Conservative Comeback

For 33 years, while British governments have come and gone. London has staunchly kept the Labor Party in local office. Last week, in a stunning setback for Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Londoners turned out the Laborite majority in the Greater London Council and voted in the Tories.

Conservatives won 82 seats on the council, as against 18 for the Laborites, who had previously held 64 seats. The council is a comparatively new body that governs a region containing almost 9,000,000 people within a 620-sq.-mi. area that stretches as far north as Enfield and as far south as Croydon.

The overwhelming Tory vote in a predominantly urban area of that size partially reflects a working-class protest against wage freezes and other austerity measures imposed by the Wilson government. Without doubt, the elections also gave many Laborites the chance to express their dissatisfaction without having to go so far as to turn Labor out of Parliament. But the fact that the To ries also won control of ten other local councils in last week's voting across the country showed that the shift was as much pro-Tory as it was antiLabor.

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