WRITTEN at five in the morning, with researchers sent scurrying into Scarborough libraries to check a quotation from Gulliver’s Travels, it stands among the greatest of conference speeches, redefining old socialist values in a furnace of modernity, science and prosperity.“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that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods .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.”
In those confident, uplifting words, Harold Wilson achieved what every successful Labour leader has done on their route to Downing Street: provide a compelling vision of social democracy, and unashamedly position the Labour party on the side of a patriotic British future. As the centenary of his birth falls this week, we can learn much from a prime minister all too often passed over in recent history.
For all Labour’s supposed belief in the “good old cause”, and our historic struggle for social justice, we are bad at celebrating landmarks in office. Instead we talk about betrayal and disappointment; about the socialist revolution cruelly superseded by Westminster fixes. This, in turn, feeds that hostility to office that is such a crippling feature of our party’s psyche.
Within months of the Scarborough speech in 1963, Wilson’s classless appeal, media guile, confident embrace of technology and total contrast to the Tory old guard that had been governing Britain for the previous 13 years had catapulted him into Downing Street.
It was by the slenderest of majorities, but, like the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles’ first LP, that 1964 victory heralded an era ripe with progressive possibility. As the Labour manifesto, Let’s Go with Labour for the New Britain, memorably put it: “The Labour party is offering Britain a new way of life that will stir our hearts, rekindle an authentic patriotic faith in our future and enable our country to re-establish itself as a stable force in the world today for progress, peace and justice.”
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Sadly, it didn’t quite work out. Wilson’s National Plan was killed by the devaluation of sterling; his Department of Economic Affairs, with its promise of coherent economic planning, was neutered by the Treasury; and In Place of Strife, a white paper on curbing the power of the unions, succumbed to “Mr Solomon Binding”, a solemn and binding undertaking by the Trades Union Congress to try to prevent unofficial strikes.
Since then, his administration has had few defenders. To the left Wilson was an apologist for capitalism and a lackey of the Americans; for New Labour, in the words of Tony Blair’s pollster 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 postwar decline until the advent of “the Blessed Margaret”.
“Wilson modernised Britain with laws on abortion, race relations and equal pay
But given the perilous position of the Labour party today, the achievements of Wilson in winning four general elections and forming two governments now seem much more impressive. For Wilson stands unashamedly for the merits of power, rather than the barren impotence of “resolutionary socialism” and the vein of anti-politics that runs through it. And more than that, a strong case should be made for his achievements in office. He oversaw perhaps our most successful assault on inequality, with rising living standards for the poorest and social security support for the neediest. This is, after all, what Labour governments do.
Wilson led the cultural, social and moral modernisation of Britain through a rich harvest of liberal legislation on abortion, marriage, voting rights, homosexuality, race relations and equal pay for women. In the words of the historian Richard Weight: “Social reform not only made Britain a freer and more civilised place in which to live. The cultural matrix of Britishness was fundamentally altered by the relaxation of national mores.”
He elevated education as a lead duty of government with the advent of the Open University, polytechnics and comprehensive schools.
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And he conducted a foreign policy that kept us out of Vietnam while maintaining the special relationship (complete with an independent nuclear deterrent) and, most relevantly of all, fought for Britain’s role in Europe.
It was not a natural fit for Wilson. The prime minister who led the last referendum campaign in favour of Europe was, according to his Downing Street aide Bernard Donoughue, “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.”
A mildly Eurosceptic prime minister, sometimes accused of lacking strong ideological convictions, committed the incoming government to a referendum to neuter hostility from within his party, fighting it on spuriously renegotiated terms with cabinet collective responsibility suspended. It was a referendum campaign designed to keep him in power, his party in one piece and Britain in Europe. Sound familiar?
It would be all too easy to conclude that David Cameron is the heir to Harold Wilson. Easy, but wrong.
For what Wilson had, in contrast to Cameron, was a passionate conviction in social justice and a deep connection with the Labour party’s historic purpose in ending disadvantage and discrimination. It was a conviction born of Huddersfield and Wirral, an upbringing hedged by unemployment and poverty and his experiences during the Second World War and the Attlee government. “Our socialism . . . comes from revolt, revolt against the inequality that is endemic in Tory freedom,” he once argued.
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And so his argument for Europe was essentially a progressive case. He understood that, as Britain withdrew from “east of Suez” and its imperial role in the world, our economic future and ability to fund decent public services lay in partnership with the Continent.
That case needs to be remade today. The current debate between rival members of the 1980s Bullingdon club is being fought out almost entirely on the political right. Rather than more Eton mess, there is a high-wage, high-skill, high-hope vision of the future in Europe that we have not seen in this campaign. Wilson, for all his provincial inheritance, had no time for the “socialism in one country” Bennite view of Britain’s place in the world or the bombast of the old imperial right.
Cameron’s politics render him incapable of making this essential, social democratic argument, and the current Labour leadership is simply absent from the debate.
This referendum, this Labour party and this parliament have much to learn from Wilson. He had a belief in the merits and virtue of power and in Labour as “the natural party of government”; a confidence to junk old dogma and develop a new vision of socialism; and a political acumen that placed the party on the side of aspiration, ambition and a sense of what Britain could and should be.
For too long his skills have been decried as weakness, but as a back-bench Labour MP stuck in opposition in 2016 — troubled about what lies ahead in the next few months of this referendum campaign and next few years of this parliament — I see them only as strengths.
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Tristram Hunt is the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. He will be delivering a lecture on Harold Wilson at the Speaker’s House tomorrow