Wednesday 15 October 2014

Fifty Years On I

On today's fiftieth anniversary, remember that it took another General Election before Roy Jenkins could put into practice part, but not all, of his 1959 Penguin Special, The Labour Case.

That had not in any sense been an official party publication, and it had barely been noticed when it had first been published in relation to an Election that in any case Labour lost.

Only for the outlawing of race discrimination (the only part of the programme that was Government policy) and for the abolition of capital punishment had Harold Wilson any enthusiasm. He voted for the rest, when he did, but it would not have been filling parliamentary time if these things had been left purely to him.

He was too busy trying to tackle economic inequality and geopolitical security, the former, at least, including his vigorous campaign against pirate radio. The Minister through whom he pursued that was Tony Benn, and the interest in which they were acting was that of the Musicians' Union.

It is almost never mentioned today, but the Sixties Swingers hated the Labour Party in general and Wilson in particular. They saw it and him as obstacles to something more radical, and were eventually to accrue to Thatcherism or to the ever-more-Thatcherite SDP, followed by Tony Blair, one of their own and not a Labour Party member in those days.

Margaret Thatcher's enthusiasm for every part of the Jenkins Revolution apart from the end of hanging was remarked upon at the time, is defended in her autobiography, and has been given full effect by her and by her successors. 

She legalised abortion up to birth. John Major made divorce legally easier than release from a car hire contract. The two of them abolished most of the restrictions on Sunday trading, in the teeth of the very strong Labour opposition that had prevented Jenkins from attempting to do so.

The present Government has introduced same-sex marriage, which was specifically ruled out by Gordon Brown during the 2010 Election campaign, so that, however many Labour MPs may have voted in favour of it when given the chance by David Cameron, they would have had no such opportunity if their own party had remained in office.

The Conservative Party is already using this as a campaigning point, especially through certain celebrity supporters. Expect to hear a lot more of that between now and May.

The Division Lists of the late 1960s make it obvious that all of the changes would have happened anyway. It mattered not one jot which party was occupying which front bench.

Tellingly, the two about which Wilson had no reservations, racial equality and the abolition of capital punishment, are the two that are no longer controversial within mainstream politics, or in at least one case in anything approaching mainstream society.

Nor would anyone wish to recriminalise male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, but all of that has become mixed up with social, cultural and political phenomena that postdate that decriminalisation. 

No one in 1967, never mind at the time of the Wolfenden Report a full decade earlier, thought of homosexuality as definitive of personal or collective identity; this was not about persons or communities, but about acts. Even Peter Tatchell now says that that might be the true, or at least the lasting, state of affairs after all.

7 comments:

  1. None of the "Private Members Bills" could have passed without the generous Parliamentary time and support the Labour Government gave them. Everyone knows it was all a ruse.

    Private Members Bills were the means by which Labour's sexual and cultural revolutionaries bypassed the electorate by passing revolutionary laws-from divorce to abortion and abolition of capital punishment-that they could never have got past the electorate.

    The reintroduction of the death penalty (abolished by a Private Members Bill never in anyone's manifesto and never properly debated) has always been supported by the great majority of the British people. It still is, according to the latest poll.

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    1. None of that has any bearing on one word of this post. I nearly didn't put it up, for being off-topic.

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    2. They could have got all of those things past the electorate. The number of people in Britain who'd vote against a party just because it has those things in its manifesto is and always has been insignificant.

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    3. It wouldn't have been then. No, it certainly would not have been. But great majorities of MPs from both parties (there were really only two in those days) did vote for these things.

      The number of people who would not vote for a party which whipped its MPs to vote for abortion, especially, might also be a lot larger than you might think.

      That's not why they they don't whip it. But even so.

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    4. Oh, and neither Thatcher's abortion and embryo experimentation legislation, nor Major's divorce legislation, nor their deregulation of Sunday trading, was a Private Member's Bill.

      The first two had free votes, but they were all Government Bills. When Thatcher was temporarily defeated on Sunday trading by the biggest rebellion of her Premiership, then it was exactly that: a rebellion.

      There was a three-line whip for Conservative MPs to vote for it. But there was a three-line whip for Labour MPs to vote against it, as they all did.

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    5. You're right, it would all have happened anyway in the late 60s. It didn't matter which party was in power, party leaders were barely asked about these things. It would still have been done by Jenkins, Steel, Thatcher and the rest.

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    6. Even then, there was the story of Jenkins's supporters canvassing Labour MPs for some office or other, and of an old miner's giving them the doorstep brush-off, "Nah, lad, we're all Labour here."

      He was never really in the Labour Party, or at any rate never really of it. His father, President of the South Wales Miners' Federation and PPS to Attlee, was. But he wasn't. Not really. Not ever.

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