Word: labouring
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...Scarborough Conference rejected that policy in explicit terms, overruling it by a vote of 3,339,000 to 3,042,000. When it passed the motion of the Transport Workers, a left-wing union led by the voluble Frank Cousin's, Labour in fact committed itself to the rejection of "any defense policy based on the threat or use of strategic or tactical nuclear weapons...
Until now, Labour's official policy on defense has been sharply defined by the Party's most powerful organs: the National Executive Committee, the Trades Union Conference General Council, and the Parliamentary Party headed by Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell himself was largely responsible for this definition, which was that Britain should have no independent nuclear deterrent but should nonetheless fulfill her military obligations to her allies...
...atomic weapons into an acceptance of this line. Despite the conference's acceptance of the Cousins Policy, though the majority of Englishmen have never supported such thinking, nor are they ever likely to. The conference may have gone over to unilateralism, as the London Times remarked, but the Labour movement...
Understandably frightened at the thought of an Opposition completely unable to oppose, Gaitskell is trying to solidify the authority of the Parliamentary Party--the Labour M.P.'s--over the conference. Attempting to reconvert the regenerate, he spoke last week with an eloquence that Cousins is unlikely to forget. "There are some of us," he said, "who will fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love, to bring back its sanity and honesty and dignity so that our party with its great past may retain its glory and its greatness...
...trouble with all this is that the Labour Party's Constitution is far too democratic to permit any such assertion of authority. "The Parliamentary Party," it states emphatically, "could not long remain at logger-heads with the annual party conference without disrupting the party," the implication being that unlike its Conservative counterpart, the Labour front bench may not dictate to the conference. Thus, to save his party from its first serious split, Gaitskell must convince next year's conference to accept a series of constitutional reforms...