Britain: Labor Reaches for Unity

The party agrees on a new leader but, as usual, not on defense

Just after he was elected to lead Britain's limping and divided Labor Party last week, Neil Kinnock and his wife Glenys took a stroll along Brighton beach for the benefit of photographers. As the cameras clicked, Labor's new standard-bearer tripped and fell into the chilly surf. Picking himself up, with a grin on his freckled face, Kinnock shook the water off his second-best suit and observed that "the damn tide came in."

The tide indeed had come in—and with unexpected swiftness—for the copper-haired Welshman, who became the youngest leader in the Labor Party's history. In his 13 years as a Member of Parliament, Kinnock, 41, a leftist with a pragmatic streak, has never served in a government post. Thus it was a measure of the demoralized Labor Party's desperate need for a new image, energy and, above all, unity that led it to choose overwhelmingly on the first ballot a candidate untested in the national arena.

Kinnock replaced Michael Foot, 70, who had tendered his resignation after presiding over Labor's worst defeat in 65 years, when Britons in June re-elected the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Kinnock's bandwagon rolled over three party heavyweights: the center-right's Roy Hattersley, 50, Leftist Veteran Eric Heffer, 61, and Peter Shore, 59, a moderate spokesman on economic affairs. The battle for the deputy leader's post proved much sharper. With Kinnock's tacit support, Hattersley defeated Leftist Michael Meacher, 43, thereby establishing what party faithful called "the dream ticket," a combination that seemed to bridge the deep left-right fissures that have plagued Labor.

For this difficult moment in the party's history, Kinnock was an ideal solution. With working-class roots deep in the black valleys of South Wales—his father was a coal miner, his mother a district nurse—he virtually grew up in the Labor Party. Though he was an indifferent student who eked out a degree from University College, Cardiff, he was keen on rugby, talk and political action. His wife, whom he met at the university, was so politically oriented that she refused a wedding band made of South African gold. Working together, the Kinnocks won Neil a safe parliamentary seat.

For three days, the Brighton conference bathed in an unaccustomed atmosphere of harmony under the dream team. But when the time came to consider the thorny issue of defense policy, unity quickly yielded to familiar acrimony. Backed by Kinnock, the party's National Executive Committee had crafted a compromise proposal designed to be acceptable to both left and right. Instead, in a wave of emotion, the cheering delegates reaffirmed Labor's commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament.

That was just the beginning. Another resolution aimed at NATO rejected "Britain's membership in any Pentagon-dominated military pact based on the first use of nuclear weapons." It called for the "elimination" of all foreign bases on British soil (only the U.S. has such bases) and declared that Labor's defense policy must be "solely concerned with the protection of Britain and its people." The resolutions passed by overwhelming acclamation.