GREAT BRITAIN: Counting Labor Out

Against the fervent and dramatic urgings of Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell, the annual conference of the British Labor Party last week voted a sensational course: to scrap British nuclear weapons, to eject Britain's U.S. allies from airbases on British soil, to pull out of the NATO alliance and count Britain out of the cold war. The decision cracked the crumbling Labor Party wide open. It doomed the Opposition Laborites—who have failed to win the confidence of British voters in three straight elections—to further years in the political wilderness.

The vote did not speak for England, did not speak for Labor's leadership, probably did not speak for more than 10% to 20% of the 12 million Britons who voted for the Labor party in last October's balloting. What happened then? The Labor decision, voted in the windy Yorkshire seaside resort of Scarborough, was an outpouring of feuding and bitterness over past defeats, fed by resentment of the U.S. and inspired by the combination of idealism, fears and pacifism that always lurks among Laborites.

Deathwatch. The outcome had actually been decided long in advance, ordained by the strange way the Labor Party is run, in which labor leaders, casting a bloc of a million union votes at a time, can always outvote the so-called constituency parties, which represent the actual British voter. In union halls and smoke-filled rooms, all the big unions had registered their stands and committed their huge bloc votes last summer. When the conference chairman banged his opening gavel in the big Scarborough auditorium, only the delegates representing the various constituency parties remained free to swing their votes—and the only question left undecided was the size of Hugh Gaitskell's defeat. Burly Frank Cousins, leftist boss of the giant Transport and General Workers Union, was driving for a million-vote majority for a neutralist policy. Gaitskell, backed by the party's 254 M.P.s was fighting not only for his defense policy but his party leadership.

Night before the showdown debate last week, Scarborough's hotel lounges were like death cells. Instead of the usual noisy, bantering throngs, groups in corners whispered: "Gaiters* has his resignation already written." Next morning, as delegates swarmed into the hall, knives were out, and Gaitskell on the platform was as hemmed in by intimate enemies as Caesar among the Roman senators. It was hard to say which was the stronger mood —Ban the Bomb or Gaitskell Must Go.