Icing for Harold's Cake

Just a single seat in Parliament was at stake in the by-elections in Coventry Northwest last week, but to British politicians the contest was pivotal. The Midlands city constituency had been Labor's, and the party's absolute majority in the House of Commons is only one seat. Laborites, moreover, had been quarreling hotly among themselves over a belt-tightening White Paper issued by the government last month, calling for billions of dollars of cuts in public spending (TIME, March 1). That was hardly a prospect to cheer a depressed industrial area like Coventry.

With recent opinion polls showing them pulling ahead of Labor nationally, Tory leaders swung heavy support behind Conservative Candidate Jonathan Guinness, 45, a personable but eccentric right-winger. The effort failed. Laborite Geoffrey Robinson, 36, a Yale-educated former manager of Jaguar Motors, was elected by a comfortable margin of 17,118 votes to 13,424. How did the Labor government manage to remain so strong despite the White Paper? TIME London Bureau Chief Herman Nickel cabled this analysis:

Coming on the eve of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's 60th birthday, the victory at Coventry was icing on his cake. Just a few weeks ago, he was facing incipient revolt from his party's left wing. The White Paper had warned that unchecked public spending would soon gobble up half of an average wage earner's salary in taxes. But to the left, the report's recipe for reducing spending sounded more like a Tory tract than a Labor manifesto. Said former Overseas Aid Minister Judith Hart: "The real struggle is not between the official opposition and the government, but between the Labor government and the Labor Party."

Class Enemies. The revolt was doomed, however, when the unions refused to join. Jack Jones, powerful boss of the huge (1.8 million members) Transport and General Workers Union, denounced those "enemies of the working class" whose disloyalty might topple Wilson and usher in the Tories. The Coventry election, moreover, underlined the distance between the Laborite left and the grass-roots workers it professes to represent. The voters have not clamored, as leftist leaders have, for heavy expenditures to end unemployment. Even with 1.25 million jobless, politicians have found that their constituents complain more about inflation than about unemployment. This could change when benefits, which last for a year, begin to run out, but at least some workers are beginning to understand the connection between excessive government spending, inflation and unemployment.

Last week, for the first time in history, the pound dropped below the $2 mark (to $1.98/9, but the event caused no panic. Confident that his anti-inflation policy has reduced the risks of a run on sterling, and anxious to promote exports (which are helped by a less valuable pound), Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey seemed content to let the marketplace decide for itself what Britain's currency is really worth.

Psychological Clout. With his own rebels under control, Wilson is in no imminent danger from the official opposition, either. Winning Labor's seat in Coventry would have given the Tories considerable psychological clout, but not enough to try for a no-confidence vote that might force Wilson to resign and call for new elections. To swing that, the Tories would have to line up all the votes of the 13 Liberals, eleven Scottish and three Welsh nationalists, and the twelve Ulster M.P.s.

The party that currently most troubles Wilson is the Scottish Nationalists. Since the government's tepid proposals for "devolving" more power to the regions merely fanned the Scots' demands for more self-government, the Nationalists are still gaining support. If an election were held now, concedes a Wilson adviser, Labor would lose as many as 15 of its 41 Scottish seats to the Nationalists; the Scots would then hold the balance of power in Parliament.

That is just one more reason for Wilson to put off elections as long as possible --and if he can avoid a vote of noconfidence, he could wait until 1979. By that time, predicts one of his senior Cabinet members, the recovery of the economy should bring Scottish voters back into the Labor fold. It would not be the first time that the waiting game turned to Harold Wilson's profit.

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