New Statesman & Society leader, 26 May 1991
Tony Blair appears to have learned the bits of Harold Wilson
he needs to emulate. But does he know what he should not copy in power?
The death of Harold Wilson this week has prompted a flood of
commentary on his legacy to British politics – and that is hardly surprising.
Although, as a result of illness, Wilson was not an active player for the last
decade ofhis life, his contribution to British politics in the 30 years
immediately after the second world war was immense.
Consider the achievements.
He won four elections out of five he fought as Labour leader – and he would
have won the fifth, in 1970, but for a combination of bad luck, the political
naivety of chancellor Roy Jenkins and, it has to be said, a dulling of his own
political instincts, brought on in part by several years of vicious party
in-fighting. His first election victory, in 1964, saw Labour winning an
absolute majority in the Commons, ending 13 years of Tory rule – the first and
only time since 1906 that an opposition party has won such a majority against a
Conservative administration. Today, after 16 years that have seen four
consecutive Tory general election victories, this appears even more remarkable
than it did at the time. Then there was the revolution in social legislation in
the 19605 – on abortion, homosexuality, divorce and reduction of the voting age
– and the massive expansion of educational opportunities achieved between 1966
and 1970 (including the creation of the Open University, very much the
brainchild of Wilson and his arts minister, Jennie Lee).
Even on the economic front, once the huge psychological
hurdle of devaluation had been cleared, the record of the 19605 Labour
government is remarkably good: the best sustained growth of any period since
the war, and the transformation of the balance of payments and the budget
deficit. Edward Heath was handed the most favourable set of economic
circumstances of any incoming prime minister this century. In short, the first
Wilson administration bears comparison with the great reforming Labour
government of 1945-51.
And yet, for all this – and despite the warm glow of nostalgia
with which the British view the 19605 – Wilson's reputation has languished. It
is only recently that there has been anything of a revival as time begins to
lend some objectivity to assesments of his
record.
Some of that is down to the persistence of baseless smears
about his private life and his alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union, put
about by paranoiacs on the far right throughout his period in office. But
Wilson hardly helped matters with his dubious choice of friends – to some of
whom he gave peerages and knighthoods – and by his endless opportunist wheeling
and dealing on everything from Vietnam and Rhodesia to trade union policy and
nuclear weapons. Even – particularly – among those on the left who admire his
abilities as a populist electoral politician, there are few who defend the way
in which he governed.
In the run-up to the 1992 general election, when Labour was
well ahead in the opinion polls, the Tories toyed seriously with the idea of
casting Neil Kinnock as a latter-day Wilson in their election propaganda – vigorous,
attractive and even effective in opposition, but a certain slave to
prevarication, procrastination and unprincipled compromise in office. In the
end, the plan was shelved, partly because Kinnock stopped looking quite as
dangerous, but largely because the Tories discovered that many voters didn't
know why they were supposed to be afraid of a new Wilson.
Three years on, memories of the Wilson years are still
hazier – yet Tony Blair looks and sounds more like the Wilson of 1963 than
Kinnock ever did, right down to the rhetoric of modernity at the core ofhis
political message. Blair appears to have learned the bits of Wilson that he
needs to emulate. The big unanswered question is whether he knows what he
should not try to copy when he gets to Number Ten.
