01.06.1995

Establishment mourns one of its own

From the left to the right the politicians of the capitalist class lavished praise on Harold Wilson

THERE WAS nothing hypocritical about the parliamentary tributes paid to Lord Wilson of Rievaulx. James Harold Wilson KG, OBE, FRS loyally served British imperialism as prime minister between 1964 and 1970, and from 1974 till he unexpectedly resigned in March 1976.

During these years Wilson proved himself the complete reactionary. His government red-baited striking seafarers, unsuccessfully tried to chain the unions, backed the US in Vietnam and sent troops to the Six Counties to crush the nationalist masses.

For John Major, Wilson “served the country well and honourably”. For Ted Heath he was a man of “compassion”. For Tony Blair he “personified a new era” that was “classless, forward looking, modern”. Even Tony Benn joined in the eulogies. In the face of the rising wave of popular discontent and protest Wilson is apparently to be praised because he kept the Labour Party united. He craftily picked his cabinet from both the right and the left. “A party, like a bird, flies best when it has two wings,” Benn quoted Wilson as saying - obviously expressing his own disappointment about the present marginalisation of the left and its commitment to permanent and organic unity with the openly pro-capitalist right.

Wilson was by conviction a technocrat. Beginning political life as a Liberal, he rose to prominence as an assistant to Sir William Beverage - the architect of the post-World War II social democratic settlement. Cleverly, Wilson earnt himself a leftish reputation by resigning from Attlee’s cabinet just before his exhausted administration sank to oblivion in 1951.

Elected Labour leader in February 1963 on a left-right compromise ticket, he took his party to victory in the October 1964 general election. Not, however, as dumbly claimed by Mike Ambrose in the Morning Star, “while remaining committed to clause four public ownership” (May 25 1995). Wilson’s Labourism owed nothing to the 1918 anti-Bolshevik antidote drafted by Sydney Webb and Arthur Henderson.

Wincarnis man had a programme of capitalist modernisation. Condemning equally “restrictive practices” and “stuffy management”, he famously promised that the “white heat of the technological revolution” would reverse Britain’s evident historic decline.

Wilson failed. British capitalism was too dependent on the parasitic City to allow any thorough-going modernisation of industry. Hit by one foreign exchange crisis after another, the Wilson government attempted to solve its problems at the expense of the working class. Unemployment began to spiral, along with strikes. Wilson’s government responded with the In place of strife proposals to legally restrict union activity. Only the successful campaign, led by the CPGB, including a series of mass political strikes, prevented Labour doing a Margaret Thatcher.

Will Tony Blair - an admirer of the Baroness - be any less anti-working class once he becomes prime minister? Given Britain’s continued relative decline, I for one say we should without delay prepare for worse.

Jack Conrad