London
IT WAS both the dullest and most important British election since Stanley Baldwin lulled the voters into returning the Conservatives to power in 1935 in the face of the rising Nazi menace. Nevertheless, even a dull election brings out once again that old-fashioned personal quality of British politics. The overriding element in a British campaign is direct contact between the candidates and the voters, and happily, no amount of television, public opinion polling, political dullness, or any of the preoccupations and paraphernalia of modern society have damped down this particular British enthusiasm.
At the top, the party leaders get national television time, but it is locally that the battle is fought — hand to hand and face to face in the 630 House of Commons constituencies. More doorbells are pushed, hands shaken, and shoe leather worn through in the intense three weeks of a British campaign than in an entire year of American electioneering. A British candidate for Parliament is expected to work His voice and his legs to a frazzle to get elected, and if he isn’t ready to knock himself out running to schoolhouse meetings, factory gates, tea parties, community halls, and bingo nights, and in door-to-door canvassing of housewives, there are plenty of eager political hopefuls waiting to take his place.
An ambassador from one of the smaller European countries remarked with mock incredulity when the campaign was at its height: “You know, I do believe that the British are the only people in Europe who take democracy seriously.” He went on to point out that almost nowhere else in Europe do people even think they are voting for a government. They simply turn out and cast their ballots every four or five years. After the votes are counted, the politicians do the real work of picking a government.
Very bad aims
The British may not have been particularly clear in regard to what they were voting about in this last general election, but at least they had no doubt in regard to whom they were voting for. All the same, it was an election campaign in which national issues were dealt with in meaningless generalized terms and cliches, and as a result, it was the ridiculous rather than the significant which often stood out.
The campaign produced, for example, a new item for some future Treasury of English Letters, written by a schoolboy who threw a stink bomb at Prime Minister Wilson, striking him in the eye. With remarkable aplomb, Wilson waved an arm and cried, “That lad ought to be on the England cricket team.” In good British fashion, a Conservative doctor who lived near the hall and was watching the rally on television rushed around to treat the Prime Minister’s eye. Nothing happened to the boy, except that he was carpeted by his headmaster at school the next day and sat down to pen this letter to Mr. Wilson:
“Dear Sir: I am sorry to say that I am the boy who threw one of the stink-bombs at your meeting in Slough. I hope your eye has now completely healed and it will not stop you from making any election speeches. I am very sorry that this happened and that it has in any way inconvenienced you. I would like you to know that it was not a deliberate attempt to hit you, but carried out with no fixed objective in mind. I was carried away by the excitement of the meeting when a friend of mine gave me a stinkbomb. I threw it toward the front. It was not a good aim at all, but a very bad one. I hope you will accept my sincere condolences and apologies.”
Similarly, toward the end of the campaign, the Conservatives, searching for some gimmick or barb that might jab the electorate, prepared an “analysis” of Wilson’s campaign speech handouts, enabling the Conservative leader, Ted Heath, to announce solemnly at a press conference, “Mr. Wilson has uttered 14,000 words, excluding interruptions. Only 511 are about the future and the Labor Party’s policy. The rest deal with thirteen years of Tory achievement and consist largely of abuse. That represents the ratio of 29 words of abuse to one of constructive policy.”
Then some journalistic purist checked the arithmetic and found that it worked out to only 27 to 1 — whereupon a Tory spokesman issued a clarification: “Unfortunately Mr. Heath condensed the figures too much. It is 29-to-1 if you add Mr. Wilson’s broadcasts to his platform speeches.” Good hard-hitting, knockabout British politics.
Hide the issues
In the end, Harold Wilson’s Labor Party victory — a majority of 98 seats in the new House of Commons and a clear run of power for the next five years — bore strong political parallel not only to the pre-war Baldwin campaign but also to Harold Macmillan’s Conservative landslide in 1959. In all three elections the common denominator was the avoidance of big national issues at a time of relative or apparent normality. A Prime Minister in power was out to improve his party’s position with the certainty of victory in advance, and he was determined not to take any chances with issues.
In 1935 Baldwin deliberately buried the urgent necessity of rearming to meet the challenge of Nazi Germany and the threat of war. Barely a year later, when a public sense of the perilously weakened condition of British defenses began to spread, Baldwin rose in the House of Commons to admit (in what he called “appalling frankness”) that he had avoided the rearmament issue because it would have cost him the election. He died a sad and bewildered old man. murmuring over and over to his friends as the bombs were falling on London, “Why do they hate me so?”
Macmillan, on the crest of a wave of inflationary prosperity in 1959, coasted home to almost exactly the same size of election victory as Wilson’s with the slogan “You never had it so good.” He took no notice of the practical and statistical evidence of Britain’s declining economic health and trade position in the world and ignored completely the political challenge of entry into Europe’s Common Market.
The success of Harold Wilson this year — pipe at the ready like Stanley Baldwin, and hair brushed and silvery like Harold Macmillan — has not been too different. His was a campaign full of promises about doing what is right and necessary, taking tough measures, not being afraid to make decisions, meeting challenges, and getting on with the job. But when the voters went to the polls, they didn’t have the slightest idea how Wilson intends to win the battle to save the pound, check inflation, bring the economy into balance, restore Britain’s growth rate, or reactivate a British policy of initiatives in dealing with Europe. Wilson did not treat with these issues for the simple political reason that he did not need to in order to win, and he knew it. The advantages of power were enormous.
Heath, on the other hand, is the first British Conservative since Bonar Law during World War I to take over the party leadership while the party was in opposition. Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home all became leaders in power. Heath prodded a batch of election policy papers out of the Conservatives which in other circumstances would have been forward-looking, liberal, and impressive.
But with the Tories out of power, the public paid scarcely any attention at all to what Heath was promising to do if he got in. He tried out a number of lines — on the strength of pound sterling, the praiseworthy aspects of General de Gaulle, Britain, and the Common Market; he added a strong dash of anti-Americanism, spoke of restrictive trade union practices, Britain’s indebtedness, and even tossed out at the end that old political chestnut “Vote for my opponents and pay later.” But none of them clicked, and nothing worked.
Pre-empt the center
However dull, it was a highly important election, even a historic decision by the British voters. In the first place, Wilson’s victory marks the end of fifty years of Conservative Party dominance of British affairs. Although the Labor Party won a much more sweeping victory in 1945 than in 1966, it was by no means a “permanent victory,”and it certainly did not shatter the Tories, who still had Churchill in reserve to lead them back to power.
Now for the first time in British history, the Labor Party has improved its hold on the government after a period in office, instead of slipping backward. Wilson has done this by pre-empting the political center. Today there is far more of a political balance between Britain’s two major parties than ever before, and as one British commentator put it after the results were in: “The longer Mr. Wilson can keep the Conservatives out of office, the more completely he will rob them of their essential election-winning mystique, the idea that they are the natural governing party.”
More to the point, Britain has elected a government for a five-year period which promises to be the most important five years in British as well as European politics since the war. Wilson is in power until 1971: Lyndon Johnson, if he runs again and wins, until 1972; and Charles de Gaulle, if he lives and does not retire from office, until 1972. The decisions of these three men will fundamentally reshape the twentyyear-old political, economic, and military arrangements which have obtained in Europe since the Truman-Stalin lineup of the cold war.
In the international field, the first challenge of this era of realignment is already on Wilson’s doorstep — the future of NATO. Along with NATO comes the question of Britain’s relation to the Common Market, a fundamental issue which Heath tried to force in the campaign and which Wilson successfully dodged. At. this point in the Wilson government’s postelection thinking, NATO is the more urgent challenge, and also offers the advantage of a framework in which Britain can reactivate its European leadership. The removal of NATO headquarters and installations from France to London would put Britain back into European diplomacy after nearly a decade on the sidelines.
Once these lies have been reorganized and strengthened in London, the ground will be prepared and the stage set for a new, more formidable British move into the Common Market. Wilson has signaled clear recognition of his “European problem” by naming a special minister to take charge of day-to-day NATO affairs and political relations with the Common Market, while his number two in the Cabinet, George Brown, has been charged with formulation of economic policy toward Europe.
Nobody in London is prepared to put labels on policy, but this “grand design” is taking shape. According to it, Britain, the mother hen of a NATO kicked out of France, giving comfort, reassurance, and new stability to the Alliance, can sail serenely at last into the Common Market and bring Norway, Denmark, and Ireland along with it in two or three years time, with “safe-conduct” guarantees for European Free Trade Association countries which do not wish to join, such as Sweden, Austria, Portugal, and Switzerland.
And then be tough
There is, however, one basic underlying requirement of any Wilson “grand design” for Britain, and that is the restoration of true economic strength. It might be possible to negotiate entry into the Common Market with inflation still going on and the pound fluctuating in the international financial breezes, but it would be a very weak negotiating position, and one which Wilson and his ministers rule out. Economic policy was never more fundamental to effective political policy, and it is on the economic front that Wilson will ultimately be judged.
He scored with the electorate in March because his defensive actions to save the pound in his seventeen months in office had been successful, even though the problem as a whole is far from solved. Just before the campaign ended, Wilson was able to produce official Treasury figures to show that he had met his target of cutting the British balance-of-payments deficit in half during 1965. The January and February trade figures looked even better.
Still, the statistics turned down slightly in March, and a £900 million credit from the International Monetary Fund hangs over sterling reserves, so the country is far from out of the woods. And meanwhile, all the classic elements of inflation and “overheating” are present in the British economy: wages which shot up by 8 percent in 1965 and are still on the rise; overemployment; lagging growth rate and stagnant productivity; rising prices; too much money, too few goods. Since he took office, Wilson has managed to exude a genuine sense of motion and of a government at work. “Labor Gets Things Done” was the key campaign slogan, and whatever the validity of the Tory charge that it has been motion, not action, the slogan was politically effective against the record of the last years of Tory rule.
At the age of fifty, Harold Wilson is far and away the most dominant figure in British politics today. There have been mutterings that with a Labor majority of 98 his left-wingers who oppose British support of the American position in Vietnam will cause trouble. But nobody who has watched Wilson operate is seriously worried about this theory. Since Aneurin Bevan’s death and Wilson’s own transformation into a man of the “radical center,” the Labor left is without a single figure of stature.
Will he be tough? He is certainly a cold and calculating political operator with few friends and no real intimates to whom he must be obligated. But there is also a curious streak of personal “softness” in Wilson. Possibly because he knows that he is cold and hard, he is painfully reluctant to be as ruthless with people personally as he is in his political decisions. His new Cabinet is virtually unchanged from the preelection lineup, although it is perfectly obvious to both Labor and Conservative politicians that he is passing up a chance to make muchneeded replacements in key posts.
Harold Wilson above all is concerned with his success as a Prime Minister, and since that is firmly tied to the strength of sterling and the position of Britain, nobody who works with him doubts his ability and readiness to “get on with the job,” whatever that will mean.