last month’s aphorism was that when the Government’s Defence policy collapsed, it was the Opposition which was thrown into confusion. This is not as funny or as paradoxical as it sounds. From the rearmament of West Germany through to “Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent”, official Labour Party orthodoxy has been wedded to the Government’s line. When, at last, the pressure of economic events drove Britain into the divorce court over Blue Streak, it was therefore a simple manoeuvre for the Government to induce the Press to name Mr. Gaitskell as co-respondent.
The point has been driven home more firmly by the new Draft Foreign and Defence Policy which the leadership has been “hammering through”. This latest Appeal to Western Solidarity (. . . “we must remain loyal supporters of NATO”) is done in the best Grand Manner: indeed, the leadership insists upon reaffirming the line of continuity down the years, by reminding us that “in the creation of it (NATO) under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, the Labour Government played a leading role.” This is the same paragraph in which the UN is quietly laid to rest (as being “divided and so unable to guarantee security”, and NATO commended in its place—“not only a military bulwark but a basis from which peaceful co-existence must be negotiated”. The lesson drawn from the break-up of the Summit, the disastrous probing flights, the Japanese enthusiasm at the thought of receiving President Eisenhower and the collapse of the Disarmament Conference, is that we are doing all-right and must goon as before.
The Draft Policy is not the basis for a new course in Labour’s foreign policy: it is a document accommodated to the existing myths, and designed to protect the leadership. Where policy has changed—over the question of Britain’s capacity to be “an independent nuclear power”—it has moved towards unilateralism. Thus Mr. Gaitskell, who argued in March that, “The real case for our having our own independent nuclear weapons is fear of excessive dependence upon the United States”, must have set his seal to that sentence which recognises that “a country of our size cannot remain in any real sense of the word an ‘independent nuclear power’”. At the same time, the Labour Movement is invited to continue to place its trust in the corporate strategy of nuclear deterrence.