Laboring Along

Healey holds on--just

In the hubbub of Brighton's Old Ship Hotel, the rough-hewn intellectual with the craggy brows celebrated his victory with a tulip of champagne followed by a pint of beer. For Denis Healey, there was symbolism as well as pleasure in the occasion--a signal that he was a man for all tastes. Healey had just been re-elected as the deputy leader of the Labor Party. Meanwhile, at a fish and chips place a few blocks away, Tony Benn, Healey's unsuccessful leftist challenger, sipped Coke from a can and ruminated on the sudden show of vigor from the party's moderates that had given the radicals their first setback in two years.

In itself, Healey's accomplishment last week was hardly a smashing triumph --he won by eight-tenths of 1%--but it was important because the battle for the relatively insignificant post of deputy leader had been so bruising that it threatened to tear the party apart. The moderates were striving to turn back the challenge of the extremists, under Benn's leadership, that had rapidly gained momentum since the party was turned out of power in May 1979. The Bennites want Britain to scrap its nuclear arms, pull out of NATO and nationalize banks and insurance companies. In February, rebelling against the leftward tilt of the party, some of Labor's top leaders bolted to form the Social Democratic Party, which has gained in popularity so rapidly that it has topped both the Labor and Tory parties in recent polls.

To beat Benn, the moderates marshaled the help of powerful trade union barons, who made it clear that they would not tolerate another year of the damaging infighting that has deflected attention from burgeoning unemployment and the anti-union policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government. At the last minute, the moderates also got an unexpected assist from 35 of Benn's fellow leftist M.P.s who do not like his political opportunism. They cast their votes for a dark-horse leftist on the first ballot, then abstained on the crucial second ballot to give Healey the edge. Next day the delegates delivered an even more serious blow to Benn's group. They dumped five members of his camp from the National Executive Committee, which plays the major role in setting party policy.

After his defeat, Benn tried to see the bright side: "It is a victory because from the very beginning right through to the end we have won the argument." But the words rang hollow a few hours later, when the Brighton conference rejected a Benn-backed resolution calling for Britain to pull its troops out of Northern Ireland. Subsequent votes turned down leftist proposals on nationalization and withdrawal from NATO. But a conference vote for unilateral nuclear disarmament fell just short of the two-thirds majority necessary to make it mandatory policy in the party manifesto. Then it voted overwhehningly to pull out of the European Community.

After his victory, Healey appealed for party unity and vowed to develop policies that "will command majority support of the British people." What was important, he told TIME, was that "we have stopped the rot of the attempted takeover of our party by the Trots, Stalinists and loonies who have really nothing in common with Tony Benn--whom I readily agree is sincere--in whose name they act." Said former Prime Minister James Callaghan: "Now we're in business again as a serious alternative to Mrs. Thatcher's awful Conservative government." Party Leader Michael Foot said the first step toward that end would be an "alternative economic strategy," a massive public works program to get Britain's 3 million unemployed back to work.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.