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Ever quick to seize on the popular issue, ex-Prime Minister Harold Wilson recently promised the Labor Party Conference that if he became Prime Minister again, he would renegotiate Britain's contract with the Common Market—as if the other members would actually let him. In one of the worst puns of the year, Wilson said that the fanfare of Britain's entry into the market was now drowned out "by the strains of Pompidou and circumstance." The Labor Party's own solution to Britain's problems: what Wilson proudly calls the "most radical" program of nationalization of land and industry since the postwar government of Clement Atlee. The new nationalization would include land for industrial and residential development, the trucking industry, shipbuilders, parts of the drug, machine-tool and construction industries, as well as the new North Sea oil and gas development. Although the new Labor platform is popular with the rank and file, it is clearly the fuzziest scheme for economic change since George McGovern's 1972 welfare program. Roy Jenkins, Wilson's former Chancellor of the Exchequer, expressed doubt about the plan. "It is no good taking over a vast number of industries without knowing how or by whom they will be run," he said. "Let us promise no more than we can do."
Lovable Bloke. The polls show that British voters are dissatisfied with both parties. In the past year, the tiny Liberal Party, led by the effervescent Jeremy Thorpe, has won four out of eight by-elections. Most voters may not know what the Liberals would do to solve their problems, but they seem to prefer untried faces to the old ones that have failed. In Parliament the Conservatives now have 322 seats, Labor 287, and the Liberals 10. Popularity polls, however, now show the three parties with about one-third each. There is a real possibility of an even three-way split in the next general election, within the next 18 months. That would give Britain its first minority government since 1929. "There is a chance, just a slim chance that Labor might manage to sneak back to power on the shoulders of those who think it is somehow safe to vote Liberal," warns Lord Carrington, the Tory chairman. "The fact is that a vote for the Liberal Party is the next worst thing to a vote for Harold Wilson."
Britain's real economic problem may not be its politicians but its lazy and inefficient workers and managers. Many Britons apparently do not care if their country is half as rich as France or Germany—as long as they do not have to work as hard as Frenchmen or Germans. Says Koestler: "The same lovable bloke who risked his life on D-day to keep the country free would not lift a finger at the Ford plant at Dagenham to put the country back on its feet."
* Koestler derives Struthonian from struthio, Latin for ostrich.