Harold Wilson: The Winner

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He was born in Panteg Hospital and brought up in Blaenavon, where he attended St. Felix R.C. Primary School. He then went to St. Alban’s R.C. High School, Pontypool, at which he later served as a Governor (2007-2015). He read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating in 2001 before working as a Tutor/Lecturer in Politics at his old college (2002-2015), specialising in twentieth-century British government. On 12 February 2021, he was appointed a member of the Privy Council by Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and, in that capacity, signed the Accession document for King Charles III. That said, Thomas-Symonds’ high regard for Wilson is not misplaced. Wilson was prime minister for eight years and won four general elections (in 1964, 1966 and October 1974, although he served as prime minister of a minority government from February 1974). He oversaw the creation of the Open University, his government allowed time for liberal bills in Parliament (most notably on abortion rights and the legalisation of homosexuality), he successfully resisted pressure from the US to send UK troops to Vietnam and he managed to keep the Labour Party together for more than a decade. Not a bad record and one undoubtedly built on his pragmatism and his ability to recognise the strengths in even the most treacherous of colleagues and friends. For all this, Wilson deserves his place on the list of successful Labour leaders alongside Attlee, Tony Blair and maybe even Ramsay MacDonald.

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

In the 1960s and 1970s, Harold Wilson presided over a rare period of Labour dominance, winning four out of the five elections he fought as party leader, though only one – in 1966 – with a working majority.During the latter years of Wilson’s first period as Prime Minister, his authority was tested by Cabinet col­­leagues and press barons alike. But, as Thomas-Symons points out, Wilson exhibited throughout these testing times extraordinary resili­ence and lightness of touch, even in the gravest situations. Although he survived, his attempt to reform the trade unions failed miserably. 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. Further, the Government could be proud of its record on housing, social services, health, and its help for the poorest, promoting equal pay for women and attempting to end the stigma attached to those on state benefits by recognising that the re­­cipients had rights. He read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. graduating in 2001 before working as a Tutor/Lecturer in Politics at his old college, specialising in twentieth-century British government. When he stood down on 16 March 1976, the upwardly mobile Yorkshire lad was the 20th century’s longest-serving prime minister. His resignation came at a time of his own choosing. He had won four general elections, despite coming to power just as the postwar settlement was beginning to collapse, nationally and internationally. As with the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, who also resigned to respectful applause, it was only after Wilson left power that the critics really got to work. And, as with Baldwin, no one has yet managed to retrieve his reputation.

Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick Thomas-Symonds | WHSmith

I know beyond doubt that Williams fed Wilson stories about rightwing dissidents in the parliamentary Labour party plotting his downfall. Although much of the scheming was imaginary, the antagonism was real. It could be traced to his decision in 1960 to challenge Hugh Gaitskell for the Labour leadership at the time when Gaitskell had promised to “fight and fight again to save the party we love” from the suicide of extremism. He lost, but in 1963, after Gaitskell’s death, Wilson took the leadership, and a year later led Labour to victory. And succeed he did. By 1945 he was an MP and by 1947 a Cabinet minister. But already colleagues were looking at him warily. In 1949, he joined two other young Labour ministers, Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay, in advising prime minister Clement Attlee on the matter of if and when to devalue sterling. They claimed that Wilson seemed able to face three ways at once. He insisted he had always believed devaluation to be unavoidable. Perhaps he just didn’t say so. 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? W hen Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister, his longtime friend and ally Barbara Castle wrote in her diary, ‘What exactly was Harold up to? More than had met the eye, I have no doubt.’ No one ever thought that Wilson played things straight. Nevertheless, the author points to the many government reforms that civilised Britain in ways that we now take for granted. Among these were further regulations on racial discrim­­ination, abolition of corporal pun­ishment in prisons, legalising abortion and same-sex relations, reforming divorce laws, and the creation of the Open University.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. 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. 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”. Paradoxically, damage to his reputation came about because of his undying loyalty to his private and personal secretary. The index of The Winner lists 68 references to Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender, twice as many as any cabinet minister. I do not know or wish to discover the nature of the Wilson-Williams relationship, though if pressed I would guess that it was not what the prurient press hoped it to be. Yet for some reason she was allowed to behave in a way that did Wilson great damage. The final blow was the “lavender list” – Wilson’s nominees for dissolution honours. It was written on Lady Falkender’s notepaper, and included names of men Wilson barely knew. Somehow it found its way into the newspapers.