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The air was atingle in Scarborough last week as 2,000 delegates poured joyously into the windswept seaside resort for the Labor Party's 62nd annual conference. It wasn't just salt they sniffed on the North Sea breeze. From the elegant old clifftop hotels to the pubs where Laborites adjourned for their midmorning pints, Scarborough smelled of victory.
For the first time in their twelve years out of office, the Laborites who filled Scarborough's three-tiered Spa Great Hall were buoyantly aware that all Britain was watching them—and the man who is expected by the majority (56%) of Britons to be their next Prime Minister. The delegates fidgeted impatiently through the first day of ho-hum oratory. Finally, at the stroke of 10 o'clock next morning, Harold Wilson rose to make the keynote speech as the new leader of the Labor Party. For a solid minute, the delegates roared and clapped their approval, while Wilson gazed vacantly over their heads, as if groping for words. His first sentence jabbed to the heart of Britain's troubled mood. Said he:
"There's no more dangerous illusion than the comfortable doctrine that the world owes us a living, that whatever we do, whenever we run into trouble, we can always rely on a special relationship to bail us out. From now on, Britain will have just as much influence in the world as we can earn and can deserve. We have no accumulated reserves on which to live."
Science & Socialism. For nearly an hour, in a mixture of rolling Old Testament exhortation and terse New Frontierese, the greying, round-faced Yorkshireman described a Britain restored to greatness "not by military strength alone" but by mobilizing "all the resources of democratic planning, all the latent and underdeveloped energies and skills of our people." The key, said Wilson, is science. He explained: "The strength, solvency and influence of Britain—which some still think depend on nostalgic illusions or upon nuclear posturings—are going to depend for the remainder of this century on the speed with which we come to terms with the world of change."
A marriage of science and socialism, in Wilson's vision, will ensure accelerated technological progress that can make Britain "the pilot plant of the world." A socialist government will radically step up the training of more scientists, ensure that they are creatively employed, and staunch the "brain drain" to the U.S. by offering them the prestige and prospects for which many of the country's ablest men now cross the Atlantic. With heavy state support for their work and more "purposive use of research," he prophesied, British scientists will yield new products, new laboratories, new industries, new sources of world trade.