GREAT BRITAIN: Shares for All?

• Share

Ever since he became leader of the Labor Party 19 months ago moderate Hugh Gaitskell has been trying to reassure the British public that his party is no longer wildly socialistic—and hoping that the party's left wing would not overhear him and prove him wrong. The leftist followers of Aneurin Bevan suspect Gaitskell of trying to make Labor "not a Socialist Party at all but a mere ginger group for making capitalism work more efficiently and humanely." Last week, after much labor, the party brought forth a manifesto on the subject, which the Economist promptly dubbed "Mouse with a Leer."

"Oldfashioned nationalization," as Gaitskell called it, is no longer Labor doctrine (even doctrinaire Socialists found the experience disillusioning). The report cheered the past nationalization of rails, coal and electric power, and renewed its vow again to nationalize the steel and trucking industries, which the Tories restored to private ownership in 1953. But the policy that Gaitskell says must "supersede" the old way is a vague threat to authorize the state "to extend public ownership in any industry or part of industry which . . . is found to be seriously failing the nation." Presumably even this was a sop to the Bevanites on the study group that prepared party doctrine. For instead of nationalization Gaitskell now favors a weird plan for the government to get part way into private business. He would have the government acquire shares in some or all of the 512 firms with assets of $7,000,000 or more, which, the report says, account for almost half of all profits earned by British private industry. One way would be for the government to accept stock in these companies, as well as cash, as death duties.

To the Economist Gaitskell's program is "deliberately designed to have the minimum of eventual real effect, while instilling the maximum of interim uncertainty in every boardroom in the country."