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Harold Wilson and Party Organisation

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Harold Wilson and Party Organisation INTRODUCTION ‘A penny-farthing machine in a jet age’. This was Harold Wilson’s description of the state of Labour party organisation in the mid 1950s and it has been repeated on countless pages ever since without question. The ‘spin’ Wilson placed on the report may have led to a misinterpretation of the competency of Labour’s local organisation. An alternative reading suggests that Wilson conceived the report to play a game of intra-party politics and that significant grassroots innovations in local organisation went unheeded. The first chapter is an examination of the politics of the Wilson report.1 Attention is given to Wilson’s rationale to engage with the topic and the assumptions that historians have made about Labour’s local organisation which, in turn, closed further enquiry on the subject. The Wilson report presented damming evidence that party organisation was in poor shape at the time of the 1955 General Election. Although the report was an accurate assessment of party organisation at that moment in time, and some evidence is given to substantiate the claim. However, it is not true to say that little was done at a local level to ameliorate the ‘problem’ or that party organisation continued to regress and membership continued to decline until the late 1980s. The second chapter will reveal fresh research on new innovative fundraising schemes that took advantage of a change in Britain’s gambling laws. The new ‘Tote’ schemes propelled some Constituency Labour parties (CLPs) into tenfold increases in their income within a two-year period and provided the resources for a programme of modernisation. The third chapter will demonstrate the application of a professional organisation to systems for membership recruitment and retention and, unique for the Labour party, reliable statistics. The Wilson report referred to the experiment in an electoral system developed by the enterprising Reading Labour party. The chapter will show how the ‘Reading’ system was tested and refined without the endorsement of Transport House by party organisers and modernising CLPs who introduced it for the 1959 election. The historiography of the Labour party does little to expand upon the cursory ‘penny- farthing’ quotation frequently cited to describe Labour’s organisation. The general histories tend to include one paragraph with the famous quotation or paraphrase it, to illustrate the parlous state of Labour’s organisation.2 This tendency is not confined to historians; political scientists such as Robert McKenzie did the same.3 Marxist commentators disregard the Wilson report completely, Labour’s failure in the 1950s, argue Coates or Miliband, was its reluctance to fight for a bold socialist programme.4 Party finance has received little attention and the contemporaneous study on trade unions by Martin Harrison includes a valuable section on this subject.5 The evaluation of the influence of trade union sponsorship on local parties and those parties who opted to pursue independent fundraising as shown in chapter two suggest an interesting area of further research. After Labour’s defeat in 1959, it was fashionable amongst sociologists to argue that Labour’s decline was commensurate with changes in society and affluence factors that the party ignored until after the electoral catastrophe of 1983.6 The most influential work of the period was that of the Labour revisionist Mark Abrams who demonstrated that increased prosperity led to a weakening of working class consciousness that would even threaten the future survival of the party.7 The period studied here was not chosen arbitrarily. In 1955, a new ‘revisionist’ parliamentary leadership came to the fore and the party embarked on a modernisation of its policies and a redefinition of Socialism.8 Party organisation in the aftermath of © Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 1 Wilson, was overshadowed by Hugh Gaitskell’s ascent to the leadership and the battles that ensued over Clause Four and nuclear disarmament. Modernisers believed that CLPs became an irrelevance to the ‘modern’ election campaign. By 1959, the battleground was no longer the doorstep, it was advertising and television.9 The CLPs are a ‘microcosm of the national Labour Party’ suggested Tom Forester and lamented about the dearth of local studies.10 The published work on grassroots activities is limited primarily to a few political scientists working in the 1950s and 1960s.11 One of the first was Jean Blondel’s structural analysis of the Conservative and Labour parties in Reading that also took a historical perspective.12 A comprehensive examination of the Newcastle-under-Lyne constituency by Bealey, Blondel and McCann included an extensive study of party members.13 Finally, a multi-party study of a metropolitan area in 1964 can be found in The Battle for Barons Court by Holt and Turner.14 Specific academic local Labour party studies are rare and John Turner’s comparative account of three London CLPs during one year in the early 1960s is itself a unique record for the historian.15 However, all these studies have a central weakness, they observe the object of their study through the lens of national politics and focus on the procedure of the party while often appearing hostile to the subject they studied, the party activist.16 Of interest to the political scientist was the activists’ attitude to nationalisation or nuclear disarmament but provincial parties often had other pressing issues, the Norwich party discussed Suez alongside a debate protesting about ‘cows fouling the highway on Bluebell Road.’17 In the last few years, Lawrence Black and Steven Fielding have breathed new life into the grassroots study of Labour’s recent past. The single study by Black began from the basic premise that the Wilson report was accurate, local parties were in a ‘dilapidated’ condition and thus interprets the material accordingly for the whole 1950s. For example, he cites that the £3,500 mortgage obtained by the Chichester CLP in 1955 to purchase their property only left an annual residual surplus of only £30.18 In chapter two, it is shown that 1955 was one of the worst years for local parties, to afford such a mortgage was a sign of strength not weakness.19 Steven Fielding, who uses a veritable potpourri of local and regional party sources, argues that Labour’s activists enveloped themselves in a cultural and political cocoon that resisted change and modernisation.20 Although this author respects the very wide research Fielding cites and accepts that many activists shared a reluctance to change, nevertheless the argument that they opposed change is inaccurate. For example, Fielding cites Labour’s agents as a motivating force for modernisation, with which the author agrees. However, to claim that ‘by definition…an effective agent would meet local opposition’ because the agent would drive party efficiency and therefore antagonise activists, is untenable.21 It is true that Labour’s agents were often a force for modernisation, as chapters two and three demonstrate, but as employees of the local party they could only have done so by consent. One explanation for the alternative interpretations may be the differentiation in source material between CLPs in London and industrial England chosen by Fielding and those used for this research.22 Psephologists traditionally say in the Nuffield Studies that the activist and the local campaign made little difference to the electoral performance of the party.23 The argument was contested in two minor studies but academic argument supported Butler et.al.24 Only in the 1970s did evidence emerge to challenge the Nuffield position albeit only in relation to local elections.25 Transport House decision makers may have believed that to fully fund the recommendations of the Wilson report would not have been a productive © Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 2 use of resources. Labour did little to alter its centralised strategy and divert resources into local organisation until the early 1990s when two studies made a significant impact on party election strategists which convinced them that investment in local effort would produce a net gain in the number of seats that it could win.26 Seyd and Wheatley, looking at the 1987 and 1992 elections were able to show that membership levels in CLPs had a statistically significant impact on the vote.27 Although far more influential was Denver and Hands examination, again of the 1992 election, that showed that there was a positive relationship between the intensity of the constituency campaign and the result.28 Recent historiography by Steven Fielding and others has set in motion new investigation into Labour’s recent past and in part this dissertation aspires to contribute to the invitation issued by Fielding to generate detailed work from local Labour records.29 Contemporary psephological studies and local archive sources offer a nexus to a wholly different interpretation of events as this dissertation will seek to do with the Wilson report. This author will offer an alternative reading of the Wilson report and contends that it was ostensibly written to further the ambition of Harold Wilson. It was all ‘spin’ and no substance, once complete Wilson dropped the subject and Transport House was able to blur the implementation of the recommendations contained in the report. Transport House in the 1950s and 1960s operated to control the party not to encourage innovation and the projects and experiments conducted by CLPs, some of which, outlined in chapters two and three, were never universally adopted. © Christopher Hemming 2002 Page 3 CHAPTER ONE POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY: HAROLD WILSON AND PARTY ORGANISATION The Labour party approached the 1955 election with considerable complacency.1 The Conservatives had several advantages over Labour and defeat was something of a disappointment but expected.2 The campaign was uninspiring, David Butler described the election as the quietest and ‘least memorable of all post-war contests,’ and local campaigns were equally uneventful.3 After defeat came recrimination.
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