Word: labouring
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Crossman arranged for the publication of these diaries and before he died had been assured by lawyers that there were no legal obstacles. As his chief literary executor he selected Michael Foot, a fiery figure of the Labour party's left and someone strong enough, Crossman felt, to stand up to Harold Wilson. The Sunday Times of London published two series of excerpts from the diaries before Wilson intervened to quash them. Claiming that he acted on the advice of impartial civil servants, Wilson instructed his attorney-general to seek an injunction against further publication of the diaries...
...their own power and prestige, but these observations were neither unprecedented nor earth-shaking. It seems that what forced Wilson to take action was Crossman's version of factual events--a version that contradicted Wilson's own--and the influence this might have on the left wing of the Labour party, restive and ready to bolt at any sign of weakness on Wilson's part...
...memoirs to have been against the resumption of arms sales to South Africa, an assertion that Crossman's diaries show to be false. Wilson and Crossman conflict on many other points, mostly ones that seem fairly trivial to outsiders but that have remained issses of passionate conceern to the Labour party's left wing...
This left wing has been giving Wilson more and more trouble lately. In his Godkin lectures, Crossman described the job of any Labour Prime Minister as "driving the two-horse chariot"--maintaining control over both the Parliamentary Labour Party, which tends to be middle-of-the-road, and the National Executive, which represents the party outside Parliament. In the complicated Labour Party Constitution, written in the early years of this century by Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Arthur Henderson, the big unions were supposed to supply the moderate ballast to keep the national party roughly in line with the P.L.P...
This has been an increasingly difficult circus act to perform. Revolts against the "moderate" Labour M.P.'s have weighted the balance of power within the National Executive heavily in favor of the radicals. The moderates, by deserting Wilson over the Common Market issue (they voted, with the Tories, to keep Britain in the EEc) lost key positions of strength. After Edward Heath's brinksmanship on the edge of class war failed to rally the nation during the Coal Strike of 1974, Wilson took office on the principle that only a Labour government could come to a rational deal with...