Arthur Latham’s journey to parliament was a relatively conventional one for a Labour politician. Growing up in a working-class family, his father a trade unionist, Latham joined the Labour Party after the 1945 election. A councillor in Romford by 21, he rose through the ranks of local politics on Romford and later Havering Council, eventually becoming leader of the Labour Group. While personally uncomfortable with the self-promotion that came with seeking a parliamentary seat, he was selected to fight the safe Tory seat of Woodford in 1959, given the daunting task of challenging Sir Winston Churchill. In his 2014 History of Parliament oral history interview with Andrea Hertz, Latham describes the strange experience of spending a few hours with Churchill and his wife Clementine, at the election count.

While his political beginnings were similar to many Labour politicians in the post-war era, Latham’s later activism reflected the emergence of new radical energies within the party and British politics more widely. Radical movements in 1960s Britain, typified by the student protests of 1968, the campaign against the American war in Vietnam, and new social movements around feminism, black radicalism and gay rights, frequently came into conflict with Harold Wilson’s Labour government. While some activists sympathetic to these energies left the Labour Party in disillusionment, others formed grassroots pressure groups to challenge the Wilson government from within. One of these activist groups, Socialist Charter, was believed to play a direct role in securing Latham’s victory in the 1969 Paddington North by-election, his campaign reportedly bolstered by the ‘help of 200 to 300 activists’ from the group [Kogan & Kogan, 13]. From then on Latham’s career frequently intersected with the fortunes of the party’s so-called ‘hard left’. His entry into parliament was both directly helped by left-wing activists, and formed an early part of a much wider change in the House of Commons’ factional composition.

Latham’s election was part of  an influx of new left-wing Labour MPs, mostly coalescing around the Tribune Group, a faction within the Parliamentary Labour Party founded in the early 1960s by  supporters of left-wing newspaper Tribune,  which had grown significantly towards the end of the 1970s.  Further, this new generation were considered far more willing to rebel, even if it meant defeating the government on the floor of the Commons. A self-described ‘rebel in the House’ and considered by others ‘a thorn in the side’ of the 1974-79 government, Latham became chairman of the Tribune Group in November 1975, then at the height of its rebelliousness [Telegraph, 22 Dec. 2016].

While Latham was prepared to often be a lonely minority on matters of principle, there were some major disagreements between the government and backbench MPs during his time in Parliament. This was revealed through the whipping system, which privileged the top-down leadership of the government, rather than the collective view of the parliamentary party. This was in complete contrast to Latham’s experience of local government decision-making and was illustrated particularly clearly when it came to parliamentary votes on joining the European Common Market. 

Latham’s frustration reflected the growing disconnect between the Labour government and its backbenches, and anticipated the internal divisions that would plague the party into the 1980s. Yet there were still limits to the Tribune Group’s rebelliousness. Latham describes how the group had to strike a ‘delicate balance’ between exerting pressure on the government without bringing it down entirely. At times, this meant that the Tribune Group was mobilised to support the government rather than rebel against it.

The period not only saw conflict between the Labour government and backbench MPs, but also a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ [Randall, 215] between the party’s parliamentary leadership and its grassroots membership. Once again Latham played a part in this internal conflict.

In June 1973, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) was formed. Made up largely of former Socialist Charter members, the pressure group was launched in reaction to Harold Wilson’s vetoing of radical policies endorsed by party conference. To ensure similar such flagrant rebuffs of conference sovereignty did not happen again, CLPD advocated a series of major reforms to the party’s constitution, ensuring that the party’s parliamentary elites were more accountable to the grassroots membership. This included making it mandatory for incumbent MPs to go through a re-selection process, and widening the franchise for the election of party leader to include ordinary members and trade unionists, as well as MPs. It was Latham who booked the room in the House of Commons where CLPD met for the first time. In this small act he played an early facilitating role in the formation of a campaign that would eventually achieve major changes in Labour’s constitution, decisively altering the relationship between the party’s grassroots membership and its parliamentary elites.

Latham’s career  reflected a wider reconceptualization of what an MP’s role could be. The new generation of left-wing MPs were not only less deferential to the party leadership, but also ascribed greater importance to activism outside parliament. Latham spent little time in the Commons chamber and made few speeches, describing it in the 2014 interview as ‘not a good investment of time’. Instead, he was ‘extremely busy’ outside, both with constituency work and in supporting extra-parliamentary movements. A lifelong peace activist, Latham was a member of the British Campaign for Peace in Vietnam, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Movement for Colonial Freedom. In 1977 Latham was elected Executive Chair of the Greater London Labour Party. While ostensibly an administrative position, his election again reflected a wider shift to the left in London politics, which culminated in Ken Livingstone’s radical administration on the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 to 1986. Latham returned to local government himself in 1986 and became leader of Havering Council in 1990. He would eventually briefly resign from the Labour Party in response to the Iraq War, once again reflecting a common experience of left-wing disillusionment within the party, and a period of dramatic decline in the party’s membership.

Arthur Latham’s career was therefore frequently a bellwether for the progress of Labour’s ‘hard left’ from the 1960s onwards. His parliamentary career intersected the left’s rise in influence and his later trajectory frequently emulated the experience of other left-wing activists across the country. Studying the political activism of Arthur Latham provides not only an enlightening insight into the experience of a committed left-wing politician, but also reveals the contours of much wider political changes in Britain in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

A.S.

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Further reading
David Kogan and Maurice Kogan, The Battle for the Labour Party second edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Ken Livingstone, If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It (London: Collins, 1987).

Hugh Pemberton and Mark Wickham-Jones, ‘Labour’s Lost Grassroots: The Rise and Fall of Party Membership’, British Politics 8:2 (2013), pp.181-206.

Nick Randall, ‘Dissent in the Parliamentary Labour Party, 1945-2015’ in Emannuel Avril and Yann Béliard (eds.), Labour United and Divided from the 1830s to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp.193-220.

John E. Schwarz, ‘Attempting to Assert the Commons’ Power: Labour Members in the House of Commons, 1974-1979’, Comparative Politics 14:1 (1981), pp.17-29.

Rhiannon Vickers, ‘Harold Wilson, the British Labour Party, and the War in Vietnam’, Journal of Cold War Studies 10:2 (2008), pp.41-70.

With access to the British Library sound archive still unavailable, a full catalogue of our oral history project and details with how to access interviews is available on our website. 

Find more blogs from our oral history project here.

Alfie Steer is a historian of modern and contemporary Britain, currently studying for a DPhil at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the history of the Labour Left from the end of the miners strike to Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015. His most recent article was published in Contemporary British History, and has written book reviews for Twentieth Century British History and the English Historical Review. Outside of academia he has written for popular publications such as Tribune.

In the dark winter months of 1973-1974, the Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, told a private audience of the grave implications of the soaring price of oil. ‘The assumption that had underlain the last 25 years,’ he said, ‘that the growth of the developed countries could proceed steadily on the basis of cheap energy, had been shattered almost overnight.’ Its loss, he warned, ‘would breed social instability, and the risk of radical and even violent change.’

The actions of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to quadruple the price of oil between October 1973 and February 1974 had delivered an almighty shock to the industrialised world. The events of that winter have often been pinpointed as the rupture that marked the decisive end to a golden age of stunning economic growth and rising prosperity.

The energy crisis that ensued seemingly confirmed beyond doubt that the age of postwar affluence had come to a shuddering halt. ‘The history of the twenty years after 1973’, Eric Hobsbawm wrote in the Age of Extremes, ‘is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis’.

Traditional assumptions unravelled as stagflation ripped through the economies of the industrialised world and beyond. Although by no means the sole cause of the economic turbulence, the implications of the oil crisis were profound. In the words of one of the leading historians of OPEC: ‘It shook the transatlantic, white, liberal, Keynesian civilization that had emerged from WWII to its core.’

In Britain, the immediate fallout of the energy crisis saw the fall of Heath’s Conservative Government. Amid the OPEC shock and the Government’s confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers, Heath had decided to call an early General Election for 28 February 1974. The gamble failed as he was narrowly defeated by Harold Wilson’s Labour.

Significantly, the 1974 election witnessed the remarkable rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Claiming Britain’s mounting North Sea oil discoveries for an independent Scotland, the SNP won 22 per cent of the popular vote in February and elected seven MPs. In a second General Election that October, the Nationalists won 30 per cent, displacing the Scottish Conservatives as the second party in the popular vote. Suddenly, the SNP were no longer a joke; the prospect of independence, not so distant.

My paper for the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar explores the double-edged effects of the North Sea oil discoveries on the politics of Scottish autonomy in the 1970s. It has two main aims. First, the paper seeks to show how the SNP’s electoral upsurge in 1974 – fired by the slogan, ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil!’ – initially induced panic at Westminster and prompted the Labour Government and, indeed, all the main parties to enter into fresh commitments to introduce a national Scottish assembly after years of inaction.

Second, the paper then highlights how concerns relating to North Sea oil – and the designs of a growing Nationalist movement in Scotland – caused the Government to delay implementing devolution after 1974. Doubts over the wisdom of embarking upon far-reaching constitutional reforms intensified as the sheer magnitude of the North Sea discoveries began to dawn upon leading figures at the heart of the British Government.

Drawing on recently released archival materials, the paper devotes considerable attention to the Government decision of late 1975 to delay moving ahead with the assembly. Devolution’s failure in the 1974-1979 Parliament, of course, can be attributed to a number of different factors: the flawed nature of Labour’s scheme; that the proposition had ‘few principled supporters’ in the parties themselves; the vigorous opposition to the legislation mounted in Parliament; and ebbing enthusiasm among voters at large by the time the 1979 referendum rolled around.

But a close analysis of documents for this period shows how the oil issue assumed a key part in the Government’s internal deliberations. And, over the course of 1975, a number of leading Cabinet Ministers and highly influential civil servants drove a pushback against the original plan of the Leader of the House of Commons, Edward (‘Ted’) Short, to hold assembly elections in 1976-1977. Fearing that an assembly would seek to impinge on Britain’s vital oil interests, the Treasury spearheaded the effort within Government to derail the proposals.

RJ

To find out more, Robbie’s full-length paper is available by signing up to his seminar and contacting seminar@histparl.ac.uk. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

To register for this virtual seminar, please follow this link and click on ‘Book now’. If you cannot attend this session but wish to submit a question to Robbie, please send it to seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

Harold Wilson is well known for many things – his Premiership and long leadership of the Labour Party and his role in key debates such as those around the UK’s recent referendum on membership of the European Union and questions about devolution. Wilson’s government’s work is still cited by current politicians- for example the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee referred back to Wilson’s work on the civil service [Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee The Work of the Civil Service: key themes and preliminary findings] and a recent collection of writings on Wilson’s government was introduced by several serving politicians, including Tom Watson [A. Crines and K. Hickson eds. Harold Wilson: the unprincipled Prime Minister? Reappraising Harold Wilson (London 2016)].

However, some aspects of Wilson’s career remain obscure. In my paper to the seminar, what I tried to do was to shed some light on one little known area of Wilson’s career – his period as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee (1959-63). Wilson took on the role unusually in combination with his roles in the Shadow Cabinet. He left it to become leader of the Labour party and what my paper tried to show was that there were links between the work he did at the Committee and his work as an opposition politician.

As Chair of the Committee, Wilson questioned civil servants about major projects and programmes of work where value for money had been compromised. These instances could range from individual misconduct – such as the failure of the Ministry of Aviation’s procedures to stop civil servants acting corruptly – to more systematic failings, like the Ministry of Transport’s failure to budget successfully for the construction of roads. Wilson’s committee was supported by the Exchequer and Audit Department who collected evidence for their inquiries and issued bipartisan reports.

This all may sound fairly interesting to a historian of administration but not to a historian of politics or of Wilson, but Wilson’s period as Chair was significant in three ways. Firstly it enabled him to build up a reputation as an impartial, expert critic of the government. Secondly it gave him a critique of government policy that he could turn into the language of partisanship – railing against Tory waste and incompetence. Later Wilson could bind this into an attack on Alec Douglas-Home and his match stick approach to economics. Lastly Wilson’s tenure on the committee informed his own attitudes to Parliamentary and especially select committee reform.

Our discussion of Wilson’s time at PAC was really interesting. I had focussed very much on Wilson’s own use of and interest in the committee, what I found fascinating was that the discussion focussed on broadening out the scope of what I was thinking about – for example people were asking about how Wilson got away with what he was doing on PAC, were others aware of his work, was this model of chairing a precedent for future chairs? Some of these questions are by their nature unanswerable or hard to answer given the evidence but they have made me think about how I develop this project in the future.

HM

Join us tonight for the latest seminar: Henrik Schoenefeldt (University of Kent) will speak on ‘The challenges of designing the House of Lords’ nineteenth-century ventilation system: a study of a political design process, 1840-47.’ Full details here.

Modern political wisdom has urged caution on Prime Ministers considering calling early elections, in part thanks to memories of 1974. There were two elections in this unusual political year: the first itself a snap election in February by Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath in response to the energy crisis, three-day-week and industrial action from miners; the second by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in a bid to gain a parliamentary majority after winning in February, but only with enough seats to govern as a minority.

Heath’s decision to call the February election was seen as a gamble at a time of crisis. The economy was crippled by high levels of inflation and the oil crisis that followed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and the government’s attempts to control rising prices by capping wages were hampered by industrial action called by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). This led to a state of emergency and the government heavily restricting energy supplies, including industry operating on a ‘three day week’. Heath hoped that an election victory would give him a stronger hand when dealing with the NUM who were threatening further strikes rather than accepting the government’s pay deal. Heath famously went to the polls asking “who governs Britain?”

According to the former MPs interviewed for our oral history project, Heath’s decision was controversial to both parties. Sir David Madel told us that he was one of many at the party’s backbench 1922 Committee to argue against the election; whereas Laurence Reed instead remembered that the meeting’s overall mood was that Heath “couldn’t back down now”. For Labour, the issue was complicated due to their close ties to the Unions. Many MPs did not fully back the NUM: Alan Lee Williams felt his failure to do so cost him Labour votes in his constituency of Hornchurch; whereas David Stoddart argued that the calling the election was “silly” as the public had sympathy for the miners, and that it gave the unions “a sense of power which a) they didn’t deserve and b) they shouldn’t have”.

Conservative Sir Terrence Higgins argued that Heath in fact called the election too late, by the time he did so the electorate were “basically upset” with the state of the country. Our interviewees certainly remembered a miserable campaign, in bad weather, short broadcast hours and “in the dark” due to restrictions on lighting, such as in this clip from Labour’s Edmund Marshall:

Unfortunately for Heath, early in the campaign a Pay Board official report was published demonstrating that the miners were in fact right to argue that they had been paid less than others in similar sectors. Sir John Hannam remembers the impact this had on the campaign:

Although Heath won the popular vote his gamble had failed: Labour won more seats (if only enough for a minority government). This was a “surprise” to many Conservatives, and to Heath himself, whose last minute efforts to form a government with Jeremy Thorpe’s resurgent Liberal party were described as “half-hearted” by Patrick Jenkin. The minority government meant that everyone in Westminster expected another election quickly. Labour candidates who lost out in February continued to campaign. Frank White, who lost by 300 votes the first time round, let his agent continue to organise “not a campaign” but an active canvassing and door-knocking plan throughout 1974.

When the election came round as expected in October, one crucial factor in the primary battle between Conservatives and Labour was the appeal of minority parties. Labour’s Jim Sillars, who went on to join the SNP, remembered noticing increased support for the nationalists on the doorstep (the SNP went on to win 11 seats – a record for them at the time), and in England the crucial factor for many was the Liberals. They had increased their vote share in February, but fell back in October, causing unpredictability (and sleepless nights!) for a number of candidates, as remembered here by Janet Fookes:

Yet for Helene Hayman, first elected in October having lost out in February, the key was Wilson’s appeal to the electorate:

Wilson did indeed get his majority, but it was a small one of just three. Labour’s Ann Taylor, one of the new MPs elected in October, remarked in her interview that four new Labour MPs elected in the North West would often say “we are the majority”. The result led to a difficult parliament in 1974-9 with the Labour government just managing to stay in power, but saw the end of Edward Heath, who was removed as Conservative leader in 1975 – too late, in the opinion of many of our Conservative interviewees, who argued his leadership was extended by the expected second election and his “stubbornness”. Margaret Thatcher became the new Conservative leader, and ushered in quite a change in government in 1979.

EP

For more on our oral history project, visit our website or you can listen to the recordings in the British Library. Watch this space for more election 2017 themed blogposts…

In addition to my usual post at the Victorian Commons, I’ve been working with Professor Sir David Cannadine (until recently a member of the History of Parliament’s editorial board) on his new BBC Radio 4 series about Prime Ministers and their props.  Each episode examines how a Prime Minister became associated with a certain object or prop in the popular mind, and how that prop, inadvertently or otherwise, came to define the public image of the premier in question.  The series considers Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella, Stanley Baldwin and his iron gates, Anthony Eden’s Homburg hat, Alec Douglas-Home and his matchsticks and Harold Wilson’s pipe and Gannex coat.  Unsurprisingly, the occasionally peculiar public association of Prime Ministers with certain inanimate objects did not escape their contemporaries in parliament. Furthermore, parliamentarians have played a crucial role in disseminating the association of our political leaders with their props.

The subject of our first episode, Neville Chamberlain, became widely associated with his umbrella after signing the Munich agreement in September 1938, and returning to England, brolly aloft, to deliver his ill-fated ‘peace in our time’ speech.  For a few brief months, the umbrella and Chamberlain became widely lauded icons of world peace.  However, within a year, war had been declared, and Chamberlain and his umbrella were quickly transformed into symbols of weakness and misguided optimism over the threat posed by Nazi Germany.  Although Westminster was quick to disassociate itself with Chamberlain and his umbrella, many MPs were taken aback by how a prop had transformed a previously unknown politician into a household name.  Accordingly, when MPs were discussing propaganda strategies in October 1939, MP for Lancashire, Hamilton Kerr, saw the identification of a prop as a key media technique for familiarising the public with its war leaders.  Props such as Chamberlain’s umbrella, he informed the Commons, had the power to transform politicians and military chiefs ‘from aloof and little-known personalities to human beings of flesh and blood’, who might help to keep ‘alive our faith in the dark days’ of war – a call to props that was answered by a certain Mr Churchill and his cigar.

Debate in parliament and during elections also provided one of the key means through which Prime Ministers became associated with props in the public mind.  Alec Douglas-Home, who became known as the ‘matchsticks premier’, after he unwittingly informed a journalist in 1962 (a year before he became Conservative Prime Minister) that he required a ‘box of matches’ to ‘simplify and illustrate’ economic documents, is the subject of our fourth episode.  His popular association with matchsticks was thanks in part to the efforts of the Labour Party, who under the leadership of Harold Wilson were intent on establishing themselves as the modernising force in British politics during the long election year of 1964. Key to this strategy was establishing that the Conservative party offered an out-dated approach to government, and Douglas-Home’s matchsticks provided the perfect rhetorical means of establishing Labour as the only party that was not just willing, but able to embrace the ‘white heat’ of technology.  At various points during 1964, Labour MPs and peers castigated Conservative economic, education and housing policy as the outmoded and ill-judged products of the ‘monarch of the matchstick’, and during that year’s election, Harold Wilson informed electors that a vote for the Conservatives was a vote for ‘matchbox economics in a computer age’.

MS

You can catch the remaining episodes of this series on BBC Radio 4 at 9:30am Wednesdays. All episodes will be available through BBC iPlayer after their initial broadcast.

In 1970 the Conservatives won the general election, and Prime Minister Ted Heath began a major diplomatic effort to join the European Economic Community (EEC) or Common Market. Even after successful negotiations at the European level, passing the legislation would remain difficult for Heath’s government.

Although opposition to joining the EEC could be found in both parties, throughout this period the largest internal divisions were found in the Labour party. Two polarised and outspoken groups emerged: on the party’s left, a group led by figures such as Tony Benn opposed the EEC on economic grounds, believing it would impact on Labour’s plans for a more planned economy; on the party’s right, an enthusiastic pro-European group supported entry both for ideological and economic reasons, led by Roy Jenkins. One of this group, Dick Taverne, even resigned the Labour whip on the issue [see our blog: ‘Defection, by-elections and Europe… in the 1970s’ ].

Ted Heath’s legislation saw Labour MPs joining forces with the Conservatives on both sides of the debate. David Stoddart, MP for Swindon who opposed joining, remembered working directly with the Conservatives to oppose legislation:

David Owen, then a member of the shadow cabinet, remembered the manoeuvres on the pro-EEC side to ensure that the Bill passed:

With this help Heath passed the legislation, despite needing 300 hours of Commons debate to pass the 1972 the European Communities Bill, and the UK joined the EEC.

By the 1974 election therefore, Labour leader Harold Wilson was left with a divided party. He solved this by giving in to the demands of the anti-Europeans in his party and included a promise of a referendum in Labour’s election manifesto. This earnt him praise from some in his party, such as his PPS Frank Judd, who at that time opposed the common market. He remembered that Wilson “understood and respected that point of view,” and was pleased to be able to discuss the issue with Wilson openly whilst keeping his job. The decision to hold a referendum however angered many of the pro-Europeans. David Owen said it was “blatant manoeuvring” and Robert Maclennan, MP for Caithness and Sutherland, it was a party political move he “couldn’t stomach”. Along with Jenkins and these two, a number of MPs resigned from the Shadow Cabinet on the issue.

Yet the Referendum proved a success for the pro-Europeans, when the country voted convincingly to remain part of the EEC. Ray Carter, MP for Birmingham Northfield, remembered the change of opinion in his constituency:

For those had campaigned against the UK staying in, however, the result was a significant disappointment, and did not stop their opposition. In this clip Frank Judd remembers drifting apart from his friend and political ally Tony Benn because of the vote:

Unfortunately for Wilson, the Referendum had failed to resolve the issue within the Labour party. It  became part of larger divisions between left and right in the 1980s, and helped cause one group to leave Labour to form the Social Democratic Party (see our blog: Labour leadership elections through the years). Yet by the 1990s it was the Conservative party who were most at war with themselves over Europe, as we’ll discuss in a post later this week…

EP