The Labour Party in Opposition 1970-1974 by Patrick Bell

Author:Patrick Bell [Bell, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138867765
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

There was a need to continue economic expansion on a steady basis.

There was a need for a more equitable distribution of wealth.

There was a need for increased democratic control over the nation’s resources.

A need to tackle the problems of inflation and high prices (and here there was a need to educate the public).

There was a need to eliminate unemployment.141

No one could disagree with this, but his analysis amounted to little more than a restatement of basic Labour beliefs. In Callaghan’s opinion the document was a statement of objectives. Admittedly there would be argument over how quickly these objectives could be realised, but ‘there would be little argument as to the objectives themselves’. However, as a former Chancellor, he felt it necessary to warn the party that it would have to decide its priorities and stick to them, ‘otherwise you could not carry out the programme without raging inflation’. Callaghan could just as easily have made this speech had there been no research programme. His sole aim was to prevent the party from splitting. Paying tribute to Wilson, he reminded MPs how in 1964 ‘due to the skill of the Leader, the Party had united on a policy and been welded together as a fighting unit’.142 This, above all else, was what was required in opposition. It did little to rescue the parliamentary leadership from the research programme, since nothing Callaghan said changed the fact that economic and industrial policy was by this time the property of the Research Department (and was about to become the property of the TUC). Giving the NEC document Green Paper status, merely postponed the moment when the parliamentary leadership would have to face up to the inevitable consequence of allowing the party to discuss policy – the actual formulation of new policy.

Labour’s Programme for Britain 1972 was effectively the sum of the party’s research effort since 1968, since when the party had published five major statements of policy: Progress and Change (1968), Labour’s Economic Strategy, Labour’s Social Strategy and Agenda for a Generation (1969), and Economic Strategy, Growth and Unemployment (1971), each of which had been heavily influenced by the Research Department. In office Wilson had been able to ignore both the Research Department and the party conference. In opposition this situation changed. The parliamentary leadership was faced with a situation of having to compete with the NEC and the Research Department for control of the party’s policy agenda. Callaghan grafted himself onto the research programme through the Home Policy Committee, but was ultimately unable to wrest control of the process away from the Research Department. Consequently, the parliamentary leadership was not the source of new policy in opposition. Jenkins and Crosland, by attempting to influence the debate on policy from outside the official process, allowed the policy proposals of their ideological and factional opponents to go unchallenged at subcommittee level and to become party policy. As a result the parliamentary leadership became dependent upon a return to office to regain control of the party.

Notes

1 LPA, HPC, Minutes, 1970–74; LPAR, 1970–74.

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