Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  At this stage the tribal rift that was soon to split the Labour party had not yet opened up; but in so far as its outline was already visible, Jenkins identified as much with the left as with the right. His two heroes in the government were Cripps, whose roots lay on the left despite his post-war reincarnation as the prophet of austerity, and Nye Bevan, still Minister of Health, but about to be moved to the Ministry of Labour. Jenkins was never personally close to Bevan (something he later regretted), but he admired him at this time ‘to the verge of extravagance’ and was briefly one of the ‘large circle of intimates and would-be intimates’ who gathered around him in the smoking room as the Welsh magician cast his spell over his disciples;4 he was also on good terms with several of the future Bevanites, including Michael Foot (for whom he was still writing regularly in Tribune), John Freeman and Tom Driberg. With Freeman and Driberg, indeed, Jenkins, Crosland and Woodrow Wyatt formed an illicit canasta school during late-night sittings of the House. (Canasta was then a fashionable card game.) In these early years he came under some left-wing pressure from his constituency party, as is clear from a letter he wrote Hugh Dalton in October 1950. He thought Dalton underestimated what he called the ‘Russia complex’ in the party, possibly because he sat for ‘good solid Durham’. ‘If you sat for a Birmingham seat,’ Jenkins told him, ‘I think you would be shocked to discover how many prominent people in the party are still emotionally violently pro-Russian and violently anti-American.’5 This was one issue on which Jenkins was always robustly right-wing. He probably thought it prudent to play up to Stechford’s expectations in some other respects.

  In the spring of 1951 he published a Tribune pamphlet which he later described as ‘the apogee of my excursion to the left’.6 In later years, when Jenkins was seen as a plutocratic fat cat, its ironic title, Fair Shares for the Rich – actually supplied by Foot – was twisted to suggest that it was an appeal for clemency to the rich. On the contrary, it was an ‘almost Robespierrean’ demand not merely for the reduction but for the abolition of large private fortunes, by taxing them on a scale rising from 50 per cent between £20,000 and £30,000 up to 95 per cent over £100,000. To minimise the shock, the government might pay back to the former owner, for his lifetime, the income he would have got from his capital. But the essence of Jenkins’ carefully detailed scheme was a swift, sharp act of confiscation; death duties and capital gains tax he dismissed as ineffective because too slow.fn1 Anticipating Conservative howls of protest, he argued that all taxation was confiscation; and – reflecting his growing historical interest in the pre-1914 Liberal government – compared his proposals with Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, which precipitated the House of Lords crisis of 1911. For the Tories to suggest that the redistribution of wealth by democratic means was unacceptable, he asserted, was a far more outrageous challenge to democracy than any tax, in 1950 as it was in 1910. Thus even at this most left-wing point of his career, when advocating a measure that he would soon come to regard as embarrassingly extreme, Jenkins explicitly placed his proposals in the Asquithian tradition of liberal reform.

  At the same time Fair Shares for the Rich concluded with a passage on nationalisation which anticipates much of the ‘revisionist’ Labour position of the later 1950s. With the abolition of great private fortunes, Jenkins argued, it would no longer be possible for 80 per cent of industry to remain in private hands. ‘There will simply not be enough rich people to own it.’

  A large capital levy therefore implies an extension of nationalisation. But it will be nationalisation for a different object, and therefore of a different pattern, from that which we have seen in the past five years.

  The coal industry, the railways, gas and electricity, were all brought under public control because it was thought necessary to take the particular industry, to reorganise it, to impose a certain structure upon it, and to run it as a unified whole. These nationalisation measures were essentially planning measures. They called for the control of whole industries, and they called for the control of particular industries. It would have defeated the whole object to have taken merely one of the four main-line railway companies, or to have substituted catering for coal.

  After steel the position will be different. Future nationalisations will be more concerned with equality than with planning, and this means that we can leave the monolithic public corporation behind us and look for more intimate forms of ownership and control. It will not matter if a large number of public bodies – municipalities, co-operatives and the like – and not merely the central Government, participate in the ownership. It will not matter if only sections of industries are publicly owned, so that they have to meet competition from the sections remaining in private hands. It will not matter if only a part of the shares of a particular company, and not necessarily the controlling part, are in the hands of a public body. It will indeed be positively desirable that all these things should occur, for the widest possible diffusion of control and responsibility is an essential aim of democratic socialism.8

  In this respect Fair Shares for the Rich reflected the thinking of the ‘new right’ that began to emerge in the last year of the Labour government, as the confident consensus of 1945 fragmented in recrimination and uncertainty about what to do next. The scope and form of future nationalisation was the central, symbolic issue. Nye Bevan’s ‘controlling heights of the economy’ – coal, gas, electricity, the railways, the Bank of England and finally steel – had all been nationalised between 1945 and 1950. Labour fought the 1950 election committed, rather unconvincingly, to adding cement and sugar to the public sector; but the rift was already opening up between the pragmatists, who recognised that further nationalisation, unless clearly justified on practical grounds, was not an election winner, and the fundamentalists who would countenance no dilution of the aim of a fully socialised economy. Under the dominating influence of Herbert Morrison, Labour went into the 1951 election with no more specific commitments to nationalisation, merely a list of criteria by which future candidates might be assessed. Morrison represented the old right of the party, which wanted only to consolidate the gains made since 1945. The younger right, headed by Hugh Gaitskell (who succeeded Cripps as Chancellor in October 1950), sought a more flexible way forward on lines first explored in the writings of Evan Durbin, Hugh Dalton and Douglas Jay before the war and fully developed by Tony Crosland in The Future of Socialism in 1956. Jenkins’ 1951 pamphlet was a minor contribution to this gathering consensus on the right of the party that envisaged no further large-scale nationalisation on the Morrisonian model, but rather the piecemeal extension of public ownership, within the framework of a mixed economy, in the name of a non-doctrinaire socialism that placed its highest priority on equality.

  Jenkins covered similar ground again in an essay on ‘Equality’ that he contributed to a collection entitled New Fabian Essays edited by Dick Crossman. These emerged from a series of Fabian conferences from 1949, but the book did not appear until May 1952 – after the Bevanite split. The other contributors included both Tony Crosland (on ‘The Transition from Capitalism’) and Denis Healey (on foreign policy) from the right, and Ian Mikardo (on trade unions) and Crossman himself from the left, with a balancing preface by Attlee. Crosland’s was the most theoretical piece – anticipating The Future of Socialism – which deservedly attracted more attention than Jenkins’ more superficial offering; but they were both singing from the same hymn sheet.fn2 Without the emotional intensity of their Oxford days, Roy and Tony had largely restored their old friendship; but Tony was still unquestionably the leader, as Woodrow Wyatt later recalled:

  Roy was oddly respectful of Tony, letting him overwhelm him in arguments. He thought Tony was the most brilliant man he knew, much above himself intellectually. I had to say, ‘Don’t be silly, Roy. He’s just more bullying, bombastic and abusive than you are. You’re much cleverer than he is’, which was true.10

  It would be some years before Jenkins realised that, if not necessarily clevere
r, he was certainly the better politician.

  Even at the height of his flirtation with the left, therefore, several countervailing pressures were already pulling Jenkins to the right. First was his ingrained loyalty to Attlee and thence to the Labour government as a whole – including, when it came to the crunch, the new Chancellor, Gaitskell, whom as yet he barely knew. The second was the former Chancellor, Hugh Dalton – a fierce opponent of the left since pre-war days and now Gaitskell’s principal mentor and champion. A big, bald, booming Old Etonian, Dalton was a much more approachable figure than the austere and private Cripps. Many years later Jenkins wrote an affectionate portrait of him in his book The Chancellors, comparing him to one of his favourite fictional characters, Anthony Powell’s Kenneth Widmerpool: unlike Widmerpool, however, Dalton, though a full generation older than Roy, was ‘teasable . . . capable of laughing at himself and highly enjoyable to be with’.11 He was also compulsively indiscreet and an excellent source of malicious gossip. In the 1950 Parliament his three special protégés were Jenkins, Crosland and Wyatt, for whose advancement he pulled every string he could. That autumn, for instance, he congratulated himself that he had helped both Roy and Tony gain some attention by speaking at conference.12 Jenkins seized the opportunity to rehearse again his argument for capital taxation. But Dalton always put Crosland first. In May 1952, when Labour was back in opposition, he urged Gaitskell to choose one of them to sit on an economic policy committee. ‘I said they were both very good young men. I thought Tony had the better brain & would be more use to the committee . . . I hope, & believe, that you will choose Tony . . . I said Roy was good, but not so good.’13

  A third factor was the Korean war which broke out in June, when the Americans intervened (under the aegis of the United Nations) to prevent Communist North Korea annexing the South. The Labour government – Bevan initially included – not only supported the American action but sent British troops to help and undertook an ambitious programme of rearmament, despite the country’s parlous economic state. Jenkins’ later view was that Attlee should have told the Americans that Britain could not afford such a burden.14 But at the time he was as hawkish as anyone. Such was their enthusiasm, indeed, that Jenkins, Crosland and Wyatt conceived the mad idea of waiving their parliamentary exemption from military call-up and volunteering for some weeks’ training in the reserves, to encourage others to join up. Wisely the War Office declined their offer.

  More important, the cost of rearmament put Gaitskell’s 1951 budget under additional strain. He responded by deciding to impose charges for National Health Service false teeth and spectacles (hitherto free), which in turn provoked Bevan’s resignation from the government. Bevan had been restless for some time, under-employed since the completion of the Health Service in 1948, but denied the promotion he felt he deserved. The last straw was Attlee’s choice of Morrison as Foreign Secretary when Ernie Bevin had to retire in March; but Bevan’s greater grievance was the earlier appointment of Gaitskell as Chancellor: a forty-four-year-old Wykehamist who symbolised for Bevan the takeover of the party by public-school intellectuals with no roots in the labour movement. Though he had initially supported the war and swallowed (when proposed by Cripps) the principle of charging within the NHS, he took Gaitskell’s determination to introduce charges into what he thought of as his Health Service as a personal affront deliberately designed to provoke his resignation; and after a couple of weeks’ blustering he duly obliged on 21 April, joined by one other Cabinet minister (Wilson) and one junior minister (Freeman). This was the defining moment which split the Labour party for the next ten, if not twenty, years.

  Jenkins and Crosland – in common with the great majority of Labour MPs – supported Gaitskell’s budget. They did not question the need to spend an additional £1,100 million on rearmament for Korea, but approved the way Gaitskell achieved it mainly by raising taxes on the better-off. Pensions were protected and overall spending on the NHS actually increased; the charges on teeth and spectacles were minimal (£23 million in a full year) and widely felt to be inevitable, if not positively desirable. ‘I think that most people,’ Jenkins declared on the second day of the budget debate, ‘have been surprised that the weight of the burden of rearmament on the nation’s economy has been as small as it has been, and . . . are greatly impressed by the ingenuity with which the Chancellor has managed to spread it.’15 In short, they believed there was nothing for anyone to resign over. They were shocked by Bevan’s self-indulgent tantrum. From Dalton they heard how he had tried to hold his colleagues to ransom – ‘Aren’t I worth twenty-three millions?’ – and personalised the issue into a choice between himself and Gaitskell.16 Michael Foot in Tribune raised the stakes by likening Gaitskell to the turncoat Philip Snowden, Labour’s first Chancellor who had followed Ramsay MacDonald into the National Government in 1931; and when Bevan finally resigned he immediately widened the issue to attack the whole rearmament programme which he had previously supported with an appalling display of boorishness and megalomania at the party meeting. Gaitskell, by contrast, conducted himself with modest reasonableness.

  Dalton’s three musketeers had no hesitation in agreeing that Bevan was in the wrong. The next weekend they went public in their constituencies. The Birmingham Gazette reported that Jenkins and Wyatt – both known as writers in Tribune – had made ‘slashing attacks’ on Bevan: Wyatt in the Town Crier, Jenkins at ‘a public forum organised by Ten Acres and Stirchley Co-operative Society’, where he declared that Bevan had ‘tried to hold a pistol at the head of the Cabinet’.17 Yet Jenkins at least was anxious not to widen the rift in the party and quickly denied that he had made ‘a slashing attack’:

  This I did not do and I have no intention of doing so in the future. There have already been too many bitter attacks delivered on leading figures in the Labour movement. What I did do was to point out that I could not agree with Mr Bevan either in his reason for resignation or in the manner in which he made it, but Mr Bevan could do service to the country by using his freedom to help hammer out an original and forceful Labour programme for the next election.18

  This was an admission that the party singularly lacked such a programme at present and indicated a concern to keep Bevan’s undoubted charisma and creativity within the fold. The worry was that – egged on by Foot and other flattering acolytes – he might kick over the traces entirely and condemn Labour to the wilderness of opposition. At the height of the resignation crisis, the political columnist of the Yorkshire Post wrote a flattering piece naming Jenkins and Crosland as two of the party’s up-and-coming intellectuals. Jenkins he described as ‘a likeable young man who has not yet allowed early success to go to his head’, clearly destined for office ‘if the Socialists ever return to power in his lifetime. But the way they are going, it doesn’t look as if his chances of ever sitting on the Front Bench are very good’.19 That was just what Labour’s young hopefuls were afraid of.

  In the reshuffle following the three resignations it was rumoured that Jenkins might get a job. In fact it was Wyatt who got the nod and became – briefly – Parliamentary Secretary at the War Office. At least in hindsight Jenkins claimed not to have been disappointed, thinking he had probably received enough patronage from Attlee and had plenty of time. But it meant that when Labour finally returned to office under Harold Wilson in 1964 he was not among the handful of MPs with previous experience of office.

  In his diary Dalton described Jenkins’ dismay at the division in the party, and his attempt to avoid taking sides:

  Roy has hated recent atmosphere in the House of Commons so much that he has only gone there to vote. Jennifer is expecting a second baby in a week or so . . . Roy – and many others – have been deeply shocked by Nye and his ‘sub-human’ performance at Party Meeting.

  But already, with Dalton’s not-so-subtle encouragement, Jenkins was clear that Gaitskell should be the next leader, bypassing Morrison:

  Roy hopes Clem will go on long enough to be able to hand over direct to
Hugh. Under Herbert, it would not be a happy Party . . . We agreed that Hugh had, as yet, no Public Face in the Labour Movement in the country, though he had it in Parliament and in public opinion generally. But this would come.20

  The government struggled on with its tiny majority over the summer until Attlee threw in the towel and called an election on 25 October. Labour pulled itself together sufficiently to fight a good rearguard action, but the political momentum was now with the Tories, exploiting public weariness with socialist austerity under the slogan ‘Set the People Free’. In Stechford Jenkins strenuously denied that socialism had ‘failed’. On the contrary, he claimed, the Tories were desperate to get Labour out because they had been ‘too successful’:

  Too successful in bringing the poor up and the rich down. Too successful in giving millions of people a new status. Too successful in ending the unemployment queue. Too successful in transforming a Tory Britain into a Labour Britain. That is why they want us to go. Not because we have failed, but because we have succeeded.

  Somewhat contradictorily he argued that the Tories had promised not to undo Labour’s achievements, while simultaneously accusing them of wanting to turn the clock back to the 1930s. Labour still had much to do, he insisted, which was why the government needed an increased majority.21 In a newspaper article he clutched a straw of hope from Tory over-confidence and President Truman’s unexpected re-election against the odds in 1948.22

  This was the only election in his life that Roy had to fight without Jennifer beside him. Now with two young children – prominently featured in his election literature – she had her hands full. Hattie came from Pontypool to support him instead. But there was no real need, since Stechford was perfectly safe. One of the local papers described the thirty-year-old Jenkins’ confident performance at a crowded meeting at Audley Road school: