AFTER WILSON'S "HUNDRED DAYS"
By T.J.Peters
In more than one sense Harold Wilson's much-heralded “hundred days of dynamic action” tailed off into Winston Churchill's ninety years of pomp and circumstance. The quasi-feudal goings-on ‘in the weeks of funeral anticipation and funeral ceremony were a fitting backdrop, mocking the proclaimed modernization program of the sociai~democratic scleneemongers. The Wilson government seems to have become hopelessly stalled in the bogs of the City and the Establishment .
In almost every respect the Wilson team, enjoying.at its formation more support and approval from the Labour movement than any previous leadership because of its left social-democratic origins and the left coloration of its parliamentary program, has thoroughly disappointed both its mass following in the electorate as well as its narrower base. among the party activists who propelled it to power. ;
Instead of grappling with the economic crisis left by the Tory party through a public inquest. into its thirteen-years rule for the profiteers, the Wilson leadership has been anxious not to cause international “loss of confidence in sterling" and in the British economy under: capitalism,
Instead of calling for mass participation of the working class in conducting such an inquest and in taking emergency measures to implement conclusions flowing from. it, Wilson and his friends have been resorting. to "orthodox" economic and financial manipula-~ tions such as the fifteen per cent import tax am the seven’ per cent bank rate, the net result. of which has been to throw the burden of the remedies on the backs of the workers and those sections-of the population least able to bear it. Even so, the crisis in sterling continues uneasily despite all the measures taken; and the economy “only limps along, the massive American-led bankers! aid which saved the currency in November bringing about an ever greater mort gaging of the whole Labour program to the interests of international capitalism.
The employers at. home, and their Tory friends in press and parliament, have been quick to seize on every opportunity to hamstring, to embarrass and to exploit the plight of the Wilson administration. They have not shied from spurring on “mass action" when it suited their purpose, not only in the. doctors! "revolt" but also in the case of the cutbacks in the aircraft industry which, as was shown in the Ferranti scandal, have been playing the "defense needs of the nation" for suckers. If Labour refrains from leading the engineering workers in this industry to demand nationalization and workers! control of its future, others are prepared to utilize any
temporary dislocation in their jobs to lead them against Labour under banners with jingoistic overtones. That was what was shown by the odd spectacle of the aircraft workers! Hyde Park demonstrations twice within a month.
But even on the purely electoral front, the timid and even craven social-democratic reaction to the bankers! offensive has its unmistakable lessons. You cannot raise the parliamentarians! pay while postponing a much touted promise to increase old-age pensions, and expect the old-age pensioners and their supporters not to be disgusted. That's one thing that the massive abstentions in the Labour vote teach in part about Gordon Walker's defeat at the Leyton by-=election which no one had expected. And another thing this event | has taught is that playing "respectable" hide-and-seek with racialism is only grist to the mill of "respectable" racialists.
The Tories show every sign of making this kind of racialism (under the guise of "controlled immigration") one of their main aces in the coming electoral contests. Quite apart from the unprincipledness of the official Labour position in retracting past pledges to ‘repeal the Tory Immigration Act recently passed to cope with the "colour problem," this is bound to feed reaction, particularly on the electoral front as the experience of Smethwick and now Leyton has demonstrated. ,
To get a full measure of the reprehensible nature of Wilson's retreat on such issues as this, they must be seen in the context of the whole of the so-called "multiracial commonwealth" and foreign policy set forth by him in opposition and even in the first days of his premiership. For they are not unconnected with the miserable showing in the matter of delivering Bloodhound aircraft to South Africa, to the whole swindle of the Malaysian Federation and the resultant confrontation with Indonesia and, finally and above all, to the support of the outrageous imperialist aggressions of the Lyndon Johnson administration in the Congo and particularly in Vietnam. The whole trend of policy has the effect of stamping the Labour government globally as part and parcel of white supremacist imperialism.
It is true that this support of American imperialism, like the domestic retreat, is shamefaced, covered up with mealy-mouthed equivocations -- and rumors of great, bold, behind-the-scenes moves that supposedly run counter to the public stand taken by Wilson, Stewart and Co. But in politics it is the public position on which parties and their spokesmen are judged. At a time of mounting opposition to the dirty Vietnam war in the United States itself -- a Labour government in Britain offers justification to the warmongers in the Pentagon and the White House!
Wilson's apologists claim that while the economic and financial crisis has frozen the public stance of Labour Britain in distorted fashion, the dynamism of the hundred days nevertheless has
had its effect in the internal machinery of government which is bound to bring about great radical changes. Not an inkling of this has met the public eye, however. It is true that the steel nationalization bill is still being processed for parliamentary action, especially under pressure from the steel workers themselves, but -all surface indications are that this measure, too, is to be trimmed to the wind of comoromise with the profiteers. The same holds true of the projected Rend and Land Act, and the tax proposals for the coming budget. ~
It must, however, also be admitted that the City and the whole business community remain hostile and distrustful, and still: fear Wilsonian "radicalism" in spite of the reassurances of the. "hundred days." But their fears are really that the pressures of the working class, in spite of all, might burst through the dam of the false “national interest"? which the social democracy defends with them in common, Indeed, the workers of Britain are going through an experience which should convince them that social demo= cracy, even of the most left variety, is incapable of resolving the social crisis and leading to socialism -- precisely because social. democracy does not break with the whole concept of a common "naticonal interest" with the profiteers, both in domestic and foreign matters, because it is content to leave intact the state machinery of the oppressors, the capitalist state.
For the Marxists in Britain the task remains, side by side with the workers, to absorb the lessons of the current experiences and to find in the course of action with them the breach through which the Labour movement can overcome the stultifying and selfdefeating limits social democracy imposes on the Lakour giant.
THE U.S. "