Dan Snow's History Hit - What Could Labour Learn From Harold Wilson?

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

In the week of the Labour Party when polls indicate that the party is likely to form the next government, it seems an opportune moment to examine what lessons they might be able to draw from their own history. But why Harold Wilson?Harold Wilson won four general elections. More than Clement Atlee or Tony Blair. Wilson was a wily, strategic political operator who made some radical changes to the UK including the decriminalisation of homosexuality, legalising abortion, abolishment of the death penalty and confirming the UK's membership of the European Economic Community. He led the country through a number of crises that would be very familiar to us today including industrial action an energy crisis and the pound sterling being under threat. He was also, allegedly, the Queen's favourite Prime Minister.To discuss Wilson's life and leadership Dan is joined by Nick Thomas-Symonds. Nick is a Labour MP and Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade. He is also a writer, barrister and politician and has recently published a biography of Harold Wilson.This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.Complete the survey and you'll be entered into a prize draw to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books- including a signed copy of Dan Snow's 'On This Day in History'.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History at the Labour Party are having their conference here in the UK this week. The Labour Party is in opposition here in the UK if polls are to believe they're likely to form the next government. And that would make Sir Keir Starmer, their leader, a Labour Party election winner. But who is the greatest Labour election winner of all time? Was it Clem Attlee who won his crushing 1945 victory? Tony Blair with his three victories? No, it's none of those folks. It's Harold Wilson. He won four general elections, albeit some of them by a very narrow margin indeed. He was the only British Prime Minister since the Second World War to be Prime Minister on non-consecutive occasions. He was allegedly

the Queen's favourite Prime Minister, curiously. Who was this man and what can the modern Labour Party learn from his career? Well, I've got Nick Thomas-Simmons on the podcast. He is an academic. He's frankly an overachiever. He's an academic. He's a politician. He's a barrister. He is Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade. He's an MP here in the UK and he writes political biographies in his spare time. Look at this guy. He's just written a biography of the unpetulant, the wily, the strategic Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister who confirmed Britain's membership of the European Economic Community in 1975, and he reports about enormous changes in the UK. He decriminalised homosexuality, illegalised abortion and abolished capital

punishment, among other things. It sort of reflected the great societal shift of the 1960s and beyond. A time when the pound sterling is under threat and we have the prospect of strike action, of an energy crisis. Perhaps we need to think a little bit more about what's going on in the 1970s and what we can learn from and avoid. So here to talk about Harold Wilson is Nick Thomas-Simmons. Enjoy. Nick, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Absolute pleasure to join you, Dan. Well, first of all, because the Queen has just died, let's get one thing out of the podcast. Absolute pleasure to join you, Dan. Well, first of all, because the Queen has

just died, let's get one thing out of the way. Was Harold Wilson the Queen's favourite Prime Minister? I think there is certainly a case to be made. Now, Her Late Majesty was always extremely discreet about her personal views, so we'll never know for certain, and that's the way it should be. But there are certainly some pointers. It was only, of course, Winston Churchill and Harold Wilson, upon whom Her Late Majesty bestowed the honour of attending the farewell dinner. But it's also the case that Harold Wilson often had a second weekly audience with Her Late Majesty, the audience with Her Late Majesty. And she is said to have found the way that he always behaved towards her as Prime Minister, consulting her before major decisions, to have been something

very positive. So there are some pointers that he could well have been the favourite. Harold Wilson, to us, can look all black and white, stilted. But talk me through what kind of politician Harold Wilson was as a young politician. How dynamic, how exciting was he and what was his background? So his background is fascinating in terms of shaping the politician that he became. He had a very congregationalist background. He was very religious. You will hear, for example, in his 1962 conference speech talking about the Labour Party as a moral crusade, or it was nothing. He was also a boy scout, so his family had not just this religion but this sense of wanting to put it into practical effect through public service. And the other thing I think really does influence him,

his father was in fact an industrial chemist, worked in the dyestuffs industry, worked in the munitions industry in World War I, but underwent bouts of unemployment. And later, Harold's father, Herbert Wilson, said, blame me for his politics. And those periods of unemployment, when Harold asked his father for money

and there was no money to give profoundly impacted upon him as a politician. He saw unemployment as this moral, social, political evil, high unemployment to be avoided at all costs. So they are, if you like, the tramlines that run through his political career. And whilst in the 1940s, when he was the president of the Board of Trade in Clement Attlee's Labour government, he was a very formal, very staid figure with a tiny moustache. You can still see him on the British Pathé films announcing the end of the wartime controls, the so-called bonfire of controls. But he was also adaptable. And by the 1960s, you get this figure with the popular touch who

probably, in my view, really captured the zeitgeist of that modernity of the 1960s. Here's an interesting background. You touched on it there. It's fascinating. And he's a grammar school boy. He went and read history at Oxford University. There's a touch of the Tony Blair in the way that he comes from quite a conservative, big C background, doesn't he? It comes from a socially conservative background. But in terms of his position as the post-war prime ministers, he's the first of the post-war prime ministers who wasn't privately educated because he was, of course, a grammar school boy. His father moving around for work, he actually ended up, Harold, as the only sixth former at Wirral Grammar. His father had moved to that area for work.

But he was also modern because he was somebody who really did link into that 1960s era. You think of the Beatles, for example, Dan, you know, these working class boys from Liverpool who sang in a different way and had this wonderful popularity were not hidebound by formality. And Harold was very similar, very accessible. He used to stay at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, and people would sing to him, Wilson, yeah, yeah, yeah, after the Beatles song, She Loves You. But he was also, it has to be said, assisted by the Conservatives. And the way that Alec Douglas Hume succeeded Harold Macmillan, because remember, at that point, there wasn't even an election for the leader of the Conservative Party. It was done on the basis of soundings.

And what happens is that Harold Macmillan, from his hospital bed, wants Hume to succeed him. But there's a problem because Hume is hereditary peer. He's, at that point, in the House of Lords. So the only way he can become Prime Minister is to disclaim the peerage and then to win election to the House of Commons, which he does do at Perth and Kinross in November of 1963. But there's a period of about three weeks, believe it or not, where the Prime Minister is neither a member of the Commons nor a member of the Lords.

I mean, imagine that today. And it led Harold to say that the Prime Ministership here is neither a member of the Commons nor a member of the Lords. I mean, imagine that today. And it led Harold to say that the prime ministership here is being decided by an aristocratic cabal. And he wasn't entirely wrong about that. Speaking of aristocratic cabals, Wilson, given unlike Macdonald or even Lloyd George, he didn't have a working class upbringing. And yet he, perhaps more than anybody,

has been tarnished unfairly with rumours of relations with Moscow, being a foreign agent. Can you talk to me about all that? Yeah, so I think Harold Wilson belongs to what I would call the squeezed middle. I think you've got Ramsay Macdonald, who, first Labour Prime Minister, very clearly from that working-class background in Lossiemouth in Scotland, that background of poverty. You've then got Clem Ackley, who of course went to Haleybury Public School, very much from a more upper class type background. So Harold Wilson, I think, of these first three Labour Prime Ministers, what I would describe as being in what Ed Miliband called the squeezed middle.

Now, he was someone who got to where he got to really on his own merits, you know, that great degree, actually changed degree to politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford and got all his alpha marks, was a wartime civil servant. And then you get these rumours about the Russian age and stuff, which in my view is nonsense. But where it comes from are essentially two things. Firstly, when he was Secretary of Overseas Trade and then President of the Board of Trade from 1947 to 51, and he was negotiating with Russia, he was accused in a negotiation with the Soviet Union of somehow revealing the designs for jet engines. They call it the jet engines episode.

But in reality, the situation was that it was what we needed from the Soviet Union were things like grain and food. And what they needed from us was technology. So it was a perfectly rational thing for him to offer to sell jet engines. That was the thing the Soviet Union wanted from us. And secondly, he actually had a job with a timber exporting company called Montague Mayor, which in the 1950s was a great political advantage to him for two reasons. One, he could travel on the international stage and often used to report back to some of those old newspapers like Reynolds News, which of course doesn't exist anymore. But also, and this should not be underestimated, it gave him an office on the Strand in an era when, of course,

MPs struggled for office space in the House of Commons. But the security services at that time, such as the atmosphere of the Cold War, were always interested in people who travelled beyond the Iron Curtain. But there's absolutely nothing to suggest that Tyrell was a Russian spy at all. Those establishment headwinds, was that deliberate? Or was it just a product of hysteria, paranoia during the Cold War by the security service, many of whom, I should point out, appeared to be working for the Soviets themselves? Or was there any truth to it? Or was it just a political attack? This was an age of suspicion. And I actually come to the conclusion in the book that while he was paranoid about the security services, there was good reason to be paranoid. And we think about this now, if you

think back to Spycatcher and Peter Wright, Peter Wright openly on television said that he wanted to bring Harold Wilson down. I'm not suggesting this was a wide plot involving the head of the security services, but there was certainly an element that wanted to do that. And looking at the 1970s as well, there was political motivation against Harold too. So he had every reason to be worried at times and to be suspicious. Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the most successful Labour election winner of all time. More coming up. More coming up. Death by tiger bites.

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the modern world as we assume it to be with our more open, tolerant society than it once was, that's a product of Harold Wilson's administrations. Yes, and these are remarkable changes. As I've already said, Harold was a social conservative, but he saw these reforms as necessary. Many of them took place under Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary. They had backbench origins. I mean, my predecessor, but one, Leo Absey,

sponsored the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexuality. And that's a remarkable thing because prior to that, people couldn't love who they wanted to because they feared the knock on the door from the police. They feared being blackmailed, which was often something that happened to public figures in those days. David Steele's Abortion Act, which of course took away the spectre of backstreet abortions. So Harold had to make sure that his government gave parliamentary time to these things. But it's even wider than that. The Race Relations Act, that actually for the first time outlawed

discrimination on grounds of race on our statute books. Theatre censorship was abolished. Capital punishment abolished. Corporal punishment abolished. Divorce law reform, which meant that people didn't have to stay in loveless marriages. But also, I think people really underestimate his second government as well. Because 1970, Barbara Castle's Equal Pay Act, this was really groundbreaking stuff about men and women treated equally in the first place,

came into effect in 1975. And by which time, Harold was back in power and essentially laid the foundations of modern day employment law, you know, the Health and Safety at Work Act, so people actually can be safe at work. That's Harold's second government. There's also ACAS, the conciliation body that today is the port of call to deal with employment disputes, created by Harold's second government. And things like the Employment Protection Act maternity leave for the first time. These are groundbreaking changes, and that's before we come to the open university in the late 1960s, which I think is a crowning achievement in our politics about lifelong learning for people. You've listed some seismic changes that have affected all of our lives. Why do we not think

of him as a sort of transformational leader like we think of when we look at the Attlee administration? I think it's because of how the 70s Labour government ended. History might be very different if James Callaghan had called an election in October 1978, but as it is, we get what became known as the winter of discontent. And of course, Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, that somehow that meant that what had happened in the 60s and 70s and the post-war consensus as it was known, became completely trashed in historical terms. And therefore, Harold ends up being largely lumped into that and largely forgotten, which I think is a mistake. He won a little bit quite narrowly in some cases, he won four elections. That is remarkable for a Labour leader. What does his success, what do you think it tells today's crop of progressive

politicians? I think there are some profound lessons in Harold's period. Since 1951 so far, Profound lessons in Harold's period. Since 1951 so far, only two Labour leaders have won general elections. Harold Wilson won four, Tony Blair won three. But what Harold was principally about really is a lesson, I think, to us, which is firstly, he looked forward. If you look at 1964, you know, that famous white heat of technology speech in October 1963 about how he was going to harness science with socialism. He looked to the future, very similar in 1974 with the idea of the social contract of political and social reform in exchange for restraint on pay. in exchange for restraint on pay. Again, looking forward. But the second thing is, he offered practical solutions as to how he could make people's everyday lives better.

And I think those two things, looking forward, but practical solutions that people can relate to are both really important for us as we survey the 2020s. It's interesting, isn't it, that Attlee, Blair and Wilson, three successful Labour leaders, none of them are anywhere near the Tory pastiche, the cliché that they're actually secret Marxists who are trying to overturn the British Constitution,

get rid of the monarchy, upend centuries of British tradition. In fact, Attlee carried Churchill's coffin. Wilson was arguably the Queen's favourite Prime Minister. Tony Blair is now lamented by his own party, having not gone far enough. Is there a lesson there? And does it speak to just the difficulty of being in that position of Labour leader? How do you position yourself within kind of the British conversation? leader. How do you position yourself within kind of the British conversation? Well, each of those leaders was making the case for change in Britain. If you look at Clem Attlee's transformational

1945 manifesto and everything that was created after that, you know, the foundations of post-war foreign policy, the welfare state, the NHS. 1964, Harold Wilson was making the case of the 13 wasted Tory years and how he was going to reboot the economy in terms of the white heat of technology, as I've mentioned. 1997, public services on their knees. Tony Barragu in Britain deserves better. deserves better. And of course, what happens when you make those criticisms is the Conservative governments at the time always say, ah, well, you see, the opposition is talking down the country. And of course, we're not talking down the country. We are talking down the Conservative government that is not allowing the country to reach its potential. And it's getting that right. It's pushing back hard. When Conservatives say that you're talking the country down, we potential. And it's getting that right. It's pushing back hard.

When conservatives say that you're talking the country down, we're not at all. We're talking the government of the country down, the conservative government that's letting the country down. I was struck by Keir Starmer and you and senior members of your party during the recent death of the sovereign, because of course, the noisy activists on Twitter, like, here's the opportunity to get rid of the whole lot of bunch of them. And Labour was very robust in its communications around the attachment to a constitutional monarchy going forward in the UK. And I wonder if this is the kind of issue, the kind of booby trap that Wilson would have been used to dealing with. He certainly was't. Harold was very attached to Her Late Majesty the Queen, thoroughly enjoyed the weekly audiences and thoroughly enjoyed drawing on her wisdom. And that's been the case for every single one of the post-war Labour Prime Ministers who had audiences with the late Majesty Queen Elizabeth

II. So I would challenge that interpretation because every single Labour Prime Minister has had this respect for the constitutional monarchy. And indeed, every single one of them, without exception, has benefited from it. And that will be the case for the next Labour Prime Minister as well. And yet it must be so frustrating then. You get hammered constantly by, I mean, this is what opposing parties do to each other, but you get hammered constantly as unpatriotic, insufficiently interested in the great and glorious traditions of Britain. I mean, that's what I find so interesting about centre-left progressive parties in the

modern world, is they can find that sometimes the cliff edge is very difficult to stand on. This is how progressive parties are attacked from the right. And these days, there are a number of different additional arenas to do it in, including social media. But yet when we talk about some great British institutions that we are all attached to, they are Labour creations. The National Health Service, great British institution, Labour creation. NATO, which is the foundation stone of post-war British foreign policy, that's Clem Attlee and Ernie Bevin who created NATO. So sometimes I think on the progressive side of politics, we mustn't be afraid of seizing

these great patriotic traditions as our own, because some of them frankly are. Whenever I get a politician on the podcast, I'm always fascinated to ask what history means to them. You are a historian, you're also a member of parliament and a member of the shadow Labour administration. Is this practical? Is this just exercising your own intellect and right of a general audience? Or do you want practitioners and politicians to take lessons and have their thoughts and policies shaped by what you've written in this book? What I really want to give is a sense of context. And I know, as you know, Dan, history doesn't perfectly repeat itself. But it is true that politicians of the past have faced very, very similar dilemmas.

And so often, I think, we hear this talk, this rhetoric that something's unprecedented or something's completely new. And I often get frustrated looking at it because I can see examples from history where this similar dilemma has presented itself. And whilst, of course, we must always recognise that times have changed and look to the future, the lessons in history are there, but often it's almost as if we choose not to look for them. So go on, Keir Starmer says, I loved your book. That was brilliant. I'm sure you sit down with him all the time, but particularly about the subject of this book and Wilson. What are you telling him? What are the lessons from Harold Wilson to Keir Starman and other progressive politicians in our modern world?

Well, I was lucky enough to have Keir at the launch of the book, which happened before Her Late Majesty passed away. So I know that Keir has been reading the book. And my message, whether it's to Keir or indeed other progressive leaders around the world, is it's about, first of all, being yourself. Wilson had his very distinct personality and the things that people now don't remember him for, but did at the time, you know, the pipe, the Gannix raincoat, the HP sauce, all these things. So it's about, first of all, being you and being authentic to yourself in leadership roles. But secondly, it is about how can I improve the country and do it in a practical sense? And that is exactly what, in my view, Harold Wilson did. Well, thank you very much. That was great. Nick,

what is the name of the book? Tell us all. So it is Harold Wilson, The Winner. It is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. It came out on the 1st of September. And it is now available, complete with Keir Starmer quote on the front cover. Crikey, Nick Thomas-Simmons, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Pleasure. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all work out