Great Britain: Travel & Travail

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The White House luncheon was finished, and it was time for toasts. Said the President of the U.S. with a twinkle in his eye: "Someone suggested, Mr. Prime Minister, that I begin this toast by saying: 'My good disassociates' "—a reference to Harold Wilson's "dissociating" the British government from the U.S. bombing of the Hanoi-Haiphong oil-storage areas. In reply, Wilson complimented the President on his sense of humor, then turned soberly to his most pressing problem: Britain's economic crisis. Said Wilson, grimly declaring his resolve to beat it: "If we have to fight alone, we shall. But I am confident, Mr. President, we shall not be fighting alone."

Absentee Landlord? Fighting was what Wilson had done all week. About the only place he did not have to do battle was the White House, where President Johnson listened attentively to the Prime Minister's explanation of his economic first-aid measures. Though Wilson neither asked for nor received any promises of U.S. financial support, it was clear that he still had excellent rapport with the President. Yet even the trip to Washington exposed the Prime Minister to fresh criticism at home. "The nation is becoming accustomed to waving farewell to Mr. Wilson just as things get uncomfortable," declared London's Daily Mail, recalling that Wilson took off on a trip to Moscow three weeks ago as the latest sterling crisis approached. The Prime Minister, added the Daily Sketch, "is in danger of becoming an absentee landlord."

Embroiled as he was with the trade unions, dissidents in his own party and the Opposition over his controversial plans to rescue the pound, Wilson deliberately chose to make things hotter by scheduling a debate on Labor's controversial bill to renationalize Britain's major privately owned steel companies. He apparently reckoned that the steel-nationalization issue—one of the Labor Party's surviving oldtime doctrinaire goals—would unite his divided party. But Veteran Labor M.P. George Strauss, who in 1948 piloted the Labor Government's original steel-nationalization bill through Commons, was critical of the measure. Desmond Donnelly and Woodrow Wyatt, the moderate Labor M.P.s who last year bedeviled Wilson's attempts to nationalize steel (TIME, May 14, 1965), again sniped nastily from the backbenches.

Misleading Margin. The biggest battle came with the Commons debate on the plan, which the Prime Minister had announced the week before, to freeze prices, wages and dividends while drastically squeezing inflation out of the economy by cutting government spending and raising taxes. Conservative Leader Ted Heath led a bitter, sometimes brilliant attack in Commons on Wilson's handling of the economic crisis. The government survived the no-confidence motion by a 79-vote margin.

The size of the margin was misleading, for Wilson's measures have exacerbated the Labor Party's internal feuds. Fearing massive unemployment, 47 Labor M.P.s signed a protest against Wilson's measures, and it was all Deputy Prime Minister George Brown could do to win the "reluctant acquiescence" of Britain's influential Trades Union Congress to the idea of a voluntary wage freeze.