The country is facing “a prime minister with little support in the country, the press, or the government”. He survives “only because of the inertia of his party, and the lack of a mechanism for getting rid of him”. Those words could easily describe Keir Starmer. In fact, they were written about Harold Wilson’s position after Labour’s catastrophic local election defeats in May 1968.
Speculation about Starmer’s survival as Prime Minister is rife. Many commentators and MPs have spoken expectantly about the upcoming local elections as delivering the fatal blow. Much the same was said about Harold Wilson in 1968. Then, as now, Labour was at about 20 per cent in the polls. Seven in ten voters said they were dissatisfied with Wilson’s performance as prime minister, the same number recorded against Keir Starmer in the latest YouGov survey. In the upcoming local elections, Labour is fighting for its life in London, expecting wipe-out in the rest of England, desultory defeats in Scotland and Wales and losing control of the devolved government in the latter for the first time.
The 1968 local elections were an appalling disaster for Labour, too. The auguries from Scotland, where voters went to the polls earlier in the week, were not good. Labour lost control of Glasgow, and the SNP won the most votes in the city. Labour came third in Edinburgh, its vote share less than half from just two years earlier. When the English went to vote, the results were “far worse than anyone contemplated”. Employment Minister Barbara Castle wrote: “The whole country seems to have gone berserk”. Labour lost northern heartlands like Sheffield and Sunderland for the first time in decades. In the Midlands, the picture was even bleaker. The Conservatives won every seat in Leicester. Labour failed to win a single seat in Birmingham. In London, the defeat was on a grand scale. Labour lost control in every borough except for three: Southwark, Tower Hamlets, and Barking. Labour went from having over 1,000 councillors in London to just 350. In Lambeth, Labour lost 57 out of 60 seats. They were Labour’s worst election results since Labour was at the helm in the Great Depression.
The previous year had been one of the most difficult that any government had faced. At this time, currencies were convertible with gold. Speculators took advantage of what they believed to be an artificially high fixed exchange rate between the pound, the US dollar, and gold. The consequence was a rapid depletion of reserves to maintain the price of sterling. Having promised not to devalue the pound, the government was forced to do so. The Chancellor Jim Callaghan was removed from post. But the problems continued. Speculators believed that the dollar was overvalued. “Gold attacks” became an increasing problem for the London Gold Pool, where currencies pegged to the dollar held gold reserves. On the evening of Thursday, 14 March 1968, a request came from Washington that the British government shut down the London gold markets.
In the middle of the night, the prime minister rushed to Buckingham Palace to request that the Queen declare a Friday bank holiday. He was joined by the chancellor, Roy Jenkins, and Peter Shore, who headed Wilson’s Department for Economic Affairs. Conspicuous in his absence was George Brown, deputy leader and foreign secretary. By that time in the evening, Brown was likely to have been in too perilously inebriated a condition to have an audience with the Queen. The fact that he had unbuttoned the back of Barbara Castle’s blouse in the voting lobbies earlier in the evening (“he grinned like a school boy”, she wrote in her diary) provided some evidence of this assessment. But, so furious was Brown at Wilson’s snub that he resigned from the Cabinet. Brown would never return to the frontbenches, although he remained deputy leader from the backbenches until he lost his seat in 1970.
Within six months, Wilson had lost his chancellor to devaluation and his foreign secretary, indirectly, to the gold crisis. The local elections were just six weeks away. Then, just over a fortnight before the election, the shadow defence secretary, Enoch Powell, gave a speech to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham where he claimed that Britain was being changed fundamentally by non-white immigration. In typical fashion for the former Classics professor, Powell quoted the warning in the Aeneid of “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. Powell also quoted from a constituent who luridly described that within two decades, Britain would be a country where “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. Two days later, the Race Relations Bill had its Second Reading in the House of Commons. That day, over 1,000 London dockers went on an unofficial strike to show solidarity with Powell and to condemn the writing of racial equality into British law. In 1889, the Great Dock Strike had been one of the contributing moments of working-class organisation that led to the creation of the Labour Party. Now, the dockers were mobilising against the Labour government to support a right-wing politician over the issue of immigration and racial change.
By the time voters went to the polls in May 1968, it seemed like almost everyone had reason to be unhappy with the Wilson government. Like Keir Starmer today, there seemed to be no one either within or outside the Labour Party who could be said to be truly enthused by Harold Wilson’s leadership. He seemed to have enemies on all sides, making course correction by leaning towards one or the other part of his political coalition unhelpful. The Labour left were angry with the prime minister for continuing to supply arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Wilson, who recognised the economic importance of the arms deals, lamely tried to distinguish between weapons that would be used for South Africa’s external defence versus those which would be used for internal repression. Although Harold Wilson is now praised as the prime minister who kept Britain out of Vietnam, at the time the Left were not satisfied with this position. They wanted the prime minister to use British influence to pressure the American president to end the war. Wilson, in their eyes, looked weak, with Britain sitting on the sidelines during a terrible and unnecessary war. The Labour right were displeased that Wilson had been unable to secure entry into the Common Market, perhaps recognising that the application had been mostly a form of political theatre to appease the minority of pro-Europeans in the party. The trade unions were impatient with the government’s freeze on wage increases to battle inflation.
Outside of the Labour Party, the Liberal and Conservative right hated Wilson, too. Middle-class aspirational voters who wished to show their upward mobility through consumption were hit by new taxes in the 1968 budget. The chancellor had increased the Purchase Tax rate on certain goods, mainly to discourage imports, but it had the effect of increasing the costs of household appliances and cars. Business leaders and the wealthy loathed the government. The government’s use of price controls to support working-class families in the face of inflation was radical but ate into industrialists’ profits. The standard rate of income tax was over 41 per cent and a surtax was placed on higher incomes that could reach as high as a 90 per cent marginal rate. When it came to unearned income, the top rate could reach almost 100 per cent. Wilson’s biographer, Ben Pimlott, observed that there was a “pervasive” view that Wilson was “weak, two-faced, morally corrupt”. He was charged with having “reversed or abandoned” every pledge he made when Labour was first elected. Wilson was subjected to withering critique in Private Eye, which wrote in 1968: “Posing variously as an economist, a socialist, a pragmatist, and a statesman [Wilson] has conned and conned again until the public has ceased to care. Never before has such a gigantic hoax been perpetuated by such a small man… To call this man a liar is to flatter him.”
Speculation over the survival of Harold Wilson in Downing Street was rife. Today, Keir Starmer can be removed by 20 per cent of his MPs nominating a rival candidate, so long as the wider party membership are prepared to vote for that challenger. In the 1960s, there was no such mechanism to remove the leader. He could only be challenged once a year at the annual meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the late autumn. Backbenchers hoped they could force Wilson out through informal means. Patrick Gordon Walker, the right-wing Labour MP whom Wilson had sacked as education secretary in April 1968, then set about collecting names of MPs prepared to go on record supporting an alternative to the prime minister. He was said to have found 120 MPs, including the chairman of the PLP. The new Labour MP David Owen, never short of confidence, wrote in early May: “With a little luck we might be able to oust the prime minister in about June.” The missing ingredient was a senior MP willing to set off the process of bringing down Wilson. A cabinet minister is a far more effective grim reaper than a backbench MP. In their moments of peril, Theresa May and Boris Johnson won the backing of their backbenchers, but it was their cabinet ministers who forced them out. The prime minister knew he was under enormous pressure.
Tony Benn wrote in his diary that Wilson “just lives in fear of the day when four senior ministers will come to him and say they won’t serve under his leadership”. At one cabinet meeting, Wilson shot off a broadside saying he knew that someone around the table wanted “to sit in my place”. But, Wilson warned that “life will be as intolerable for him as it is for me”. The man to whom Wilson was elliptically speaking was his Chancellor, Roy Jenkins. The other rivals for the top job were out of contention. Callaghan has sullied his reputation with devaluation the previous year. George Brown, although still deputy leader, sat on the backbenches, having won himself no favours in his hasty resignation two months earlier. While some raised the possibility of Barbara Castle, she was discounted by close colleagues due to her gender and she privately held misgivings about her ability. Wilson tried to placate Jenkins in June 1968 by directly raising the matter of the party leadership with him in a private conversation. Wilson assured Jenkins that he would not stay “too long” as party leader, implying that if Jenkins just waited a bit longer, then he wouldn’t need to call for Wilson’s resignation and could become leader in a more salubrious context. Of course, Wilson did not hold true to his word, and he remained party leader for another 8 years. Jenkins had the premiership in his grasp, and he let it slip away. He feared the coup failing, costing him his position as chancellor and possibly a place in the cabinet altogether. Jenkins told his old friend and rival Denis Healey: “I will never be caught with a dagger in my hand unless it is already smoking with my enemy’s blood.”
The parallels with today are clear. Like George Brown, Labour’s erstwhile deputy leader Angela Rayner sits on the backbenches, still damaged from her resignation last year. Just as Wilson’s most dangerous rival, Jim Callaghan, was temporarily politically indisposed, the man who could most easily defeat Starmer in a leadership contest – Andy Burnham – cannot stand against him. Wes Streeting, who has a clearer path now than he may ever again, is under a shadow for his relationship with the disgraced Peter Mandelson. Ed Miliband could plausibly take down Starmer, but having already served as leader and lost a general election, there are serious doubts about him, too. Bill Rodgers, one of the Labour right MPs who wanted Wilson gone, later recalled: “We discussed the mechanics of how he might be replaced endlessly.” Yet, when push came to shove, the only person who could really get rid of Wilson lost his nerve. Jenkins’s view was that if he is to go for the top job, he must not miss. The same is true today. Keir Starmer has shown himself to be ruthless to his internal adversaries, and it is likely that the challenger would find himself or herself exiled to the backbenches should a challenge fail.
But, if no one moves against Starmer after the local elections, they may miss their moment, and Keir Starmer, like Harold Wilson, could wriggle away. With Wilson achieving his great escape, by the time that the PLP met in November 1968 for its annual general meeting, he had steadied the ship and the polls were improving for the party. He would eventually, lead Labour to two more general election victories (and one defeat) in the coming years. But, the local elections had profound long-term consequences for the internal political composition of the Labour Party. By clearing out longstanding Labour councillors across the country, they precipitated a generational, ideological, and class shift in the party’s local government representation.
In 1968, just as Labour was teetering on the edge of annihilation in his home borough of Lambeth, Ken Livingstone joined the Labour Party. He attended his first Labour meeting at the back of a member’s house in Norwood. There were about a dozen people, and everyone except Livingstone was a pensioner. Within four months, Livingstone was a delegate to the General Management Committee, the Executive Committee, and the Local Government Committee. He became constituency secretary. He was soon drawing up Labour’s local government manifesto in Lambeth.
That year, Jeremy Corbyn was living in Jamaica, and he would spend the next few years bouncing around Latin America, staying in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. However, on his return in the early 1970s, he became active in Labour politics, supporting the left’s alternative programme and successfully ensuring that a commitment to a “fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. He was himself elected a Labour councillor in Haringey in 1973 once Labour’s position in local government improved.
Labour’s membership numbers have taken a nosedive since Keir Starmer became leader. After the local elections, no doubt more will leave. It may be the case that some of the Labour councillors who lose their seats will be fed up and disengage from politics or look to alternative parties. But, those who stay – and those who join – at Labour’s periods of electoral humiliation are those who will set the direction of travel for the party in the years ahead. They will be the next set of Labour councillors and MPs. They will decide the next leadership contest. While these may be desperate times for Labour – and, indeed, they are – the example of 1968 shows that parties are not static. From the ashes of defeat, they can be remade anew.
[Further reading: Welsh Labour is dying]
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Subscribe here to commentAn interesting read as I wasn’t living in the UK during the period described, but what was the magic formula that enabled Wilson to steady the ship, see polls improve and lead Labour to two more general election victories?