The election that Labour should worry about most isn’t 1992 – when an exhausted and recessional administration beat an unreformed opposition right at the death – and it certainly isn’t 1983, when a triumphant and successful government carried all before it. It’s 1966.
Prior to the 1964 election, as leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson had been unsure just how far to take ‘modernisation’: was it a sop to appease the electorate until the votes were cast, or a way of life? Still, no matter: the government had been in for over a decade and what was left of its reforming energies had been dispersed completely when it replaced its charismatic serial election-winner with a man who seemed to embody many of the electorate’s worst fears about the party. What could possibly go wrong?
Come election day, though, the promised landslide was nowhere to be found. That old warrior turned out to be tougher than his opponents expected, and so Wilson was forced to govern by expediencies. It was largely disastrous: the government’s economic policy was a rolling catastrophe, the administration achieved little, and, as for the prime minister, well, he barely managed his party and preferred a fix to a solution: he survived largely by kicking any difficult questions into the long grass or through the calling of lengthy and expensive inquiries.
Sound familiar? There’s bad news, though, for latter-day progressives: Wilson won, and won handily, in the election that followed. How did it happen? In the end, Wilson got lucky: the economy started to grow – albeit briefly and unsustainably – and that was enough.
2015 need not be a blue-tinted 1966; the Tory brand still produces a high enough level of revulsion among young people, ethnic minorities, Scots, city-dwellers and northerners that a Conservative majority remains a thing of science fiction, not political science. A shrewd Conservative leadership might be able to make inroads into Labour fiefdoms in the north or the public services, but a shrewd Conservative leadership probably wouldn’t respond to mounting concern over energy prices with an instruction to wear jumpers, either.
Regardless, not everything in Labour’s garden is rosy. The party is in danger of hitting a ceiling of 38 per cent in the polls. Enough to beat the Tories and secure a majority at present, but no opposition in history has got from now to polling day without suffering a loss in its vote share, so either something has to change, or we’re in trouble.
What might Labour do? It could learn a thing or two from another Edward, from the man who found himself victim to Harold Wilson’s sudden good fortune in 1966: Ted Heath. No leader today would be granted a second try after an election defeat, but Heath’s 1970 triumph offers lessons for Labour just as his 1966 reverse offers a cautionary tale. Heath never closed the gap on Wilson in the popularity ratings, or ever convinced the electorate that there wasn’t something a little bit peculiar about him: but he won nonetheless.
In 1966, the Conservatives still looked bruised, confused and self-involved but, by 1970, they had a programme that appeared to hang together. Labour still lacks a coherent narrative. The energy freeze is great politics; but if the cost of living is the question, Labour will need a better answer than switching it off and switching it on again. That requires that Ed Miliband do in one term what Ted Heath was only able to do in two.
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Stephen Bush is a contributing editor to Progress, writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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“replaced its charismatic serial election-winner”?.
Macmillan won one election – 1959.
Two points about mcmillans victory was that the Tory vote stabilised ,yet the Labour vote only fell a few thousand, and the turnout was 88%’ the other point regarding Wilson’s victory in 1966 was that the race issue of the time same as 1970′ saw Ted Heath distancing himself from both the bloke who had the vote labour if you want a n@@@@r as your neighbour, or Enoch Powell,
Turnout was 78%. Highest ever in the UK was 84% in 1950.
For the record, SuperMac – Harold MacMillan – was a fiction. He only won one general election, 1959, although with a majority of nearly 100. Hardly a “charismatic serial election-winner”!
Indeed his 1962 “Knight of the Long Knives” was not least because he realised the electorate had already sensed his government, who had ridden a “You never had it so good” tide earlier, had now lost touch and was failing, as demonstrated by a string of poor by-election results, most notably that in Orpington won the Eric Lubbock for the Liberals.
The Home Counties in that by-election were revolting, against a fuddy-duddy governing elite, exemplified by the plus-fours of both MacMillan and Douglas-Home on the grouse moors, and Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC’s remark in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial where he said “Is this a book you would want your wife or servants to read?” Most middle-class people by the mid-60s no longer had servants, or at best ‘someone who came in’. Perhaps they sensed that the Maudling boom of 1963-64 was only transient; boom is perhaps a misleading word – it was only a boom by contrast to the “stagflation” of before, and was fuelled by relaxations on hire purchase rules. Meanwhile In the north of England, the Conservatives lost their grip on seats they had held for decades, and may not recover for another half-century.
If you seek a reason for Wilson’s unease in 1966, look at the social problems illustrated by ‘Cathy Come Home’ on TV and ‘A Taste of Honey’ at the cinema, and all the other kitchen sink dramas; these problems needed money to sort them out; and money was in short supply.
I think you should look mainly however at the fatal decision in the autumn of 1964 and spring of 1965 not to either devalue the pound sterling from its unsustainable exchange rate since the 1940s or, more bravely, to float it against the dollar and the other European currencies.
With a fixed rate of exchange, Britain was always going to be vulnerable to speculation against sterling, and so it proved in 1967. With too high an exchange rate, exporting was very difficult for a managerial class that thought little of marketing, less of going abroad and even less still of speaking foreign languages in which they were aware they could not function without arousing guffaws of laughter.
Wilson was blighted in 1964 by a dull Home Secretary in Sir Frank Soskice and a less than sparkling (though politically astute) Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a whole bench of almost deadbeat stranded whales – the Freds, you might say – bequeathed to him by the rule that Shadow Cabinet members were elected by the PLP. He shuffled them off as quickly as was decent, but after devaluation in 1967 Roy Jenkins proved a more prudent and cautious Chancellor than perhaps he should have wanted when he replaced Jim Callaghan.
If Wilson was privately worried in the run-in to the 1966 General Election, it was not because he did not by then have a reasonably sharp set of ministers on his front bench nor did they lack confidence and ability. It was that he foresaw trouble ahead with the pound-dollar exchange rate. When devaluation did eventually happen, Jenkins proved too cautious to fully exploit the devaluation when it happened, and so offered the Tories in 1970 – as in 1951 – the chance to profit from a public discontented by restrictions (I remember well the limit on how much money with which you could leave the UK on a holiday). Perhaps Britain needed structural reforms beyond the ability of governments then.
But if you want to sum up why the 1966 government was a one-term Labour government in one word, it would be “race”. The Wolverhampton “Rivers of Blood” speech by Enoch Powell transformed Britain politically. In the May 1968 local elections that came soon after, Labour got almost totally wiped out (as the Tories were to suffer likewise in 1971 when the pendulum swung back). Labour had not handled the immigration issue well. Neither the Tory 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (Hugh Gaitskell, called the Act “cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation”) nor the Labour 1965 measures to tighten administrative controls over immigration and reduce the number of vouchers available were anything other than essentially racist, and the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1968 – responding to the wave of migrants expelled from East Africa – were hardly anything better (the liberal Jenkins was now replaced by the more socially cautious Callaghan at the Home Office). Half a century ago it was legal in the UK to discriminate against someone because of the colour of their skin – jobs, housing, you name it. Mississippi here in the United Kingdom, in effect, but without most of the lynchings. The Race Relations Act 1965, now accepted as, and even then considered by many as, a weak piece of legislation made it a civil offence (note, rather than criminal offence) to refuse to serve a person, an unreasonable delay in serving someone, or overcharging, on the grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins. But the Act did not extend to Northern Ireland – a haven of bigotry still not overwhelmed by the events of the Troubles – and specifically excluded shops and private boarding houses, a disastrous omission. It failed to end racial discrimination in the UK.
The Race Relations Act 1968, which extended the legislation’s remit to cover employment and housing was an improvement but by then the Rivers of Blood effect had soured and scarred society and political debate. So much so that one side in Parliament dared not address the discomfort of many about immigration (until Gordon Brown’s fatal 2010 Rochdale meeting with Gillian Duffy, after which Labour was willing to talk about immigration controls) whilst the other side quietly revelled in the electoral boost Powell had given them whilst reviling him as an outcast in public. What did for Wilson in 1970 was a weakness caused by his tiny 1964 majority, and an inner cowardice. Not for him, “be bloody, bold and resolute”. Whatever cutting edge of t”he white heat of the technological revolution he might have portrayed in the period before the 19″64 election, he was at heart as cautious as Sunny Jim. “Steady as she goes” took him onto the rocks in 1970 and it was his fault.
It’s a lesson for a future Labour prime minister newly surrounded by civil servants advising caution. “Be bloody, bold and resolute” (Along with “Don’t Invade Russia” and similar foreign policy maxims)
I am delighted to say that the 1966 election was before my time (I was born later that year). I do know, however, that Labour got a small majority in 1964 and then got a working majority in 1966, while Cameron chose in 2010 to have a coalition for five years rather than trying to get a majority a year or two later. If anything, 2015 will have more in common with 1970 when Miliband, like Heath, will have been Leader of the Opposition for about five years. He will also be facing a Prime Minister who will have been in office for several years.
We need to be able offer people hope and incentive to come out and vote for us. We need radical policies and also we need policies that will safrguard public services, jobs and also growth within the economy.
This article gives the impression that Labour were behind in the polls for most of the 1964-66 parliament and then suddenly had a lead due to economic growth, called an election and then received a majority.
In fact Labour lead in the polls all the way from October 1964 to March 1966 apart from a few polls in the summer of 1965 when Heath was elected Conservative leader.
The 1966 election was simply a case of timing by Wilson as to maximise the Labour majority,
He did lose a by election in 65′ and the polls are always bias to labour,
He or rather Patrick Gordon Walker lost the Leyton by-election in 1965. But that was a backlash against trying to get him back into parliament after he lost Smethwick in 1964. There was a swing to Labour in the Hull North by-election at the beginning of 1966.
The polls weren’t biased to Labour in 1950, 1951, 1955 and Feb 1974. In those elections they did better than most or all the polls suggested they would.
True about 74′ not sure about 55′ weren’t labour behind in the polls a few weeks before the 50 election, I meant on polling day, labour were clearly ahead of the Tories,
In 1950 Labour won by 3.9%. The three polls in Feb of that year had them ahead by 1.5% (2 polls) or the Tories by 0.5 (1 poll).
In 1955 the last five polls before the election had the Tories ahead by 2.5, 3.5, 4.0, 3.5 and 4.0. The result was a 1.8% victory.