Harold Wilson: The Winner

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His was the government to decriminalise homosexuality, legalise abortion and abolish capital punishment. Yet he has never been admitted to Labour’s pantheon of heroes, since he delivered neither socialism nor economic success.

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Wilson’s final years in office, after his fourth election victory, were dominated by the debate on membership of the EEC, leading up to the Referendum. Harold Wilson: The Winner is at least partly intended to remind today’s Labour movement of the virtues of subordinating differences to the cause of winning power.He was, Thomas-Symonds concludes, one of our greatest prime ministers, who, given the political circumstances, had a remarkable record of solid achievement. Nevertheless, Jenkins, then deputy leader, and nearly seventy other Labour MPs defied a three-line whip to help the Tories get the legislation through the Commons. His avowed intent is to persuade us to think of Wilson not just as a sharp politician in a Gannex raincoat, but also as a leader who shaped 20th-century Britain. Hindsight says he should have done so, but he was fearful of the consequences for a party whose reputation was already scarred by two previous devaluations, in 1931 and 1949. In the 1960s and 1970s, Harold Wilson presided over a rare period of Labour dominance, winning four out of the five elections he fought as party leader, though only one – in 1966 – with a working majority.

Harold Wilson: The Winner by Nick Thomas-Symonds review – a

Sir Keir Starmer QC MP in November 2021 appointed Nick Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade. Wilson took his place in British history as the prime minister who deserted his friends and abandoned his principles. In The Winner, we meet a Wilson who is both pragmatic and principled, able to be flexible on certain issues, inflexible on others.It took 18 years in opposition, from 1979 to 1997, for Labour to recover; and whereas at the end of the 19th century a Liberal leader had proclaimed “We are all socialists now”, by the end of the 20th, Labour under Blair could regain power only by assuring voters that they were none of them socialists now.

Harold Wilson Lecture 2023 - Harold Wilson: The Winner The Annual Harold Wilson Lecture 2023 - Harold Wilson: The Winner

On succeeding Gaitskell, Wilson set about portraying Labour as the party of the future, crucially in his “white heat” speech to the 1963 party conference. It was assumed that he made the distinction in the hope of trivialising Bevan’s rebellion and capturing the leadership of the Labour left. Preventing, or at least postponing, a Labour party split is probably more important to Thomas-Symonds and me than it is to posterity. Thomas-Symonds then sets out those issues that all too quickly diminished Wilson’s reputation, especially “his apparent obsession with the activities of the secret services”.No bloody vision’, but slowly and effectively Wilson began putting forward a prospectus for a modern Britain that avoided old arguments of left and right and was based on planned economic management, a harnessing of new technologies and a cradle-to-grave education system that excluded no one. He has served on the Labour frontbench in a number of roles; Shadow Pensions Minister; Shadow Employment Minister; Shadow Solicitor-General; Shadow Security Minister; Shadow Welsh Office Minister; Shadow Home Secretary and Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade.