Book Review - Harold Wilson

Book Review - Harold Wilson

By Ben Pimlott

Defining a man who has been labelled by contemporaries as well as political scholars as a particularly enigmatic, controversial and mysterious character was never going to be an easy task. Harold Wilson, a humble grammar school boy from Yorkshire became Labour leader and later prime minister during a time of great turmoil, both foreign and domestic, for Britain. Wilson stills holds the record for winning most general elections, four in total, and served as prime minister between 1964-70 and 1974-76.

Wilson joined the front benches as a fresh-faced technocrat in the post-war Atlee Shadow Cabinet, and slogged doggedly to prominence in the Labour Party. For more than a decade during the sixties and seventies he shaped the political weather and helped legalize abortion and homosexuality as well as outlawing capital punishment and founding the Open University, yet his name seems curiously omitted from Labour history if you listen to contemporary politicians. The achievements of Clement Atlee are widely celebrated while a former leader who is a lot more controversial than Mr. Wilson, Tony Blair, still looms large in the national debate.

It is a great shame that Mr. Pimlott is no longer with us, his honest and perceptive biography of Wilson paints the most accurate portrait to date. This new edition, published in 2016, features a foreword by Peter Hennessy that places Wilson’s life and works in a contemporary context. Or at least it did until the general election in early June of 2017 upended old truths about the electoral prospects of the Labour Party. I had thought that this review would be easier to write after the general election, instead it became a fiendishly difficult project. Mr. Corbyn’s success, who Mr. Hennessy comprehensibly thrashed in the foreword, while holding Wilson aloft as an example of a past grand master whose deft touch the Islington leftist sorely lacks, could mean that we are facing a watershed moment in British, as well as European, politics. Like Mr. Hennessey I firmly believe that we can learn a lot from Wilson, but perhaps not in the way he thought. To get to the root of this conundrum, and get the measure of this mammoth biography, a brief plunge into British history and the life of Harold Wilson is required.

Harold Wilson was born into a lower middle-class family in Yorkshire in 1916. His father, Herbert, was a chemist and his mother a housewife. The Wilsons were never rich, but through hard work and grit they managed to carve out a moderately prosperous life for themselves. Pimlott notes that Margaret Thatcher, born nine years later, was born too late to remember the harsh economic times that plagued the Wilsons during the post-World War I period. Wilson was a gifted and hardworking young man, and went on to win a scholarship to a grammar school before later attending Jesus College at the prestigious Oxford University. Wilson was only moderately engaged in politics during his studies at University, but later went on to do economic research regarding unemployment and the trade cycle for the progressive economist William Beveridge. During World War II Wilson served as a specialist in Whitehall, and after the war he served in the Atlee government as Secretary for Overseas Trade. Wilson’s background is important because it marks him as perhaps the most economically literate prime minister in British history.

The Atlee postwar Labour government has been widely celebrated by party historians as Labour’s finest hour, when landmark legislation was enacted which led to the creation of the Welfare State, with the NHS as the jewel in the crown. A couple of years in, however, the party leadership was increasingly demoralized and bereft of ideas. When Atlee suggested introducing some modest charges to the NHS to pay for increased military expenditure he soon had a cabinet rebellion on his hands. The Labour party, like most left of center parties in Europe, consists of a diverse coalition of social democrats and democratic socialists. As Pimlott notes repeatedly, the alchemy of the Labour party is especially volatile, some semblance of party unity is often necessary to achieve electoral success, and the task of keeping the party together is a difficult and thankless one. In the cabinet revolt that followed the defense spending row the leader of the Labour left, Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, a coalminer’s son who served as minister of health and had recently spearheaded the creation of the NHS, quit in protest. He received unexpected support from Wilson. Up until now Wilson had been regarded as a policy mandarin, not part of either the Labour left or the right. By swinging to the left to resign with Bevan, Wilson endeared himself to the left wing of the party, but it was widely assumed that his career was over.

This turned out not to be the case. Wilson soon returned to the Shadow Cabinet as the shadow chancellor, now under the leadership of Hugh Gaitskell, a leader who belonged on the right wing of the Labour party. During the following years the Gaitskell right clashed repeatedly with the Bevanite left. Wilson, who was now regarded as a creature of the left, was distrusted by the right wing and Gaitskell regularly plotted do to away with him. Wilson did his best to keep his head down while connecting with the membership rank and file and digging his trench deep in the crimson soil of the party. After Gaitskell passed away due to a sudden illness, Wilson successfully ran for Labour leadership in 1963.

Wilson has consistently been accused of being a tactician with little overall strategy, but during the early sixties he cleverly and consistently maneuvered to position the Labour Party in such a way that it could become the natural party of government. Speaking during his first party conference, Wilson laid out a bold vision where Britain would be modernized in the “white heat of technology.” Wilson’s long-term plan was to link Labour in the minds of the electorate with modernity, meritocracy and economic planning. The last part of his vision was in vogue at the time, when the Soviet Union enjoyed strong growth, and is also a legacy of his earlier mentor William Beveridge. When the 1964 general election dawned, Britain had endured thirteen years of conservative rule. There was a widespread longing for something new, as well as a sense that British industry was becoming obsolete and needed to be modernized. The incumbent Tory prime minister, Lord Alex Douglas Home, who was the last to enjoy the distinction of being elected from the House of Lords, was a soft target for the quick witted, high-tech Wilson. In a commons debate Wilson called the hapless prime minister, who had admitted that he used matchsticks to think through economic problems, “the fourteenth lord Home”. A flabbergasted Douglas Home responded by saying that surely his opponent was the fourteenth Mr. Wilson, a jibe at his rural middle-class background.

Labour won the 1964 election on a promise to fundamentally reform and renew the British economy. After thirteen years in the wilderness, everything seemed to be going Labour’s way. The press liked Wilson, the public liked Wilson, the Labour left were overjoyed that they were no longer out in the cold and the right were in no position to oust him any time soon. The rosy mood of these early days contrast sharply with the bitterness and acrimony that were to haunt the later years of Wilson’s reign, and the disastrous wilderness years Labour endured during the eighties and nineties.

This was largely down to the fact that Wilson promised the world but failed to deliver on his radical promises. During his tenure as prime minister, Wilson had the misfortune of constantly being at the mercy of events outside his control. Britain’s decline from global empire to nation state within Europe meant that the pound was dangerously overvalued, and the economy was severely hamstrung as a result. Costly military bases maintained overseas certainly didn’t help either, even if they kept up the illusion that Britain was still a heavyweight global player.  

Even though a devaluation of the sterling was necessary, Wilson knew that it would be considered a betrayal against the country. Labour was especially vulnerable on this point, since they would be accused by the Tories of being Bolshevik spendthrifts and gravediggers of the empire if they dared to devalue. After a successful snap election in 1966 that increased Labour’s majority, the agony of a devaluation denied grew steadily worse. I have never read any book of any kind, including books about macroeconomic theory, where inflation gets such a prominent role. At the time it was the ghoul whose gnashing teeth that kept Wilson and his Chancellor, James “Jim” Callaghan, awake at night. Devalue and be crucified by press and public, or keep the bloated pound and condemn any dreams about the white heat of technology to the dustbin. Added to this misery were recurring problems with industrial relations, an issue you would think that a Labour government should be able to handle, but apparently, they were not. A white paper on industrial relations labelled In Place of Strife ironically caused massive strife between Wilson and the Unions, with the unfortunate side effect, from Wilson’s perspective, of strengthening Jim Callaghan’s relations with the Unions and making him a dangerous contender for the party leadership.

On the foreign policy front, the Vietnam War was raging in the Far East, and president Johnson, as well as many Tories, consistently pressured Wilson to send British troops to Vietnam. To Wilson’s immense credit he steadfastly refused to give in, and never sent a single British soldier to Vietnam. Even when dealing with a communist insurgency in the lush jungles of the Far East, the need for devaluation reared its ugly head. To keep the British economy above the waterline, Wilson was dependent on American largesse, which meant that he couldn’t condemn the war in public. This in turn meant that he was soon under attack from the student left for being soft on the Vietnam War, a smear that was extremely unfair. Another foreign policy hotspot was Rhodesia, a British colony in Africa that broke away in the 1960s and declared white minority rule. Wilson was equally unwilling to send troops to Rhodesia, a fact he loudly declared out of fear that, you guessed it, would impact on the sterling and lead to runaway inflation. He settled for sanctions instead, which British oil companies deftly bypassed with help from their French colleagues. It is a great shame that Tony Blair didn’t share Wilson’s wisdom in avoiding unwise foreign entanglements.

As the 1960s rolled on and the euphoria of Labour’s 1966 election success wore of, the Wilson administration became increasingly embattled. In 1967 the government finally devalued, a move that helped restore the balance of payments to a surplus two years later. On a televised broadcast shortly before the devaluation, Wilson made a disastrous gaffe when he assured the public that “the pound in your pocket” wouldn’t lose its value. Although he went on later in the speech to say that prices would rise, Wilson’s detractors merrily crowed about the “pound in your pocket” for the rest of his political career. The economy was shaky following devaluation, but started to improve leading up to the 1970 election, one that Labour unexpectedly lost. For Wilson, this was a grave setback, as it is believed he had planned to retire a year or two later and hand over the reins to a chosen successor. Instead he had to lead the Labour party in opposition, at a time when the question of whether or not Britain should join the EU (then called the European Community) was hotly debated. Wilson had tried to join the EU in 1967, but had been rebuffed by French president de Gaulle. The new prime minister, Edward “Ted” Heath finally led Britain into the EU in 1973. The Labour party was dangerously split on the issue of Europe, and it took all of Wilson’s political experience as well as his mastery of the art of managing Labour’s different ideological factions to keep the party together.

Under increasing pressure from militant trade unions, Heath called a general election in 1974, and lost. Wilson was back in office after four years in opposition. Pimlott writes that Wilson was by now a changed man, no longer the energetic modernizer he had been during his first tenure as prime minister. The post 1974 Wilson was content to delegate and let his by now competent and experienced ministers get on with their job. Having been on the front bench almost constantly since 1945, Wilson’s health had started to decline, which was one of the main factors behind his resignation in 1976. He was succeeded by Jim Callaghan, whose popularity plummeted catastrophically during the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent. Callaghan was trounced by Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 election, and Labour spent the next 17 years in the political wilderness, riven by vicious internal strife.

Pimlott, who wrote Harold Wilson in the early nineties, looks back on the Wilson years with a healthy dose of forgiveness for all its shortcomings that the press did not feel at the time his resignation. Having experienced the success of Margaret Thatcher, the failure of Harold Wilson no longer feels so bad, he quotes one contemporary columnist. Unemployment was nearing one million when Wilson left office, which was considered dire at the time, but after Mrs. Thatcher that number had risen to three million. The fact that voters hadn’t rebelled en masse and the Tories were still in power at the time is something Pimlott seems to have found both disappointing and a bit depressing. Only a few years later, however, Labour under Tony Blair would go on to win a landslide victory in 1997, and today Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party looks like it could win a general election if and when Theresa May’s desperate coalition with the DUP collapses.

Harold Wilson is a very fascinating read. Pimlott paints a vivid picture of one of Britain’s great statesmen, as well as the history of the Labour Party and of the country itself. One gripe is that Pimlott assumes everyone is as knowledgeable of Labour Party history and Whitehall bureaucracy as himself, and doesn’t offer any explanations even when one might occasionally be needed. I recon myself to be fairly knowledgeable about British politics, yet I often had to go online and look things up. All in all, Harold Wilson is a fascinating biography, that succeeds in both illuminating the recent past as well as gifting its readers with a better understanding of issues that continue to be highly relevant to contemporary British politics, such as the internal strife of the Labour Party, Britain’s attitude to the EU and its need to find a new role for itself in a post imperial age.