World: What a Labor Government Would Be Like

IT may still be a long way back to power, but every by-election and opinion poll in Britain today indicates that a growing majority of voters want a Labor government. In a far more prosperous society than the war-weary nation that elected the last Labor regime in 1945, the question is what life would be like under new Socialist leaders. Curiosity is most intense among voters under 30, who have been spared memories of the snoek (canned mock salmon), "reconstituted" eggs and whale steak of previous Laborite austerity.

Sensing that this new you-never-had-it-so-good generation is both weary of Tory rule and leary of Socialist dogma, the Labor program today emphasizes "pragmatism" and "responsibility" rather than headlong plunges into doctrinaire" experiments. The party's catchwords, a heady blend of Gladstonian rhetoric and New Frontier pep talk, call for "a sense of purpose" to "get Britain moving." How much of its ambitious program will actually be enacted depends on the kind of majority it can win at the polls. But there are some fair indications of what Labor aims to do.

Nationalization

State ownership of industry—which Winston Churchill called that "burglar's jemmy to crack the capitalist crib" —is the goal most commonly associated with a Socialist administration. Tory scaremongers even claim that Labor already has a "shopping list" of 104 companies it plans to nationalize. However, after bitter argument the Labor Party has abandoned its longtime commitment to public ownership of the economy's "commanding heights." It plans now only to renationalize steel, which was partially restored to private enterprise by the Tories, and Britain's trucking industry.

The Economy

A Labor government would demand broad powers to regulate the economy. It would give manufacturers tax incentives and guaranteed orders for exports, but would itself build and run pacesetting plants in any industries, such as machine tools, that it judges inadequate or inefficient. Socialist principle demands a tax on capital gains, which have been largely immune so far, and possibly even a levy on capital. In Harold Wilson's words, Britain has a "laissez-faire, soft-center, speculative, hire-purchase, advertiser-controlled, stop-go economy." To change this, Labor would have to transform completely the nation's business life. Hence the Economist sees Labor's economic aims as "at once consoling and frightening."

To ease the nation's critical dearth of living space and clear its squalid legacy of slums, Labor promises to commit more public funds to new housing and redevelopment, restore rent controls, and regulate new construction. Labor also aims to break the age-old power of wealthy landowners, who seldom sell property outright but give developers long-term leases on which the landlords continue to collect "ground rent." New legislation would give all leaseholders the right to buy actual "freehold" ownership of their land.

Europe