BRITAIN: A Tiny Victory for Harold Wilson

"There is no one in British history more experienced in small majorities than myself." So said Harold Wilson last week as he watched the results of Britain's second general election in less than eight months. Despite polls that showed the Labor Party winning by a margin of possible landslide proportions, Wilson came out of the election with a wafer-thin parliamentary majority—319 seats in the House of Commons, or two more than half of the total—and the smallest popular vote (39.3%) for any majority government in Britain's history.

The underwhehrdng Labor victory was nonetheless sufficient to give Britain the stable government that it has lacked since last February, when no party won a clear victory and Wilson formed a minority government that could have been brought down at any tune by a combined vote of the Conservatives and the smaller parties. This time the Tory representation in the House dropped from 296 seats to 276.

The Liberals, whose striking gains in February (19.3% of the popular vote and 14 seats, with one later addition) had threatened the traditional two-party political system, not only failed to make an electoral breakthrough into major-party status but lost two of their seats at Westminster.

The feisty Scottish Nationalists, meanwhile, picked up four more seats, for a total of eleven, and raised their share of the popular vote in Scotland to more than 30% (against 22% in February). The Scots have long been angry at the loss of their talented young to London and the concentration of the country's wealth in the south. Westminster will thus be under continuing pressure to give greater autonomy 'to the region. Other regional parties also fared well. The Ulster loyalists retained ten of Northern Ireland's twelve seats, including one taken by renegade Tory Enoch Powell, while the Plaid Cymru gained one seat in Wales, for a total of three.

In light of the qualified mandate, Wilson's Laborites were understandably restrained in their celebrations. "It is going to be a very, very hard slog for a couple of years," the returned Prune Minister said, referring to an economy that is buffeted by ever gloomier news of combined inflation and recession almost every day. "It is going to be a hell of a job."

Hellish Job. Much of the election pivoted on just how hellish that job will be. Tory Leader Edward Heath, who is now expected to step aside in favor of Party Chairman William Whitelaw, said it would be hellish indeed. During the final week of the campaign, he described the fall of the British economy in elegiac, black-bordered tones. "We shall be cutting our own throats if we think that collapse cannot happen here. It can." Heath argued that only a government of national union could deal with the country's problems and promised that if the Tories won he would call in other parties and groups to help form it. To deal with the staggering economy, he pledged strict control of public spending, a more moderate growth of the money supply and possible wageprice controls if inflation continued at its present 17% annual rate.