Word: laborings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...general election that swept the British Conservatives back to power last October left more than the defeated Laborites worried by Labor's defeat. In a country that invented the political theory of the Loyal Opposition and governs itself by the swing of the party pendulum, what kind of alternative choice is there in a doctrinaire and out-of-date party that had won only two general elections in half a century, and had just gone down to defeat for the third time...
...Labor's leader, Hugh Gaitskell, had waged a buoyant campaign that left him unchallenged as party leader. In defeat he felt strong enough to pledge himself to "a vow of silence, self-imposed," while he "collected the voices" about what was wrong and what needed to be changed. But at his middle-class Hampstead home in north London, he chose to consult not with trade-union leaders, with whom he feels uncomfortable, but with fellow Oxford intellectuals such as Economist Douglas Jay, who publicly urged that the party should drop its "class image" and "nationalization myth" and even consider...
Last week, in the seaside resort of Blackpool, its beaches deserted by all but the sea gulls, its skies greyed over, some 2,000 Laborites assembled gloomily for Gaitskell's promised post-election "inquest." From the outset, Hugh Gaitskell took the offensive: Labor must drop its demands for nationalization or "be content to remain in permanent opposition...
...changing character of labor, full employment, new housing, the new way of living based on the telly, the frig and the car, and the glossy magazines-all these have had an effect on our political strength," said Gaitskell. Labor's response, he said, raising a donnish finger and pursing his lips for emphasis, must not be to repeat past failures-"we have to show them that we are a modern 20th century party." Elderly party leaders on the platform looked stonily out over the unmoved audience...
...voters. The unions, no longer underdogs, no longer able to count on public sympathy for slowdowns, strikes and restrictive practices, are still the most powerful vested interest in the party. They provide 75% of its funds, control 17 of 28 seats in the National Executive Committee, elect 93 of Labor's 258 M.P.s, and cast blocks of a million or more votes at party conferences. And Gaitskell also appealed to the original aims for which Keir Hardie and his cloth-capped trade-union radicals-none of them socialists in the doctrinaire sense of the continental European Socialist parties-founded...