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Home , Aneurin Bevan, Anthony Crosland, George Howarth, Gerald Kaufman, Harold Wilson, Ian Smith (photographer)

The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Parliamentarians on Parliamentarians

Harold Wilson

By Tristram Hunt MP

Let me begin this lecture with ’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 speeches.

‘We are re-defining and we are re-stating our 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that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods … our future lies … in the efforts, the sacrifices, and above all the energies which a free people can mobilise for the future greatness of our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 .

Wilson’s 1964 victory was arrived at by the slenderest of majorities, but like the Lady Chatterley trial and ’s first LP, it heralded an era ripe with progressive possibility. As ’s 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 spelt out in Tony Crosland’s seemed on the verge of implementation.

‘In the event,’ wrote Labour MP turned academic , ‘few modern British governments have disappointed their supporters more thoroughly than his.’ Wilson’s National Plan was killed by the of sterling; his Department of Economic Affairs – and its promise of coherent - was neutered by the Treasury; and the modernisation of Industrial Relations succumbed to Mr Solomon Binding; reform was torpedoed; and the response to ’s declaration of UDI in Southern 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 , 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 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 , 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 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.

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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 – 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 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 , 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, Town

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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 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 . 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 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. The Wilson family was, in the words of his authorised biographer, ‘low church, low-living, lower middle class and proud of it.’ Yet it was also a fragile existence, as the woollen industry entered upon its post-colonial cycle of decline. Herbert lost his job and the spectre of – ‘which my parents endured with quiet dignity,’ as Harold wrote – was ever present. It affected, as we shall see, Wilson’s sense of political purpose. But it also proved a great blessing as the search for work moved the Wilson family from Yorkshire to the Wirral in 1932 as Herbert took up a job at Brothertons Chemical Works. It was upon the rich, verdant tennis courts of the Wirral peninsula that Harold Wilson first caught sight of Gladys Mary Baldwin. ‘The following weekend I hung up my running shoes and invested fifteen shillings in a tennis racket and another pound in membership of the club. A week later we both laid up our rackets and began “walking out” together.’ Harold told Mary that he was going to marry her – which was forward. He also told her he was going to be Prime Minister – which was, we are led to believe, a less pleasing prospect for the future Mrs Wilson, who would nonetheless prove a source of incredible support, intellectual energy, affection and familial strength during their long and happy marriage.

The other great gift of the Wirral was the local , with its ambitious and well- connected set of teachers who successfully guided the gifted young Wilson into a scholarship in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford. ‘He was always a pre-eminent examination passer,’ noted, sniffily, in his DNB entry on Wilson. ‘But he showed no wide intellectual curiosity. He was superb at the syllabus, but he ranged little outside it.’ Truth be told, Jenkins the Cavalier just had little time for Wilson the Roundhead, the studious undergraduate who veered far away from the Sebastian Flyte world of ‘Brideshead’ Oxford, as well as the Oxford University Labour Club. ‘What I felt I could not stomach was all those Marxist public school products rambling on about the exploited workers and the need for a socialist revolution.’ 4

The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson

In fact, his political awakening emerged after graduation under the tripartite influence of , JM Keynes, and GDH Cole. Following his brilliant First in finals, Wilson was appointed as a research assistant to a huge Beveridge inquiry into unemployment, and sent to scour the labour exchanges. This was followed by some miserable months working alongside Sir William in his Wiltshire cottage. ‘Early rising was not my forte but Beveridge, after a swim in the coldest water I have ever known, kindly awakened me each morning at seven with a cup of tea.’ It would be two hours of work before breakfast and then, later, an evening spent playing bridge with Beveridge and Jennie Mair. ‘Contract was the least of my achievements, and each hand was followed by an acrimonious inquest.’

But under Beveridge’s Cromwellian stewardship, Wilson’s mind was trained and tuned into what we might now term a ‘policy wonk.’ Where Wilson parted company with Beveridge – apart from early morning swims – was over , which was by the mid- 1930s sweeping university faculties. So he joined forces, with his third guru, the economics don and high-profile socialist GDH Cole, to convince Beveridge of the correctness of Keynes’s approach. ‘It was GDH Cole as much as any man who finally pointed me in the direction of the Labour Party … My religious upbringing and practical studies of economics and unemployment combined in one single thought: unemployment was not only a severe fault of government, but it was in some way evil, and an affront to the country it afflicted.’

On the verge of the Second World War, we find Wilson a committed Keynesian, a man who believed in the virtue and efficacy of planning, and someone with a moral passion for social reform. His experiences as a war-time civil servant in the and then as statistical assistant to the Secretary for Mines only cemented his technocratic temperament. But witnessing close up Parliament, Ministerial departments and even international diplomacy also convinced Wilson that he himself could be an actor on the main stage. And by the end of the war he had manoeuvred himself onto the approved list of Labour Party candidates. After flopping in Peterborough, Wilson was selected as the Labour candidate for the half-agricultural and half- overflow seat of .

THE GREASY POLE

Harold Wilson’s journey from newly elected MP in the 1945 Labour landslide to leader of the Party by 1963 constitutes an exemplary account – for us Parliamentarians – of how to climb Disraeli’s ‘greasy pole.’ His journey to the top was assisted by a series of vitally important relationships with the Big Beasts of the Labour movement. Wilson adored Attlee, who swiftly elevated him into a ministerial post in his trademark staccato manner. ‘Forming a government. Want you to be Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Works. will be your Minister. Said you tried to kill him [after Harold gave him a lift in his

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The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson

car], but doesn’t hold it against you. Report to him.’ When the Prime Minister first met Mrs Wilson, the interaction was also pure Attlee. ‘He asked Mary whom she liked in history. She said, knowing that he would not approve, “The romantic ones, Charles II, Rupert of the Rhine, Byron.” His response was: “Bad history, wrong people.”’

Within that astonishingly talented ’45 government, it was Sir who provided the most instructive support, securing Wilson’s swift promotion to Secretary for Overseas Trade. As one of Wilson’s biographers puts it, ‘Cripps’s aloof command of detail, his scientific education and knowledge, his administrative genius, his belief in bureaucracy, his patriotism, his Christianity and even his vegetarianism combined to make what Harold Wilson regarded as the perfect politician.’ Wilson succeeded Cripps as President of the Board of Trade at the age of only 31 and whilst Jenkins dismisses Wilson’s tenure – ‘a competent, rather bureaucratic minister’ –one Tory MP described how, ‘he had never known a President of the Board of Trade with a greater technical grasp of his subject, more verve, more foresight and greater courage.’ In post, Wilson expanded his knowledge of the ; supported the British film industry (wanting more productions shot in the North of ); and embarked upon his celebrated ‘bonfire of controls’ over the bureaucracy and rationing which still governed post-war Britain. Launched around Guy Fawkes night, the initiative and accompanying publicity was the first hint of a previously unknown gift for political showmanship and – in office – the pursuit of what were deemed right-wing policies.

If Cripps and Attlee were making a minister of Wilson – a politician of red boxes, effective decision, and the business of government – there was another force field at work. As soon as Wilson came into contact with Aneurin Bevan – a personality as unlike Wilson as it is possible to imagine - ‘I fell readily under his spell.’ In contrast to the supposedly desiccated politics of , ‘with Anuerin Bevan, a policy decision or political attitude emerged from the inner certainty he derived from the smoky metropolis in the pure Welsh air of the moorlands above Trefil, the Dufryn Valley and the Black Mountains.’ And so, remarkably, when in 1951 Nye Bevan walked out of the government in the row over re-armament and , Wilson joined him.

It marked the start of Labour’s crippling internal strife between the Gaitskell-wing and the Bevanites – with Wilson accused, on the one hand, of being (in Hugh Daltron’s ugly phrase) ‘Nye’s little dog’ and then, later, accused of apostasy by taking Bevan’s place in the . Through endless reshuffles, internal elections, tilts at deputy leader and leader, Wilson laid out the prototype career path of the smart Labour leader which meant that when the moment came – following the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963 – it was a relatively easy final stomp to the summit. In short, he went Left to win the party, convincing and other old allies that the Bevanite cause had triumphed at last, and right to win the country. As Wilson ostentatiously liked to grumble to friends, he ‘was running a Bolshevik revolution with a Tsarist Shadow Cabinet.’ However, the route was not without 6

The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson

cost: many on the Right of the party found it hard fully to trust Wilson after his decade of tacking, and the label ‘careerist’ was rarely far from his critics’ lips.

In that path from ministerial functionary in ’45 to Labour Leader in ’63 (at the age of 46), Wilson had also acquired something else: the attitude, apparatus, and mind-set of a political leader in a media age. He consciously and purposefully developed wit; Parliamentary bravado; a homely style of partisan knock-about; a deft feel for the rhythms of print and broadcast media; an interest in polling and public relations; a political Cabinet of supporters and aides; and a ruthless determination to get into Downing Street.

NEW BRITAIN: SOCIALIST VISION

‘Wilson had barely 20 months as leader of the opposition before he became prime minister. He handled them almost faultlessly.’ Roy Jenkins, as we have seen, was not much given to praising Wilson, but even his hostility could not block out Wilson’s winning Blitzkrieg as party leader. In the run up to the 1964 General Election, Wilson brilliantly managed the two vital tasks of a successful political insurgent: he allied the Labour Party to a new idea of what Britain stood for; and he articulated a popular, novel and relevant vision of social democracy.

In his seminal essay on English Socialism, The Lion and the Unicorn, had called for a Labour Part that put power into the hands of ‘the heirs of Nelson and Cromwell,’ now to be found ‘in the fields and the streets, in the factories and armed forces, in the four ale bar and the suburban back garden.’ These were the ‘wholly necessary people’ – the airmen and mechanics; the scientists and technicians; the chemists and teachers – who could be found in the communities of the future: Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, and Hayes. And Wilson, the child of an industrial chemist, a son of Huddersfield and Wirral, connected with them perfectly.

As his finest biographer, , put it: ‘It was as if there stared, out of the empty grey skies, a reflection of what many people in the early 1960s were seeking: an image, not so much of equality or classlessness, but of self-help, energy, efficiency and hostility to upper- class pretension and privilege. It was an image of virtue, endeavour and just reward.’ Not for Wilson the Trollopian world of MacMillan and Douglas-Home; instead, the anti- Establishment radicalism of That Was The Week That Was. The 1964 Labour Manifesto was entitled, Let’s GO with Labour for the NEW Britain: The Labour party is offering Britain a new way of life that will stir our hearts, re-kindle an authentic patriotic faith in our future,

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The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson

and enable our country to re-establish itself as a stable force in the world today for , peace and justice.

Wilson combined this optimism about a meritocratic, patriotic future with a coherent political philosophy. Since the publication of ’s The Future of Socialism in 1956, the revisionists on the centre-right of the party had junked public ownership for redistribution as the tool of socialism. Labour in government, it was held, should be about promoting equality via progressive taxation; spending the fruits of economic growth to advance social justice. The essential prerequisite was solid economic growth. And in the white heat of technological progress, Wilson thought he had found the elixir for improved productivity, manufacturing exports and material prosperity.

But the impact of the coming technological change was so awesome that it necessitated a high level of planning, control, and oversight (as the Soviets, he liked to suggest, had shown so successfully). Wilson, the wartime statistician and life-long enemy of unemployment, wanted to unleash a new Whitehall of National Plans and Economic Development Committees. ‘It is the choice between the blind imposition of technological advance, with all that means in terms of unemployment, and the conscious, planned, purposive use of scientific progress to provide undreamed of living standards and possibility of leisure.’

This begged the question: who would do the planning? The answer was Orwell’s ‘necessary people.’ Key to the success of Wilson’s election campaign and vision of a New Britain was his relentless criticism of an incompetent Establishment holding the country back – a nation of Gentlemen in a world of Players. Britain was entering the jet-age governed by an out-of- touch aristocracy concerned with property and stocks, not science and industry. They simply did not have the expertise and industriousness needed to reshape Britain. Wilson’s ‘scientific revolution’ meant harnessing talent, employing professionals rather than amateurs, and abolishing the old boys’ network.

REALITY STRIKES

But on the very night Harold Wilson took office in , the Prime Minister was told the country faced a budget deficit of £800 million and the prospect of a sterling crisis. The formative memory of his ministerial career in the Attlee government had been the impact of devaluation on the reputation of the government. Wilson was in no mood to repeat the Labour curse as Prime Minister. So, all those careful plans for 25% economic growth in six years, improved technology, higher production and more exports swiftly fell victim to a never-ending devaluation decision. For the all the aspirations of long-term decision making, far too quickly the Wilson administrations was simply trying to hold on to get by. By , after the second election victory, Crossman was already 8

The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson

grumbling about Wilson: ‘His main aim is to stay in office. That’s the real thing and for that purpose he will use almost any trick or gimmick if he can only do it.’

But, as I suggested at the outset of this lecture, I have come to praise not to bury Harold Wilson on his centenary year. For it is all too easy to demean the rare, elusive and occasionally dubious skills a Prime Minister must deploy in order to sustain a connection with both party and country. Moreover, periods of rapid social and technological change place an enormous pressure on existing electoral coalitions. As David Marquand’s magnificent Progressive Dilemma makes clear the Labour Party, in particular, has always been an uneasy, unresolved and ultimately unfulfilled coalition. On one hand you have the cosmopolitan radicals and liberals agitating for the New Jerusalem. On the other you have a more sceptical and even socially conservative ‘Labourism’ that seeks to represent the bread and butter concerns of the British working class. Harold Wilson sought to balance these two traditions as Labour leader, and you can see this in four crucial areas of achievement.

Prosperity and Equality

For a long time, historians and commentators have liked to frame the Wilson and then Callaghan governments within the idiom of national decline. ; strikes; runs on the pound; crises; public expenditure cuts – this was the dreaded economic landscape of poor monetary policy, weak fiscal discipline and an indulgent approach to industrial relations. But, once again, our contemporary condition begins to shed a different light on the economics of the 1960s and ‘70s. Given our own grim landscape of secular stagnation and steadily deteriorating living standards, suddenly the Wilson years begin to look like an era of much more equitable economic growth and Keynesian good practice. Britain might not have achieved the giddy aspirations of the National Plan, but in terms of Wilson’s own ambition to eliminate joblessness an unemployment rate averaging under 2% is an impressive record. And despite so-called slow growth (relative to our European competitors), the period still left Britons enjoying one of the most sustained (and equally shared) rise in their living standards ever. Wilson put the extra resources into attacking poverty. Family allowances were doubled and pensions boosted. Expenditure on rose from 16% of national wealth to 23% in 1970, health from 3.9% to 4.9% and education from 4.8% to 6.1%. The distribution of net income was evened out due to a progressive tax structure and a shift from indirect to direct taxes. In short, Wilson enhanced the overall living standards of the poorest groups in society and secured a reduction in the level of inequality in society. Which is what, after all, Labour governments do.

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The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson

White Heat

What about the centre-piece of his plans, the ‘white heat’? In policy terms, it had three components. The first was George Brown’s Department of Economic Affairs, to challenge the Treasury’s short-termism. Secondly, the Ministry of Technology to speed the application of new scientific methods to industrial production. And, thirdly, there was Wilson’s most personal of projects, inspired by his visit to the University of ’s extra-mural learning project, the ‘University of the Air.’ The (as it became) was designed, he reflected, with technicians and technologists in mind who had, perhaps, ‘left school at 16 or 17 who, after 2 or 3 years in industry, feel that they could qualify as graduate scientists or technologists.’ , however, was amazed at Wilson’s suggestion ‘that there [are] even housewives who might like to secure qualifications in English literature, geography or history.’ The OU, under Arts Minister Jennie Lee’s deft stewardship, embodied the best of Wilson: innovative; meritocratic; aspirational; and strangely unglamorous. Its location in the new town of seemed perfectly to reflect those ideals.

There is more to add to Wilson’s record in education, when we look at the establishment of vocationally-focused polytechnic colleges; the designation of Educational Priority Areas to tackle low standards in high poverty communities; and, more controversially, Crosland’s circular to give local authorities the power to turn grammars and secondary moderns into comprehensive schools. Not since the war-time Butler Act had a British government concentrated on improving educational provision so determinedly.

Liberal Reform

Wilson, the provincial, socially conservative Non-conformist, was also the overseer of a fundamental reconfiguration of the British people’s character. His time in office was marked by a seismic liberalisation of sexual morality and an assault on private misery. Since the 1950s, Crosland had been arguing that in an age of affluence, gas and water socialism should be accompanied by a drive towards ‘personal freedom, happiness and cultural endeavour.’ He wanted to see ‘brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafés, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places.’ In short, the politics of full enjoyment as much as the politics of full employment.

Wilson appointed Roy Jenkins as and, equally importantly (given the number of Private Members Bills involved), as Leader of the House, in full knowledge of their progressive views. And it is worth reflecting, I think, on just the enormity of in this period: abolition of the death penalty; the 1965 Race

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The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson

Relations Act; the 1967 Family Planning Act; the 1967 Abortion Act; the Sexual Offences Act (legalizing homosexual sex amongst the over-21s); the 1968 Family Law Reform and Representation of the People Act (lowering the age of voting to 18); the 1969 reform Act; the 1970 Matrimonial Property Act; the 1970 Equal Pay Act. Taken together, it was the most significant package of changes on morality for over half a century. In the words of historian Richard Weight, ‘Social reform not only made Britain a freer and more civilized place in which to live. The cultural matrix of Britishness was fundamentally altered by the relaxation of national mores.’

Whilst Harold Wilson himself was probably not over enthusiastic about these reforms, he was always a passionate believer in ending discrimination and inequality. What was more, Wilson was never hemmed in, as his former aide puts it, ‘by the boundaries of his upbringing.’ Rather, he had an acute instinct for the way the world was moving and wanted the Labour Party to help shape it.

Out of Vietnam; Into Europe

At the very highest level, Wilson’s time in office was governed, above all, by the conundrum of how to manage Britain’s ‘east of Suez’ global role – its extensive, lingering post-imperial military responsibilities - in increasingly straightened financial circumstances. The fragility of sterling made the Treasury even more dependent upon the United States for currency support. But the quid pro quo was a persistent demand by Washington for the British government to retain an active international presence. To my mind, this abusive power imbalance, the ‘’ at work, makes Harold Wilson’s repeated refusal of Lyndon Johnson’s request to send the into Vietnam even braver. Wilson valued the Atlantic Alliance, supported NATO and a British nuclear deterrent, and assisted the US with logistical and diplomatic support in South East Asia. However, his response to pressure from the was, in Ben Pimlott’s formulation, ‘to give the Americans everything they wanted, short of what they wanted most, which was British troops in Vietnam.’ Famously, ‘not even a band of bag-pipers.’

At the time, he was castigated by the anti-war Left for not condemning ‘American imperialism.’ But, in light of more recent, shall we say troubled, relationships between Labour Prime Ministers and US Presidents when it comes to military action abroad, Wilson is remembered favourably. As his parliamentary successor in , George Howarth MP has written, local people remember Harold for two reasons above all. ‘First, they invariably cite an example of how, as the local MP, he had been helpful in a tangible way to their family or the local community. Secondly, they express some pride in the fact that, as Prime Minister, he avoided allowing us to be embroiled by America in the war in Vietnam.’

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The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson

If he kept the UK out of Vietnam, he took us back into Europe with a Referendum on EEC membership. Notoriously, Wilson (unlike Jenkins) was not a natural fan of Brussels. In the words of Bernard Donoughue, ‘he was probably mildly anti-European in the sense that he did not like the continental style of life or their politics. The French and southern Europeans appeared particularly alien to him. He disliked their rich food, generally preferring meat and two veg with HP sauce. When he returned from a Paris dinner with the French President in September 1974 suffering from an upset stomach, he readily accepted Marcia [Williams’s] admonition that it was a proper punishment for going abroad.’ He would have preferred that the European Economic Community did not exist. Now that it did, he adjusted to that reality. What was more, as the National Plan stumbled and the scientific revolution stalled, Europe offered an external source of economic dynamism. Wilson’s initial attempt at application had been batted back by General De Gaulle in 1967; he (opportunistically) opposed ’s terms of entry in 1972; and, in the third act, committed the incoming Labour Government of 1974 to a referendum – to neuter hostility from the Labour Left - on spuriously ‘renegotiated’ terms. ‘It soon became clear to me that the objective was to create conditions in which we could stay in,’ noted one of the officials in charge of renegotiations. ‘Wilson was obviously quite determined from the word go to stay in, but he needed a price to pay to satisfy the mood in the Labour Party. The final deal exacted the price. It was not meaningless, but it was fairly cosmetic.’ Sound familiar?

Wilson’s plan for the referendum campaign was to keep his party in power and in one piece and Britain in Europe. His genius was to revive the Ramsay MacDonald precedent of 1932 suspending collective Cabinet responsibility, and allowing Ministers to make the case for and against membership. And, as with the social reform agenda, all his eel-like skills (as termed them), achieved a great outcome of securing Britain’s place in Europe on the back of a popular mandate. Yet Wilson, the proudly English Northerner, the provincial Nonconformist, seemed almost embarrassed by the thumping ‘YES’ victory. He barely campaigned in the Referendum, made a fairly begrudging case about being better off ‘in’ on economic grounds, and (for a politician who adored a public ding-dong) had little appetite for the argument. Nonetheless, his legacy was to make British participation in the European Union permanent - or so we used to think…

POWER AND PURPOSE

Trying to keep a divided party together over Europe; a referendum on a superficial renegotiation; an innate belief in the rightness of his party to govern; a leader sometimes accused of lacking strong ideological conviction – it would be all too easy to conclude this lecture with a suggestion that was the modern heir to Harold Wilson. And wrong. For what Wilson had, in contrast to David Cameron, was a passionate conviction –

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The Speaker’s Lecture Series 2016: Tristram Hunt MP on Harold Wilson

born of Huddersfield and the Wirral; an upbringing hedged by unemployment and poverty; his experiences during World War II and the Attlee government - in social justice and the Labour Party’s historic purpose in ending disadvantage and discrimination. ‘In the part of the world I come from, men are very ruggedly equal,’ he wrote in a 1959 essay. ‘The Yorkshire Socialist revolts from poverty, not so much because it is a product of inefficiency and a badly-run social system, but because it is a crime against God and man. Our socialism … comes from revolt, revolt against the inequality that is endemic in Tory freedom.’

None of this makes his premiership immune to criticism. The psycho-dramas of Downing Street were a relentless drag on the government’s ability to function. He could and should have pressed on with reform and modernisation of the nationalised industries – which would, as a result, be taken in hand by Mrs Thatcher. And, from a Labour perspective, most damagingly of all, his habitual tendency to balance and cajole, avoid confrontation and just ‘keep going on,’ arguably set in train the political fissures which would see, by the early 1980s, radical Bennite Leftism on the one hand and the creation of the SDP on the other.

That said, I maintain that the modern Labour Party has much to learn from Wilson. A belief in the merits and virtue of power – indeed, Labour as ‘the natural party of government.’ A confidence to junk old dogma and develop a new vision of socialism, with a charismatic leader able to sell it to the British public. A political acumen which placed the party on the side of aspiration, ambition and a sense of what Britain could and should be. An ability to ‘do’ politics which kept together a herd of such big political wildebeests as Jenkins, Callaghan, Benn, Williams, Castle and Crosmann.

For far too long these skills have been decried as weakness, but as a back-bench opposition Labour MP stuck in 2016 I can only see them as strengths.

Mr Speaker, Harold Wilson gave women, for the first time, control over their own property and their bodies; he abolished the death penalty; he decriminalised ; he introduced the first race relations Act; and he won the referendum to stay in Europe. Under him we won the Eurovision song contest and the World Cup.

So, it is only right that we have gathered here tonight to celebrate the centenary of Harold Wilson’s birth – and acknowledge his profound contribution to Party, Country, Commonwealth and Parliament.

ENDS

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