Britain: Gaitskell Wins

When British Socialists in 1955 picked Hugh Gaitskell, now 53, to succeed the retiring Clement Attlee as head of the party, they applauded, but they did not cheer. The sad fact was that the longtime heir apparent, chirpy Herbert Morrison, was too old to take over. And the idol of the left, Aneurin Bevan, seemed too hotheaded. A compromise choice, Gaitskell found himself heading a party whose old-time religion had lost much of its appeal and whose leaders were perpetually torn between accommodating the conservative labor unions and the radical left wing while formulating a policy that would appeal to the nation as a whole. Last week, as the biggest union of all--the powerful (1,300,000 members) Transport and General Workers--met for its biennial conference on the Isle of Man, Gaitskell's problems seemed weightier than ever.

Down with Unity. Britain faces a general election between now and next spring, and Gaitskell needs a unified party. He has held it together by unexciting compromises. This is not fiery enough stuff for cocky Frank Cousins, the ambitious boss of the Transport Workers, who by the peculiarity of labor voting, controls a bloc of 1,000,000 out of 6,800,000 votes at Labor Party conventions. Before a wildly cheering conference last week, Cousins baldly threatened the unity of the entire Labor Party by demanding immediate renunciation of the H-bomb. He further denounced the extent of Labor's backing of NATO on the ground that some NATO general might "plunge us into war."

When the news broke, a group of panicky Labor M.P.s hastened off to Gaitskell, urged him to call a special private parliamentary meeting to bolster himself with a renewed vote of confidence. But Gaitskell peremptorily refused: "Why? There's no need." He was ready to give battle.

A trained economist, educated at posh Westminster and at Oxford, Gaitskell preaches a brand of socialism that leftists talk scornfully of as "milk and water" ("If we want to snore ourselves to Sweden, this is the way"). As his closest advisers, he prefers university-trained economists rather than the men who have risen from factory and mine. "The day of the cloth cap in the Labor Party is over," laments one working-class ex-minister. Bustling about the country with the air of a don doing his best to be folksy, Gaitskell has not been able to match Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's glamor, but he has earned solid respect. He has kept his party fully behind NATO and, though infatuated with the notion of disengagement, has also kept his party behind the allied position in Berlin.

With grim determination last week, Gaitskell again asserted his leadership. To promise unequivocally to renounce the bomb as Cousins demanded, said Gaitskell, would be "escapist, myopic and positively dangerous to the peace of the world." He refused to give such a pledge, and denied the right even of a Labor Party Conference to bind "those of us who have the responsibility of leadership" in a future Labor government. To ban the bomb unilaterally "would be handing the Soviet Union the power to overrun Europe, without any fear of retaliation."

At two other major union meetings last week, the nation's mine workers (680,000 members) and railwaymen (370,000) took the same position. And over the BBC a somewhat chastened Frank Cousins made a promise of his own: should the Labor Party Conference next fall reject his view, he would go along with Gaitskell, who still seemed to be very much in control.

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