Hugh Gaitskell died 50 years ago today
on 18 January 1963. He had great qualities and his Eurosceptic views resound
with ever more urgency today as we enter upon the long-awaited renegotiation of
our membership terms.
Pupils from Winchester have
enriched many areas of national life in Britain. One such was Hugh
Gaitskell (1906-63), the Leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to his death and
a political hero to me in my youth. Gaitskell was the son of an official in the
Indian Civil Service and his maternal grandfather was Britain’s consul-general in Shanghai. A top-line education at The Dragon
School, Oxford followed by Winchester
College saw him move to New College,
Oxford.
Gaitskell graduated with first class honours in politics, philosophy and
economics in 1927. His Establishment credentials were impeccable.
However, Gaitskell had been radicalised by the General
Strike of 1926. He lectured in economics to the WEA and to Nottingham
miners. In the early 1930s he became head of the department of political
economy at University College London and tutored at Birkbeck College.
He travelled in Europe and was attached to Vienna University
in 1934, witnessing the conflicts between Right and Left there. He stood
unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1935 and married his feisty Jewish wife Dora
in 1937.
During the Second War he worked at the Ministry of Economic
Warfare under Hugh Dalton and he entered Parliament as an MP in the Labour
landslide of 1945.
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| Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell |
Gaitskell joined the cabinet in 1947 as Minister of Fuel and
Power and when that apostle of austerity Sir Stafford Cripps retired through
ill-health, Gaitskell succeeded him as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1950. He
only presented one Budget and the time was inauspicious. Revenues were needed
for Korean War rearmament and Gaitskell raised profits tax and adjusted others
but most controversially introduced charges for glasses and teeth, hitherto
free on the National Health. The Labour Left regarded this as a betrayal of the
principles of the Health Service and Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson resigned
from the cabinet. Labour lost office at the election later in 1951.
The Post-war economic consensus between the parties was
dubbed “Butskellism” after Gaitskell and his Tory opposite number Rab Butler.
Butskellism accepted a mixed economy, with important industries nationalised,
working alongside a hopefully buoyant private sector. In the event powerful
trades unions and ineffective industrial management undermined Butskellism – it
needed Margaret Thatcher a generation later to find a new path.
When Clement Attlee retired in 1955, Gaitskell easily enough
defeated Bevan and Morrison for the leadership of the Labour Party. Bevan once
called him “a desiccated calculating machine” and he did have a stern public
image. Yet Gaitskell was fun-loving: he had an enthusiasm for ballroom-dancing,
earning the sniffy disapproval of de Gaulle; he was fond of the ladies and
embarked on a reckless affair with Ann Fleming, man-eating Tory wife of Ian
Fleming, creator of James Bond. Living in Hampstead, he gathered around him a
coterie of admiring intellectuals full of ideas including Roy Jenkins, Anthony
Crosland and Denis Healey.
Gaitskell showed his thoughtful perspicacity when he pressed
Anthony Eden not to go to war over Suez
in 1956. He deplored Nasser, but did not consider him an overt threat; he
wanted Eden to work through the United Nations –
Blair might have done better had he taken the same line with Bush over Saddam
and Iraq.
He had a long struggle with the Left about Clause 4 in Labour’s Constitution
pledging wholesale nationalisation in the long term; he lost this battle and
only Tony Blair’s New Labour lanced that boil about 35 years later. After losing
the election to Macmillan in 1959, he was faced with a Labour Conference
decision to work towards Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament. He promised to reverse
this policy and in a famous speech vowed to “fight, fight and fight again to save the Party we love”. Gaitskell
duly won the following year in 1961.
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| Gaitskell's Passion |
Gaitskell upset many of his followers, including me, by
opposing Britain’s
entry to the EEC. Speaking in October 1962 he said;
It does mean, if this
is the idea, the end of Britain
as an independent European state...it means the end of a thousand years of
history.
Gaitskell could see, as we did not, the integrationist and
federalist ambitions of the European elite who had created the Treaty of Rome.
He realised the pledge to move towards “ever-closer union” was not mere
rhetoric. He wanted hard reflection in Britain on the choices we faced.
That reflection never came (commentators like Christopher Booker maintain there
was a deliberate cover-up) and we are facing the consequences now.
I only saw Gaitskell speak in the flesh once, to a student
audience in Oxford
in 1962. He reviewed the issues of the day with fluency and wit: it was clear
that his statements were the fruit of earnest thought and intellectual rigour;
he did not bob and weave like Wilson
or pump up his windbag like Kinnock. He was indeed “the best prime minister we
never had”. When he suddenly died in January 1963 his admirers were devastated.
Gaitskell is to many an almost forgotten figure. Yet his
compassionate engagement, his logical mind, his striving after sensible
solutions to national problems and above all his patriotism are by others not
forgotten and our political life needs these qualities as never before. If
David Cameron is looking for allies in his European struggles, he might do
worse than evoke the spirit of Gaitskell and find common ground between Tory
and Labour Eurosceptics.
SMD
18.01.13
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013
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