LABOUR IN THE WILDERNESS
IN the language of politics the wilderness is the place where parties discover, or re-discover, their souls. Freed by electoral defeat from the cares of office and the distractions °f success, they wander, purge themselves, meditate and wrestle. and at last emerge from the desert stronger and purer and more 'united. It is stretching the term a little to say that the Labour Party went into the wilderness in 1951, since the normal preliminary to this process of self-examination and reconstruction is a heavy electoral defeat or a deep split (such est,that suffered by the Conservative Party in 1846, before uisraeli's rise to leadership). The Labour Party in 1951 were neither badly beaten nor badly split. And yet at this moment they are deep in the wilderness, still purging, wandering and wrestling, and seemingly further than ever from finding a way out to the promised land of unity and power. It is a depressing sight, because British politics can never be said to be perfectly healthy unless there are at least two genuinely effective parties in it; because the present Conserva- tive Government is of the kind that needs the spur of a lively and formidable Opposition; because the Labour Party, instead cif repairing its divisions is making them appear even worse !Ilan they are; and because the main cause of all the trouble is Mr. Aneurin Bevan. . Mr. Bevan is a very special disaster for Labour in that,- despite his infinite capacity for causing an Uproar, he has absolutely no positive intellectual contribution tb make to a party which is badly in need of some hard and clear thinking. Intellectually Bevanism is negligible. Its con- tent changes continuously but its main elements at the moment are, in foreign policy, opposition to any settlement in Indo- 211Ma other than surrender to the Chinese, opposition to uerman rearmament, and opposition to the United States; ...and in home policy, more free healtrservices and more wages Or the same. amount of work. All these items are unrealistic nonsensical in one respect or another (though the question ‘,1 German rearmament requires particularly careful analysis). let Mr. Bevan is still there, and he still continues to behave ,as if the nonsense he talks meant something. What is to be "Mte in a case like this ? Obviously there is nothing to be gained by arguing with Mr. Bevan. The real question is— can the Labour Party end his power once and for all ? As Wbitil Senator McCarthy in the United States, so with Mr. 'cyan in Britain, talk is of no use. It is action that matters, and in particular action by the party to which the mischief- Maker belongs. . The fact is that the Labour Party is not incurably divided 1:1.13r in an incurable mess. The fundamental belief which .11iles it—a belief in the virtue of State control and direction- 's not likely to be broken. We have no effective liberal party tso challenge it. The Tories, despite the successes they have .eored in the •past two years by allowing more economic tareedom. are always liable to fall back on State control in . _r1„ emergency, as they did in November, 1951. The hard core u,sr. Socialist belief does not. change. The Socialist vote in • -us r.itain does not fall seriously. The official party programme _till calls for an extension of nationalisation and welfare services. And yet somehow the old bogey is emerging. The Pcist of Ramsay MacDonald walks again. The myth is reviv- teng that it is necessary to be either a 'traitor to the workers' pause,' or a Bevanite. And this myth revives inside the Labour ..artY—not outside it. Nobody outside the party is likely to '',I_ that it is composed of two simple elements—renegades and , _sodlepates. There is a considerable and genuine respect for Ten like Mr. Attlee and Mr. Gaitskell, who stand for some- 'lung that is fundamentally good in Britain as well as in the Labour Party. Yet these are the men whose authority in the party is now being challenged- There is no sense in it. It must stop. But how to stop it ?
The'first step is to get the facts of the immediate past quite straight. Mr. Bevan is said to have resigned from the Labour Party's Parliamentary Committee in protest against an alleged "surrender to American pressure" by Mr. Attlee over Indo- China and German rearmament. But that is only Mr. Bevan's version, and what Mr. Bevan says in these cases is notoriously coloured as much by his future intentions as by the present facts. Almost exactly three years ago he resigned from the Labour Government because he disapproi,ed of the introduc- tion of charges to National Health Service patients, but that did not prevent him from creating the myth that he resigned in protest against the defence expenditure announced at that time. On the present occasion it would clearly have been better for him to have waited for a proper discussion in a Parliamentary Labour Party meeting of the foreign policy questions which he says worry him so much, instead of resigning in advance of that discussion. Clearly in this case something more than a desire for truth and justice influenced Mr. Bevan's action. It would be a great mistake for the many people in this country who feel a little uneasy about German rearmament (as who does not ?) to allow Mr. Bevan to put himself at their head. It would be necessary to be quite sure that he had ceased to confuse his undoubted personal ambitions with his alleged championship of principle before anything of the kind could be allowed. Surely nobody is deceived about this. Mr. Bevan has his eyes on the Labour Party Conference in Scarborough in October and on the next General Election —not on Indo-China and Germany.
Surely this makes it doubly clear that it is the business of the Labour Party to stop him. That is where he operates, inside the councils of• the Labour Party—not among the -float- ing voters, who dislike and distrust him, not among the Tories whom he openly reviles. With the aid of his fellow Bevanites on the National Executive, the constituency parties and some of the trade unions, he can still hope to get his way. For the present, and on the whole respected, leaders of the Labour Party it is not, therefore, a question of whether to stop him, but when and how. Roughly speaking there are two alterna- tives, which members of the Parliamentary Labour Party are already discussing fairly freely. Both are unattractive and dangerous. The first is to leave Mr. Bevan free to stump the country between now and October, and then, at the Scar- borough Conference, to propose an alteration to the constitu- tion of the Party in order to reduce the quite disproportionate power at present wielded by the overwhelmingly Bevanite con- stituency parties. This would, of course, produce the worst split since 1931, and it might well be the signal for the Govern- ment to propose an autumn election, while confusion reigned in the Opposition camp. The second alternative is to expel Mr. Bevan from the Labour Party now and try to bring the constituency parties to heel before October. Both alternatives involve such dangerous risks that it is unlikely that either will be taken. That is the Labour Party's affair. But if no risk is taken then it is certain that Mr. Bevan will continue to work mischief in the party ranks until the day comes when he can work bigger mischief in the country as a whole.
If Mr. Attlee lets things slide, if he does not reproduce that fierceness in party discipline which he has occasionally employed in the past, then he will have a lot on his conscience. He knows what is right for his party and for the country. He knows that Mr. Bevan is neither a representative nor a reliable figure. The constituency parties (which means, of course, a tiny majority in each constituency) and a few dissident trade unions are all that stands between him and a weight of adverse public opinion which would crush Mr. Bevan if it got a chance. Mr. Attlee must also know that if everything went wrong for Britain in the next six months, Mr. Bevan would become more and not less powerful. An American slump, American mistakes in foreign policy, a show of arrogance na the part of the Germans, the final collapse of EDC—all these would be grist to the Bevanite mill. In fact whichever way the leaders of the Labour Party look they are faced with risks. But the worst risk of all lies in leaving things as they aro.
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