Labour leaders looking to cite successful predecessors, at least in the most obvious electoral sense, don’t have many to choose from. Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair: the old-fashioned ring of those first three names tells us how long ago most of Labour’s sporadic premierships were. It is now 50 years since a general election was won by a Labour leader other than Blair.
Successful Labour governments have been even rarer, if we measure success by how they are remembered. Media bias against the party, the more subtle negativity of many historians and the critical eyes of many Labour voters, members and politicians: all these have combined for decades to highlight the party’s failures in office and downgrade its achievements.
This fraught history is one more minefield for Keir Starmer to navigate in the endless months between now and the election. As ever, his approach to Labour’s past governments has been cautious. His inner circle and instinct to move right on most issues may be Blairite, but in public he makes only occasional references to New Labour. The obviously more charismatic Blair campaigned for office and governed in easier times. But even his premiership ended badly, with New Labour losing voters by the million and being for ever associated with the disaster of Iraq rather than with its flawed but considerable domestic accomplishments in repairing public services, reducing poverty and devolving power.
In his speeches, Starmer sometimes likes to evoke a Labour premier who is less divisive today: the once dominant and popular Wilson. Starmer describes him approvingly as someone who sought to “modernise” the country, and also as a more high-minded figure. “Harold Wilson once said that the Labour party is a moral crusade or it is nothing,” Starmer said in 2021. “He was right.”
That Wilson also won more general elections than any other modern British party leader – four out of the five he contested – enhances his appeal for Starmer, who has never experienced such a victory even as an MP. Usefully, Wilson’s premierships from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976 were also long enough ago for most voters to know little or nothing about them. Unlike Blair, he can be presented as a relatively untainted role model.
However, if we look at the Wilson governments more closely, the lessons for Labour today may not be the ones Starmer wants us to learn. Like Starmer, Wilson made reviving the economy his central mission. In 1964, he created a new department of economic affairs (DEA), to work with the Treasury, which he rightly saw as sometimes too passive and unambitious. But both that innovation and his wider economic project failed, undermined by Whitehall infighting, the shortcomings of some ministers and the age-old reluctance of British finance to invest in British businesses. The DEA was shut down after five years, and the economy did not break out of its usual boom and bust cycle. Wilson’s initial reputation as a dynamic premier gave way to a wearier public persona. Being in office aged him fast: he stepped down shortly after his 60th birthday, younger than Starmer is now.
One of Wilson’s problems was that he was often better at electioneering than governing. With Starmer, the opposite may turn out to be true. He lacks Wilson’s wit, phrase-making and ability to charm voters; but he exudes more energy. Having become a politician much later in life than Wilson, Starmer seems determined to make his opportunities count. It’s hard to imagine him disappearing from Downing Street for whole afternoons, as Wilson did, to drink tea at his doctor’s house in the London suburbs.
Wilson had a lot to escape from, especially during the 1970s. As well as the struggling economy, there was a war in the Middle East with global implications, a resurgence of the British far right, and a mood of introspective gloom in Whitehall, corporate boardrooms and the media, where people accustomed to international influence were not enjoying their first full decade without an empire. The resemblance to today’s post-Brexit Britain is striking.
To an extent, Wilson’s government was simply ground down by the sheer weight of crises, as were 1970s governments across the west. There is a danger that the same will happen to any Starmer administration that, unlike Wilson’s, will also face the climate emergency, fragile public services and rapidly worsening poverty. Today’s rightwing media, inflamed by populism and the post-truth virus, is also even less fair to Labour than it was in the 1970s. If the party takes office, expect it to be blamed almost instantly for everything that is wrong with the country, rather than our past 14 years under the Tories.
There is one positive lesson for Labour from the Wilson era, however, if Starmer and his lieutenants care to take it. For all their failures and crises, Wilson’s governments also managed to pass or support a lot of pioneering progressive legislation: against racism and for equal pay for women, against the death penalty and for statutory maternity leave, gay rights, easier divorce and access to abortion.
These achievements have been largely forgotten, thanks to the campaign ever since by the right, and some on the left, to present postwar social democracy as a dead end, an inadequate solution to Britain’s long economic decline. Yet the life of a society is not just economic. Millions of lives have been improved by Wilson’s social reforms, as they have been by the reforms of other supposedly unsuccessful Labour governments. To point this out is not to deny such governments’ many terrible compromises and disappointments. Labour has achieved a lot less in office than it might have, particularly in the precious times when it has had a big majority, as Wilson did in the late 1960s and Blair did from 1997 to 2005.
If Starmer wins the election, it would be foolish to expect much change to this pattern. But when and if his administration does anything good, from a left-of-centre perspective – when and if it makes “a difference worth fighting for”, as Starmer promised in his new year speech yesterday – that should be recognised and then remembered. Otherwise, the story of Labour in power will continue to be written largely by its enemies, and power will usually be held by others.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
