Harold Wilson: The Winner

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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. 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.

the winner’ Harold Wilson Keir Starmer is looking more like ‘the winner’ Harold Wilson

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?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.’ 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.” David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai 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. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

Harold Wilson Lecture 2023 - Harold Wilson: The Winner The Annual Harold Wilson Lecture 2023 - Harold Wilson: The Winner

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. 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”. 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.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.