Roy Jenkins
Page 18
Last night one felt that the secret of his success lay in his platform manner. Never once did he talk down to his audience; whether discussing the international situation or home affairs he was always with them and of them, speaking for some 40 minutes without a voice being raised against him.23
There was no Liberal candidate this time, so he had a straight fight against the same Tory opponent, Edith Pitt. As a result his majority was slightly cut, though his vote actually went up:
Roy Jenkins (Labour) 34,355
Miss E. Pitt (Conservative) 23,384
Labour majority
10,97124, fn3
This closely mirrored the national result. On a slightly reduced (but still 82 per cent) turnout, Labour recorded its highest-ever vote, nearly fourteen million – 200,0000 more than the Conservatives; but by the vagaries of the electoral system the Tories won twenty-six more seats. By this ambiguous verdict the seventy-seven-year-old Churchill was returned to Downing Street, flanked by the much younger Anthony Eden and Rab Butler and several of his wartime cronies. Despite Labour’s divisions, few imagined that the party would be out of office for thirteen years.
On the contrary, such was the left’s faith in the inevitable march of progress that they took it for granted that Labour would be back very soon. Tribune thought it ‘a tragedy that Labour’s period of government has been interrupted’ by what it called Churchill’s ‘stopgap administration’; while Attlee expected to be Prime Minister again within two years.25 The civil war that convulsed the party for the next four years was so bitter precisely because both sides – Bevanites and Gaitskellites – believed they were fighting to set the agenda of the next Labour government. Though Attlee and Morrison remained as leader and deputy leader, much of the burden both of opposing the government and of preparing for Labour’s anticipated return to office fell upon Gaitskell, who was almost the only senior figure to emerge from the party’s defeat with his reputation enhanced and his energy undimmed. Though only forty-four, he had enjoyed a rapid rise to the second position in the government as the old warhorses – Bevin, Cripps and Dalton – had died or retired. Hitherto a prim and somewhat donnish figure, he had displayed in his showdown with Bevan a new assertiveness which led the powerful right-wing union bosses – pre-eminently Arthur Deakin, Sir Tom Williamson and Will Lawther, leaders respectively of the Transport & General Workers, the Boilermakers and the Miners – to embrace him as the champion they had been looking for. He now had an extraordinary opportunity to shape the party’s future, and in his quiet way he was determined to seize it.
Jenkins had been impressed by Gaitskell’s cool handling of his dispute with Bevan and became a Gaitskellite almost overnight, though it took a little longer before he was drawn into his inner circle. During the last months of the Labour government he made a number of strongly supportive speeches in economic debates which earned Gaitskell’s gratitude; then when the party went into opposition he took a hard line in favour of withdrawing the whip from fifty-seven left-wingers who voted against the Tory government’s defence estimates, and quickly emerged as a reliable voice against the Bevanites in party meetings. ‘Chris [Mayhew], Woodrow, Tony and Roy have all done well,’ Gaitskell noted in March 1952, ‘and thus set an example to others.’26 As an economic specialist, Jenkins was thus an obvious pick for the small team (also including Crosland) that Gaitskell assembled to fight Butler’s first budget. His particular contribution was to lead the attack on what he later called ‘a complicated piece of window dressing’ known as the Excess Profits Levy, which was supposed to claw back some of the easy profits generated by the rearmament programme. Though Labour might have been expected to applaud such a measure, Jenkins persuaded his colleagues that it was at best a marginal sop in the context of a broadly regressive budget, and devoted the whole of April and May to fighting it – gathering support, briefing interested parties, drafting and moving amendments, and conducting guerrilla warfare through eight long nights on the floor of the House. This, he recalled, involved ‘more detailed parliamentary drudgery . . . than I had ever done before or was ever to do again . . . When this part of the Finance Bill came to be debated I think I understood it more completely than did the then Chancellor and more completely than I was ever to understand any complicated part of a Finance Bill which I was to introduce myself nearly two decades later.’27 So it was a good apprenticeship. A warm cross-party camaraderie develops over the course of such campaigns, and one night there was some bantering disagreement between Jenkins and Crosland about the meaning of a particular clause, to the amusement of the Tories, before Gaitskell intervened to explain that they were both right.28 Another time the future Tory Chancellor Reginald Maudling gracefully complimented the ‘joint eloquence’ of the Members for Stechford and South Gloucestershire, ‘to which this Committee have now become fairly well accustomed. Their eloquence and persuasiveness is well known.’29 Not for the first or last time, they made an effective double-act: Crosland the more brilliant, Jenkins more painstaking. They did not of course defeat the bill. But they made a thorough nuisance of themselves, helped to raise Labour morale and confirmed their own growing reputations. ‘Tony and Roy have been magnificent,’ Dalton wrote after one all-night sitting, ‘and quite established themselves.’30
It was while working together on the 1952 Finance Bill that Jenkins got to know Gaitskell well. ‘Private relations were very close amongst the group,’ he later wrote, ‘and Gaitskell could be treated with as much mocking but friendly disrespect as anyone else.’31 He had already been impressed politically by Gaitskell’s seriousness and integrity; now he was still more captivated by his private gaiety and his determination to enjoy a social life beyond politics, which matched Jenkins’ own widening sense of priorities. Their friendship, he wrote on Gaitskell’s death, ‘although it arose out of politics, was not primarily a political one’.32 Around this time he became a member of XYZ, the economic dining club founded by Dalton and others before the war, which now brought together people like Douglas Jay and Patrick Gordon Walker of Gaitskell’s own generation, a number of academic economists and Labour-supporting bankers, and some younger MPs among whom Jenkins and Crosland were the most prominent. From now on Roy and Tony were invariably spoken of together as Gaitskell’s brightest young lieutenants, though Crosland was always Gaitskell’s favourite, as he was Dalton’s: though he had outgrown his youthful homosexuality (he married his first wife in 1952), there was still about him a trace of that sulphurous homoeroticism that had dazzled Roy at Oxford. Wyatt wrote opaquely that between Gaitskell and Crosland there was a bond ‘which Socrates would have understood’;33 and Jenkins wrote in his memoirs that ‘In my retrospective view, with both of them long dead, Gaitskell was more excited by the idea of Crosland than he was by the idea of me, but found me rather easier to deal with. As a result he saw about an equal amount of one as of the other, but mostly though not always separately.’ At the same time he and Tony ‘saw at least as much of each other as either did of Gaitskell, and when one of us disagreed with him we were mostly united.’34
Labour’s 1952 conference, held that year for the first and only time at Morecambe, was the most poisonous ever. Several Bevanite motions – reaffirming the principle of a free Health Service and the nationalisation of ‘key and major industries’ – were carried against the platform; and others more extreme (including one advocating strikes to bring down the government) won significant support. Speakers from the right were jeered and booed; while in the voting for the constituency section of the National Executive the Bevanites swept six of the seven places, with Morrison and Dalton kicked off, to be replaced by Wilson and Crossman. (Gaitskell got barely half the vote of Crossman, the lowest elected Bevanite.) The atmosphere, in Michael Foot’s words, was ‘rowdy, convulsive, vulgar, splenetic’.35 To the left, this was simply the grass roots asserting themselves against a complacent and out-of-touch leadership corrupted by the compromises of office. To the right it was an irresponsible eruption which threat
ened the very survival of Labour as a party of government. Two days later, in a speech at Stalybridge on his way home, Gaitskell hit back, alleging that ‘about one-sixth of the Constituency party delegates appeared to be Communists or Communist-inspired’ and declaring that it was ‘time to end the attempt at mob rule by a group of frustrated journalists’ – he mainly meant Tribune – ‘and restore the authority and leadership of the solid sound sensible majority of the movement’.36 If there was a moment when Gaitskell cast off his previously donnish image and declared himself a future leader, this was it.
Jenkins was enthusiastically behind him. The day the conference ended he asked Gaitskell to attend a meeting he was trying to organise ‘from our point of view’ in Birmingham, to counter a successful Brains Trust which the Bevanites had held earlier in the year, assuring him that the local leaders, ‘who were rather wobbly beforehand, have been so shocked by Morecambe as to be driven very hard our way – I don’t want them to be discouraged’.37 Like Gaitskell, he had great faith in the fundamental good sense of ordinary members of the party, if firmly led. He also had, already, an unusual sense of the need to appeal beyond Labour’s traditional base. Since the beginning of the year he had been working on a little book entitled Pursuit of Progress, designed as a counter to Bevanism. His theme was that Labour, having achieved its historic breakthrough in 1945, must not now, as the Bevanites appeared to want, regress to it origins as a purely class party, but must face up to the problems and responsibility of remaining a party of government, representing the whole left-leaning half of the electorate. He had been developing this idea in articles and speeches to various audiences since 1950, even including a talk on Finnish radio. Labour’s problem was that between 1945 and 1951 it had achieved its first tranche of objectives: nationalisation of key industries, full employment, the National Health Service, social security and a good start in reducing poverty and inequality. The question was what to do next: how to win the voters’ continued support for progressive policies when the worst injustices of unemployment and the Means Test had been removed and most people were so much better off than before the war. In a letter to Dalton, Jenkins used a slightly bizarre analogy which some of their colleagues might have considered frivolous. ‘Most people,’ he wrote, ‘will go to more trouble to get rid of a shoe that pinches than save up for a trip to Naples.’ (Why Naples, one of the poorest cities in Europe, except that he had recently been there and evidently saw it as an epitome of a post-war dolce vita?) ‘We have helped people to get rid of their pinching shoes, but it is at least possible that they will not allow us to conduct them to Naples.’38 Socialism, on this analogy, was a sort of mass charabanc trip to the continent!
In fact the domestic agenda set out in Pursuit of Progress was still pretty radical. There was some retreat from his earlier proposal to confiscate private fortunes at a stroke: redistribution, he now conceded, might have to spread over a generation, but the objective was unchanged. Likewise, Jenkins no longer wrote of abolishing the public schools, only of making the state system so good that it would be able to absorb them. But while he took a swipe at ‘those who regard nailing one’s colours to the mast of nationalisation, without much regard to what it is designed to accomplish, as an infallible proof of robust radicalism’, he remained committed to greatly increased public ownership as a means of promoting equality:
It is quite impossible to advocate both the abolition of great inequalities of wealth and the acceptance of a one-quarter public sector and three-quarters private sector arrangement. A mixed economy there will undoubtedly be, certainly for many decades and perhaps permanently, but it will need to be mixed in very different proportions from this.
Whether it would require ‘a thirty per cent, fifty per cent or seventy per cent public sector’ it was impossible to say. ‘The answer will become clearer as the goal is approached.’ This was a very characteristic formulation: whether in the advancement of socialism, the unity of Europe or the evolution of the SDP–Liberal Alliance Jenkins always believed the direction of advance was more important than spelling out a precise goal. But in 1953 he still insisted that ‘the whole concept obviously demands a much more vigorous and far-reaching nationalisation policy’ than the vague list of criteria on which Labour had fought the 1951 election. While tolerating ‘the indefinite continuance of some form of private enterprise’, he took for granted the government’s responsibility to plan the economy as a whole.39
It was rather in foreign policy that Jenkins directly confronted the Bevanites – in particular their continuing sentimentality towards the Soviet Union, their ambivalence towards the United States, and their hankering for a ‘socialist’ foreign policy that would seek a neutral posture between the two. For Jenkins, as for Gaitskell, one of the Attlee government’s greatest achievements was Ernest Bevin’s unswerving alignment of Britain with the United States in NATO, repudiating, in the face of the Soviets’ brutal crushing of democracy in central Europe, the wishful ‘left can talk to left’ naivety with which the party had come to power. Critical as he was of American capitalism, he recognised that the US was at least a democracy, and therefore capable of evolving towards socialism, whereas the USSR was a thoroughly unsocialist tyranny. He was as realistic about Russia as he was optimistic about America:
If it is thought that the most difficult task of modern socialists is not so much the undermining of capitalism (which is happening in any event) as the prevention of its development into a horrid managerialism, of which the hallmarks will be the centralisation of power and the existence of grossly privileged groups, the Soviet system has little to its credit beyond that of being somewhat ahead in the race to beastliness.40
Capitalism, he implied, was doomed anyway: the battle of the future was between democratic socialism and ‘horrid managerialism’.
Meanwhile neutralism was not an option for a progressive party:
Neutrality is essentially a conservative policy, a policy of defeat, of announcing to the world that we have nothing to say to which the world will listen . . . Neutrality could never be acceptable to anyone who believes that he has a universal faith to preach. And those countries which have successfully adopted it in the past have paid the price of becoming little islands full of frustrated hedonists. Switzerland and Sweden are as ideologically sterile as they are physically undevastated.41
Here, for the first time in Jenkins’ writings, is a hint of the theme that would define his career over the next half-century. The idea of a ‘socialist’ foreign policy was a delusion based on an outdated view of Britain’s place in the world: ‘a subconscious faith in the omnicompetence of British policy . . . the essential foundation of utopianism’.42 In 1953 the idea of the European Common Market was only just beginning to take shape; and for some years yet Jenkins adhered to the conventional view that Britain could not think of joining it. But this passage shows him already seeking the appropriate vehicle for Britain’s engagement with the modern world.
Having rejected neutralism, he continued, Labour must also reject its lingering pacifism and accept the need for defence expenditure commensurate with Britain’s reduced but still significant weight as a middle-ranking power. The spectacle of the Minister of Defence, Emanuel Shinwell, being voted off the National Executive in 1951 to salve the left’s guilt about armaments exemplified the party’s confusion. It was an honourable part of the Labour tradition to be suspicious of the use of force; but it was unrealistic to pretend that the ability to exert any influence in the world did not require a military capacity. If Labour was to be a governing party again, and not a permanent opposition, the leadership must be ready to take on the neutralists and pacifists. It was better to face a temporarily damaging split in the short term than risk ‘the destruction, by schism, perhaps for a generation, of the whole progressive movement in the country’.43
‘The whole progressive movement in the country’: this was what Jenkins thought Labour now was and must take care to remain. After a messy period of trans
ition between the wars, he believed that Attlee’s Labour party had taken over from the Asquithian Liberal party as the embodiment of the non-Conservative half of the electorate. In the penultimate chapter of Pursuit of Progress, entitled ‘The Swinging Pendulum’, Jenkins argued that defeat in 1951 should not be seen as a setback for Labour. The voters would always tire of any government, but the Tories habitually prospered by adopting their opponents’ policies. Socialism would advance not smoothly but by fits and starts, punctuated by periods of Tory government which would not reverse Labour’s achievements, but merely give Labour time to prepare the next advance. Labour did not have to be in power all the time, but should accept this pattern of advance. ‘The confident heyday of capitalism will recede still further as time goes on,’ he blithely predicted, but the Tory party was resilient. ‘It may well survive the transition to a classless society and a largely non-capitalist pattern of production with little more difficulty than it survived the nineteenth century shift in the social balance.’ Accordingly Labour should have confidence in its own ideas and ‘devote more time to leadership and less to the anxious study of the Gallup polls’. It should show ‘a philosophical acceptance of the fickleness of the electorate combined with a determination to use periods of power, when they occur, to the greatest possible advantage’.44
‘The first duty of a party of the left,’ he concluded, ‘is to be radical in the context of the moment, to offer the prospect of continuing advance, and to preserve the loyalty of those whose optimistic humanism makes them its natural supporters.’45 ‘Optimistic humanism’ was another characteristic formulation which described his political mindset for the rest of his life. In 1953 he still called it ‘socialism’, but increasingly it was ‘radicalism’, ‘progress’ or simply ‘reform’. The essential divide, on this view, was temperamental rather than doctrinal, between the selfish-defensive pessimism of Toryism on one side and liberal-socialist-progressive optimism, under whatever label, on the other: a belief, not in the perfectibility of man (the preserve of utopian revolutionaries), but in the possibility of society being improved by rational action in gradual steps. It was a simple philosophy, arguably a woolly one, certainly not intellectual, but essentially pragmatic. Thirty years later, as leader of the SDP, Jenkins was still offering the country the same hazy combination of ‘hope and realism’ or – in an echo of Gladstone – ‘conscience and reform’. The specific content of his policies evolved over the intervening years as the march of socialism was halted and capitalism made an unexpected comeback. He admitted in 1981 that he had not used the word ‘socialism’ for years. He generally called himself a liberal, and ended as a Liberal Democrat. But his essential yardstick – ‘to be radical in the context of the moment’ – was perfectly consistent.