Political Commentary

quch ado about everything

Eatrick Cosgrave

if one simple question is simply answered we earl learn a great deal about the apparent tra

vail in the Labour Party which followed its National Executive Committee's decision to

Commend as party policy the nationalisa'On of twenty-five top British companies and ,."Ir Wilson's forthright rejection of that Commendation. The question is: if Mr Roy

,riattersley was censored by somebody in .Iransport House, and a speech by him back Mr Wilson denied release through the 'ransport House machinery, why did the same thing not happen to Mr Denis Healey, Who spoke out in very similar terms? Was it, Perhaps, that the men behind Mr Ron HayW,ard, Labour's general secretary, feared that ptne tough guy Healey might come down to °„Mith square and thump them all, while Mr oattersley could be relied upon to take his ,Illeclicine more or less like a gentleman? Alas, V. It was simply that Mr Healey never asked

Lransport House to release his speech; and if

wir Hattersley had been sensible he would have been similarly independent. That having been said, it remains the case that Mr Hattersley was unlucky, both in the °riginal and in the eventual timing of his sPeech. Had Mr Hattersley spoken on SaturdaY, his relatively mild qualifications to the ;‘11EC policy on public ownership might well ave appeared in the Sunday papers as a footnote to the Prime Minister's far more aggressive denunciations of the same programme, lso delivered on Saturday; perhaps even worse, they might have appeared to be part of 4 lenkinsite orchestration in support of that lost leader's speech at Bath on Friday. Nolletheless, when Mr Hattersley finally gave voice, on Sunday, he appeared as a man in1oisive, uncertain of whether he could or st,nould buck Transport House or not, even nough his main motive in finally issuing the sPeech appear t' to have been the desire to kill 8,sillY press speculation about its content. His e"amerous critics could never accuse Mr Hat!raley of lacking courage, or being willing to ",.°w-tow to the combined forces of Mr Hay_ward and Mr Terry Pitt, the Labour Party Re!earch Secretary, so he was singularly unr_o_rtunate in being trapped in a concatenation °I circumstances in which he could do no t However, all this is, as one might say, by Le by. A great deal of sound and fury has en generated by Mr Wilson's original and ristering disavowal of the NEC, but it is far tris°10 clear that anything more is involved :tan a dispute about the electoralsignificance f-,.2 symbol — those notorious and unidentis'vo twenty-five companies. Certainly, it 4e,emls fairly clear that those dubbed moder‘e by the press are in merely tactical, and irdlc't strategic, disagreement with the left. As r Healey Said: tWe! are all agreed on the need for a massive exaits.fision of public ownership . . . The question is Ply whether we should justify any further takeers op their merits case by case, or whether we th:tald commit ourselves now to nationalise 25 of wit,100 or so largest manufacturing companies pa,:!°1-it being able to say which particular com

es we mean ...

And Mr Hattersley, though he used stronger

Ords, did not dissent from that view. At ramlington on Sunday he said:

1 d ° not believe we will command the country's

iluIPPort for some " numbers game" unrelated to the Port of some specified industries.

But There are industries within the British economy which the next Labour government must and will nationalise. Both North Sea gas and North Sea oil must come under direct public control . . . Both development land and rented property must come into public ownership.

Clearly the Labour Party as a whole, even allowing for its fairly widespread willingness to nationalise when last in power, has moved substantially leftwards since' 1970. What, then, was the row — I mean the row in the party, not in the press, — all about, for there can be no doubt that feelings are bruised on all sides?

So far as one can see, it was a row about who runs the Labour Party. It is a row that has been going on quietly and relentlessly since the last election, and its existence as well as its character can be understood only as part of the heritage of the 1964-70 Government. For it is perfectly clear that those who first proposed the idea of nationalising twenty-five top companies were less motivated by old-style dogma than by a determination so pin down and truss up Harold Wilson and the Shadow Cabinet with specific policy commitments that they could not, if they came to power, manage to work themselves free of those commitments, as, it is believed, they did between 1964 and 1970. The whole thing is an exercise in management, carried out with some awareness of the danger being run of alienating the electorate: the fact that the left are aware of this danger suggests that, before Labour tears itself apart at the next conference, a compromise will be effected, and the twenty-five companies forgotten about. The tip of the iceberg of this trouble was the refusal of Transport House to distribute Mr Hattersley's speech. An inquiry into precisely how this decision was made, and who made it, is to be held. But it already seems clear that the censor was not Mr Ron Hayward, but Mr Terry Pitt. Some hold that only Mr Hayward is entitled to refuse the distribution facilities of Transport House to a Labour member making a speech; some that Mr Pitt, in his capacity of guardian of the NEC's decisions, has power to do so. Mr Hay ward has categorically denied that he im posed any ban, and he added, according to the Times, "I have ,no veto on what any man or woman in the party says. What we would do, what we can do, is to decide not to issue a speech to the press if the speaker were attacking another member of the party, or anything like that." I am not certain what wealth of meaning is contained in the phrase "or anything like that," but unless it means a great deal, it is diametrically opposed to Mr Pitt's judgement that distribution facilities can and should be refused to speakers opposing party policy — meaning by this the policy of the NEC. Connoisseurs of these matters may, moreover, consider, Mr Hayward a little disingenuous if they recall that, during the life of the last Labour government Transport , House, at the instigation of Mr Pitt, refused to distribute a speech by Mr Benn; and three times during this parliament no less a person than Mr Shore, who once held Mr Pitt's job, had his speeches turned away. On Friday last Mr Hattersley called at Transport House on other business, casually left his speech with Mr Pitt, and departed (though there is some dispute about whether, given a general awareness of Mr Heath's forthcoming attack he had at this stage actually made up his mind to deliver it on Saturday). When Mr Pitt had read the speech, and come to the view that it could not and should not be distributed, he telephoned Mr Hattersley to tell him so, though he had difficulty in getting in touch , with him immediately. Subsequently there were various telephonic exchanges between Mr Hayward and Mr Hattersley, but these it would appear, were about the timing of the speech, not its content: Mr Pitt does not appear to have felt the need for more than formal communication with the General Secretary.

How much does it all matter? Quite a lot, as it happens. Clause Five of the Labour Party's constitution has been effectively quoted in recent times both by Mr Wilson, to assert his authority as leader, and by those who believe that conference, and the NEC as the voice of conference, should lay down the policy of the party. The democrats, or demagogues, or populists, or whatever you like to call them, use Clause Five to justify the elaborate process of consultation and research that has been going on since 1970, with interim papers submitted to conference, debated and voted upon, returned to committees, re-examined, re-submitted, and so on, endlessly. Mr Wilson points to the section of the clause which says that, though all this work produces a programme, "The National Executive Committee and the Parliamentary Committee (i.e. the Shadow Cabinet) of the Parliamentary Labour Party shall decide which items from the party programme shall be included in the manifesto . ." At any such joint meeting Mr Wilson would be certain of a majority, and his allies are willing to mutter about his determination to veto any NEC or conference proposal he finds not to his liking. There is no disputing then the final and theoretical authority of the leader and his parliamentary allies, but they would naturally find it diffi cult too often to reject conference and the NEC, and the spectacle of a party in disarray, which frequent disagreement would offer for the delectation of the Tories, could be terriby destructive electorally. What Mr Wilson's opponents are trying to do, therefore, is to push him and his allies as far as they dare so that, come an election victory, he will be as hamstrung as possible. His awareness of the danger of this encircling movement caused Mr Wilson to act quickly to assert his position and produced, ultimately, the embarrassments of last weekend.