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...