his pro- cess of bringing democratic socialism up to date, but there was only one view about the rightness of his aim.

Labour lost power in the 1951 election because it had exhausted the dynamic of its 1945 aims. The prospective wickedness of the Tories almost kept Labour in power and it pulled out the highest Labour vote in history. But, in the ab- sence of a new dynamic—and with the Tories not quite so wicked as had been, forecast—the 1955 election was a foregone conclusion. There was Suez in 1956. But Mr. Macmillan delivered himself of a staged performance in 1959 that stamps him as one of the great impresarios of all time—whatever may be history's judgment of him as a Prime Minister.

It is doubtful whether Labour could have won against the mood of 1959, whatever it had done. Yet the so-called 'election bribes' played into the hands of Messrs. Macmillan and Hailsham as if they were a pair of avaricious Australian slip fielders in a Test Match. Labour's alternatives to the Prime Minister's 1959 'never- had-it-so-good' campaign were more welfare, some extension of social equality and some nebulous nationalisations. Labour's image was also inextricably associated with Mr. Peter Sellers's vivid portrayal of a certain type of trade unionist. The tone of the Labour campaign was soggy and outdated, except for Mr. Gait-' skell's brilliant leadership in the first few days.

Mr, Gaitskell's merit was that he appreciated this in the bitterness of defeat, when others did apt After a few days of de Gaulle-like medita- tion, he began his campaign to redress the situation. His famous Clause 4 speech at Black- pool, a month after the election, deserves to be ranked with his more famous cry to fight again at Scarborough nearly a year later. The effect of his policy, despite the screams of the Corporal Blimps, was to impress firmly upon the public mind that no longer was Labour going to be the Party whose thinking was rooted in the back- yards of the 1930s. Nationalisation as presented by Mr. Gaitskell became accepted as only a means to an end, not the panacea for everything from inflation to gout and ingrowing toenails. Welfare was to have its proper priority and no more—and it had to be paid for.

President Kennedy's victory and Britain's Manifest industrial decline at last awakened the British electorate to the consequences of Mr. Macmillan's 1959 complacency. Labour rapidly became the party to get Britain 'on the move again.' Mr. Gaitskell steadily reshaped the Labour Party in his own image, in a manner that no other party political leader has done in this century. With his lucid and bravely stated arguments for the alternative to the Common Market—whose substance 1 accept wholly, although I rejected their context—Mr. Gaitskell carried his policies to the point of them being understood by the man in the street. Therefore, When the Brussels negotiations collapsed. Mr. Gaitskell's ideas filled the entire national stage Whilst a nation was mourning him as it had done no other public figure of the left since Gladstone.

In brief, Mr. Gaitskell advocated a rational • and integrated defence policy within the Western alliance. He believed in an overriding priority for industrial investment, which included educa- tion. After this great investment in machines and men came welfare, because this was the only way. In which the better welfare services could be financed in the end. It might be argued that there was nothing original in all this. That is true. But somebody had arrived who was determined t0 carry out this policy. There was nothing new

In Britain's economic malaise either. Except for a brief period of war and of post-war reconstrue-•

tion. the British economy has been stagnant sines 1918.

Yet there are several imponderables in policies

that a Labour Government may now pursue in office.

The overriding industrial and educational priority depends upon two factors. Labour will have to secure the confidence of the great part of enlightened private enterprise. It can only be done if the Labour Government eschews the !argon of the left and speaks in accents that can .be understood and respected in Britain's leading board-rooms. To say this is not to deny my socialism, but to be practical—for Britain has a 'nixed economy and she is certain to continue with it for many years to come. Secondly, there has to be a real national wages and incomes policy—not lip-service to the ideal. The implementation of such a policy will call for great political courage in dealing with the trade unions as well as employers. It will require leadership of rare quality and clarity. It will not be merely a question of government by exhorta- tion. The public must understand and /eel that 'Britain is on the.move,' Many steps will have to be taken which will appear to be unpopular in order to create the proper balance in the industrial cycle—money spent on the successive stages of research, de- velopment and production and then recouped in profits, to go back into the same cycle. Hitherto Labour's attack on the Government has tended to give the impression that the major party of progress has sought to defend some of the out- dated furniture of the past.

The hard truth is that every invested from now on will have to show its best return. A railway system geared to the horse-drawn age, coal pits or factories that are uneconomic, or farming 'as a way of life' cannot be defended as ends in themselves. Similarly, any location of industry policy must be based upon sound eco- nomics as much as on good social reasons. Practicality has to be the yardstick. Where changes have to be made and industries closed, the emphasis must be on generous compensation terms and on enlightened retraining schemes. Only in this way will Britain make full use of her industrial population and ensure its mobility.

Specific policies—from meeting the building land 'scandal' to Lord Taylor's pacemaking com- mittee on the universities–'fall within this general approach.

However, one area of policy has yet to be dealt with by the Labour Party as comprehen- sively as it deserves: the machinery of govern- ment. The present British system has reached the point where efficiency has been sacrificed to outworn tradition. Unless there. are radical changes in the organisation of the civil service involving the. powers of the Treasury, a major devolution of some functions from Westminster to new regional authorities and the introduction of a more efficient form of single-tier local government, I do not believe that Britain can be made to move. Labour will have to address itself to this subject if it is to succeed in office.

It does not require the public-opinion polls to confirm that Labour's position at the moment is a very strong one indeed. There will be .changes 'between now and the election—especi- ally if it is postponed for a year—but the real test for Labour, in the post-Gaitskell era, will come upon the day it 'forms a Government. Fundamentally, that test will be one of.character and courage, even more than of policy. For us, 'A sinking nation's fame to save.'

'What do they think an old has-been like Adatn Faith knows -ahaui present-day teenage morals!'