Fewer Liberals In British Poll

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31009, 15 March 1966, Page 17

Fewer Liberals In British Poll

(A Z.P.A. Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, March 14. Nominations opened today for the March 31 British General Election in which more than 1600 candidates will be fighting for 630 seats in the House of Commons. At the last elections 1757 contested the poll. The record of 1868 was set in 1950. The drop in candidates is because of fewer Liberals in the contest.

The Liberal leader, Mr Jo Grimond, yesterday forecast that in spite of the drop his party would poll more than the 3,000,000 votes they won in the 1961 contest. The Liberals had 10 seats in the Parliament dissolved last week. “I feel considerable confidence about our showing at the election,” Mr Grimond told a press conference. “I do not believe that most people want to go back to Tory Government, and also have very little enthusiasm for Labour.” The Prime Minister, Mr Harold Wilson, told a Labour Party rally at York, Yorkshire, last night that he was not going to reply to Conservative “name-calling” in his election campaign. The Conservatives, he said, were name calling because they had no policy to put forward. “We believe in playing the ball and not the man,” the Prime Minister said. ‘Noose’ Trial The Conservative leader, Mr Edward Heath, returned to the Cowley “noose” trial in a press conference at his London home. At a “court” of unionists in the Cowley, Oxfordshire, factory of the British Motor Corporation several workers who did not support an unofficial strike were fined last week by their co-workers sitting in a “trial” at which a noose was suspended from the ceiling. The Conservatives would clean up the situation, said Mr Heath. They were the only party to propose laws to do so. The Conservatives wanted a Government-appointed registrar of trade unions, Gov-ernment-approved union laws, and industrial courts to act if the union laws were broken. Workers would be able to go to the courts if they were locked out and the employers would be able to seek court action against unofficial strikes and restrictive practices. At the Labour rally in York the local candidate, Mr

Alex Lyon, described the scare over the noose trial as a “political gimmick.” Commenting on suggestions that the men responsible should be prosecuted he said: “How are you going to prosecute 300 men and send them all to prison?” What was wrong at Cowley was the wrong attitude of the men working there. The only way to change the attitude was by a carefully-considered approach, which was what the Government was trying to do. Mr Wilson told the rally that the Conservatives could not carry out their promised programme of more houses.

more hospitals, new aircraft carriers for the British Navy, bigger pensions, and so on, and at the same time cut taxation as they claimed to plan to do. ‘Difficult Job' “I am not impugning their honesty,” said the Prime Minister, “only their arithmetic.” The Labour Government had taken unpopular decisions in spite of its very small majority, he said. “We have not solved the problem. We still have a very long way to go and you will not get from me in this election any soft, easy sugges-

tion that there is an easy time ahead. “We have a very difficult job—all of us—to do together. But we have made progress, encouraging progress.” He added: “We are opposed, and bitterly opposed by the very people responsible for the problem we were trying to solve, the very people who in 1964 postponed the election for political purposes, the very people who during the run-up to that postponed election had failed to take the decisions which, if taken in time, would have left us with a much more manageable problem.”