Notes on Harold Wilson’s Labour Government 1964-1970

Some years ago I read Clive Ponting’s book Breach of Promise: Labour in Power 1964-1970 (1990). I began to read the rest of Ponting’s work after completing his biography of Churchill – a book of nearly nine hundred pages, but with such literary and analytical merit that I read it with speed and pleasure.¹ Breach of Promise was similarly excellent; the book proves that Harold Wilson’s first Labour government failed to either transform Britain or uphold its own alleged principles. These are the notes I made after reading it:

1. Wilson did not have many convictions & felt most of the population were not interested in politics & simply wanted a competent hand steering the ship.
   • He was impressed by the machinery of Whitehall
   • He was ever more influenced by the conservatism of Whitehall institutions & bureaucracy
2. The government sacrificed its own alleged moral principles:
   • Arms sales to South Africa
   • No strong position against the Vietnam war
   • Co-operating with Shell and BP to undermine the government’s own sanctions against Rhodesia
   • Postponing raising the school leaving age
   • Failure to challenge entrenched wealth with income-based progressive taxation
3. The government was bound by a series of constraints in the early years when it had a majority of just four MPs (1964-1966), but there can be few excuses for its clumsiness in policy making after gaining a majority of one hundred (1966-1970).
4. No radical reforms were implemented except in the field of social policy.
5. Policy could be made by very small groups even within the cabinet e.g. George Brown, James Callaghan & Wilson in the early years. Secret deals e.g. in 1965 with the USA to support the pound had a strong influence on policy.
6. Cabinet was not always a democratic body. Ministers ‘briefed’ the press against each other; use of dirty administrative tricks e.g. leaving people off of the list of papers to be circulated; self-imposed deadlines; barring of discussion of certain topics e.g. devaluation. The government often failed to listen to the concerns of Labour members, ignoring conference decisions, the TUC, & alienating them. Thus Labour membership collapsed by around 50 per cent by the end of the government’s term.
7. Prioritisation of maintaining the value of sterling meant the government prioritised the interests of central banks, the City & international capital over the interests of workers.
8. Economic policy of the exchequer/treasury was highly orthodox, usually deflationary and probably no different to what the Tories would have done in similar situations.
9. Cabinet decisions could be strongly influenced by fears of political manoeuvring on the right & left of the Labour Party. Wilson feared being supplanted by Brown or Callaghan. Principled backbenchers in the PLP were seen as an obstruction to government policy.
10. Wilson saw political issues as a matter of tactical victory & defeat. He tried to outflank the Tories on issues like the European Economic Community, but he was so ‘pragmatic’ that his politics lacked real substance.
11. None of the government’s major reform programmes (the House of Lords, the Land Commission, the Department of Economic Affairs, the National Plan, the Law Commission, etc.) were very successful. Often they were total failures.

1. Unfortunately the biography is now out of print. It should certainly be republished. ↩︎