Roy Jenkins
Page 16
During 1949 Jenkins continued to work hard at being a diligent young MP. With no future in Southwark he needed to make a mark quickly in order to find a safer berth before the next election. To that end he intervened early and often in the debates on Cripps’ second budget, defending it particularly against the criticism of the Communist Phil Piratin, and praising rather too fulsomely the unflinching way in which Labour’s ‘Iron Chancellor’ was discharging his ‘difficult and thankless task’. He even ended one speech by quoting Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston: ‘Uncheered and undismayed, he marches up the broad, bare staircase of his duty.’22 ‘I was a tremendous loyalist during my first years in the House,’ he wrote slightly apologetically in his memoirs. ‘I waited to see what the Government was going to do and then devoted my speeches to defending decisions made rather than attempting to influence those which were still to be taken.’23 In this spirit he vigorously backed the government’s Profits Tax Bill (which clawed back some of the increased profits made by dollar exporters as a consequence of devaluation) as a small blow for greater equality, by contrast with the Tories’ ‘intolerable policy . . . of narrow selfishness’.24 Schooled in the Oxford Union, he was already a polished performer with an elegant turn of phrase and a veteran’s ease with the courtesies of parliamentary speech – ‘It is within the knowledge of the hon. Member’; ‘I am glad to see the right Hon. Member in his place’; but at the same time he could be waspish and aggressively partisan. Years later he admitted to being influenced by Dick Crossman’s way of holding attention by logical acrobatics. ‘I was sufficiently impressed as a young MP that he was the only parliamentarian I ever consciously tried to emulate.’25, fn4
He also contributed articles to Tribune and other Labour journals like the New Statesman and Socialist Commentary – earnest pieces on such subjects as wage stabilisation (his first engagement with the question of incomes policy), the need for a capital gains tax and the nationalisation of cement; attended Fabian conferences; and wrote long letters to The Times.27, fn5 At the same time – as a safety net in case he failed to secure another seat – he was beginning to do some more popular journalism. In July he had a big article in Picture Post, spread over seven pages, illustrated with grim photographs of dole queues and hunger marchers, under the headline ‘If US Depression Spreads CAN WE ESCAPE THE BLOW?’, in which he warned against repeating the policy mistakes of the 1930s.29 In addition he began a lifelong ability to turn his travels to profit by writing about the problems of the Italian socialist parties for the New Statesman.30 Already he was developing a useful second income to supplement his MP’s salary.
In June – the last time it was held in the summer – he managed to speak at the party conference at Blackpool. He spoke in the economic debate, once again defending Cripps against a resolution supported by practically every previous speaker pleading for some relaxation of wage control. As sternly as his master, Jenkins warned that inflation always hit the wage-earner hardest. But he balanced that unwelcome message by asking Cripps to make the ‘special contribution’ of his 1948 budget permanent. ‘I hope . . . that a general capital levy is still possible.’31 Cripps, however, made no concessions to Jenkins or anyone else, but in an ‘unrelenting’ reply, which, The Times reported, ‘left his audience intellectually helpless though probably emotionally unconvinced’, simply reiterated his stark message of continued austerity until the country had balanced its trade gap.32 For the moment party discipline was still such that conference swallowed its medicine without a vote.
That summer Jenkins suffered from what he called in his memoirs ‘a prolonged bout of the imprecise, lowering, although never disabling psychosomatic pains which have occasionally afflicted me throughout my adult life’.33 The likelihood must be that he was getting anxious about finding another seat and worried that his political career might be about to end before it had properly begun. He went to see a psychiatrist who depressed him further by telling him that he might hope to live a normal span so long as he avoided any undue strain. In later life Jenkins liked to recall this diagnosis with some amusement; but at the time it was not so funny. Seats were becoming vacant, but boundaries had been redrawn, making it hard to assess the winnability of the new constituencies. He turned down the opportunity to contest Hammersmith North, for instance, where the Labour candidate in 1945 – up against the Independent, effectively Communist, D.N. Pritt – had lost his deposit. In fact the new Labour candidate, Frank Tomney, easily defeated Pritt in 1950 and held the seat till his retirement in 1979; so Jenkins passed up the chance of a safe London seat. He did apply for two more promising constituencies: Eton and Slough, which preferred the veteran peace campaigner Fenner Brockway; and Ogmore – another Welsh valley seat some thirty miles west of Pontypool – which chose the president of USDAW (the shop workers’ union). He found the experience of hawking himself around the country ‘at once nerve-racking and mildly humiliating’, and was becoming ‘dismayed and a little desperate’ by the time the Member for Birmingham Yardley decided to stand down.34
Jenkins had actually had his eye on Birmingham all along, where a new constituency had been created on the eastern side of the city, formed in roughly equal proportions from the old Yardley and Erdington divisions and the more working-class parts of Solihull, where he had fought in 1945. It seemed certain to be a cast-iron Labour seat, and one where he already had some credit in the bank. One of his strongest supporters in Solihull had been Joseph Balmer, a Birmingham city councillor, later to be Lord Mayor; now, as chairman of the new constituency party, Balmer backed Jenkins equally strongly for Stechford. At the selection meeting on 16 October 1949 Jenkins had to deny that he was being foisted on the constituency as Attlee’s favourite son; he emphasised, as in Southwark, his ‘solid working-class stock on both sides of my family’, his training as an economist and the fact that his wife was ‘as keenly interested in socialist politics as I am’ and would play a full part in his campaign – an important selling point in a seat where the Tory candidate was a woman.35 In a three-way contest he narrowly squeezed through on the second ballot between the local party chairman (who led on the first ballot) and Fred Mulley (then a Cambridge academic, later to be a ministerial colleague in the Wilson governments), who came third. It was a huge relief. After six years of trying he finally had a secure base for a long parliamentary career.
Stechford was as different from Southwark as another urban seat could be. Central Southwark was a doomed but still lively community, its ageing electorate crowded together in crumbling Victorian tenements ripe for redevelopment. Stechford, by contrast, was an anonymous stretch of new housing estates mainly inhabited by skilled manual workers employed in the booming Birmingham motor industry and allied trades. If Southwark was a traditional Labour seat in which any of the early pioneers would have felt at home, Stechford epitomised the new world of Labour, in which some of the activists were still left-wing but the voters were less interested in socialism than in the size of the weekly pay packet and increasingly, as the 1950s went on, in the washing machine, the family car and the package holiday in Spain. When old socialists like Nye Bevan deplored the growing materialism of the working class, it was of places like Stechford that they were thinking.
Jenkins represented Stechford for twenty-six years, and its character, or lack of it, inevitably affected the development of his ideas over the next two and a half decades. He was a conscientious Member in the days when there was no expectation that MPs should live in their constituencies or visit more than once or twice a month. Local problems were dealt with by local councillors, who resented an MP who interfered. After some early tensions he enjoyed excellent relations with his local party, particularly with Joe Balmer, his agent S.G. Cooke and a couple called Austin and Dora (Dink) Hitchman, with whom he stayed during elections. He had some historical feeling for the city which Joe Chamberlain had made his personal fiefdom in the previous century, though Chamberlain was far from being one of his heroes. Yet in a quarter of a
century as a Birmingham MP he acquired little affection for the place. As early as 1952 he was playing his favourite game of drawing comparisons between cities in an article for the weekly illustrated magazine The Sphere. He did his best to present Birmingham as a ‘great and proud city’, with ‘a certain civic dignity . . . good theatres and good shops’. But ‘compared with European cities of roughly equal size – Marseilles or Milan or Munich – it lacks pulsation at the centre. It is essentially a place where people live and people work, rather than where people congregate.’36, fn6 In his last completed book, published the year before he died, he wrote that in the 1950s and 1960s ‘the city’s restaurant resources were minimal’. He never identified with Stechford as he did later with Glasgow, Hillhead, or romanticised it as Tony Crosland did Grimsby. Yet he was always grateful that it sustained his political career for twenty-six years ‘with steady and undemanding generosity’.37
He only had to nurse Stechford for four months while still representing Central Southwark. In that time, however, he was caught out by the taxman claiming for expenses to which he was not entitled. In those days MPs only received travelling expenses to and from their constituency, plus telephone calls within London and postage to government departments. (The need for second homes had not yet arisen.) But in July 1950 Jenkins’ claim for £40 for travel to Birmingham in the months before the election was rejected on the ground that he did not yet represent the constituency.38
Attlee called the election in February 1950. The government and all its senior ministers were palpably exhausted; while the Tories, still led by the seventy-five-year-old but rejuvenated Churchill, burning to reverse his defeat in 1945, were able to exploit public weariness with the years of rationing and socialist controls. Jenkins fought Stechford against this returning Tory tide. He had told his selection conference in October that the election would be ‘one of the most bitterly fought in our whole political history’, and that Labour would have to fight ‘the greatest defensive battle in the history of the labour movement’.39 In this spirit, his election address was a serious and notably well-written 1,000-word statement of Labour’s achievements – full employment, increased production, social security and the National Health Service – in the face of enormous economic difficulties. Above all, he contrasted Labour’s policy of fair shares for all with the Tories’ hankering to turn the clock back:
The alternative would be a return to power of the Conservative Party, with its policy dressed up a little for electoral purposes, but with its basic ideas the same as in pre-war days. The results would be much worse than in pre-war days, for the war has destroyed many of the advantages which we used to enjoy in our trading relations with other countries. Tory ideas of a fair distribution of wealth, which brought enough misery in the easy days, would now be intolerable; and Tory neglect of our productive resources . . . which was dangerous enough fifteen years ago, would now mean national disaster.
‘Since 1945,’ he concluded, ‘we have had, for the first time, a Parliament which has . . . worked for the whole community, and not just for a selected few. I ask you to elect another such Parliament on February 23rd.’40
With thirteen Birmingham constituencies to cover and Stechford assumed to be safe, the local press did not pay him much attention. His opponent, Edith Pitt – an industrial welfare officer and local councillor who campaigned mainly on what were called ‘women’s issues’, specifically the cost of living – got rather more coverage. Reporting one of his meetings, the Birmingham Gazette commented that Jenkins ‘looks like a young Conservative – one of the more serious type’, describing his emphatic gestures with his right hand while his left stayed mainly in his jacket pocket – ‘so much more graceful than the trousers’ pocket’; but conceded that ‘this new arrival in Birmingham is one of the city’s most impressive Labour candidates’.41 The Birmingham Post reported that Jennifer came up ‘from the South’ as often as she could to help him, both speaking at meetings and canvassing (as she had done in Solihull and Southwark); she also featured prominently on his election leaflets, contributing her own ‘Message to the Women Electors of Stechford’, mainly about prices and family allowances. Hattie too came up from Wales.42 But very little was reported of what any of them said.
The national result left Labour still the largest party, but its huge majority melted away and the government was left with a bare overall majority of just five. Attlee was able to stagger on for another twenty fractious months; but the socialist millennium, so confidently hailed in 1945, had run into the sand. In Stechford, however, Jenkins was comfortably returned to a House of Commons where he could now feel he properly belonged:
Roy Jenkins (Labour) 33,077
Miss E. Pitt (Conservative) 20,699
S.W. Haslam (Liberal) 2,789
Labour majority
12,37843
The Birmingham Gazette reported, slightly satirically, that the newly elected Member ‘wasted no time in seeking relaxation. He went to the pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, last night, with 200 Labour Party members, settled down in his seat and forgot the huge task ahead of him. Today he is going to London with his wife for a brief rest.’44 The pantomime, suitably enough, was Jack and the Beanstalk. He was now ready to start climbing.
* * *
fn1 In 1948 the Commons were still sitting in the House of Lords, as they had been since their own House was bombed in 1940. They did not move back into the rebuilt Commons chamber until 1950.
fn2 Model Parliaments were an admirable Victorian exercise in civic participation which still survived in some places, where local people met to debate current issues in a sort of mock House of Commons, like a less privileged Oxford Union.
fn3 The rent was £240 p.a. – nearly half Roy’s MP’s salary of £600 p.a. – but, with a friend of Jennifer’s lodging with them, their housing costs were ‘almost negligible’.21
fn4 A letter to Dalton in October 1950, however, suggests that he was beginning to find Crossman’s compulsive love of paradox merely tiresome. ‘One ought at least to pretend to believe in the ideas one puts forward.’26
fn5 He was also willing, slightly surprisingly, to put his name to Cold War propaganda prepared by the Foreign Office for dissemination in non-aligned countries like Norway, articles with titles such as ‘Soviet Sharp Practices Exposed: How Yugoslavia was Exploited’.28
fn6 He had recently been to Milan, but it is not clear that in 1952 Jenkins had yet visited either Marseilles or Munich.
7
Fair Shares for the Rich
THE NEW MEMBER for Stechford was a serious young socialist. He had fought the election on the Labour government’s record since 1945. But at his selection meeting the previous autumn, facing an exclusively party audience, he had set out where he believed the Labour movement should be aiming in the years ahead. It was widely agreed that the government had run out of reforming steam since its initial burst of energy in 1945–8. Jenkins listed three steps – more radical than anything in the 1950 manifesto – which he suggested the next Labour government should take towards creating ‘a more genuinely equal and democratic society’: first, ‘a large-scale capital levy’, to spread the ownership of wealth more widely; second, the destruction (or at least the absorption into the state system) of the public schools, which was ‘essential’ to creating greater equality of opportunity; and, third, moves towards industrial democracy, starting in the nationalised industries. These were all mechanistic matters of social engineering. But he concluded with a statement of the broader purposes of socialism, as he understood them, of which much more would be heard over the next decade:
I am by training an economist. Day to day politics . . . are becoming more and more an affair of economics. But do not let us for that reason begin to think that socialism is something solely concerned with economics. It is nothing of the sort. Economic policies, measures of nationalisation, these are only the means to an end. The end is the creation of a society in which everybody can live full, c
ontented and worthwhile lives, working in a decent atmosphere and living in good houses and pleasant surroundings. This is the end, and we must never lose sight of it. I think that so far we have made fairly good progress in the right direction, but that we still have a long way to go. It is our task in the Labour movement to see that we get there.1
For the moment, however, he still projected himself very specifically as an economist. He was at once loyal to the government and distinctly left-wing; aware of the country’s severe economic difficulties, yet determined that the transformation of society should not be halted by them. Speaking on the budget in April 1950, he repeated his call for a capital levy to reduce ‘the gross inequality of property . . . which . . . I believe to be totally incompatible with a truly democratic society’. He thought Cripps had been ‘a little over-cautious’ this year, but pompously conceded that his record was so good that he was entitled to the benefit of the doubt! This speech also gave him the opportunity to congratulate Tony Crosland, who had been elected for South Gloucestershire, on his ‘striking maiden speech’, which took much the same line.2 No doubt they had discussed it together. Over the spring and summer he made several more short speeches and interventions in the debates on the Finance Bill. ‘On two occasions,’ the Birmingham Labour paper, the Town Crier, noted with approval on 24 April, ‘he entered the debate, and with great skill exposed the arguments of the Tories for the sham they were.’3 In June he asked his first oral question, of the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, about exports to the United States; and in the new session, beginning in November, he made several more fairly technical speeches about raw materials and the cost of living.