The Speaker's Lecture Series 2016: Parliamentarians on Parliamentarians Harold Wilson by Tristram Hunt MP
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The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Parliamentarians on Parliamentarians Harold Wilson By Tristram Hunt MP Let me begin this lecture with Harold Wilson’s most celebrated oration. Written at five in the morning, pacing his hotel room, researchers sent scurrying across Scarborough libraries to check a quotation from Gulliver’s Travels, it still stands amongst the greatest of Labour Party Conference speeches. ‘We are re-defining and we are re-stating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution,' Wilson told the assembled activists, MPs, and trade unionists, on the eve of the 1964 General Election campaign. ‘The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods … our future lies … in the efforts, the sacrifices, and above all the energies which a free people can mobilise for the future greatness of our country.’ It was a leader’s speech delivered by a man at the helm of a Party that had caught the national mood. The 14th Mr Wilson’s restless modernity, classless patriotism, media guile, and total disconnect from the Tory old guard – with their plus-fours and grouse-moors; Profumo scandals and Establishment cover-ups – catapulted him into Downing Street. Wilson’s 1964 victory was arrived at by the slenderest of majorities, but like the Lady Chatterley trial and The Beatles’s first LP, it heralded an era ripe with progressive possibility. As Tony Benn’s Diaries recalled of the moment, ‘There is all the excitement of a revolutionary movement, with plans for this and that already afoot – just as if we were partisans poised for a victorious assault upon the capital.’ For the Labour Party, in Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ there was finally a compelling vision to take socialism on from the post-war Labourism of the Attlee government. And after the fratricide of the Gaitskellite / Bevanite struggle of the 1950s, here was a leader who commanded the centre ground of both party and country. For a giddy few months, the revisionist programme of social democracy spelt out in Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism seemed on the verge of implementation. ‘In the event,’ wrote Labour MP turned academic David Marquand, ‘few modern British governments have disappointed their supporters more thoroughly than his.’ Wilson’s National Plan was killed by the devaluation of sterling; his Department of Economic Affairs – and its promise of coherent economic planning - was neutered by the Treasury; In Place of Strife and the modernisation of Industrial Relations succumbed to Mr Solomon Binding; House of Lords reform was torpedoed; and the response to Ian Smith’s declaration of UDI in Southern Rhodesia was bungled. The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson Since then, the administration has had few defenders. To the Left, Wilson was an apologist for capitalism, lackey of the Americans, and institutional conservative; for New Labour, in the words of Philip Gould, ‘Wilson failed to modernise Labour, which put the genuine modernisation of Britain beyond his reach’; and for the Right, Wilson was just another step in the epic saga of post-war decline until the advent of ‘the Blessed Margaret’ in 1979. Inevitably, Harold Wilson himself, the self-styled centre forward turned sweeper of two governments, has been held personally responsible for the disappointments and, in the process, become the subject of remarkable personal obloquy (a trend assisted by the number of highly readable diarists and memoir writers in his Cabinets). For Denis Healey, Wilson ‘had no sense of direction, and rarely looked more than a few months ahead. His short-term opportunism, allied with a capacity for self-delusion which made Walter Mitty appear unimaginative, often plunged the government into chaos.’ (Wilson, of course, gave as good as he got. ‘I made Denis Healey Minister of Defence,’ he recalled in his own Memoirs. ‘He is a strange person. When he was at Oxford he was a communist. Then friends took him in hand, sent him to the Rand Corporation, where he was brainwashed and came back very right wing.’) But the most persistent allegation has been that Wilson was a Prime Minister concerned above all with tactical manoeuvres and short-termism. His style of government - the Kitchen Cabinet dominated by the ever forceful Marcia Williams; the ceaseless reshuffles and playing-off of rivals; and the destructive air of paranoia – all too often put at risk the record of government. He was the Leader who became tarnished as much for his Press Lobby aphorism that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ as for the uplifting promise of ‘white heat.’ Kenneth O. Morgan, reflecting on the state of Harold Wilson’s reputation in 1992, wrote: ‘Since Harold Wilson’s stock has plummeted so sharply for so long, one can only suppose that it will someday register an upward movement. It is likely, indeed, probable, that historians will take a more charitable and compassionate view of his career and achievements than do commentators who delight in trampling on a man when he is down.’ Well, I am happy to play that role this evening as we come together to commemorate the centenary of this great Labour Prime Minister’s birth. It was the Victorian historian, JR Seeley, who once suggested that ‘History is past politics, and politics present history.’ The past is always refracted through the present. And given the crushing recent defeats of the contemporary Labour Party, the achievements of Harold Wilson in winning four general elections and forming two governments now seem much more impressive that previous criticisms might suggest. 2 The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson There is also a broader point here for the Labour Party to reflect on. Despite our supposed belief in the importance of ‘the good old cause’ and the ‘line of march,’ despite a culture of historicism, we are very bad at celebrating our landmarks in office. Instead, we rush to talk about betrayal and disappointment; of the socialist revolution cruelly abandoned by Westminster fixes, conveniently scapegoating our leaders as if they were someone transplanted onto the party totally against its settled will. This collective amnesia, in turn, feeds a perverse hostility to power and office which is such a crippling feature of the far-Left within the party. Of our two most successful leaders of modern times – Harold Wilson and Tony Blair – one is patronised and the other reviled. So, to me, Harold Wilson also stands unashamedly for the merits of power: of the meat and drink of progressive politics, rather than the barren self-indulgence of resolutionary socialism. But, more than that, a strong case can be made for his achievements overseeing a Golden Age of capitalism and its assault on inequality; the cultural, social and moral modernisation of Britain; the elevation of education as a lead duty of government; and a foreign policy which kept us out of Vietnam and took us into Europe. My contention is this: that somewhere between the ‘white heat’ of Scarborough and the ‘week in politics’ tactician lies the true record of Wilson. And that the Labour Party must now begin to cherish the legacy of one of its most successful, modernising socialists. WILSON: THE EARLY YEARS AND OXFORD At the heart of it all stands the personality of Harold Wilson himself – that remarkably intelligent, quixotic, supple, industrious, self-made, determined, leader of the Party. The eight year old who had stood on the steps of Downing Street, with a premonition he would be heading back there one day; the 14 year old saved from a typhoid outbreak, prompting his grandfather to suggest he ‘was being saved for something special.’ It is a career of compelling paradoxes. Wilson was the faultless technocrat who would come to be regarded as the archest of political maneuverers’. He was the man who defined the Labour Party’s purpose as ‘a moral mission,’ owing more to Methodism than to Marx, but who would come to be accused of being the most managerialist of PMs. He was the partisan, Bevanite, Left-winger but also an instinctive conservative, with an unbridled admiration for the Queen and Winston Churchill, and the institutions of Oxbridge, Parliament and State. He was the intensely, almost parochially, patriotic Englishman with a deep feel for the British Isles (from Cornwall to the Colne Valley) and the Commonwealth, who would secure our place as part of the European Economic Community. And he was the consciously provincial, pipe-smoking, Coronation Street-watching, Huddersfield Town 3 The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson supporting, beer-drinking everyman - who then oversaw the metropolitan modernity and sexual liberation of the Swinging Sixties. Perhaps that Northern, provincial background is a good place to start. There is a subtly double-edged anecdote, in Wilson’s own memoirs, of an encounter with Aneurin Bevan who wanted to know where Wilson was really from. ‘”I thought,” said Nye, “that you were a Yorkshireman but your Dad has been telling me all about Manchester. Where were you born boy?” With a Yorkshireman’s natural pride, I said, thinking of Sheffield’s steel, “Yorkshiremen are not born; they are forged.” “Forged were you?” said Nye in that musical Welsh lilt of his, “I always thought there was something counterfeit about you!”’ Born on 11 March 1916 and raised in Huddersfield, Wilson wrote that he had ‘a very provincial upbringing.’ His father, Herbert Wilson, was an industrial chemist who worked in the dyestuffs, but more importantly was a central figure in the local Scouts groups and Nonconformist chapels.