Meanwhile another equally emotive but more substantive row blew up over nuclear weapons. It was the 1945 Labour government which had committed Britain to developing its independent nuclear deterrent: Ernest Bevin was determined to have a British bomb ‘with the bloody Union Jack on top of it’ to maintain Britain’s position as a great power.23 Up to 1957 the party in opposition, still dominated by the right-wing unions, had held to that commitment, with even Nye Bevan, in an emotional speech to the 1957 conference, horrifying his unilateralist supporters by refusing to send a future Labour Foreign Secretary – he meant himself – ‘naked into the conference chamber’.24 But by 1960 the balance in the party had shifted. Bevan was dead, a new generation of left-wing leaders led by Frank Cousins of the TGWU had taken over the unions, and the left, already gunning for Gaitskell over Clause Four, seized on unilateral nuclear disarmament as a new stick to beat him with. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) held its first march from London to Aldermaston (later the other way round) in 1958 and quickly attracted a mass membership. Over the summer of 1960 one union conference after another carried unilateralist motions and Gaitskell faced a second defeat at Scarborough in the autumn. Given his concern that Britain should scale back her military pretensions and adjust to a more modest role in the world, Jenkins might have been expected to feel some sympathy with CND. But on this issue he was still a firm Cold Warrior, devoted unquestioningly to the Atlantic alliance. Privately he actually thought Gaitskell could have afforded to fudge a bit on the detail: at a heated meeting at Ladbroke Square in May, for instance, Jenkins, Crosland and Gordon Walker all thought the leader’s ‘extreme and provocative clarity’ likely to be counterproductive and were exasperated by his stubbornness.25 But Jenkins’ overriding worry was that the left’s lurch into unilateralism was just another symptom of irresponsible opposition-mindedness that threatened to make Labour unelectable.
When the AEU (the engineering union) voted for unilateral disarmament (as well as sweeping new targets for nationalisation and against any change to Clause Four), he agreed with Dalton that ‘the position had become impossible for Hugh’. They both thought Gaitskell should declare that if the party went unilateralist, he could no longer lead it. But Jenkins wanted him to go further and ‘say something positive and forward-looking to attract support from non-members, e.g. an anti-Trade Union declaration. We couldn’t go on being pushed about, on matters of policy, by snap decisions at Trade Union Conference by narrow margins, while delegates were waiting for tea.’26 In other words, it was the method of making policy, as much as the policy itself, that he objected to. (He accepted that he had not objected to the union block vote when it was controlled by the right, but argued that it was different now that it was being used to oppose the leadership rather than to support it.) In June he held a press conference in Stechford and issued a stark warning of what was at stake if the unions tried to impose unilateralism on the parliamentary leadership:
For the conference to force such a policy upon these men could hardly fail to destroy the Labour Party as we know it today. Either they would have to stand up in the House of Commons and say things which everybody knew they did not believe, and inevitably sacrifice the respect of the country, or they would have to resign and leave the party virtually leaderless. Either alternative would be catastrophic for Labour’s electoral prospects.
The vote at Scarborough would not rid the world of nuclear weapons; but it could easily ‘destroy the hope of a Labour Government for a generation’. He begged other local parties to follow the lead of the Birmingham Labour Party and reverse their position.27
Over the summer many did so – Stechford followed his advice by a margin of 5:1 – so that by the time they came to Scarborough most of the delegates in the hall had swung back behind the official multilateralist line. The trouble was that most of the big union block votes, headed by Cousins’ TGWU, were long ago tied up the other way. So when Gaitskell made his famously defiant speech (‘There are some of us, Mr Chairman, who will fight and fight and fight again to save the Party we love’) he had already won the argument but lost the vote. He still lost the vote, but by a much narrower margin – just under 300,000 in a total vote of six million – than had seemed likely a few weeks earlier.28 Jenkins was moved ‘to tears and total commitment’ by Gaitskell’s speech.29 The next day he spoke in the debate on Clause Four and directly confronted the left’s destructive hostility. ‘I hope we can conduct the rest of this debate,’ he began, ‘without the personal bitterness and rancour which seems to have been previous speakers’ main contribution to socialist aims.’ The party was actually pretty united on practical measures. ‘There may be a small minority who think we can achieve our aims only through cataclysm and misery. But the majority know we must change radically, but not destroy, society, and build on the foundations which exist.’ He mocked the ‘unyielding conservatism’ of those who would admit no change to the party constitution, and also their chauvinist insularity:
We exist to change society. We are not likely to be very successful if we are horrified at any suggestion of changing ourselves . . . One of the things from which we are suffering is a misplaced national complacency: a belief that we do things better than anyone else . . . Do not let us be too afraid, in the Labour Party, to learn from some of our friends abroad.
Socialist parties all round the world, Jenkins pointed out, had been modernising themselves in recent years – most famously the West German SPD at its Bad Godesberg conference in 1959, but also the Scandinavian, Austrian, Israeli and New Zealand Labour Parties – and doing very well as a result; the last wholly unreconstructed socialist parties left were the Australian and the French. To haul itself back into a position to win again, Labour must show that its principles were relevant to the 1960s, not keep refighting ‘old battles with old slogans’.30 He was booed for his pains. But Jenkins, for all his fastidious manner, never shrank from telling conference what it did not want to hear.
Having survived Scarborough, the next challenge Gaitskell faced was from Harold Wilson, who felt obliged to stake his claim to Bevan’s inheritance by standing against Gaitskell for the party leadership in November. He stood on a somewhat spurious unity ticket, claiming that Gaitskell’s style of leadership was ‘divisive’; but to the right, his candidacy only confirmed his reputation as an ambitious little twister. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Jenkins was confident that Gaitskell would be able to reverse the unilateralist vote next year, and was contemptuous of Wilson’s cynical suggestion that the nuclear argument could somehow be fudged:
It is peculiarly difficult to see how Mr Wilson, were he by chance to achieve success, would view his new position. He is clearly not a unilateralist . . . To pretend that compromise is always possible and that policy statements can mean both everything and nothing is a certain recipe for the continued erosion of the Labour vote.31
Gaitskell comfortably defeated Wilson by 166 votes to 81; but the two-to-one margin underlined the continuing tribal division in the party. Analysing the result in the Spectator, Jenkins jeered that if Wilson had been prosecuting in the recent Lady Chatterley trial he would doubtless have argued that ‘with goodwill there should be no difficulty in reaching a compromise between publication and suppression’. He went on, more seriously, to assert that there was no point compromising with the left, which only wanted to remain the left. To win again, Labour must reconnect with its potential supporters in the country:
Unless the Labour Party is determined to abdicate its role as a mass party and become nothing more than a narrow sectarian society, its paramount task is to represent the whole of the leftward-thinking half of the country – and to offer the prospect of attracting enough marginal support to give that half some share of power.32
That was precisely the objective of a new organisation, the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, founded that autumn to lead a grass roots fightback against the domination of the left. Jenkins attended the first meeting, in a Chelsea pub in May 1960
, which decided on the name. Tony Crosland helped write the manifesto (with two Oxford city councillors, Frank Pickstock and Philip Williams), and at least one of the early meetings was held in Jenkins’ house. But CDS, though it soon attracted the declared support of forty-five Labour MPs, the covert sympathy of most of the Shadow Cabinet and the endorsement of Attlee, was primarily an extra-parliamentary movement of younger candidates, councillors and local activists, including many of the rising stars of the next generation. The chairman and part-time paid organiser was Bill Rodgers; Denis Howell and Dick Taverne were also on the executive; while others who cut their teeth in CDS included Shirley Williams, Brian Walden and David Marquand. All of these entered Parliament in the next few years: Rodgers, Howell and Taverne at by-elections in 1961–2; Williams and Walden at the 1964 election; Marquand in 1966. All would be more or less closely associated with Jenkins over the next three decades, and all but Walden and Howell were founder members of the SDP in 1981. CDS was in fact a clear precursor of the SDP, successfully fighting within the Labour party much the same battle against the influence of the left that later drove the Social Democrats to leave the party. CDS was the first major exercise of Bill Rodgers’ unmatched organising talents, and was largely instrumental in enabling Gaitskell to beat back the unilateralist challenge at the 1961 conference in Blackpool. Compared with the other leading members of the ‘Hampstead set’, however, Jenkins himself did not play a very active part in CDS, even behind the scenes. ‘I was aware of your relative absence,’ Rodgers told him in 1990 when commenting on his draft memoirs. ‘I began to wonder if you were serious about politics.’33
He was not the only one. Jenkins was at this time, by his own admission, a ‘semi-detached MP’.34 After his uncharacteristic burst of energy immediately after the 1959 election he seemed to prefer writing about politics to full participation. That autumn he started work on his most ambitious literary project yet, a full-scale biography of the last Liberal Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith. The following summer, after a mild tiff with Gaitskell, he slightly petulantly resigned his frontbench post in order to be free to speak about Europe. ‘I have no general policy disagreement,’ he explained. ‘It is only on this one issue.’35, fn5 But he actually spoke very little over the next two years, preferring to use the Spectator as a platform from which to comment on the political scene in lofty and often somewhat disillusioned terms. For the Sunday Times in October 1961 he wrote a ‘long and adulatory’ – but anonymous – profile of Gaitskell in which he attributed his recovery of authority less to CDS than to his own exceptional qualities: his ‘stubborn intellectual integrity’ combined with (ironically, as it turned out) ‘extraordinary resilience of mind and body’. With Wilson ‘talented but isolated’, he asserted, and Gaitskell now buttressed by a group of right-wing colleagues (George Brown, Patrick Gordon Walker, Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey) with whom he worked well, Labour looked like an alternative government again.37
For the Spectator, however, and in his own name, he wrote a considerably more critical assessment of the 1961 conference.fn6 Despite the leadership’s victories on the main issues, the tone of the debates was still worrying, with too much ignorant applause for ‘farragos of half-baked Marxist nonsense’ from an irreconcilable minority who were ‘far more interested in the destruction of Mr Gaitskell than in the return of a Labour Government’. There was a disturbing lack of interest ‘whenever a matter of internal party dispute was not being touched on’. The reason, he suggested, was ‘the feeling of impotence produced by the years without power’:
The party is now suffering from ten years of passing too many programmes without any of them being carried into effect. What it now needs above all is not more policy proposals but the ability to carry through some of those it already has. It would then begin to be more interested in constructive solutions.
There were still ‘a lot of faults in the party’s structure’, as well as ‘a sizeable irreconcilable element’ within it. ‘But it may be,’ he concluded cautiously, ‘that, with a little more help from the Conservatives, these are containable until after the next general election and not incompatible with victory when it comes.’40
But his great cause in 1960–62 was the Common Market. By now Jenkins was clearly established as the leading Labour advocate of entry, which he presented primarily as a progressive cause to set against the ‘ghastly complacency . . . bound up with insularity . . . which, under Mr Macmillan’s example and inspiration, is settling upon the country’, and he attempted to link it with the youthful optimism aroused by the election of President Kennedy in the United States. He took as his text a pamphlet published in October 1960 by the sociologist Michael Young (author of The Rise of the Meritocracy and founder of the Consumers’ Association), entitled The Chipped White Cups of Dover:fn7
An effective Labour party must be against retiring behind this rather squalid and insubstantial fortification, against the dangerous isolationism which is implicit both in unilateralism and in much of Mr Macmillan’s foreign policy, and in favour of the steady merging of British sovereignty . . . A major task of the Labour party is to see that we do not remain the last bastion of misplaced self-satisfaction.41
His problem was that it was the Tories, not Labour, who were becoming the pro-European party. In the summer of 1961, after much cautious testing of the ground, Macmillan finally brought his Cabinet to agree to open negotiations for British membership, to be conducted by Ted Heath. Jenkins became deputy chairman of an all-party Common Market Campaign. Chaired by the former ambassador to Paris, Lord Gladwyn, it comprised a careful mix of parliamentarians, industrialists, mandarins and one or two trade unionists (including the former Durham miners’ leader, Sam Watson); its newsletter was initially edited by Bill Rodgers. But its cross-party character and City funding, plus the fact that it seemed to be supporting the Tory government, was a handicap in winning Labour support; so after a few months Jenkins set up a separate but overlapping Labour Common Market Committee, with himself as chairman and Jack Diamond, who was already treasurer of the parent body, as treasurer. (Diamond, Labour MP for Gloucester, was another long-term ally who would serve with Jenkins in the Treasury and later in the SDP.) At its launch Jenkins claimed the support of eighty Labour MPs. The division in the party was broadly right/left, with a majority of Gaitskellites (including Crosland) in favour and the old Bevanites like Michael Foot and Barbara Castle the most vociferous opponents; but there were plenty of cross-currents. Some left-wingers like Eric Heffer and the veteran Fenner Brockway supported entry; while several leading CDS supporters, including Jay, Gordon Walker, Michael Stewart and Denis Healey, leaned against. Gaitskell at this stage tried to hold the balance; but only three members of the Shadow Cabinet – George Brown, Ray Gunter and Douglas Houghton – could be counted as definitely pro-Market. So Jenkins’ committee faced an uphill task.
In the Commons on 28 June – a purely temperature-testing debate with no vote – Jenkins spoke with what Macmillan in his diary called ‘luminosity and sincerity’ in favour of early entry,42 but was heckled from both sides of the House. The Common Market issue, he wrote in the Spectator a few days later, cut across party lines to an unprecedented degree, uniting the far left in incongruous alliance with the far right: Sydney Silverman with Lord Hinchinbrook, Tribune with the Daily Express. ‘They all share a grossly exaggerated and completely outmoded view of Britain’s importance in the world and her capacity for independent action.’ The Suez mentality and unilateralism were reverse sides of the same coin. At the same time he dismissed equally scornfully Douglas Jay’s illusion that Britain could find a viable alternative in the Commonwealth and Denis Healey’s simple Atlanticism, pointing out that the Kennedy administration itself wanted to see Britain inside Europe. Healey, he wrote more tactfully, had now fallen back on ‘the most subtle and intellectually credible presentation of the Commonwealth argument’: that Britain must keep clear of ‘colonialist’ Europe in order to exercise leadership in the emerging Third World
. But this too was nonsense, since the emerging nations did not want leadership from Britain: they wanted independence and aid. It was a ‘pathetic illusion’ to imagine that everyone wanted leadership from Britain. ‘Whether or not we join the EEC is now subsumed by a bigger question: whether we live in an atmosphere of illusion or reality about our position in the world.’43
Jenkins next took his argument to the floor of the Blackpool conference, where he met the argument that he was supporting the Tory government by pointing out that he had supported joining the Common Market long before Macmillan and only wished that Labour had taken the initiative first. Again he insisted that Labour objections to the Common Market were mistaken. The Commonwealth would not suffer but benefit from British membership; while there was nothing necessarily anti-socialist about the EEC. Nothing in the Treaty of Rome would prevent Britain nationalising industries; within the Community France had more effective economic planning; both France and Germany had better social services; and every socialist party in the Six wanted Britain in. To use the European issue to attack the government, he urged, would be dangerously xenophobic for an internationalist party, dangerously backward-looking for a progressive party, and dangerous electorally:
Think of fighting a General Election with the Daily Herald, the Daily Mirror, the Guardian and the Observer against you! And who would be our allies – the Daily Express and the Daily Worker . . . Let us put such thoughts from our minds, and remember that as an international and an adventurous party, we should be moving towards and not away from Europe.44
The pro-Market resolution was overwhelmingly defeated. For the moment Labour resolved, without a vote, to await the outcome of Heath’s negotiation. For most of 1962 Gaitskell reserved his position, trying to hold his party together by keeping the pressure on the government, while his pro- and anti-European friends competed to win him to their side. At the turn of the year Jenkins thought the whole political outlook deeply depressing. On 12 January, in what turned out to be his last column for the Spectator, he delivered a withering assessment of the government, charging Macmillan with sidelining his ablest colleagues (Butler and Hailsham) while surrounding himself with mediocrities. ‘The result is that we have a weak Chancellor of the Exchequer [Selwyn Lloyd], a foolish Foreign Secretary [Lord Home] and a general Cabinet intellectual level which is such that it seems perfectly natural to have Dr Charles Hill in charge of all land use planning, of housing and of local government reform.’ But he was scarcely less despairing of Labour:
Roy Jenkins Page 28