Gaitskell's Dilemma

For the past year there has been an increasingly discernable split in the British Labor Party; last week, as was virtually inevitable, the split widened into a chasm. The annual Party conference shoved unilateralism into the protesting, mouths of its Parliamentary leaders, and voted a policy which if carried out by a Labour Government would mean Britain's withdrawal from NATO.

Until now, Labour's official policy on defense has been sharply defined by the Party's most powerful organs: the National Executive Committee, the Trades Union Conference General Council, and the Parliamentary Party headed by Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell himself was largely responsible for this definition, which was that Britain should have no independent nuclear deterrent but should nonetheless fulfill her military obligations to her allies.

The Scarborough Conference rejected that policy in explicit terms, overruling it by a vote of 3,339,000 to 3,042,000. When it passed the motion of the Transport Workers, a left-wing union led by the voluble Frank Cousin's, Labour in fact committed itself to the rejection of "any defense policy based on the threat or use of strategic or tactical nuclear weapons."

Cousins' proposals are no newer and no more politically responsible then they were during last year's General Election campaign. At that time, however, Gaitskell was able to persuade the conferences that his threat to spread the quarrel between the two wings of his Party was, to say the least, inopportune. But the sudden effusion of peace rallies, "Ban the Bomb" movements and agitation for unilateral nuclear disarmament have lost Gaitskell his tenous hold on the rank-and-file of the Left.

It matters, of course, that the unilateralism Cousins supports results from the frightened thinking that would inaugurate a policy of disarmament without taking into account the demands of international politics. The Party Conference members, and to some extent the electorate which they are supposed to represent, have now translated their increasing terror of atomic weapons into an acceptance of this line. Despite the conference's acceptance of the Cousins Policy, though the majority of Englishmen have never supported such thinking, nor are they ever likely to. The conference may have gone over to unilateralism, as the London Times remarked, but the Labour movement has not.

Understandably frightened at the thought of an Opposition completely unable to oppose, Gaitskell is trying to solidify the authority of the Parliamentary Party--the Labour M.P.'s--over the conference. Attempting to reconvert the regenerate, he spoke last week with an eloquence that Cousins is unlikely to forget. "There are some of us," he said, "who will fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love, to bring back its sanity and honesty and dignity so that our party with its great past may retain its glory and its greatness."

The trouble with all this is that the Labour Party's Constitution is far too democratic to permit any such assertion of authority. "The Parliamentary Party," it states emphatically, "could not long remain at logger-heads with the annual party conference without disrupting the party," the implication being that unlike its Conservative counterpart, the Labour front bench may not dictate to the conference. Thus, to save his party from its first serious split, Gaitskell must convince next year's conference to accept a series of constitutional reforms.

Neither his difficulties not this controversy can possibly be hidden. The whole business of unilateralism will be hashed over again and again once Parliament begins its session on November 1. Some 200 M.P.'s (about four-fifths of the Labour membership), including influential front-benchers like Philip Noel-Baker, George Brown, and Denis Healy, will stand by the official policy. There is little choice, after all; if they display so blatant a change of attitude, their campaign promises (many of which stressed responsibility to NATO) will seem ludicrous. As Gaitskell dramatically asked the conference: "Do you think we can become overnight the pacifists, unilateralists, and fellow-travelers that other people are?"

The remaining Labour M.P.'s will probably follow the example of K. Zilliacus, one of their number who declared the other day that "Mr. Gaitskell's arrogance and fanaticism and hydrogen-bomb strategy mean that he is not fit to lead the party and will have to go." This group may propose to replace Gaitskell with Harold Wilson, a non-leftist who is nonetheless unlikely to quarrel with the conference.

This November, in other words, there will be two Labour parties in Westminster. Gaitskell has two choices: to fight and fight and fight again for constitutional revision, or to see his party lose in so many General Elections that disgust will force him to join the Liberal Party which he now so much dislikes.