From Socialist Worker, No. 116, 5 April 1969, pp. 2–3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
IT WOULD TAKE a long and fruitless search to discover a Labour Party member more uncompromisingly reactionary, than Joe Gormley, of the Yorkshire Mineworkers Union.
Yet it was Gormley who, at the Labour Party National Executive on March 26, moved a resolution condemning the government’s White Paper in Place of Strife.
As soon as Gormley had spoken, an amendment to the motion, approving her own white paper was moved by Mrs Barbara Castle, Minister of Employment and Productivity.
Mrs Castle spoke modestly for more than half an hour of her painstaking work and wonderful achievements. The amendment was then defeated, with only five votes (all from Ministers) in its favour.
The long courtship between the Labour Party’s ‘Left wing’ and Mrs Castle was at an end.
Nothing serves a Labour career politician better than the ‘firebrand image’, and no one has developed it more meticulously than Barbara Castle.
In her days in the Socialist League before the war, the Metropolitan Water Board during the war and the Bevanite group of Labour MPs after the war (she has been in parliament for Blackburn since 1945) she developed a militant ‘conference’ rhetoric which proved irresistible to the rank and file.
From the outset, Mrs Castle protected her career as scrupulously as she developed her radical image. She it was who introduced Harold Wilson to the Bevanites, after working after the war as his Parliamentary Private Secretary.
Of Wilson’s work at the Board of Trade to revitalise British capitalism after the war, she told a Huyton audience in 1950:
‘He was a man who was a hero to his PPS.’
In the mid-fifties, the Bevanite group began to split between the firebrands who believed in outright opposition to the party leadership and the firebrands who argued that the best way to beat the leadership was to join it.
At the end of 1955, the Labour leader-elect, Hugh Gaitskell, told a newspaper that ‘the only Bevanites I would have in a government would be Dick Crossman, Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle’.
Mrs Castle straddled both horses – Gaitskellite and Bevanite – by concentrating almost exclusively, from 1956 to 1964, on foreign affairs.
She it was who moved the the 1957 resolution at the Labour Party Conference urging that at least one per cent of the national income should be spent on aid to the underdeveloped countries.
‘This is,’ she said, ‘a very specific commitment and a very important one.
She it was who raised a lot of fuss about the savagery of British troops in Cyprus and who became first chairman of the anti-apartheid movement and promised that a Labour government would cancel the South African order for Buccaneer aircraft.
Thus she remained a militant without ever fully supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or even the campaign for more nationalisation.
Militant expressions of solidarity with the independence movements in Africa and elsewhere enabled Mrs Castle to avoid more crucial questions at home, chief among which was the problem of the incomes policy.
Before 1964, there is very little on Mrs Castle’s record about economic and incomes problems, and she fell neatly into line with the confusing jibberish about a ‘planned growth of incomes’.
Mrs Castle’s radicalism was confined almost entirely to her use of words and her obsession with the problems of everyone except those living in Britain.
In 1964 she was given a chance to put some of what she had been saying into effect. As Minister for Overseas Development, she improved on her rhetoric about the starving millions and as Minister of Transport she demonstrated that she is an expert in public relations.
She even expressed a little public anger at the August 1965 Immigration White Paper and, once, threatened to resign if there was any sell-out to Ian Smith. But the reality of office soon put an end to these childish protests. When Wilson re-shuffled his cabinet early last year he sought around for a loyal, successful Minister to operate the incomes policy.
Barbara was the obvious choice. Her radicalism did not stretch to workers’ problems at home. She saw ‘the case’ for matching wage increases with productivity. Workers and trade unionists she believed, could easily be won round to ‘common sense’ with a dash of public relations.
The cup of tea with the Ford women strikers was a suitable start to a dismal year in which all Mrs Castle’s vitriol, once directed against South African racialists or British imperialism, has been turned against the people who voted her and her colleagues into power.
The Tory cliches of a century – ‘lost production’, ‘pointless strikes’, ‘the world not owing us a living’ – have been used to push through the most anti-worker legislation since the Combination Acts.
This is not just a personal sell-out. It is the natural development from the phoney and sentimental radicalism which hypnotised the labour movement in the 1950s.
’Our slogan is: “You cannot trust the Tories.” You cannot trust them because they don’t understand the economics of expansion, the theory that you will only increase wealth by spreading it. When the general election comes we shall make it a national remembrance day for the Rent Act and for what the government has done to our coal and cotton industries.’ September 1959
Following Tory victory at at the polls: ‘The working class movement has been divided and weakened. The call must be for political and not merely industrial militancy on the part of trade unions. We have affirmed our belief that it is impossible for us to achieve the moral and social aims for which we stand – a just society, the dignity of the individual, full democracy, the end of the exploitation of man by man throughout the world – unless we transform the economic base of our society and make it one in which common ownership is predominant. Only in this way can we subordinate the growing power of private economic giants in the common interest.’ March 1959
On equal pay for women: ‘Women have waited long enough for this elementary piece of justice. The only answer now is legislation and I’m delighted that a Labour government is pledged to introduce this.’ May 1968
‘I am not going to preside over a prices and incomes policy under which we tell our people that they have just got to grin and bear things for the next two years. They are a spirited lot and they won’t do it anyway. Harold Wilson has put me in this job to find ways by which we can all help ourselves to an improvement in the quality of our lives within the context of the essential economic policy.’ April 1968
‘Any individual increases in top salaries are as much subject to the influence of the prices and incomes policy as any wage in this land ... I will never ask wage earners in this country to hold back and make sacrifices if people with top salaries are not going to show any sense.’ July 1968.
‘I am profoundly convinced that the operation of the prices and incomes policy enables us to concentrate on the continuation of the reforms which benefit the workers, the industry and the nation.’ December 1968
Last updated on 13 January 2021