Fifty Years On III

Rob Philpot writes:

The similarities between Ed Miliband and Harold Wilson, who became prime minister for the first time fifty years ago this week, are not immediately obvious.

While Wilson’s father had been an active Liberal, his Huddersfield upbringing had little in common with the north London childhood, steeped in politics, of the current Labour leader.

Wilson’s studied ‘man of the people’ persona – the Yorkshire accent, Gannex raincoat and pipe, love of HP Sauce, and support for Huddersfield Town – is hardly one shared by Miliband.

And few would currently wager a bet on Miliband challenging Wilson’s record of four general election victories.

Nonetheless, Wilson’s premiership offers some important lessons for Miliband.

When Labour returned to power in October 1964 it did so with a majority of just four. Miliband could face similarly tricky parliamentary arithmetic in six month’s time [but he won't].

With the arrival of fixed-term parliaments, he will not have the luxury afforded Wilson of governing for 18 months before going back to the country and asking for a majority to ‘finish the job’.

But Wilson’s strategy of reassurance during the short parliament of 1964-1966 – the focus on making Labour the ‘natural party of government’ and the determination to reach out to middle-class voters whose support was crucial if a bigger majority was to be attained – is instructive.

It was one which paid rich dividends: fighting on a slogan of ‘you know Labour government works’, Wilson went back to the country in March 1966 and won a majority of 97, secured seats that have only ever fallen to the party in 1945 and under Tony Blair, and, at 48 per cent, polled the party’s second highest ever share of the vote.

As Ben Pimlott suggested, Labour had been rewarded for ‘a sense of movement and freshness, and a reforming zeal limited only by a tight economy and a very tight majority’.

Wilson’s government had ‘ceased to alarm the electorate, yet succeeded in remaining the party of promise’. 

Crucially, he continues, ‘not only had the Labour government handled the economy better than the Tories, its proven ability in this field was the real point of the election.’

Miliband should, though, balance a reassurance strategy with a willingness to take tough decisions early. 

Wilson’s determination that Labour should not again be seen as ‘the party of devaluation’ – he had been central to the debates in Attlee’s cabinet when it decided to devalue in 1949 – led him to postpone that painful but necessary decision for three years.

Devaluing when Labour had first come into office could – with good justification – have been laid at the door of the policies of the outgoing Tory government.

By 1967, Labour was landed with the entire blame. The fallout from that contributed to the party’s defeat in 1970.

Both Wilson and his defenders stressed his ability to hold the Labour party together as one of his great talents.

In 1973, on the 10^th anniversary of his election as Labour leader, he listed ‘keeping the party united’ as one of the three most important achievements of his decade at the top.

This was no mean feat.

As Geoffrey Goodman, a Daily Mirror journalist close to Wilson, has suggested, Labour in the 1960s and 1970s was a ‘disparate and warring coalition of ideas and ambitions’.

While the party has long been free of such deep ideological divisions, Miliband’s skill at preventing the Labour party from engaging in the kind of vicious infighting which accompanied its return to opposition after its defeats in 1951 and 1979 is nonetheless an achievement.

However, while internal party warfare is a sure route to electoral defeat, postponing tough decisions simply because they might provoke a row also has a political cost.

After its defeat in 1979 Labour would pay a heavy price for Wilson’s unwillingness during the early and mid-1970s to heed the warnings of those – such as the party’s national agent, Reg Underhill  – who urged him to confront the growing power of the hard left, including the infiltration of Trotskyites into local constituency parties.

Miliband’s leadership has been marked by a belief that challenging the party and unions smacks of New Labour-like triangulation.

But this determination to preserve unity above all else may rebound upon him if Labour wins next May as the anger of those unprepared for the squeeze on public expenditure his government will have to implement boils over into parliamentary rebellions and public sector strikes.

Wilson’s cabinet was also truly a team of rivals.

Roy Jenkins, Jim Callaghan, George Brown, Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle, Denis Healey, Tony Crosland: this was a government of huge talent, and huge egos.

And just as Miliband has an uneasy relationship with the supporters of his predecessor but one, so Wilson was confronted around his cabinet table by many colleagues who retained an emotional loyalty to his predecessor.

For them, Hugh Gaitskell’s early death had robbed the party of a man who was both more principled and more able than the man who sat before them as prime minister.

Wilson artfully managed and exploited those egos and rivalries, but he rarely showed he was intimidated or threatened by them.

At the height of the government’s unpopularity in 1969, the prime minister skilfully dampened the persistent speculation that he was about to be challenged for the leadership, with a joke at a May Day rally:

‘May I say, for the benefit of those who have been carried away by the gossip of the last few days that I know what’s going on,’ he began before a dramatic pause: ‘I’m going on, and the Labour government’s going on.’

Perhaps his own cultural conservatism led Wilson not to seek over-identification with perhaps the greatest achievement of his governments: the package of liberalising measures which decriminalised homosexuality, scrapped censorship, ended backstreet abortions and abolished capital punishment [that is understating his ambivalence, as Jenkins bitterly pointed out to the end of his days].

Nonetheless, Wilson allowed Jenkins – a man who definitely had his sights on the premiership – a largely free rein at the Home Office, and support at crucial junctures [that is overstating his quiescence, as Jenkins bitterly pointed out to the end of his days].

Similarly, on Labour’s return to power in 1974, Wilson told his new foreign secretary, Jim Callaghan, he would allow him to pursue the policies he though right – except on Israel and South Africa, the former a reflection of the prime minister’s passionate Zionism, the later his abhorrence of apartheid [how Israel has changed].

Wilson’s somewhat middling reputation – historians routinely rank him below the likes of Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Clement Attlee but above Anthony Eden, Ted Heath and John Major – reflects not simply the perception of a man who appeared, as Philip Ziegler put it, to raise ‘expediency to the level of a political philosophy’, but the gnawing sense that this intellectually brilliant and skilled politician should have achieved so much more.

That assessment is perhaps not one shared by the beneficiaries of the race relations or equal pay legislation which passed on Wilson’s watch.

Nor does it fully take account of the skill with which he resisted American pressure to embroil Britain in the Vietnam war.

However, like Miliband, Wilson entertained grand plans to reform fundamentally the British economy, with his determination to break the conservative stranglehold of the Treasury institutionalised in the short-lived Department for Economic Affairs.

It is the gap between those plans and his record into which Wilson’s reputation has fallen.

In the end, it was the creation of the Open University which, above all else, Wilson wished to be remembered for.

It is not an achievement to belittle. Over the past four decades 1.9 million students (many of whom may not otherwise have had the chance to go onto higher education) have studied on its courses.

Politically, moreover, the Open University points to the value of a prime minister being able to lay claim to something very concrete if his or her more grandiose visions prove unrealisable.

It is probably an understatement to suggest that Miliband’s final conference speech before the general election has not captured the mood of the country in quite the way that Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ did in 1963.

That speech symbolised a leader who had an agenda which appeared modern, future-focused and forward-looking.

With just over six months until polling day that, perhaps, is the most important lesson Miliband could learn from Wilson today.