Harold Wilson (1964-70, 1974-6) - Prime Minister - Parliament

Harold Wilson was born in 1916 and educated at Oxford University before moving onto working as a research assistant at the London School of Economics and a lecturer at Oxford University itself. He joined the House of Commons as a Labour MP and progressed under Attlee. After years of struggling to head the Labour Party he eventually became the leader and argued that he would modernize Britain if he came to power.

Once he came to office, he was fairly successful at doing this. By 1970 though unemployment and inflation was at a high and Wilson lost the General Election to Edward Heath. But the Conservative Party ran into trouble and by 1974 Wilson and his Labour government had been restored to power. However by 1975 Wilson’s government had again run into trouble and was faced with the prospect of having to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund. With this and his deteriorating health, Wilson finally resigned in 1976 and was replaced by James Callaghan.

Harold Wilson, Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 – 1986:
“When the Finance Bill was tabled, it contained the fateful clause. Bevan was on a speaking engagement in East Anglia. He rang me up to say, 'I am resigning. They've introduced the Bill.' The next day he sent in his resignation letter. To the last he was pressing John Freeman and me not to resign, and Freeman records that he would have stayed on but he felt he had to resign when I did.

Mary remembers how I agonised about my own resignation, walking up and down the bedroom floor all night trying to make up my mind. I was under some pressure to stay in the Cabinet and maintain a presence, if only to fight the battle from within. What formed no part of my thinking, although I have been challenged on it, was the calculation that the Government was disintegrating and that I would do well to put down a marker for the future.

At the time it looked far more like an act of political suicide, but the issue on which I resigned was different from Nye's.
His own speech to the House was sadly miscalculated. For once he should have had a script. As it was, banal interruptions and barracking from the Conservative benches, and murmurings from a few on his own side, provoked him to extravagance in his choice of words. One thing was certain: he could not speak for me.

The following morning we went to Ernie Bevin's memorial service and in the afternoon I made my own statement, which was quietly received. I was careful to say that although I personally found it necessary to leave the Government, I intended both inside and outside the House to do everything in my power to support the Party and the Government in the difficult times that lay ahead”.

Wilson, House of Commons – 12th November 1956:

“For the past fortnight, the House has debated the cost in political and moral terms of the Government's action in Suez. Today we have to count the reckoning in economic terms as well. When I say 'in economic terms' I do not mean merely the cost in terms of government expenditure. We are no longer in the days of nineteenth-century colonial wars, when the cost of these ventures could be reckoned in terms of another tuppence on the income tax or another penny on tea.

I hope that the Chancellor or the Minister of Supply will tell the House frankly today what, in the view of their advisers, will be the economic consequences of this military action. After all, it was long prepared. What estimates did the Government make of its costs and its economic consequences? What estimates do they make now?”

Wilson, at the Labour Party Conference – 1st October 1963:
“The problem is this: since technological progress, left to the mechanism of private industry and private property, can lead only to high profits for a few, a high rate of employment for a few and to mass redundancy for the many, if there had never been a case for socialism before, automation would have created it.

Because only if technological progress becomes part of our national planning can that progress be connected to national ends.
So the choice is not between technological progress and the kind of easygoing world we are living in today. It is the choice between the blind imposition of technological advance, with all that means in terms of unemployment, and the conscious, planned, purposive use of scientific progress to provide undreamed of living standards and the possibility of leisure ultimately on an unbelievable scale.

Now I come to what we must do, and it is a four-fold programme. First, we must produce more scientists. Secondly, having produced them, we must be a great deal more successful in keeping them in this country. Thirdly, having trained them and kept them here, we must make more intelligent use of them when they are trained than we do with those we have got.

Fourthly, we must organize British industry so it applies the results of scientific research more purposively to our national production effort. Russia is at the present time training ten to eleven times as many scientists and technologists. And the sooner we face up to that challenge the sooner we shall realize what kind of a world we are living in.
Until very recently over half our trained scientists were engaged in defence projects or so-called defence projects.

Real defence, of course, is essential. But so many of our scientists were employed on purely prestige projects that never left the drawing-board. Many more scientists are deployed not on projects that are going to increase Britain's productive power, but on some new gimmick or additive for some consumer product which will enable the advertising managers to rush to the television screen to tell us all to buy a little more of something we did not even know we wanted in the first place. This is not strengthening Britain.

What we need is new industries, and it will be the job of the next Government to see that we get them. This means mobilizing scientific research in this country to produce a new technological breakthrough. We have spent thousands of millions in the past few years on misdirected research and development contracts in the field of defence. If we were now to use the technique of R and D contracts in civil industry I believe we could within a measurable period of time establish new industries which would make us once again one of the foremost industrial nations of the world.

Relevant also to these problems are our plans for a University of the Air. I repeat again that this is not a substitute for our plans for higher education, for our plans for new universities and for our plans for extending technological education. It is not a substitute; it is a supplement to our plans. It is designed to provide an opportunity for those, who, for one reason or another, have not been able to take advantage of higher education, to now do so with all that the TV and radio state-sponsored correspondence courses, the facilities of a university for setting and marking papers, conducting examinations and awarding degrees, can provide. Nor, may I say, do we envisage this merely as a means of providing scientists and technologists.

I believe a properly planned University of the Air could make an immeasurable contribution to the cultural life of our country, to the enrichment of our standard of living”.

"A week is a long time in politics"

"Whichever party is in power, the Treasury is in power"

"From now on the pound abroad is worth 14 percent or so less in terms of other currencies. It does not mean, of course, that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued"