[BITList] Labour's loss

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Gaitskell,  Hugh Todd Naylor  (1906-1963), politician, was born at 3 Airlie Gardens, Kensington, London, on 9 April 1906, the youngest of the three children of Arthur Gaitskell (1870-1915), of the Indian Civil Service, and his wife, Adelaide Mary (d. 1956), the daughter of George Jamieson, who had been consul-general in Shanghai. They met on the boat to Japan. Hugh, known as a child as Sam, was born into a comfortable upper-middle-class English family with strong roots in the empire. After attending the Dragon School, a preparatory school at Oxford (1912-19), he was educated at Winchester College (1919-24), and New College, Oxford (1924-7), following his elder brother, Arthur, who was an academic star at both.

University teacher and Labour Party adviser

For Gaitskell the general strike of 1926 was a transforming experience, which drew him to the left (he joined the Labour Party about this time). At Oxford he took part in activities in support of the strikers, and came into contact with G. D. H. Cole, under whom he studied and wrote an extended essay on Chartism, arguing that a successful working-class movement needed middle-class leadership. This was published as a Workers' Educational Association booklet in 1928. After graduating with a first in philosophy, politics, and economics in 1927, he spent a year as a Workers' Educational Association tutor in the Nottinghamshire coalfield. It was a formative experience for him, both personally and politically. Personally, he lived briefly with a local woman and enjoyed his first mature relationship. Politically, he developed a less romantic view of the working class and learned much more about the practical aspects of socialism. In 1928 he was appointed to a lectureship in political economy at University College, London, and he remained there until 1939, becoming head of the department of political economy and university reader in 1938. He was adopted as prospective Labour Party candidate for Chatham in autumn 1932, but was defeated when he stood there in the general election of 1935.

Gaitskell developed his ideas, and had his first impact on Labour policy, when he moved to London, becoming heavily involved in policy groups and the political and cultural activism centred on Fitzrovia, near Bloomsbury. From its formation by Cole in March 1931, Gaitskell helped to run the New Fabian Research Bureau, which influenced the drafting of Labour's Immediate Programme of 1937 and the unused policy documents for the election that was due in 1939 or 1940. From 1934 he belonged to the XYZ Club, a select dining club which brought City figures, such as Nicholas Davenport, into contact with Labour's financial experts, such as Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin, and Douglas Jay. Gaitskell absorbed the Keynesian analysis as it emerged, and with Durbin and Jay politicized its implications for policy, feeding these ideas to an often reluctant Dalton. Gaitskell's political economy entailed fiscal and monetary planning along Keynesian lines and physical planning where these policies proved inadequate. The programme of 1937 endorsed some of these ideas, but Dalton's crucial paragraph committing the party to 'plan the economic life of the nation, both industry by industry, and district by district, and on a co-ordinated whole' was dropped from the published version. There were commitments to nationalization in the programme, though not of the joint-stock banks or the steel industry, and the wording was ambiguous in places and left the party freedom of manoeuvre. Gaitskell never wavered in his conviction that the economy could and should be planned.

During his apprenticeship Gaitskell stood out from the small group of advisers gathered around Dalton in two ways. First, his economic analysis was always grounded in a political analysis, which recognized the electoral dimension of policy making but which was realistic about voter aspirations; and second, he consistently opposed appeasement, both before and after Munich. His firsthand experience of helping Austrian socialists escape from the seizure of power by a right-wing, authoritarian government in 1934, when he was studying in Vienna as the holder of a Rockefeller scholarship, ensured that he had few illusions about the nature of the enemy. Dalton became his patron, and was among those recommending him for selection as a candidate for the Labour seat of South Leeds in November 1937.

Election to parliament and office in the Attlee government

On the outbreak of war Gaitskell was recruited into Whitehall, working for Dalton as a temporary civil servant in the Ministry of Economic Warfare from May 1940, and from February 1942 at the Board of Trade, which brought him into contact with the miners' leaders. His period in the civil service demonstrated his aptitude for administration. It also meant that, following his return for South Leeds in Labour's general election landslide in 1945, he was unusual among the new intake of Labour MPs in having seen Whitehall from the inside. A short but significant illness prevented his immediate inclusion in the government, but he was made parliamentary secretary to Emanuel Shinwell at the Ministry of Fuel and Power in May 1946. Gaitskell's first task was to help the passage of the Coal Nationalization Bill through the House of Commons, and he carried the brunt of the committee stage, winding up both the final debate on nationalizing this industry and the second reading debate on electricity nationalization. He also shouldered much of the ministerial burden of the fuel crisis of 1947. Jay and James Meade had been warning Gaitskell for months of the possible problems and Gaitskell had tried to get this through to Shinwell, who dismissed him as a Wykehamist who did not know the miners. Finally on 6 February 1947 Shinwell had to ask the cabinet for permission to implement daily shutdowns of the power stations in several regions, blaming the minister of transport for the crisis. Gaitskell ran the key committee that decided where the coal should go, and his administrative decisiveness and skill made a considerable impression throughout the department and the cabinet.

Gaitskell's first major task as a politician was to create and then deal with the shortcomings of nationalized industries. He believed in nationalization on grounds of efficiency, economies of scale, and rationalization of production, and considered it to be morally right. He also recognized its limitations. Although in public he defended the structure of the nationalized industries to the hilt, he was privately somewhat ambiguous about how the public corporation had been devised. The problem was that Gaitskell, like the rest of the Labour government, put far too much faith in the nationalization programme. The result could hardly be presented as the socialization of industry or indeed as having anything very much to do with socialism. Management structures and the exercise of authority in the workplace were largely unaltered. At best the change of ownership produced an enhancement of the unions' status. Gaitskell's hope for the industries was that the relationship between workers and employers would be transformed. That aspiration was never realized.

In October 1947 Gaitskell replaced Shinwell as minister of fuel and power, though he remained outside the cabinet. He was obliged to defend unpopular policies of fuel economy, including the abolition of the basic petrol ration for private motorists. Less publicized, but more crucial in the long term, was his far-sighted encouragement for the building of oil refineries and the development of a petrochemical industry in Britain. During the devaluation crisis in the summer of 1949, when the illness of the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, left a space in the government for economic policy making, he was among a triumvirate of young ministers who were crucial in bringing to a head a debate on changing the value of sterling. Gaitskell was the rock of the group and, backed by Douglas Jay, held Harold Wilson, the president of the Board of Trade, to the line agreed on the economic benefits of the change. The prime minister, Clement Attlee, and other senior ministers took note.

Chancellor of the exchequer, 1950-1951

In February 1950 Gaitskell was promoted to minister for economic affairs, though he was still outside the cabinet, and in October 1950, when Stafford Cripps resigned, Gaitskell was appointed to succeed him as chancellor of the exchequer. This was a dramatic leap to one of the most senior positions in the government. The major feature of Gaitskell's short period as chancellor was the controversy over the imposition of National Health Service (NHS) charges, known as the 'teeth and spectacles row'. No other political crisis in Gaitskell's career better illustrated how far his greatest strength-political courage and confidence-could turn into his singular weakness, stubbornness. His budget of 1951 did not lose the Labour government the election, but it did little or nothing to help the government win. There have been election-winning budgets, but Gaitskell was not in the business of delivering a reflation package. When he presented the outline of his proposals to Attlee, the prime minister's response was that there were not going to be very many votes in it. Gaitskell replied that he could not expect votes in a rearmament year. However, with the benefit of hindsight it is too easy to see the Labour administration as one that was running out of steam: a successful budget, a unified party, and careful timing could have produced a different result in 1951.

The most damaging feature of Gaitskell's budget, which sought to raise additional taxation to meet the cost of the rearmament programme resulting from the Korean War, was the imposition of the charges on teeth and spectacles. These charges were originally accepted by the cabinet in February 1951 but the debate was reopened in the budget cabinets in April. The initial agreement was critical to Gaitskell's case but the imposition of the charges was completely irrelevant to the short-run economic well-being of the country, to its capacity for fulfilling the rearmament programme, and even to the terms of the Treasury's own forecasts. This episode raised two substantial policy issues. First, could the NHS have been sustained without the imposition of charges? Second, should charges have been imposed to help finance the rearmament programme for the Korean War, alongside an overall budget that proposed wide-ranging tax increases? Here Gaitskell represented the consensus in the cabinet as agreed in 1949 and in February 1950: welfare expenditure could not be an open-ended commitment. This assessment reflected the importance which the Labour government attached to production or supply problems as well as to welfare provision. A further question was whether these charges had to be implemented at this point, in this budget, in this way, with the possible political fall-out. Gaitskell forced the cabinet to back him. Herbert Morrison repeatedly offered a compromise whereby the budget would contain a ceiling on NHS spending but would not mention charges. Gaitskell consistently refused and made this the sticking point. He believed that it was necessary to adopt charges and that merely setting a ceiling was insufficient; politically, he needed to be backed by the cabinet to assert his ascendancy over his main political rival and the champion of the left, Nye Bevan. Attlee had little option but to back his chancellor: resignation the week before a budget by a chancellor would never have been accepted.

Though he genuinely seems not to have counted on such an outcome during the budget crisis, Gaitskell was the principal beneficiary in personal political terms. He established his position as a political actor in his own right, in effect forcing his two main opponents (Bevan and Wilson) out of the government, and consolidating his standing among the leadership, who suspected that Bevan was looking for a pretext to resign. Paradoxically perhaps, Gaitskell, supporting a rearmament package in support of an anti-communist war in Asia, emerged as the loyalist and Bevan, supporting the idea of a free health service and opposing an over-ambitious rearmament package which squandered much of the post-war recovery in export trade, was seen as the splitter. The whole affair brought Gaitskell close to a physical and emotional collapse, but it also placed him ahead of Bevan in terms of popularity with the Parliamentary Labour Party, in which loyalty counted above almost anything else.

In opposition: the Labour leadership

Following Labour's defeat in the general election of 1951, Gaitskell's house in Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, became the centre for a long and successful campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party. Initially it seemed that the leadership would pass naturally to Morrison for a period before moving to Gaitskell's generation. However, Morrison's reputation had been undermined by his weak performance as foreign secretary, and his support from right-wing unions declined. A movement of opinion on the right developed in favour of someone of Gaitskell's age-group who would take a tough line against left-wing critics. As a former chancellor Gaitskell was able to lead the attack on the Conservative government's economic policies. He attacked his Conservative successor as chancellor, R. A. Butler, thereby producing evidence against those who employed the epithet 'Butskellism' to suggest ideological continuity.

In a speech at Stalybridge on 5 October 1952, following an acrimonious party conference at Morecambe in which the Bevanites effectively took over the constituency section of the national executive committee, Gaitskell attacked communist infiltration in the party, and spoke of 'mob rule' got up by 'frustrated journalists'  (Brivati, 176). His stand as a patriotic anti-communist and critic of the broader left gained him a powerful network of backers among the leadership of the right-wing trade unions, including at this time the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU). Although they did not have votes in the election for leader, figures such as Arthur Deakin could bring pressure to bear on their sponsored MPs. Having effectively courted union support, Gaitskell defeated Bevan in the election for Labour Party treasurer in October 1954, a victory he repeated more decisively a year later. The backing of the unions had its price, and he felt obliged to do some of what he termed the 'dirty work'  (Diary, 401, 2 April 1955) for them. Most notably he took the lead in the unsuccessful attempt to have Bevan expelled from the party in March 1955. This toughness consolidated Gaitskell's hold over the right.

Attlee finally retired as Labour Party leader after losing the general election in 1955. In the ensuing leadership election, held in December 1955, Gaitskell won an emphatic victory at the first ballot, gaining 157 votes against 70 for Bevan and 40 for Morrison. Between 1951 and 1955 Gaitskell had consolidated his national reputation, made some strong alliances but also some powerful enemies, and often displayed a sure political touch, sense of timing, and acumen. It was a political performance that has not received the credit it deserves, for energy, for strategy, and for sheer nerve.

The first major challenge which Gaitskell faced as leader was the Suez crisis, and his political touch, timing, and judgement failed him momentarily. He has been criticized for this ever since. In his first speech on the crisis, in the House of Commons on 2 August 1956, he clearly stated his view that he would support armed intervention only if it was endorsed by the United Nations. Although this was his line throughout the crisis, it occupied only a minor part of his first speech, the emphasis of which was more anti-Nasser than pro-United Nations. The speech, which could be cited selectively to create the impression that the Labour Party was not opposed to the use of force, was even welcomed by some Conservative die-hards. But on 31 October he attacked the military intervention by Britain, France, and Israel, calling it 'an act of disastrous folly'  (Brivati, 273-4) which compromised the three principles of bipartisan foreign policy: solidarity with the Commonwealth, the Anglo-American alliance, and adherence to the charter of the United Nations. When it became clear that the prime minister, Anthony Eden, had been lying to him in private, he reacted with characteristic passion and emotion, broadcasting a powerful attack on Eden (4 November 1956) in reply to an earlier ministerial broadcast. In doing so, however, he was exposed to the Conservative charge that he had changed his position in response to the clamour of his own party's left wing. Gaitskell was in fact consistent throughout the crisis, and spoke for an internationalist tradition that was deeply rooted in British politics. It was arguably at odds with the views of some core Labour voters, but he attracted support from sections of Liberal opinion who in other respects might have found a Labour Party based on trade unions and sentiments of class solidarity unattractive.

The internationalism of Gaitskell's stance on Suez and the emphasis he placed on the central role of the United Nations connected him with a broader movement in colonial development and disarmament, which had a constituency of support that was much wider than Labour's traditional strongholds. He had no sense of this during the crisis, but afterwards it tended to reinforce his instincts, which were further supported by the evidence produced by the pollster Mark Abrams, that Labour needed to become more open and less sectarian in its search for electoral support. But he presented his position badly, and his performance deteriorated because of the depth of his distaste for Eden: his call for Conservative opponents of the Suez operation to join with the opposition to oust Eden was a serious miscalculation, for it served only to rally that party behind its leader. Gaitskell committed errors during the Suez crisis and was made to pay for them in the House of Commons and in the press.

Family and private life

The emotion and passion shown by Gaitskell during the Suez crisis and later in his conference speeches in 1960 and 1962 were the key to the personality that lay behind his otherwise dry public image. He was an engaging and warm person away from the political stage, with a love of dancing, an enjoyment of life, and a liking for high society. At university he had worked and studied hard with one set of friends centred on Evan Durbin. Serious-minded, politically engaged, and rather earnest, they expressed the side of Gaitskell's character that insisted that his suits were bought from the Co-op. But he had another set of friends at Oxford, including his old schoolfriend John Betjeman, who were members of Maurice Bowra's salon. Their world was altogether more frivolous and bohemian. Gaitskell was comfortable in both groups.

On 9 April 1937 Gaitskell married Dora (1901-1989) [see Gaitskell,  (Anna) Dora], the divorced wife of David Frost. She was the daughter of Leon Creditor. They had two daughters. When Gaitskell first met Dora in Bloomsbury, she belonged to a group of artists and intellectuals who seemed to bring the two sides of Gaitskell's Oxford life together. From 1946 their home was at Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, which became the focus of his 'Hampstead set' of younger MPs, notably Tony Crosland, Douglas Jay, and Roy Jenkins.

In the middle of the 1950s Gaitskell met and had an intense affair with the society hostess Ann Fleming  (1913-1981), the wife of the writer Ian Lancaster Fleming. Friends and close colleagues worried both that the liaison would damage Gaitskell politically and that the kind of society life that Fleming lived was far removed from the world of Labour politics. Widely known in journalistic circles, though never reported, his attachment did not outwardly affect his marriage, but it did show the streak of recklessness and the overpowering emotionalism in his character that so diverged from his public image.

Revisionism and clause 4

The early years of Gaitskell's leadership saw some blurring of the Labour Party's factional alignments. Frank Cousins became general secretary of the TGWU in 1956; gradually this loyalist union shifted to the left. Bevan, on the other hand, became shadow foreign secretary in 1956 and broke spectacularly with the left at the party conference in 1957 with his attack on unilateral nuclear disarmament. Gaitskell's early leadership was reconciliatory; his opposition to the Suez invasion strengthened his standing within the party, not least on the left. Within this relatively consensual environment the party rethought its policies in the aftermath of a second successive general election defeat. The most controversial policy document, Industry and Society, was endorsed at the party conference in 1957. This supplemented the existing conception of the public corporation as the method of nationalization by more flexible forms of social ownership, including state purchase of shares in private firms. The policy was a compromise not least between Gaitskell, Bevan, and Cousins, but the superficiality of the new-found unity was quickly made clear when Industry and Society was loudly condemned by Bevan's wife, Jennie Lee, and by Michael Foot in the pages of the Bevanite paper, Tribune.

Nevertheless, the Labour Party appeared to enter the general election in 1959 more united and more confident than in 1955. Its campaign was better organized and its appeal on international and domestic questions was more positive. Yet the election came at the end of a long hot summer and in a context of national well-being. 'Life's Better with the Conservatives. Don't let Labour Ruin it' was the claim against which Gaitskell had to make his party's case. He appeared in all Labour's television broadcasts and undertook a strenuous national tour. The campaign increased his standing but an apparently innocuous comment at Newcastle arguably inflicted decisive damage on the party's chances. A pledge that in normal circumstances Labour would not raise income tax seemed reasonable in the light of the party's plans for economic expansion. But the Conservative counter-attack against 'fiscal irresponsibility' proved effective. The result showed an increase in the Conservative majority to over 100 seats.

The implications for Gaitskell and the Labour Party were potentially devastating. Commentators suggested that the party-at least in an unreformed state-would be doomed to long-term opposition due to the spread of post-war affluence and the resulting transformation of working-class experiences. In one sense Labour was seen as a victim of its own success in creating extensive welfare provision and a climate in which large-scale unemployment was politically unacceptable. Despite the defeat Gaitskell's position within the party was initially strong. Both Richard Crossman and Tony Benn thought that this credibility would allow him considerable scope to advocate party reform.

Gaitskell felt that the Conservatives' campaign had exposed ambiguities in Labour's proposals for nationalization. Industry and Society, with its share-buying proposals, allowed both cautious and radical interpretations. His own views on the status of public ownership within party strategy had been presented in a Fabian pamphlet, Socialism and Nationalisation, written in 1953 and published in 1956. This rejected the view that the achievement of a socialist society required the gradual extension of public ownership. There was no such necessity; the contributions of specific public ownership proposals to full employment, industrial democracy, and the transfer of economic power were matters not of assertion but of investigation. In effect Gaitskell rejected public ownership as the most efficient means of transforming the market economy into a socialized one. In particular he rejected the Morrisonian model. However, he retained a faith in physical controls to correct market failure and advocated flexibility about the form but not the existence of public ownership. In this Gaitskell was, and remained, a little to the left of his closest ideological partner, Tony Crosland, author of the classic statement of what became known as the revisionist case, The Future of Socialism (1956). Both men, however, believed that the ritual endorsement of public ownership needed to be replaced by a commitment that the Labour Party would maintain a mixed economy which operated with more efficiency and greater fairness because of government intervention, especially to stimulate demand. This position was shared in its essentials by Gaitskell's closest allies within the party. Socialism was not an end state to be achieved by gradual transformation, but the reform of institutions and practices for the more effective realization of preferred values. The roots of Gaitskell's position on these basic issues could be found in the 1930s, not least in his association with Evan Durbin, whose book The Politics of Democratic Socialism (1940) was a seminal text.

Goodwill towards Gaitskell within the party diminished rapidly in the aftermath of defeat. An impromptu gathering of his close associates at his Hampstead house three days after the election sparked rumours of radical change, and these inevitably fed criticism. Inept public comments by allies meant that when he addressed the postponed party conference in November 1959 the party was already divided. Faced with this challenge, he abandoned the reconciling strategy that had served him and the party well for four years. Ignoring prudential advice from some close allies, he advocated replacing clause 4 of the party constitution, which was a commitment to the public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. To urge its replacement with a new statement of party aims was to combine his pragmatic view of public ownership with a desire to revise the party's socialist commitment.

Gaitskell was receiving detailed polling evidence from Mark Abrams that the image of the party and its association with nationalization was disillusioning younger voters. He therefore decided that the party had to break with the strongest statement of that commitment, clause 4. He decided on this because he believed it would address directly Labour's electoral weakness and allow a more modern presentation of the party's message. How far the removal of clause 4, in isolation from other more wide-ranging reforms, would have improved Labour's electoral position, is debatable. What was clear was that the attempt to remove it carried obvious political costs. The removal of clause 4 aroused not just the predictable hostility of the left, but a much broader opposition. Much was pragmatic. Clause 4 was irrelevant to the party's activities; division over its removal was therefore unnecessary. Even on the right of the party there were many normally loyal supporters of Gaitskell for whom the broad outlook which clause 4 embodied, if not its precise detail, was integral to their political identity. This was true in particular of the older trade union loyalists both inside the parliamentary party and on the industrial wing of the labour movement. Gaitskell risked rejection; he was inspired by a sense that he could re-educate the party by a frontal assault on a significant, if rarely cited, party symbol, a Labour equivalent of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.

Initially it appeared that a compromise had been reached. The party's national executive in March 1960 endorsed a new statement of aims as an addition to clause 4, not a replacement. But through the summer the verdicts of union conferences showed that this settlement would probably be rejected by that party's autumn conference. To avoid such a denouement, the new statement was demoted to the status of a 'valuable expression'. Clause 4 remained intact and alone. Four of the six largest trade unions had in effect opposed the party leader. Pragmatism and cultural conservatism combined with ideological opposition to the proposed change; some trade union rule books contained the equivalent of clause 4.

Britain's nuclear deterrent

The controversy suggested that one relationship that had dominated Labour Party politics for decades was coming under pressure. Gaitskell's rise to the leadership had owed much to the backing of significant trade union leaders. Once elected leader, he had depended on such support for his control of the party conference, an alliance that had sustained his predecessors. The clause 4 controversy demonstrated that this backing was not guaranteed. Changes in internal union politics-most notably in the TGWU-and Gaitskell's tactical mistakes had produced a rebuff. Moreover clause 4 was intertwined increasingly with a second party crisis over defence. The issues were complex. From 1959 the unilateral abandonment of Britain's nuclear deterrent became an increasingly popular cause, not least among trade union activists. Those union conferences that addressed the clause 4 controversy in spring and summer 1960 also debated the defence issue. Gaitskell and a large majority within the parliamentary party favoured defence through the NATO alliance involving both nuclear and conventional weapons. Disarmament should be multilateral. By late summer it became apparent that the party conference might reject this policy and declare for unilateralism. The evidence of a likely clash eventually encouraged Gaitskell to abandon the battle over clause 4.

The issue's complexities provided sufficient scope for face-saving compromises but Gaitskell once again favoured a combative strategy, not least against Cousins. In effect the defence issue served as a focus for broader concerns about the continuation of Gaitskell's leadership and the character of the party. As in 1951 Gaitskell sought an outcome that in his view would present Labour as a party of government, rather than of principled protest.

The Scarborough conference of October 1960 produced the dramatic spectacle of a Labour Party leader faced with the rejection, albeit narrowly, of a key policy. Two unilateralist resolutions, from the transport workers and the engineers, were carried; the official policy document on defence was rejected. Gaitskell's moving peroration that he and his allies would 'fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love' passed into party folklore. Less remembered was an echo of the Stalybridge speech, that his opponents included not just pacifists and unilateralists but fellow travellers.

As Gaitskell publicly recognized, his leadership was at stake; so was the effective operation of the party constitution. The arrival of a sizeable parliamentary Labour Party in 1906 had soon raised the question of the relationship between the Labour MPs and party conference decisions. The established constitutional interpretation emphasized the ultimate sovereignty of conference but left to MPs significant autonomy as to timing and priority. Historically, significant conflict had been avoided through the operation of an alliance between the parliamentary leadership and loyalist trade union leaders. At Scarborough in 1960, this alliance failed, and for the first time on a significant issue the parliamentary party and the conference were at odds with one another.

The crisis was addressed initially within the parliamentary party. When Wilson challenged Gaitskell for the leadership he was defeated by 166 votes to 81. Within parliament the Labour Party advanced a defence policy that effectively rejected the Scarborough decisions. Yet it would be simplistic to see Gaitskell's position as an unqualified assertion of the position of the parliamentary Labour Party over the extra-parliamentary party. He and his allies sought to reverse the unilateralist commitments of the trade unions. They were sufficiently successful, though sometimes by only narrow margins, to secure a decisive vote in favour of multilateralism at the Labour Party conference held at Blackpool in October 1961. In the aftermath of Scarborough pro-Gaitskellite activists in the constituency parties and in the unions had come together in the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, a strongly revisionist group. Its impact on the complex shifts in trade union positions was small, but its long-term significance was in influencing the selection of parliamentary candidates. Much more weight should be attached to how Gaitskell re-established his position after Scarborough, aided by the difficulties of the Macmillan government. By summer 1961 a desire for a united party was the dominant emotion and Gaitskell reverted to his earlier, more conciliatory style of leadership.

Britain and Europe

This reversion was evident in his handling of the party's response to the Macmillan government's decision in July 1961 to apply for entry to the European Economic Community. Although the European issue did not fit easily into established partisan alignments, most of Gaitskell's closest allies were in favour of Britain joining; many on the Labour left and the traditional right of the party were hostile or sceptical. In summer 1962 Gaitskell shifted from a relatively non-committal position to one of opposition. He felt that any terms achievable by a Conservative government would be unacceptable. The economic consequences for the Commonwealth would be damaging; the community would be resistant to reform. Moreover Gaitskell was concerned that Macmillan envisaged the issue as a means of restructuring the political agenda, allowing the Conservatives to present themselves as a modernizing party. However, Gaitskell's conference speech at Brighton in October 1962 demonstrated a visceral response to what he acknowledged to be a complex question. Thus he characterized the prospects for a federal Europe as amounting to 'the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it. It means the end of a thousand years of history'  (Brivati, 414). Summoning the images of Vimy Ridge and Gallipoli, he articulated a national identity in which a sense of empire was integral. In his last major speech he had returned to his own origins.

Gaitskell's Brighton speech dismayed many of his closest friends. 'All the wrong people are cheering', his wife observed  (Williams, 736). Yet his allies remained loyal, and many critics and doubters were committed to his leadership. Although his initial handling of the European issue marked a shift back from his post-election confrontational style, his conference speech demonstrated his capacity for decisive leadership. That the speech further united the party was not the decisive reason for making it.

Legacy and historical reputation

Hugh Gaitskell died at the Middlesex Hospital, London, of the rare disease lupus erythematosus, on 18 January 1963, 108 days after the Common Market speech. He left the Labour Party united and on the threshold of power, though it took the greatest performance by a leader of the opposition this century, Harold Wilson, to achieve a narrow victory. Gaitskell's legacy to the Labour Party was a style of confrontational leadership and a political approach of brutal frankness. He was intellectually and emotionally woven into the Labour Party and labour movement even though he enjoyed a social life far removed from the experience of ordinary Labour members.

The political ideas which dominated Gaitskell's life were rooted in an emotional response to the inequality he saw as a young man first at Oxford and then as a Workers' Educational Association lecturer teaching miners working in the Nottinghamshire coalfield. His socialism was based on a desire to change the structure of society so that it promoted equality rather than inequality. The means for achieving this were of secondary importance, though he firmly believed to the end of his life that state intervention was a more efficient way of organizing society and promoting social welfare, and that the free market was wasteful. This marked him out from most Liberals, except the very interventionist phases of new Liberalism personified by Lloyd George, and it is a widespread mistake to see Gaitskell's political heritage in the progressives of the period before the First World War. The intellectual and political liberation Gaitskell offered the Labour Party on domestic policy was actually a distinctive one. It was to focus on the ends for which the party had been created and stop being obsessed with the means. He failed to teach his party the lesson, but his leadership was a heroic failure.

Gaitskell's leadership was the defining event of the post-war history of the British Labour Party. The force of his personality and the immense personal loyalty of his followers resulted in prolonged factional fighting that switched, somewhat ironically, from unilateralism to Europe. The Gaitskellites, with the important exceptions of Douglas Jay and Tony Crosland, became committed supporters of British membership of the European Economic Community and were ultimately the basis for the Social Democratic Party. His opponents formed the opposition to the community and learning the lessons of 1960-61, they dedicated themselves to taking over the constituency Labour parties and transferred power in the party from the leadership and the national executive committee to the activists. This process culminated in the Wembley conference in 1980, when even the election of the leader was transferred from the MPs to an electoral college of activists, trade unions, and parliamentarians. This 'democratization' contributed to the left's domination of the party's programme and a long run of election defeats.

Until the 1990s Gaitskell's legacy to his party appeared both negative and doubly ironic. Thereafter the picture began to change. The return to revisionism under Neil Kinnock, the attempt to break the stranglehold of the left on the apparatus of the party, and the adoption of more centrist macro-economic, foreign, and defence policies opened a space for a re-evaluation of Gaitskell's leadership. The election of Tony Blair and the launching of the 'new' Labour project speeded up this process of reappraisal. Gaitskell's revisionism was compatible with a commitment to the future of the Labour Party as an independent political entity. He did not toy with coalition or merger with Liberals but advocated, in his attempt to replace clause 4, the modernization of the Labour Party so that it absorbed the radical centre. His brand of economic intervention and his central belief in equality were not easily reconciled with economic liberalism. He did not believe that the destruction of the historic Labour Party was necessary for the formation of a revisionist Labour Party: the integrity of the Labour Party as an independent political force was not negotiable, and he believed that the market economy was a less efficient and equitable means of distributing wealth than a mixed economy. This model of modernizing leadership was one of his legacies. Above all, however, the quality that Gaitskell brought to British politics was an almost reckless honesty and courage when he felt that an issue of principle mattered.

Brian Brivati 

Sources  B. Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell (1996) + P. M. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: a political biography (1979) + The diary of Hugh Gaitskell, 1945-1956, ed. P. M. Williams (1983) + M. Foot, 'Hugh Gaitskell', Loyalists and loners (1986) + D. Marquand, 'Hugh Gaitskell', The progressive dilemma (1991) + J. Vaisey, 'Hugh Gaitskell', In breach of promise (1983) + S. Haseler, The Gaitskellite (1969) + G. McDermott, Leader lost (1972) + W. T. Rodgers, ed., Hugh Gaitskell, 1906-1963 (1964)
Archives UCL, corresp. and papers + W. Yorks. AS, Leeds, constituency corresp. | Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with William Clark + Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with R. R. Stokes + King's Lond., Liddell Hart C., corresp. with Sir B. Liddell Hart + London School of Economics, Tony Crosland papers + London School of Economics, Hugh Dalton papers + NL Wales, letters to Desmond Donnelly + Parl. Arch., corresp. with Lord Beaverbrook + TNA: PRO, treasury and other departmental papers + U. Sussex, corresp. with New Statesman magazine FILM BFINA, Profile, 8 June 1959 + BFINA, Reputations, 30 Sept 1979 + BFINA, 'Walden on Gaitskell', 3 March 1997 + BFINA, current affairs footage + BFINA, news footage + BFINA, party political footage + IWM FVA, actuality footage SOUND BL NSA, Reputations, T2533 W BD1 + BL NSA, current affairs recordings + BL NSA, party political recordings + IWM SA, oral history interview
Likenesses  photographs, 1951-63, Hult. Arch. · P. Halsman, bromide print, 1955, NPG · J. Cassab, oils, 1957, NPG [see illus.]
Wealth at death  £80,013 10s.: probate, 23 April 1963, CGPLA Eng. & Wales




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