Word: labour
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...process, important issues about Cabinet secrecy and freedom of the press were raised, as well as Crossman's theory that "Cabinet government" has been replaced in England by "Prime Ministerial" government. Last week's piece ended with a short account of Wilson's difficulties in holding the Labour Party together and how the Crossman diaries fit into this situation...
Wilson's success in the forging of his new "social contract" between Labour and the nation--Britain's last credible chance to stave off economic anarchy, as even the Tories concede--will depend on factors more fundamental than the revelations of the Crossman diaries. But clearly the embarassments they contain could not have come at a worse time for Wilson, when he needs all the support of Labour's Old Left (Foot and others of the New Statesman set) to control the New. But Wilson gravely miscalculated his legal position when he tried to suppress the diaries by direct government...
...least once in recent history, moreover, revelations of Cabinet discussions had brought down a Labour Prime Minister. In 1923 the first Labour Cabinet in Britain's history attempted to quash the prosecution of a communist for incitement to rebel. Ramsey MacDonald, who was Prime Minister at the time, claimed that he had not been consulted in the matter and had not acquiesced in the decision. This outraged the professional civil servants who play a much more important role in Whitehall than in Washington. The Cabinet Secretary circulated a memo around government offices in which MacDonald's assertion...
...other hand, Wilson's position within the Labour Party is reasonably secure. No one else in the party can hope to command a broad enough spectrum of support--both inside and outside the party--to keep Labour in power. And what the recent Blackpool conference proved is that the one thing every major Labour party figure, including the big union leaders, can agree on is that Labour must be kept in power at all costs. Crossman himself would have appreciated the strengths as well as weakness of being a Labour politician. When he first ran for office...
...mowing his grass in his front garden looked up at me and said, "I wonder, boy, why you waste your time talking like that. You do realise, I suppose, that Coventry East would vote for the back end of a jackass if it was labelled Labour...