Word: smethwick
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...pound was safe for the moment, but after Christmas came another crisis. In a by-election for the supposedly safe Labor seat of Smethwick, Wilson's close friend and new Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker lost to a Tory. But Wilson was deaf to appeals that he hold a snap national election, arguing that this would undermine all that had been done to defend the pound. In effect, it would mean running out on the U.S. and the other allies who had come to Britain's aid. Wilson prevailed, and the assurance gained from the decision carried over...
...deal lower than it once was. Hence the fact that Labor's immigration policy has risen to plague the party-and particularly Patrick Gordon Walker. Until last October, the placid, pipe-smoking onetime Oxford history don had held a parliamentary seat from the racially mixed factory town of Smethwick. Then, during Britain's general election last October, Gordon Walker suddenly found himself in the middle of an ugly racial campaign conducted by backers of Tory Candidate Peter Griffiths. "If you want a nigger neighbor, vote Labor," read the smears on Smethwick's stone walls. Apparently plenty...
...safe Labor constituency by year's end). Stung by chuckles from the Opposition benches, Wilson looked up from his notes and tore into a vitriolic attack on his predecessor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as well as on Peter Griffiths, the Tory candidate who defeated Gordon Walker at Smethwick, a Midlands industrial suburb that has colored immigrants...
Over a rising storm of protest from the Opposition, Wilson declared that Griffiths had won Smethwick with "an utterly squalid campaign" based on racial prejudice. Charging that the Tories would bear "a lasting brand of shame" for Sir Alec's reluctance to condemn such tactics, Wilson shouted that Griffiths should "serve his term here as a parliamentary leper." After a shocked pause, surging, howling, gesticulating M.P.s from both sides of the House silenced Wilson for 15 tumultuous minutes. Never before had a new Prime Minister stirred such hostility in the Commons. Amid shouts of "Shame!" and "Disgraceful!" 25 Opposition...
...welfare benefits for a sixth of the population. Then, before pie-in-the-sky turns into shillings-and-pence in taxation, Wilson may go back to the people for a less precarious mandate. Meanwhile, four Labor backbenchers filed a tongue-in-cheek motion censuring the Prime Minister for describing Smethwick's M.P. as a "leper." Wilson, they declared, had thus cast "a cruel and unmerited slight on lepers...