Great Britain: Looking Left

Never in Britain's history-not even under German guns in 1940-had a new government moved so quickly and decisively to reshape the molds of power as Labor did last week. Prime Minister Harold Wilson machine-gunned appointments out of No. 10 Downing Street, by week's end had named 101 ministers, the highest total since the early 1700s. Whitehall was a shambles of furniture movers and displaced teamakers as Wilson shifted departments and created four new ministries: Economic Affairs, Technology, Overseas Development, and Land and Natural Resources.

Though Wilson had been expected to scatter his appointments across the party's political spectrum and had a certain number of personal debts to repay, he went out of his way to give Labor's troublesome, hard-core left-wingers seats in the new government-including six in the Cabinet itself.

Archers at Agincourt. Wilson may intend to isolate and contain them by bringing them into the government, but with Labor's narrow majority, some of Wilson's own advisers were clearly troubled by his look to the left. Among the leftists named:

> Frank Cousins, 60, Minister of Technology. A hulking six-footer who began working the coal pits at 14, Cousins by 1938 was a full-time labor organizer. As boss of the 1,300,000-man Transport Union, Cousins clashed with Labor's late solidly NATO-minded Hugh Gaitskell and stubbornly called for Britain's unilateral disarmament. Cousins argued that Britain had defended itself in World War II without A-bombs. Gaits-kell's withering reply: "And the British archers won at Agincourt without machine guns." Among Cousins' new responsibilities: overseeing Britain's atomic-energy establishment.

> Barbara Castle, 53, Minister of Overseas Development. A pert redhead with a flair for fashion, she came from a Yorkshire Laborite family, was an ardent member of the old, deep-pink Popular Front Socialist League. Her idea of a Sunday in the park is addressing a crowd from a Trafalgar Square plinth. She has made all the Aldermaston ban-the-bomb marches, has long had a passion for emergent Africa, the purview of her new job.

> Richard Grossman, 56, Minister of Housing. Probably the most prolific pamphleteer alive in Britain today. Grossman, a former Oxford don, has long been the brilliant, erratic idea man of the Labor Party, was a member of the Keep Left group of party rebels that sniped at the last Labor government while it was in power. His main task: to carry through the state takeover of urban land, which Labor hopes will solve Britain's soaring land inflation.