Harold Wilson: The Winner

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verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ When he stood down on 16 March 1976, the upwardly mobile Yorkshire lad was the 20th century’s longest-serving prime minister. His resignation came at a time of his own choosing. He had won four general elections, despite coming to power just as the postwar settlement was beginning to collapse, nationally and internationally. As with the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, who also resigned to respectful applause, it was only after Wilson left power that the critics really got to work. And, as with Baldwin, no one has yet managed to retrieve his reputation. This new biography comes with praise from Sir Keir Starmer. It might teach him how to get to Downing Street, but it will not help him decide what to do if he gets there. Can we imagine such a thing as an age of Wilson? Surely the final quarter of the 20th century belongs to Labour’s nemesis, Margaret Thatcher? Thomas-Symonds, however, would like us to see Wilson’s Britain as a different place to Thatcher’s: a modern country, socially liberal, anti-racist and in Europe. He sets out, in short, the credit side of the Wilson balance sheet.

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David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai W hen Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister, his longtime friend and ally Barbara Castle wrote in her diary, ‘What exactly was Harold up to? More than had met the eye, I have no doubt.’ No one ever thought that Wilson played things straight. Pragmatist or traitor? Party politics is often a squalid business and, as Thomas-Symonds says in one of his episodic attempts to put his central character in a kinder light, no amount of hindsight can help one disentangle advantage-seeking from expediency and the laudable desire for party unity. Yet while it’s hard not to detect snobbery among the party-loving, public-school Gaitskellites towards this lower-middle-class, pipe-smoking northerner who cherished his family, holidayed in the Scilly Isles and liked going to the football, none of his contemporaries, whether on the left or the right of the party, quite trusted him.

And succeed he did. By 1945 he was an MP and by 1947 a Cabinet minister. But already colleagues were looking at him warily. In 1949, he joined two other young Labour ministers, Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay, in advising prime minister Clement Attlee on the matter of if and when to devalue sterling. They claimed that Wilson seemed able to face three ways at once. He insisted he had always believed devaluation to be unavoidable. Perhaps he just didn’t say so. Yet he has never been admitted to Labour’s pantheon of heroes, since he delivered neither socialism nor economic success. On arriving at Downing Street in 1964, he promised a new Britain based on the “white heat” of the technological revolution. Yet what he delivered was not, as one critic put it, a socialist vision of “a more just or a more humane society”, but one of “technocratic privilege, high salaries and early coronary thrombosis”. For a brief period, from 1963, when he became Labour leader, to 1966, when he deflated the economy, Wilson inspired a generation, entranced by his insistence that Labour was a “moral crusade”. But disillusionment was rapid. It took 18 years in opposition, from 1979 to 1997, for Labour to recover; and whereas at the end of the 19th century a Liberal leader had proclaimed “We are all socialists now”, by the end of the 20th, Labour under Blair could regain power only by assuring voters that they were none of them socialists now.

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Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Wilson was also characterised as opportunist for his tergiversations on membership of the European Community – as the EU then was – being against it, from 1961 to 1966; then for it, in the late 1960s; then against it in the early 1970s; then for it again when in office for the second time after 1974. On other matters, too, Wilson seemed slippery – for and against further nationalisation, for and against a British independent deterrent, for and against trade union reform, for and against devaluation of the pound and deflation. He appeared not to care where the train was going so long as he was driving it. When Bevan and then Gaitskell died prematurely, Wilson was the unchallenged leadership candidate of the left in a party still dominated by the right. Conveniently, however, the right’s leading candidate was George Brown, an erratic and, it proved, unelectable trade unionist. In 1963, aged forty-six, Wilson became party leader. In the 1960s and 1970s, Harold Wilson presided over a rare period of Labour dominance, winning four out of the five elections he fought as party leader, though only one – in 1966 – with a working majority.Soon his enemies (and his friends) had other grievances. By the late 1940s, Attlee’s government was struggling and exhausted. The 1950 election reduced its majority to five. The young guns were tooling up to fight over the party’s future. In the bitter battle between Gaitskell’s centre-left pragmatists and the missionary socialists led by the father of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, Wilson chose the side of Bevan. In April 1951 he joined Bevan in resigning, a move that astonished his Cabinet colleagues and hastened the end of Attlee’s government. When, three years later, Bevan – a serial resigner – walked out of the Shadow Cabinet over the creation of a NATO equivalent in southeast Asia, Wilson, who had initially sided with Bevan, broke with him and took his place.

Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick Thomas-Symonds review – a

Harold Wilson is the only post-war leader of any party to serve as Britain’s Prime Minister on two separate occasions. In total he won four General Elections, spending nearly eight years in Downing Street. Half a century later, he is still unbeaten, Labour’s greatest ever election winner. How did he do it – and at what cost? The enduring social reforms that distinguished Wilson’s first government came largely through the efforts of his home secretary Roy Jenkins. These included the abolition of capital punishment and corporal punishment in prisons, the enshrining of the right to abortion, the legalisation of homosexual acts and the ending of censorship (though not before Wilson had personally censored parts of a play based on Private Eye’s satirical version of the diaries of his wife, Mary). There was also anti-discrimination and equal-pay legislation. These things transformed life in Britain, but with few was Wilson closely associated. For many on the right of the party, membership of the EEC became a cause to rally around. Edward Heath’s Conservative government successfully negotiated entry, but with the Tories split on the issue, the necessary legislation could only pass with Labour support. Since Wilson had applied for entry on similar terms in 1967, his decision now to oppose it on the grounds that defeating the Tories was ‘the primary purpose of opposition’ caused outrage. Thomas-Symonds’s defence of Wilson’s actions rests on the argument that he needed to maintain party unity. Labour’s official, conference-approved policy was to put the terms of entry to the public at a general election. Until then, Labour MPs were to vote against membership. Nevertheless, Jenkins, then deputy leader, and nearly seventy other Labour MPs defied a three-line whip to help the Tories get the legislation through the Commons. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our

Wilson, as Thomas-Symonds says, was an underestimated social reformer who expanded higher education and the social services, and made Britain a more pleasant place to live in through such measures as outlawing race and sex discrimination, equal pay for women, maternity leave, safety at work and, above all, the Open University, of which he was particularly proud. And he kept Britain out of the Vietnam War. Yet he failed to achieve his central aim of regenerating the British economy. No doubt Wilson’s hopes were always illusory. For even if, as he believed, harnessing socialism to science could raise the growth rate, that would not happen in the lifetime of a single government. Perhaps indeed there is no rapid way of increasing growth, which depends more upon deep-seated cultural factors than on short-term economic policy. When Gaitskell succeeded Attlee as party leader in 1955, the party’s agonising and politically costly divisions appeared to have been settled in favour of the right wing. Wilson concentrated on quietly accruing power within the party, identifying with the left but never totally severing links with the right. This decade saw Wilson at his most attractive. Bevan might have once said of him, ‘All bloody facts. No bloody vision’, but slowly and effectively Wilson began putting forward a prospectus for a modern Britain that avoided old arguments of left and right and was based on planned economic management, a harnessing of new technologies and a cradle-to-grave education system that excluded no one. The best defence of Wilson is that he was a child of his time. If you want to know what a man thinks, Napoleon said, look at what the world was like when he was 20. At the age of 24, Wilson became a wartime civil servant. Like others of his generation, including his great opponent, Edward Heath, he had a deep-seated belief, derived from wartime experience, in the power of government. When, in 1954, Sir Raymond Streat, chair of the Cotton Board, was shown Wilson’s plans for reorganising the industry, he was horrified: “He has a fantastic belief in the power of the government and individual ministers to supervise and decide things for the public good. He seemed to have no conception of what is involved in totalitarianism of this sort.” Meanwhile, in Parliament and beyond, the Labour Party was once again pulling itself apart. Unwisely, Wilson sought a political victory over the Tories by legislating to stop unofficial strikes. The threat of ending the right to free collective bargaining brought trade unionists in Parliament and beyond together in a devastating alliance against Wilson and his ally Barbara Castle that nearly propelled Jim Callaghan into the leadership prematurely. Outside Parliament, trade unions and constituency parties, the twin pillars of the Labour movement, moved leftwards in search of radical alternatives to austerity and pay restraint. Internally divided, the party lost the 1970 election. From university days, Wilson aroused suspicion. Top marks in his finals? He found out what the dons marking the papers wanted and gave it to them. This was Wilson’s first problem: he wanted to succeed just a bit too obviously.