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Already in the U.S., automated tool lines can produce an entire automobile without a single worker, and control computers can make decisions in one three-billionth of a second. To gasps from the audience, Wilson turned on the trade union leaders who have tried to prevent automation: "We have no room for Luddites in the Labor Party."* The answer, he declared, is not to thwart technological progress but to keep pace with it by providing 10 million new jobs in the next decade. Said he: "These facts put the whole argument about industry and socialism in new perspective."
When Wilson's flat, nasal voice reached the end of his speech, the wildly cheering delegates gave him a standing ovation that lasted nearly two minutes. It was the most successful oration that Wilson had ever made, and one of the most important for the future of the Labor Party.
Up with Growth Stocks. British socialism is more Methodist than Marxist. Its leaders have always had fervent faith that in freedom and social justice Englishmen can build the New Jerusalem of William Blake's vision. It was Britain's hunger for a better-ordered world that swept a Labor government to power in 1945. In the wilderness since 1951, Labor has fought ceaselessly to shape the coherent contemporary philosophy that might earn its passage back to power. It did not succeed because its leaders always came up with dreary, dogmatic formulas that were remote from the everyday lives and problems of the people.
The Labor Party no longer draws its support from cloth-capped workers clamoring to be delivered from the "thralldom of wagedom," as they called it. Its present and potential appeal is to middle-and working-class Britons who are skeptical of socialist dogma and hostile to any radical social experiments that might threaten their living standards. What they desperately want is more and better education, housing, hospitals and highways, and they fault the Conservative government for not meeting or even fully grasping their need. As a result, Britain's mood today, said former Labor Prime Minister Clement Attlee, is once more "the spirit of 1945."
Nationalization as a cure-all for Britain's ills is out. What Wilson has in mind is far more selective and would extend state ownership to greener pastures. Pastures, in fact, may well be taken over by the government as part of its program to ease the housing shortage; Labor intends to buy idle building land, at market prices, for new state-owned housing projects. But its biggest prize would be the new products and whole new industries that science and socialism are to create. The state would also control the cadres of scientists and reserves of knowledge that his government would call forth. Wilson says he is content to let established industries "wither away" in private hands. "All he wants," remarked one observer, "is the growth stocks."
Wilson's program for the party made him a hero among Laborites and commanded respectful attention throughout Britain. "I was afraid it wouldn't go over," he confessed afterward. "I am very pleased with its reception."