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Why Ed Miliband must be like Harold Wilson
Neil Clark: If Ed Miliband can unite Labour as Wilson did, maybe he can also win four general elections
Man of the moment Ed Miliband has had no shortage of advice since he won the Labour leadership contest on Saturday. But if he's really shrewd and wants to re-establish his party as the party of government, he would do well to follow the example of Labour's most successful leader. No, not Tony Blair, but Harold Wilson.
Taking over a dispirited party that had been out of office for 12 years, Wilson made Labour the 'natural party of government' (he won four elections out of the five he contested), without moving to the right, as Tony Blair did, and surrendering all Labour's traditional principles.
Wilson was able to achieve such remarkable success because he realised that party unity was the key to winning elections.
This, as his biographer Philip Ziegler explains, meant taking up policy positions which "almost everyone could accept if not actually share". Wilson stressed that Clause Four - Labour's commitment to public ownership - was "the position of the whole party". On foreign policy he kept Britain in Nato, but refused to send British troops to Vietnam and supported détente with the Soviet Union and the communist countries of eastern Europe.
On Europe, he kept both Labour Europhiles and Eurosceptics happy by expressing his support for the European ideal, but stressing that Britain would only join the EEC if there were adequate safeguards for the Commonwealth and for British agriculture.
His announcement of a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the EEC in 1975 was a classic example of Wilson's brilliant party
management: any other policy would simply have split the party.
Wilson's cabinets and shadow cabinets reflected the broad nature of the Labour movement, including not just social democrats like Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland, but committed socialists like Tony Benn, Barbara Castle and Michael Foot.
Wilson found room for everyone - as Ziegler states: "His preoccupation was that no one - left or right, ideologue or pragmatist - should feel excluded." Right-wingers who feared being marginalised by the advent of Wilson - a man of the left - as party leader were pleasantly surprised by Wilson's approach, while the left were kept happy because their most prominent members were given important cabinet posts.
Wilson forged friendly relationships with prominent business leaders while still keeping the beer and sandwiches ready at Number 10 for the union leaders.
Of course, Wilson had his detractors: as I mentioned in The First Post last week, the far-left, including Ed Miliband's father Ralph, a Marxist academic, believed that he had 'sold out' for failing to condemn US military action in Vietnam and that in office he had not been left-wing enough.
But critically, the vast majority of the left in Britain stayed
onboard: Labour's electoral decline only started after Wilson stepped down as party leader and Prime Minister in 1976. After Wilson left, Labour gradually fell apart - with the left- and right-wings engaging in a brutal civil war which enabled the Conservatives to stay in power for almost 20 years.
Wilson has never got the credit he deserved, but with the passage of time, his achievements in government look even more commendable.
Without having the benefit of North Sea oil revenues, Wilson extended public ownership, abolished prescription charges, established the Open University and passed important legislation outlawing racial and sexual discrimination.
The gap between rich and poor narrowed in the Wilson years and ordinary people saw a significant rise in their living standards.
It will be harder for Ed Miliband to emulate Wilson's achievements today, given the fact that the media is far more right-wing than it was in Wilson's heyday. And despite the ludicrous 'Red Ed' jibes, Miliband is, on several key policy areas, far more to the right than Wilson was, as I highlighted in The First Post last week.
Nevertheless if Miliband can up his game and put together a programme of progressive policies that can unite the vast majority of people in the Labour movement the rewards could be huge.
For that to happen, Miliband needs to 'do a Wilson' and listen to all strands of opinion within his party and not just a narrow right-wing clique who have dominated Labour for far too long and whose pro-privatisation, pro-war views are not shared by the population at large.
To show to Labour traditionalists that the New Labour days really are over, he must find roles for prominent left-wingers like Diane Abbott and John McDonnell. But, in the interests of party unity, he also needs to find suitable positions for those who opposed his candidacy, such as Alan Johnson, the former Home Secretary, who backed Miliband's brother David.
"What a change from Hugh (Gaitskell)! That man knows how to get the best out of people," enthused Tony Benn, on Wilson's leadership skills.
Labour supporters will be hoping that they'll be saying the same thing about Ed Miliband in a few years' time. ·
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"Iraq was wrong" shouts that somehow Afghanistan is right. Ed may have to wait until we are kicked out before it will be politically safe to say that Afghanistan was yet another of Tony's blunders.
Wilson's "management" of the party grew more and more tenuous until he wisely gave way to "make way for a younger man" (Callaghan was, in fact OLDER than Wilson) by which time the party was so polarized that making ANY kind of statement would lead to howls of outrage from one wing of the party of the other. Callaghan's famous 1976 "Ruskin" speech (widely held to have "transformed the future of vocational education") is an example of the dangers: he says almost nothing at all, and when he DOES say something, he immediately contradicts what he's just said. (What REALLY transformed vocational education was the debate brought about by press leaks from the Ministry of Education. The leaks forced the Tories into FORMING a policy!) Wilson's legacy was the Callaghan government - and a party that had passed beyond control.
The best leader labour ever had in my opinion was Calaghan, I will give you an example in the late 70's an argentinian expedition landed on a small island near south georgia and raised their flag without asking us first.
Calaghan sent the Argies a message through diplomatic channels that a small Royal Navy force was on its way to eject the group of climate change liars or whatever brand of nutter they were.
Because he did not publise the threat the Argies had no idea whether or not it was bluff.
Being Argies they didnt want to stay to find out, honour was satisfied without a shot being fired.
Compare that to the foreign office and mi6 cock ups that led to the falklands war
You only have to look at the sixties cartoons of wilson to see what he was famous for.
Of taking out his pipe and hiding behind it when asked embarrassing questions about the vietnam war, a conflict where he had sent elements of the SAS after american pressure had been applied, but didnt even have the guts to tell his defence minister let alone the rest of his cabinet.
Of sucking up to the american president, of sucking up to the KGB, 200 of whom were sent packing by the new government after he lost the 1970 election.
Of his various friendships with rich eastern europeans, like kagan whose cheap coats he modelled, some of whom died in mysterious circumstances.
Seems pretty much like new labour to me.
Ed looks and sounds seriously dull to me. It mat not matter.
Revisionism par excellence.
Wilson was a failure for many of the same reasons you laud him: essentially while elected with a majority of 5 he decided with Callaghan to run a socialist budget in '64 and essentially drilled a hole in the economy. A trade deficit of $800m, handed over by the disastrous previous Tory adminsitration convinced everyone that sterling would come under pressure however he then announced in the budget that year that he was going to increase social benefits and national assistance as well as introduce a capital gains tax. Queue Sterling collapse and the governor of the Bank of England having to raise a gurantee of £3 Billion to prop it up ($45 Billion today!). He then spent the next decade attempting to paper over the cracks in his own party caused with disillusionment in his ability to actually deliver a genuine left wing sweeping reform because of the parlous state of the govt's finances (witness the fairly lowly scrabblings around Steel), which enhanced his existing fairly low reputation as not a man of princple.
Many of the standout achievements of the period stem purely from the energy that Jenkins brought to the table as Home Secretary. Wilson? Not so much.
Excellent article. The New Labour fanatics are all crawling out of the woodwork to tell Miliband that he can only win by being nearly identical to the Tories albeit having a strategy to pick up a few thousand more votes in East Anglia and the Midlands.
I think this is nonsense. Labour will only win if it has a more comprehensive strategy to make optimism and fairness once more an ideal in itself that the whole world can benefit from.