1974 Wilson stood on platform of land nationalisation and won (no LVT!)

[Tony Gosling]

Now!
It was in Labour's October 1974 (the second that year) election manifesto.
here's a piece by Paul foot which shows how high 
it ws in Labour party minds in the sixties & seveties
A feeling that the work of 1945 was not finished
Diluted by the town and country planning act
quite right
T

‘There is no doubt that, relatively, with regard 
to the past annals of the Labour leadership, 
Wilson represents a kind of progress. Wilson 
constantly professes the habitual Labour contempt 
for theory – “theology” as he calls it – but has 
far more theoretical grasp than any previous 
leader. Unlike so many former Left-wing figures 
who have moved towards power, he has never 
actually renounced or broken with his past: he is 
likely to be much more open to Left-wing ideas 
and pressures than his predecessors. In contrast 
to Gaitskell and Attlee, Wilson seems singularly 
free from the bigoted anti-Communism which has 
been a surrogate for thought and action in many social-democratic movements.’
https://www.marxists.org/archive/foot-paul/1968/xx/wilson.htm

The almost unanimous inclination of the Labour 
Left to turn their attention from the written 
policy to abstract rhetoric about ‘commanding 
heights’ and ‘nationalisation of urban land’ 
enabled Harold Wilson during his twenty months as 
leader of the Opposition to fulfil his promise of 
remaining loyal to the policy of Hugh Gaitskell 
while at the same time convincing Gaitskell’s 
enemies that Gaitskellite revisionism ‘was not on 
the agenda.’ His ambition, as expressed to John 
Junor, to hold high the banner of nationalisation 
while leading the Labour Party away from it had been fulfilled.

This achievement was sustained in the immediate 
afterglow of the 1964 election victory. Only a 
few Labour MPs complained about the delay of six 
months in paying the proposed pensions increase, 
and even fewer objected to the decision to send 
Buccaneer aircraft to South Africa. Throughout 
November, Tribune re-published Harold Wilson’s 
main speeches, explaining that the differences 
between the paper and the leader were ‘of 
emphasis rather than of principle.’ [8] The 
paper’s clerical correspondent, Dr Donald Soper, 
who was shortly to receive a peerage from the 
Prime Minister, declared his New Year’s 
resolution on 1 January 1965: ‘to support the 
Government more fervently.’ And when George Brown 
had enticed the leaders of the trade unions and 
of industry to sign a declaration of intent to 
formulate an incomes policy, he received 
uncritical support from Tribune’s two economic 
correspondents from Sheffield, Mr Michael Barratt 
Brown and Mr Royden Harrison, who were not 
ashamed to cloak Mr Brown and his advisers in the 
mantle of Marxist orthodoxy: ‘The scene,’ they 
wrote, ‘is once again set for a decisive victory 
for the political economy of Labour.’ [9]

Summarising Labour’s first hundred days, 
Tribune’s editor concluded: ‘It would be grossly 
unfair to turn upon the Government now and rend 
it.’ Any minor errors, he was sure, would soon be put right. After all,

‘Given the spirit which Harold Wilson has most 
notably displayed on many previous occasions, 
there is no reason why the Government could not 
and cannot recover all the ground lost in the 
past weeks, and capture much more territory in the months ahead.’ [10]

And so it seemed, for a few months at any rate. 
The publication of ‘Dick Crossman’s brilliant 
housing Bill,’ the ‘welcome Race Relations Bill,’ 
the plans for steel nationalisation, the Budget, 
and the long Commons battle with Tory 
stockbrokers, all put heart into the Labour Left. 
Tribune proudly published interviews with leading 
Ministers, notably one with Anthony Greenwood, 
the new Colonial Secretary, who astonished the 
paper’s readers in British Guiana by his 
enthusiasm for the Duncan Sandys’ Guianese 
Constitution (described by Harold Wilson at the 
time of its publication as ‘fiddled’) and his 
description of the Guianese Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, as ‘a socialist.’

More important matters, however, soon arose to 
ruffle the solidarity of the Labour Left. First 
was the Government’s immediate and unequivocal 
support for the Americans in their war in 
Vietnam, particularly their support for the 
American bombing of North Vietnam, which started 
in February. Second was the Immigration White 
Paper in August. Third was the series of nibbling 
deflations, culminating in the big £100m bite at 
the end of July. Fourth was the Government’s 
decision, in the light of the abstention of 
Desmond Donnelly and Woodrow Wyatt in the House 
of Commons, to shelve the nationalisation of 
steel. And fifth, perhaps worst of all, was the 
National Plan, published in September. All these, 
in one form or another, were attacked by the 
Labour Left, though none of these attacks took 
the form of Parliamentary votes or abstentions. 
The National Plan particularly irritated those 
who had hoped for a genuine economic programme 
based on social justice, welfare and equality. 
The Plan, complained Tribune, ‘is a non-plan with 
its priorities badly wrong. George Brown should 
go away and think again.’ As for deflation, the 
Left’s alternatives did not (yet) include 
devaluation. John Mendelson, Left wing MP for 
Penistone argued both in Parliament and outside 
for import controls and overseas investment 
checks. On the issue of the incomes policy, the 
Left was split. Clive Jenkins, who had argued so 
furiously a year earlier that Harold Wilson was 
opposed to wage restraint, found that George 
Brown’s plan for an Incomes Bill was 
‘fundamentally authoritarian and anti-trade 
union. It should be spurned as a hobble for free 
men – a device which perpetuates inequality in 
British society.’ [11] The academics of the Left, 
however, still believed that the Government would 
produce a ‘socialist incomes policy.’ The extent 
of the Left’s reaction to these measures differed 
sharply. Some were so shocked and horrified that 
they cried halt to all support for Labour. 
Malcolm Caldwell, a dedicated Labour campaigner, 
voiced the most extreme disillusionment in a letter to Tribune on 20 August:

‘Socialist principles have been tossed aside with 
almost indecent cynicism and casualness. Racial 
discrimination in Britain has been condoned and 
strengthened. American butchery in Vietnam has 
been actively supported and encouraged. Social 
welfare and economic development in Britain have 
been sacrificed to carry out a reactionary 
economic programme at the behest of international 
finance capital. What of the Left leaders in 
Parliament? Tell them off on your fingers, 
comrades, and think of their words and deeds in 
recent months while the Labour movement has been 
sold down the river. It is a sad picture and I 
can personally neither see nor offer any excuses. 
Are we finished, we of the Labour Left?’

And, the following month, Alan Dawe, Tribune’s 
education correspondent, announced his resignation from the Labour Party:

‘We are not right,’ he wrote ‘to view the Labour 
Party and its latter day works as having anything 
to do with socialism. They don’t, they won’t and 
it is time we faced up to it.’ [12]

Such voices were, at the time, isolated heralds 
of the massive disillusionment that was to 
follow. The editor of Tribune received a great 
many more letters complaining about his attacks 
on the Labour Government and was forced to write 
an editorial explaining the need for dissent. 
And, even in that unhappy summer, the Left-wing 
Labour MPs could take solace in the wizardry of their leader:

‘He (Wilson) commands more widespread support 
within the Parliamentary Labour Party and in the 
country than any other leader the Labour Party 
has had. He fights the Tories and enjoys it ... 
The atmosphere (at the PLP meeting at the end of 
the summer Parliamentary session) was euphoric. 
Miraculously the gloom was banished ... 
Everything in the garden seemed to be looking, 
well, if not exactly lovely, at least a good deal 
greener than when Callaghan was wielding his axe six days before.’ [13]

As the economic crisis was temporarily dispelled, 
and, as Parliament met again in the autumn, the 
atmosphere of euphoria drugged the Labour Left. 
The total disarray of the Tories, under a new and 
indecisive leader; Harold Wilson’s two vast 
speeches at Party Conference and his apparently 
tough line on Rhodesia; the promotion of Barbara 
Castle and Anthony Greenwood; and a number of 
important welfare reforms, notably rating relief 
and local authority interest rate subsidy, 
combined to convince the Left that the Government 
was on the right road. When Richard Gott decided 
to stand as Radical Alliance candidate in the 
by-election in North Hull, he was severely 
rebuked by the Labour Left. ‘Do not destroy the Government!’ bellowed Tribune:

‘Every socialist has the right to criticise the 
design and performance of the Labour automobile – 
so long as he also helps to put some petrol in the tank.’ [14]

Two months later, with the decision to hold 
another General Election, all criticism was 
thrown to the winds in a stampede to get as much 
petrol into the tank as possible. Even Clive 
Jenkins’ carping about the Incomes Policy was 
stayed. For the new Labour Manifesto, Time for 
Decision, Tribune had nothing but praise:

‘The Labour manifesto is not only an interesting 
and stimulating document. It is also, in essence, 
a socialist one. The answers are inescapably 
egalitarian. There is some self-congratulation, but is it not justified?’ [15]

As election day approached the enthusiasm became 
feverish: ‘March 31st,’ wrote Michael Foot, ‘will 
mark one of the essential dates in the forward 
march. It is an opportunity which only 
incorrigible sectarians and nihilists, the best 
allies of the forces of reaction, will not wish to seize.’ [16]

It is hard even for an incorrigible sectarian to 
read Tribune before and after the March 1966 
General Election without a lump rising in his 
throat. On the day of the election, Tribune 
brought out a special front and back page which 
shouted in savage exultation at the impending 
destruction of the Left’s enemies:

‘... Who doesn’t want a landslide? We see you, 
Desmond Donnelly, with your Spectator pals – 
well, here it comes and you’ll be buried in steel ...

‘Pensions up, Rent Act Security, Unemployment 
Down, Prescription Charges off, who cares! We do 
... and so do millions ... now, for bigger advances, VOTE LABOUR!’

It was the triumphant, almost incredulous shout 
of thousands of men and women in the Labour 
movement who had worked all their lives without 
compensation for the return of a Labour 
Government in prosperous peacetime. The quarrels, 
the arguments, the strikes and lock-outs, the 
bitter theoretical wrangles of the last thirteen 
years had been smoothed over and bypassed with 
the injunction: ‘Get the Tories Out.’ In the past 
17 months of miniscule majorities, the injunction 
had been reiterated even more earnestly. For the 
50,000 or so readers of Tribune, the hard core of 
Labour’s rank and file, a Parliamentary majority 
for Labour was the first solution and did promise 
a more libertarian, more egalitarian society. No 
wonder in the hour of victory, that Tribune 
bellowed: ‘SOCIALISM IS RIGHT BACK ON THE 
AGENDA,’ and that their columnist Francis Flavius 
could argue that the election results marked ‘a 
significant watershed in British politics.’ [17] 
The Labour Left and Tribune took the 1966 
election result more seriously than anyone else 
in the land. The Press, who had whipped up a 
violent campaign against Labour in 1964, the 
industrialists, (even the steel masters who knew 
that a big majority would bring steel 
nationalisation) were silent. The flow of big 
money into Tory Party funds, even from the steel 
masters all but dried up. Political commentators 
reported ‘a boring election’ and predicted ‘no 
change.’ And, in the event, nothing changed. The 
course of British politics was not altered in the 
slightest degree by Labour’s landslide victory of 
1966. After a brief moment of euphoria, Harold 
Wilson and his henchmen continued their 
propaganda about restrictive practises on both 
sides of industry, their paranoiac defence of the 
pound sterling and their attacks on the trade unions.

Once the axe started to fall, it fell quickly. In 
May, the seamen went on strike to be met with 
fierce resistance, smears and abuse from the 
Labour Government. In early July, Frank Cousins, 
hero of the Labour Left, resigned from the 
Government over the publication of the Prices and 
Incomes Bill. In mid-July another sterling crisis 
pushed the Labour Government into a wage freeze 
and the most ruthless deflationary measures since the war.

The Left reacted to all this in shocked 
astonishment. ‘There has been,’ complained 
Tribune in June, ‘no glimmer of a changed 
strategy, no enlarged vision since the General 
Election of March 1966.’ John Morgan, a devoted 
socialist with a strong Left-wing bias, greeted 
the July measures with a melancholy cry which 
must have touched the hearts of the Labour Left throughout the land:

‘It isn’t just emotion that moves the socialist 
to rage and sadness now – not that there would be 
anything wrong with emotion. Dismay springs from 
the knowledge that a good, coherent programme for 
modernisation existed, even exists, which has 
been abandoned without even being tried. When 
Harold Wilson began speaking on the stage of the 
Brangwen Hall, Swansea, on the afternoon of 25 
January 1964, he was not only establishing 
himself as a national leader, he was winning the 
people to sensible ideas. It was an important 
moment in British politics ... The speech became 
the basis of the National Plan. It demonstrated 
how the recurring difficulties of the balance of 
payments could be defeated, how increased 
production could be the basis of a new society.’ [18]

John Morgan represented the Labour Party members 
who had been won over to what he called ‘that 
series of great speeches in the early months of 
1964.’ The dreary semi-Keynesian technocracy of 
Harold Wilson had inspired men like John Morgan 
just as John Kennedy’s preposterous New Frontier 
had inspired the soft American Left four years 
previously. Now with the Government’s collapse 
into Conservative remedies and Conservative 
reactions the Labour Left was utterly 
disillusioned without anything to offer as an half credible alternative.

In his Sunday Times article, in fact, John Morgan 
argued that the pound should have been devalued 
in 1964. Along with many others on the Left and 
Right who argued along the same lines, Morgan had 
advanced no such argument hi 1964. Tribune 
opposed devaluation in 1964, 1965 and in July 
1966; only in 1967 did the majority of the 
paper’s economic correspondents support a 
floating rate for the pound. And even then the 
Labour Left argued, quite dishonestly, that 
devaluation need not involve deflation. [19]
--
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