polls, the Tories are not obviously pressing for a —. = Eran the very near future, This might seem strange but, from : whee Pp “sae of view — which is the political expression of British capita is still much for the Labour Government to do.
oliticians are careful to conceal that there is a po ie ge when it comes to the job of running British sapien but every nav and then one of the more unsubtle Tory spokesmen hs cat out of the bag. One such is Charles Curran, columnist in the London Evening News and former Tory M.P. In an outspoken article on December fi mek 51 ictal is not perfect, There are many drawbacks to having Laour in power, But there is one advantage as well, It is simply this: Labour can do some of the things that need to be done in Britain far more easily than can the Tories. "( My emphasis — CVG).
What are the things which Labour can do so much better than the Tories? Curran makes no bones about it. A Labour Government, according to this spokesman of British capitalism, can attack the workers' standard of living much more ruthlessly than a Tory Government would dare to do! To undermine the welfare state has long been a Tory ambition and in this they have the full support of the international financiers to whom Britain is in pawn, The most effective way of doing this would be to re-introduce the means test. The Tories, writes Curran, were scared of these two words, They dared not tamper with the set-up. This, Curran optimistically hopes, is one of the "sacred cows" which Mr. Wilson is now ready to sacrifice. Next he wants the Government to tackle the Health Service. It was, after all, a Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, who drove through the legiSlation under which the Tories were able to re-impose prescription charges. Now Mr. Curran wants Roy Jenkins to do the same - and to go even further — to impsse a consultation charge whenever a sick person goes ‘tothe doctor, Thirdly, he wants to stop subsidised school meals and here again he would like to see some sort of means test in force. This article reveals the Tory mind, They attack the unemployed, the aged, the sick and the youth. But what is even more revealing is that they confidently expect the Labour Government to do their dirty work for them, To the catalogue above, Curran could have added anti-trade union legislation which no post-war Tory Government would have dared to introduce, Curran concludes that the British people will take these attacks lying down, Here he must be shown to have seriously miscalculated, If some Labour politicians are prepared to sell their political soul to save a dying capitalism, the rank-and-file in the unions, in the Labour Party and the left in Parliament must be prepared to resist and to launch a counter-attack. Britain could be "solvent" almost overnight if the Labour Government had the courage to cut defence expenditure drastically, cash overseas investments and nationalise the import and export trade.