Category: Speeches

Below is the text of the speech made by Harold Wilson, the then Leader of the Opposition, to the Labour Party conference in October 1970.

Last year this Conference met in the spirit of pride and confidence. Pride in five years’ achievements in transforming our society. Confidence in the more rapid advance which lay before us once crippling economic deficit had given place to economic strength. This year our task is to resist those who seek to halt and to reverse those achievements, who seek to turn back.

18 June should not be seen simply in terms of a rejection of one set of men, of one Party, of the replacement of one Government by another. It was the rejection of a system of society based on a set of values of which our people are proud, but which our opponents discounted as they preached their philosophy of greed. All that is yours, they said, all that you dream of achieving will still be yours, but you won’t have to pay for it. The taxes on what you earn will be cut. There will no longer be a problem of rising prices. Their cynical conclusion was that enough of the electorate would be prepared to place at risk all the Labour Government have achieved for the better and fairer education of our children, for dignity and civilised standards in old age or sickness; all we have done to help the casualties of modern industrial society, to create a fairer and more equal society, in return for the lure held out by the Tories, the lure of increased spending power.

Their cynicism was vindicated not so much by those who voted but by those who did not trouble to vote.

Now our task, above all others, in the months ahead is to overcome that cynicism by making clear the values in which we believe, by convincing our people that only by our Socialist policies can those ideals be achieved.

It means exposing the emptiness of those Tory promises as time reveals that emptiness; it means a determined fight for our principles as others proclaim the doctrines of selfishness and sectional advantage.

It means fighting to preserve the concept of the national community, caring for all, and willing to share, against those who have reck­lessly embarked on a course of dividing our people, of promoting conflict and exalting personal advantage.

How we are to do that must be, the keynote of this Conference, the task of this Movement, starting now.

First we must expose what has happened in the three months since the General Election. Contrary to the promises they held out of immediate action to change the direction of our Government and our society, we have had – as even the Conservative press are beginning to bear witness – a period in which Government, action, decision, have been at a discount.

This is not to say that in the first heady days no decisions were taken. There was, indeed, that short burst of ‘instant’ ideological arrogance. Three decisions within three days before the Cabinet had even met.

Sir Alec Foster-Dulles searching for Com­munists on the Indian Ocean bed and concluding that the threat must be met by shipping arms to Apartheid South Africa. The Governess of the Board of Education reversing the trend of a generation of educational thought and advance by giving encouragement and fresh hope to reactionary Tory education authorities in their fight to maintain the 11-plus. The decision to put council houses on the market and diminish the stock of immediately-needed accommodation for the overcrowded and the unhoused.

And very soon thereafter the decision to abolish the Land Commission: values created by the community no longer to accrue to the community: values created by the community were now to enrich the speculative developer.

Instant decision when it was a question of pandering to Tory prejudice.

Indecision, procrastination when problems had to be faced up to.

That was why after that first week they pulled the blankets over their heads and hoped the problems would go away. The only recorded case in zoology of hibernation in the summer.

This from a Government whose Leader’s final clarion election call was: ‘Britain is in danger of falling asleep.’

From a Leader who two days before polling day outlined a policy to be ‘pursued immed­iately.’ Immediately. An instant economic policy to be carried out at one stroke.

Now, a hundred days on, even the Tory press has had to admit what everyone else knows, and most people are saying, that Britain has no government. There’s been nothing like it since the Hans Andersen story when the populace turned out to see the whole imperial establishment parade through the streets – only this time it is the clothes that have no Emperor.

Though no words of mine could rival the for-once attributable briefing by a Downing Street spokesman recorded in the Financial Times a few weeks ago: ‘The Government is in the back seat but it is watching the driving mirror to see what others are doing.’

By mid-August Conservative papers were appealing for reassurance that a government existed. Even the Daily Sketch ran a panic headline: ‘Reassure us, Ted.’

And even now, he hasn’t. For what they have discovered is that the mess they are in is the promises they made, promises they cannot keep, promises they knew they would

not be able to keep when they made them.

It is right that what they then promised must be set on the record. Kept on the record, for now we face a massive nation-wide brain­washing operation aimed at persuading you that what you heard them say is not what they now want you to think they said.

They were going to act. The emphasis in that last pre-election week was on immediate action, at a stroke to reduce the rise in prices, increase production and reduce unemploy­ment. They are his words. It’s in the book.

A Better Tomorrow. On TV last week he was asked by Mr. Burnett after three months, ‘When is tomorrow?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we are working towards it all the time.’ We are working towards tomorrow all the time. Watchman, what of the night -and how long will it be?

That wasn’t the pre-election mood.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, I quote: ‘In the first month of a new Conservative Government, taxation will be reduced. That would do more than anything to release energies.’ He can be dismissed from the case. Economics were never his strong suit.

But what of his Leader, the present Prime Minister? Last week was not his first interview with Mr. Burnett. Before the election Mr. Heath gave a firm pledge to him – to the electorate – that they would abolish S.E.T. and they would cut direct taxation in the first budget. Now, apparently, no budget till April: no sense of urgency, still less emergency there. That’s not what they said in that last week of the election. Already immediate action ruled out.

But now they are hedging even about their budget policy when finally they are forced to introduce one. S.E.T. not to be abolished. Reduced maybe – but not yet. Mr. Robert Carr was put up last month to say that the present Government unfortunately could not ‘make progress with expansion and the reduc­tion of taxation to which the Government is pledged, till we have got this present cost inflation spiral under control.’ Mr. Barber was reported as confirming this. But what his Leader said on 16 June was that cutting taxes, and especially S.E.T., was the immediate way to ‘break into the price/wage spiral by acting directly on prices and costs,’ to give us a ‘breathing-space’ while long-term policies were being worked out.

I am not in fact today going to embark on a considered attack on the Conservative Govern­ment’s economic policy, because I don’t know what it is – any more than they do.

A government whose leader pledged himself in the Manifesto to deal ‘honestly and openly with the House of Commons, with the Press and with the public’ relies not on open straight talk, but on closed, anonymous hints behind cupped hands.

Mr. Heath and Mr. Barber will not deny that the message they are putting out on taxes is this:

No immediate action. No abolition of S.E.T. in the first budget;

In fact no decreases in taxation until they’ve made those sweeping cuts in public expenditure, the mighty promise of which always set those Tory audiences ablaze;

Cuts in expenditure or not, they can’t cut taxes until they’ve broken the wage-spiral.

The whole public discussion of Tory economic strategy has now been reduced to a plaintive barnyard soliloquy by the unfortunate Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity about which came first, the hen or the egg. And the price of both is going up under the Tories.

But they are not even pretending now that they have a policy for prices, at any rate for stopping them rising. True, the repeated assertion that they had is precisely what won the election. Morning, noon and night. I recall that moving appeal the Conservative Leader made to the housewives of Leicester.

Someone had given him a shopping list. Bread, how dear that was. And, oh dear, it’s going up again. Milk – what price does he now think that will be when the better tomorrow dawns? He revealed the most intimate secrets of his larder, jam, sausages, the lot. He wept that the housewives were telling him that they had to go for the cheaper cuts of meat, buying standard eggs instead of large ones.

Oh yes, and he mourned that the dinner money at school takes more out of her purse. Strangely I haven’t yet read that school meals have become cheaper under the Tories. But let me put this question to Mr. Heath. (Cap’n, art thou sleeping there below?). Since I know he would not wish his speech to the Leicester housewives to be dismissed as vulgarian vote-getting, will he just reassure them now by giving a pledge, for what that is now worth, that the review of public expenditure they have announced will not involve an increase in the price of school meals?

But it was not only in Leicester. To make assurance doubly sure, there was his firm pledge of immediate action on all prices, private sector and public sector, issued with a blaze of publicity, by coincidence just two days before polling-day. In view of the organised attempt to bury this effusion – well, it is being said, after all, Mr. Heath didn’t actually write it, it was written for him – I feel it right that so superb a passage of English prose should not be allowed incontinently to be swept into oblivion. In other words I’m going to read it.

But there is a very real alternative which ought to be pursued immediately. That alternative is to break into the price/wage spiral by acting directly to reduce prices. This can be done by reducing those taxes which bear directly on prices and costs such as the Selective Employment Tax, and by taking a fain grip on public sector prices and charges, such as coal, steel, gas, electricity charges and postal charges. This would at a stroke, reduce the rise in prices, increase production and reduce unemployment. It would have an immediate effect on moderating the wage/price spiral which would far outweight any effects of a higher pressure in demand for labour.

‘Immediate,’ ‘at a stroke.’ He went on: ‘In this way we can obtain a breathing space which must be well used to put our industrial relations on a sound footing … to cut direct taxation and to encourage savings…’ And so forth.

In other words, this was to be done at once.

And in case any one had missed the point he concluded with the choice which in his view the country was facing: whether to continue with a Labour Government, or (I quote) ‘Whether it would prefer immediate and determined action to avert such a crisis.’ Well, we haven’t had it. The crisis. Or the action.

One action he was going to take was to hold prices down artificially in the public sector. We warned him at the time that that would mean Treasury subsidies, and they would mean not lower taxes but very much higher taxes. The Treasury soon told him.

So we had a short period in which Ministers fell over themselves to raise charges in the public sector, even when it wasn’t necessary. One was in the field of public transport. In the election, of course, we had had his doleful forecast, in due course, if Labour were returned, of a minimum fare of a shilling for short journeys on bus or tube. A shilling minimum. It may be a surprise to him, but this took effect on 16th August, just two months after he came into office: the shilling minimum fare was imposed. By the Tory Greater London Council.

Labour had refused to approve it and sent it for impartial enquiry by the Prices and Incomes Board.

The Tory Government, in an unaccustomed fit of exertion, approved it.

For good measure, when it came to half-price fares, the Conservative Government further approved a new break-through in the higher Conservative duodecimal mathematics, based on the inflationary principle that half of one shilling is sevenpence.

But the Tories said, public sector prices would be scrutinised with vigilance. Not though, to protect the consumer.

When Mr. Heath saw Mr. Victor Feather we got the real threat: publicly-owned industries would be starved of finance, and subject to rigid price control, not to protect the consumer but as a sanction to enforce a wage policy selectively directed against public employees.

Before Parliament adjourned they told us of their Policy for the private sector. There was to be no further use of the Prices and Incomes Board to deal with excessive price demands; the early warning system for price increases was to go.

Then we got this pearl from Mr. Robert Carr: ‘We believe that where there is competition that is the most effective means of safe­guarding the consumer, and the less it is interfered with the better.’

So you must thank all the gods of competi­tion, and Mr. Carr, their earthly spokesman, for the safeguards you are privileged to enjoy against price rises by private enterprise which led first the oil companies, then the tobacco industry, the bakers, the cement industry, to put up their prices.

But you should be so lucky. The safe­guards didn’t stop there. A fortnight ago the country was electrified by an announcement that the early warning system, and the agreed system of price-control for the brewing industry, were to be abrogated. This was announced by Farmer Prior who, although he can claim a higher degree of sophistication per live-hundredweight than most of his colleagues, decided that he could not improve on the words of Mr. Carr. ‘Where there is competition that is the .most effective means of safeguarding the consumer, and the less it is interfered with the better.’

I cannot tell you how thirsty dockers in my constituency, tears dropping into their tankards, blessed the name of Prior: nor of their mortification the next day when they read in their Daily Telegraph the headline: ‘4d.-a-pint beer rise forecast,’ for in beer as in bread, the mills of competition grind slowly. But they were happy to read in the City page of their Daily Mail the following Tuesday, with what joy the news had been received in the brewery-shares section of the Stock Exchange.

For even this period of inert government has enabled me to acquit the Conservatives of a charge I have sometimes heard, that they lack care and compassion. I was reluctant to believe this because we had that election broadcast of theirs, when Mr. Chataway said: ‘I care – and Ted cares too.’

They lost no time in showing that care when approached by the bankrupt brewers. Indeed I must in fairness to them, record another case, the deep concern shown by the Minister of Housing and Local Government when he overruled the report, made by the inspector after a public inquiry, and decided a planning case on behalf of a major brewery company not 20 miles from here.

Not content with falling over themselves to allow private enterprise to raise its prices, the next step was to encourage them to do it.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose appointment is the only thing Mr. Heath has ever done to suggest that he has a sense of humour, will not be disposed to dispute the source of the message which one paper after another simultaneously felt moved to announce a fortnight ago.

The headline in the Guardian: ‘Tories to let prices go free.’ In the Daily Telegraph: ‘Price rises to rebuild working capital in order.’ ‘Companies may raise prices with tacit Gov­ernment blessing.’

The Times: ‘The shortage of company liquidity is acknowledged; and it is argued that the solution lies in raising prices where this is necessary for maintaining profits, investments and working capital.’

‘The solution lies in raising prices.’

Three months to the day after that dramatic promise of immediate and direct action to break the price/wage spiral, the Government had decided that they had so little to offer their industrial friends in fulfilment of their promises to reduce taxation on industry – on top of all the other pledges to reduce taxation – that their only solution to deal with the prob­lem of the squeeze on liquidity, the problem of cash flow in industry, was to encourage industrialists to get on with it, to put up prices and get more money for them­selves.

So now we know. A Government elected precisely because of its pledges to tackle rising prices insists now that in private enterprise prices are not high enough.

A Government elected after accusing its Labour predecessor of planning to hold down wages, has embarked now on deliberate action to hold wages down, starting with the weakest and lowest paid. And this at a time of free-for-all in prices.

The Government’s strategy has now emerged.

It is a strategy first of distraction. To dis­tract the country from the Government’s failure by putting all the blame for their econ­omic difficulties, not on their own irresponsible election promises, but on the trade unions and their members. And in shifting the blame, to use the whole power of Government in enforc­ing a policy of selective interference with wages, to the point where the costly and bitter disputes they were elected to avoid are not only to be allowed to happen, but actively provoked.

It is a strategy, second, of ostentatious in­difference to the modernisation of industry, and the needs of the development areas, by discard­ing priority industrial and regional projects.

It is a strategy, third, of re-shaping public expenditure on principles which pre-date the welfare state, and by methods which must inevitably destroy the welfare state as we know it today.

First, the policy of a deliberate show-down with organised labour. The Government standing aside when their intervention is necessary to avert or end a dispute, in the private sector; the Government acting as provocateur in wage negotiations in the public sector.

In the private sector, denying conciliation where conciliation is needed. Deciding that fifty years of conciliation are to be set aside. That the Secretary of State’s job was to be that of a querulous referee who conceives it as his function to stand on the touch-line selectively throwing his bottles at just one set of players.

This and his discriminatory wages policy against the public sector, miners, nurses, railwaymen, probation officers, teachers, manual workers in Government employment. Ministers who have talked of anarchy are hell-bent on intensifying anarchy. Those who have talked of disputes are dedicated to pro­voking them.

There is one clear and definite message on which this Conference has already shown its determination.

The Tories are not going to be allowed to divide one section of our national community from another. To resist the Tories is one thing, and determination to resist is unequivocal. But we all recognise the clear responsibility on this Movement: I mean this Movement, industrial and political. For when doctrinaire Tory measures have been beaten back we shall have the responsibility of showing to the country that, together, we are capable of working out an effective approach for dealing with problems that confront, not this country alone, but every modern industrial society. A policy for full employment based on stability of values and the protection of those within our com­munity least able to help themselves.

This eluded us before because in 1964 we came to office in the middle of urgent and immediate problems which never gave us the time and the opportunity to work out the necessary approach. Now we have the time and together we must use it to find a way. It is not a question of formal declarations or treaties. It is a question rather of expressing our common purpose.

That cannot be made explicit until, between us, we can set out a climate in which that purpose can alone operate. And it is to define and fashion that climate as well as to agree on our mutual responsibilities, that the future work and co-operation of this Movement must be directed.

And putting back the clock in industrial relations is matched by the second part of the strategy, a reversion to the law of ruthless profit-seeking in industry, regardless of national or regional priorities.

The law of the market, which recognises only profit, however earned, the balance-sheet to be paramount, ignoring the economic or social claims of employment, of export, of the development of Britain’s productive resources.

If the policies they have decided to follow had been adopted by us, the Upper Clyde would not have been saved.

Cammell Laird’s – now busy with new orders – would have closed; there would have been no British-owned computer industry, and the last section of the indigenous British motor-car industry would before long have passed into American ownership.

We are told that investment grants are to go, investment allowances are to take their place – rewarding those that have profits to show, denying new industries and firms, however enterprising, who need a start.

This is not economic policy. It is economic abdication. The assertion of Government, of community responsibility, whether for the strength of our economy or the welfare of our people, is to give place to a new concentration of power, where the take-over bidder, the financial entrepreneur holds sway, regardless of what is produced, regardless of the decay of proud regions, the welfare of their workers, the opportunities for their children.

And the third element in their strategy is the re-shaping of Government social expendi­ture, not on new priorities, but on the old priorities; on which until this year, all parties had turned their backs.

If a phrase was coined that I regret it was ‘Yesterday’s Men.’ Why did we have to use that flattery? Yesterday is modernity compared with those who now seek their inspiration in the golden days before World War One – golden for some. Selsdon Man, gagged and muted throughout the election, has now become Selsdon Minister. Remember how we warned that these men would take us back – in the social services back to pre-Beveridge; back in housing to pre-Wheatley; back in health to pre-Bevan. When I warned that they would seek to introduce the concept of first-and second-class status within the Health Service – the test being ability to pay – I was indignantly contradicted by Mr. Heath.

I warn them that if they lay their hands on all that has been built up by the British people, by this Movement, then whatever their mask of cold indifference and doctrinaire arrogance, the fight we shall put up by day and by night against their legislation will make even the battles they had to fight to get the Rent Act through seem mild by comparison.

We all of us in this Party, in this Movement, have the right to make that warning explicit. We are proud of the achievements of the first post-war Labour Government in creating in those years of unparalleled difficulty, the Welfare State, the Health Service, that great advance in education, and low rent housing.

We are proud of the record of countless members of local authorities over a generation, bringing to the legislation passed by Parliament the warmth, humanity and compassion of people nurtured in socialism and social ideals.

We are proud of our record over the past six years, when once again we did not allow crippling economic difficulties to daunt us, of the years in which we almost doubled the provision for our social services, health, housing, education and the attack on poverty.

It is because of what the Labour Govern­ment achieved that over this past year – indeed this was one of the great themes of the last Conference – all of us recognised and stressed that more and more must be done for the forgotten members of our society. The men­tally handicapped, including very particularly the mentally handicapped children. The problem of shelter and care in old age, the creation of a real equality of opportunity in education, not only at 11 but at 18. So much had been done, so much more still remained to do. For the first time we had been able to create an economic base on which we could build.

I warn this Conference, as earlier I sought to warn the country, what irresponsible Tory financial promises must mean for our great national social services, and the essential local services dependent upon national provision. They are failing to get even a fraction of the expenditure cuts they had said would be so easy. That is why I must warn at once about the danger of Tory action this autumn to cut back the real value of Government provision for all the wide range of local social services.

The biennial Rate Support Grant has to be determined before the end of the year and secure Parliamentary approval. Of small importance that the record provision made in 1968 was attacked by Mr. Heath as being too small, when he thought there were votes in such an attack – that implied pledge goes the way of all the rest.

Now we shall have the Conservative Government blindly swinging their axe. The more severely they cut down necessary provision, then the more will local authorities, at a time when so many are Conservative-led, be tempted to cut and slash essential services to avoid still further loading the rates over and above what will be forced upon them by declared Conservative policies.

And it is as these Councils balance essen­tially inadequate central finance with their desire to keep rates as low as possible that the temptation will be upon them, a temptation they are not the men to resist, to economise and pare on all those items of local government expenditure which are the characteristic of a civilised society – what they no doubt will call the frills – what we consider the means to a better and fairer Britain.

The irresponsible promises of the Tories have brought upon them, and upon Britain, the problems I have described.

And this applies with equal force to the policies for Southern Africa. Recall how this began. Sir Alec told the press his firm decision, our embargo on arms for South Africa would be revoked. But when he was confronted by us in Parliament it was a different story. All he was doing was consulting the Common­wealth. There has been no decision. There would be no decision before Parliament resumed in the autumn.

But then there was the strange case of Mr. Heath. He refused to publish the message he had sent to the Commonwealth, of which, for greater accuracy, I had obtained a copy. However, the Prime Minister of Canada pub­lished his own reply in which he referred to Mr. Heath’s message as a ‘decision.’ Nothing like dealing honestly and directly with Parlia­ment, the press and the public, not to mention the Commonwealth.

We warned him over the Springbok tour, over his policies for South Africa and Rhodesia. We warned him that his policies would endanger any hopes of a rational policy on equal community relations, regardless of race or colour. Those warnings were con­temptuously ignored.

It is my clear duty this morning, not to repeat them, but to reinforce them by saying what the policy of the next Government will be.

It is important that, in default of the present Government, someone must assert that, in these matters, Britain stands and always will stand on the side of the eternal decencies.

If the Conservatives, for whatever reason – be it an unwillingness to reverse the instant, ideological government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, be it the pressures of the Monday Club, the Powellites – if they decide to spurn the Commonwealth, indeed to risk its very existence, by a decision to sell arms to South Africa, then whatever contracts they may sign will be repudiated by an incoming Labour Government at the next Election. Any ship­ments arising from them will be embargoed. And let me warn them about any manoeuvrings designed to tie our hands. We have seen before how they were able to turn a commercial agreement into an enforceable international treaty. If for ideological reasons they clothe these indefensible contracts with the enforce­ability of a treaty, then let them know that a Labour Government will accept no treaty which is in conflict with the decision of the United Nations, our membership of which, our commitment to whose decisions, were themselves enshrined in a treaty which we have regarded and always will regard as bind­ing on the individual decisions of Government. I hope that this will help Mr. Heath, despite himself, to be able to attend a full meeting of the Commonwealth in Singapore next January. But should he ignore these warnings, I want to make this appeal to our Common­wealth friends.

I know how you feel on this issue. You feel as we do.

You know that this is a matter not of a few millions on the balance sheet.

That recognising this and knowing how the heart of Britain really beats on this question, that you do not leave the Commonwealth, which I believe to be one of the greatest forces not only for international co-operation but for international decision in the years ahead. Bite on the Tory bit and realise that there will again be a Britain with a different conception of Commonwealth leadership.

Rhodesia too.

I recall the equivocation of the Tory leader­ship over the years since U.D.I. Not that there were even votes in it, but the Tory leadership had to move very close to appease­ment of a racialist regime in order to keep within their ranks the racialist extremists who never fail to assert their power when they recognise that they are faced with a leadership lacking in moral fibre on these fundamental matters of principle.

Again the future of the Commonwealth is at stake, a derisory consideration perhaps, when with a Parliamentary majority of thirty, they are facing the hard-liners of the Monday Club.

They have said, it is on the record, that there will be no agreement on a legal independence except on the basis of the five prin­ciples which we laid down. All Parties in this country are committed to them: History will not forgive, nor shall we tolerate a settlement based on the racialist principles of the police-state, now near-fascist regime in Rhodesia.

But, Mr. Chairman, the overseas issue which will dominate the life and work of this parliament, will be the decision that has to be taken about Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community. A decision which has to be taken when the Brussels negotiations reach a point where Parliament and the country can measure and assess the advantages and the costs.

This is not the time for decision.

Last year at Conference I pointed out that Britain’s application had been made, approved by Parliament, approved by Conference, three years ago. Few, if any, were proposing a reversal of that decision. The question was, what terms for entry.

The main change since last year has been the physical opening of the negotiations, though there have also been changes and developments within the Community itself which will have an important bearing on the terms of Britain’s entry. It is too early to judge what the terms will be.

I have not changed my view, although I respect the view of many here who think differently, that providing we can get the right terms, entry will be advantageous for Britain. A country which depends as much as Britain for our exports to world markets must face the fact that the three principal markets into which we trade are for one reason and another being more and more rigged and systematised and certainly not to our advantage.

The North American market, in which these past two years has seen such great success for British exports, is becoming more and more subject to a fever of protectionism against which it was our duty to warn suc­cessive Presidents. I have small doubt that these warnings have been repeated by those who now have the responsibility.

The Commonwealth. Some of us on entering office had high hopes that we could reverse the downward trend in trade within the Commonwealth, and at Commonwealth Conference after Confer­ence I sought to establish meetings of trade Ministers and by other means to get agree­ment on means to increase Commonwealth trade.

But we have to face the fact here that some of our biggest Commonwealth trading partners are more and more integrating their economies with those of their neighbours, Australia with Japan and the countries of South-East Asia; Canada more and more with her neighbour, and also with the Caribbean and South America; we have had disappointments in Commonwealth countries in Africa and a growing number of these have been making their own arrangements with the European Common Market.

And that third great area, the vast European market, is the subject of tight and cohesive trading rules which are made by others, with no British participation. The problem here is not only the rules of that increasingly inte­grated community. There is a problem, too, of the growth of the large multi-national com­pany or trust whose interests and loyalties transcend national boundaries, and who make their own rules. The European Corporation is becoming a reality even if so many of the Europe-wide companies, in motors, in com­puters, in electronics, are in fact American dominated and controlled.

It is to face this challenge that we have seen the growth of the huge mergers in British industry with economic and industrial and social consequences which we have not yet fully learned how to meet – another great question on the agenda of our future work.

If the terms which emerge from the nego­tiations are such as to impose a crippling and unacceptable burden on our balance of pay­ments and our social structure, I should be the first to say that these terms must be rejected. But we have to recognise that the right terms would give us a greater power of participation in the decisions which will in­creasingly dominate world industry.

Last year I said that Britain’s growing strength meant that if the terms were right we need not fear the sharper competition which entry would mean; that we could indeed benefit from the new opportunities British industry would have.

But equally, I said that if the terms were wrong, we had by our own efforts, our own restraint, our own self-discipline, created for ourselves the strength to stand on our own feet outside the Community.

I believe that is still true, though we shall watch anxiously how far the irresponsible men now in power in this country fritter away that strength by pursuing false economic objectives and by their policy of dividing – where we did so much to unite – our nation.

Unlike the situation eight years ago, had it been a Labour Government which secured entry into the Common Market in the present negotiations, it would not have been out of crippling weakness but out of confident strength. That strength must not now be dissipated.

But if our warnings about this fall on deaf ears there is one argument we will not accept – we heard it before – that, whatever the terms, we have to go in because we are too weak to stay out.

Between 1964 and 1970 the Labour Govern­ment brought Britain through to a position of economic strength. But the political effects of the very measures we had to use have denied to us – for a time – the opportunity to follow through. The opportunity to use that strength we had created, to intensify and accelerate the creation of a better and fairer Britain.

For how often have all of us said that economic strength is not an end in itself. It is a means, but a necessary means, to the realisation of everything this Movement stands for. That was the message seven years ago at Scarborough. The message that Socialism must be used to harness, control, humanise, civilise the speed of the new technological revolution. The Scarborough programme for modernising and reorganising industry, and providing for those who suffered through change, was becoming a reality under the Labour Government, forced through against those who, while not resisting change, de­manded that the direction and force of that change should be dictated by private interests, for private ends.

If the Labour Government had not been pushing the Scarborough programme through, this country by now would have slipped out of the mainstream of technological and econ­omic advance with all the harmful and social consequences this neglect and abdication would have involved. But if Scarborough was right and necessary for its time, we must recognise that time has moved forward and that Britain must move forward with it. There are new problems now, and tomorrow will bring other problems of whose scope and nature we can only be partly aware. The Socialism of the Labour Party possesses the only approach to match and conquer those problems. We must begin planning now within this Party to create the apparatus which will make that approach a reality.

For our experience of the Scarborough pro­gramme has taught us this. First, that the sheer implications of economic and social change imposed by the speed of modern science and industrial technique are such that their planning and control need to be not less wide than we attempted, but wider. That the planning cannot be related to the arbitrary lifetime of a single Parliament only. That we have to have our vision of the Britain of the nineteen-eighties and ’nineties to be able to plan the measures of the ’seventies.

And the second lesson is this. The very facts I have just mentioned about the aggregation of power in vast national and international economic groupings underline the need for a continued assertion of the protection of the increasingly helpless individual against the demands of increasingly ruthless and remote economic, power.

Man has to work, in order to consume. He is not a free being simply because society gives him more alternative ways of spending the money he earns, if he becomes less free in how he earns it. Man does not live by the monthly index of retail sales alone.

But, and this is the third challenge to modern society, to industrial frustrations are added a wider dimension, going far beyond the dictates of the production-line. The dimension of man in his environment. And here I do not mean only the social costs of technical advance, the pollution of the air and water, and the countryside.

The problem of the environment is psycho­logical as well as physical. You can pollute a man’s soul, a child’s dreams, just as you can poison the water and the air around him, if every decision affecting his future is taken by more and more remote, less and less account­able beings. And if technological advance dic­tates that more and more decisions are taken, whether in public or private enterprise, at stages further and further from the point where the work is done, then a modern conception of Government means a greater, not a smaller, degree of concern and protection for the man and woman at the point where the work is done.

Government’s task, Parliament’s task, is not only to ensure the accountability of economic decisions: it is to ensure that those affected by these decisions are first consulted and then safeguarded. Three months have dramatised the essential difference between a Labour Government and its successors. The Labour Government insisted that if the coal, industry had to suffer from technological change, the men affected must be given protection and economic security. As a matter of course we brought a Bill before Parliament last June to continue that protection. After three months of vacillation and hesitancy, and despite the urgent insistence of all of us, that Bill has not yet been reintroduced, nor solid assurances given that in the form we laid down, it will be.

When a shipyard was in danger of closure under the Tories, the Tory Minister’s message was: ‘You’re out on your own.’ Palmer’s Yard closed this weekend. But the challenge goes far beyond the loss of work and security. Those who seek to deal with the problems of modern industry by repression and appeals to law and order fail to get at the underlying frustration. Frustration for the individual.

When we hear learned and self-righteous individuals who have forgotten even what it was to be young, condemning modern youth, they fail to understand the frustration of young, people lost or trapped in the blind alleys of modern industrial society. Or students who, questioning the basis of the system of indus­trial recruitment or the big brother dossiers, will fight any attempt to transform a free university into an adjunct of industrialism. It is frightened men, and men out of touch, who seek to fight the student frustration by repression alone, without understanding.

It’s a frightened and unthinking act, not a confident act, that is inspired by the belief that you can deal with our student problem by sending a sick student out of the country. Law, yes. Order, yes, but these are comple­ments to, not a substitute for attacking the conditions which give rise to the problem. The break-out in advanced but uncaring societies of black power, as men condemned for gener­ations to helotry on no basis other than the colour of their skin, turn to violence – and are exploited by others who can turn violence to their own ends.

There are other frustrations too. The frus­trations of working men and women on the factory floor, who see vast changes taking place around them but are scarcely able to influence the forces which dictate the course of their lives. The frustration of office workers and technicians who feel that big power-blocs are elbowing them aside, so that they must cling on to their living standards by their finger­tips.

It is for Labour to reunite these sections of the community. It is for us to strengthen the power of the community and make it relevant to the needs of the new decade.

The worker is hostile to the student, grumb­ling that his income tax goes to pay for their demonstrations. The rumbling against immigrants goes on, wherever social conditions create tensions. We must condemn violent demonstrations. We must condemn with all the vehemence in our power the manifesta­tions of Powellism. It is not so much that the Powellites have exploited fear and hatred, or even that they have created fear and hatred in order to exploit them. They were exploiting a vacuum. They were taking up a cause – how­ever venomous that cause – because there were so many who, due to the conditions in which they worked, the conditions in which they lived, felt that they had no one to give them a lead, no one with whom they could identify. But we must not make the mistake of dis­carding as beneath our notice the human beings involved in these confrontations. Ugly emotions are the outcome of false hostilities created by social conditions it is our duty to transform.

We must convince all these groups – factory workers, office workers, technicians, immigrants, students, that their interests are not in conflict but in common, and can be served only by their combining together to support Labour’s implementation of Socialist policies.

In the explanations offered last June we became familiar with the word ‘volatility.’ It wasn’t volatility in the sense of something flashy and insubstantial. It was closer to cynicism, in the case of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens, sullenness, a feeling that political battles had nothing for them. A Parliamentary colleague has told me of a block of old and substantial municipal flats in his constituency, where the total poll was thirty per cent. You’re all the same, he was told, whoever’s in power – and they might have meant in Parliament, they might have meant in the Council – they haven’t fixed my drain, or got rid of the damp.

The task of our Socialism is to make Parlia­ment a reality to people who feel that nobody cares. This of itself is a condemnation of a new Government which is resolved – if irresolute on all else – to narrow the area of Parliamentary concern, whether in an economic system which leaves the vital decisions to the irresponsible and the unaccountable, or in social affairs where matters of social concern are to become primarily matters of personal provision, regardless of the power to provide.

It is for us in this Movement to challenge that negativism, and to provide the answer to it. To show that man need not be a dwarf in the shadow of his own means of livelihood. To prove that Parliament and local democracy can be made relevant to people’s lives – work­ing lives, family lives – through a Socialism which connects their lives with the mechanisms which dominate them and the decisions which determine them.

The Conservatives say that ‘You’re out on your own.’ That Government must contract and withdraw, only holding the ring while the giant corporations make decisions in their own interests. They call this individualism. But it is the death of individualism.

The individual identity, the rights of a man and his family can only be restored and enhanced if individuals join together to con­trol the apparatus they have created.

This is Socialism. This is why, if Socialism had never been thought of before, it would now have to be invented. This is why the Socialism of the Labour Party is more relevant and more needed now than ever before.

We are now at the start of a Parliament – a Parliament in which the electorate have decided that we are to carry out the role of Opposition.

We shall do our job, and do it vigorously. But while we must always be a party of protest, the last six years have proved that we are now also a party of Government.

We must begin preparing now for the day when the people of Britain decide that they want to take the Government of the country back into their own hands.

This Conference is that beginning.

Below is the text of the speech made by the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to Labour Party Conference in Blackpool in 1965.

Mr. Chairman and fellow delegates, I present to Conference the Parliamentary Report. The delegates here, and those whom we represent here today, were responsible by their unremitting and dedicated efforts for the election to Parliament, for the first time for 13 years, of a Labour majority. And it is entirely right and fitting that in the name of that Labour majority I should today report back to you. In every phase of the tough year through which we have gone, we have never for one moment forgotten those who put us there, the ideals for which they fought, the sacrifices they have made: for every one of us realises that not one of us would be in Parliament today as a result of his own efforts, but that we are there as representing a determined people.

When the country voted a year ago, it was not just a decision to replace one group of men and women by another, as in the long history of ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ which characterised an earlier phase of our Parliamentary history. The country took a decision. It was a decision for a New Britain, for a more positive and purposeful Britain – a Britain in which our economic resources would be planned and mobilised for the welfare of the British people as a whole – yes – but more than that, for the strengthening of Britain’s influence in the world. It was a decision that our latent economic strength, measured not in terms of industrial buildings, and plant and machinery, but in terms of the innate skills and energies of our people, should be purposefully developed year by year, in fulfilment of an economic and social plan – and not contemptuously and fitfully organised on a stop-go-stop cycle directed less to Britain’s strength and wellbeing than to the electoral success of the Party of privilege. It was a decision that the economic strength, which has so long lain dormant and only partially realised, should be used to build a New Britain – a Britain that cares – a Britain that rejects the distortion which Tory policies and Tory philosophies had created. It was a decision – last October – springing from a sense of frustration – of shame even, at a distortion of our society which had come to exalt private gain and purely material affluence and which had sacrificed to that scramble for material affluence the social priorities – social affluence as opposed to private affluence – which is the hallmark of a civilised society.

It was a decision that the old closed circle of opportunity based on family connections and school connections should go and should yield place to a land of opportunity for every boy and girl – for every man and woman – equal opportunity in our schools, equal opportunity to the right to higher education in all its forms, equal opportunity for the keen and thrusting and trained men and women in industry to get to the top. It was a decision that not only our industrial system, but every aspect of our national life that has been corrupted by the doctrine of a self-perpetuating establishment, should give way to an open society where knowing your job would mean more than knowing the right people.

It was a decision that national purpose should override sectional interests and that just as social good should take priority over private gain, so earning money should take precedence over making money. It was a decision for change, not change for its own sake, but change, radical and dynamic, for economic and social purpose. It was a decision that this second industrial revolution (which Harold Collison has just referred to) should be tempered with a humanity that was lacking from the first industrial revolution, a lack indeed that led to the creation of this Labour Movement.

It was a decision, in short, that Britain should have a government and that that government should govern.

For Britain for a long period before the last election had had no government. Whatever limited ideals and policies had animated the incoming Tory Government of 1951, had long ago lost their fire. The Conservative Government had remained in office in a posture of almost total abdication, content to leave the basic decisions that affected Britain’s economic life to the irresponsible and faceless controllers and manipulators of the centres of economic power. And drift and lack of purpose at home had led to drift and lack of purpose abroad.

It was this abdication, this refusal either to take the decisions that had to be taken, or to make way for those who would; it was this sacrifice of decision to electoral manipulation that more than anything else created the formidable problems which have dominated the past 12 months – the first year of this new Labour Government.

One thing I think, Mr. Chairman, you will allow me to say.

For nearly a year now, Britain has had a government, prepared to tell the nation the facts, prepared to talk in the gritty accents of reality, to tell the nation what had to be done, and unafraid to take the decisions that have to be taken, regardless of their short-run political popularity or any long-run electoral considerations.

We said it would not be easy. We said, in the spirit of the imperishable philosophy of Nye Bevan, first proclaimed here in Blackpool, that our actions would be governed by the language of priorities.

Time and time again before the election, we warned that our entry into office would be dominated by a deep-lying industrial and trade crisis. A crisis which in the event, was made immeasurably graver by their postponement of the day of electoral decision, and their failure in those humiliating months to take the decision that had to be taken.

When we issued those warnings, and I can take you back to a whole series of speeches beginning in Swansea in January, 1964, we underlined three things.

We underlined first, that we should be facing this crisis with a limited range of financial weapons which would be all that they would bequeath to us, but that we should use these weapons to the full, if necessary, to make Britain strong and sterling strong, whatever it meant, and however this might appear contrary to our broad long-term policy. We said that long before the election.

But we said, secondly, that while we were doing this, we would be taking every measure open to us not only by refurbishing and modernising the financial weapons, but also by creating new and more selective weapons of economic policy, to ensure that Britain should no longer be fated to plunge into a trade and payments crisis every time we dared, fitfully, for a few months, to break out of economic stagnation into a short period of expansion.

For we said that the condemnation of the Conservative stop-go-stop cycle was not merely their emphasis on stop. It was their failure all the time to build up our economic strength, to broaden our industrial base with more and modern equipment, to speed the training of skilled labour – so that we could break out of this cycle of crisis.

And the third thing we said – and all this was said before the election – was that if we faced a crisis, we would not, as happened in the bitter years that have followed each Tory election victory – seek to solve our problems by placing the greatest burdens on those least able to bear them; on the old, the sick, the disabled, the children. And neither would we hold back in a general freeze, the urgent task of bringing work to those areas where work was needed.

Although the Parliamentary Report I am presenting today has been dominated throughout this past year by the economic situation we inherited, it would, I think, be wrong for me to deal in detail with either the crisis and its causes, or with the action we have taken because the First Secretary of State and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if they catch your eye, Mr. Chairman, will be dealing with this on Thursday.

It is for me only to draw out one or two central themes. One – we have met the successive developments of this crisis by decisions, by measures, that have been taken, measures which were not only relevant to the current need and the current problems and the current state of sterling, but were also relevant to the deep, underlying, longer-term problems we are facing. And equally, and no one would question this, the measures we have taken to rid this nation not only of the economic crisis that we inherited but of the industrial inadequacies, the industrial distortion which underlay and caused that crisis – those measures that we have taken have been opposed, misrepresented and irresponsibly misused by the very men who bore the responsibility for the crisis and who, for their own unworthy reasons, had failed to take the decisions which they knew, and which they know, to have been necessary.

My second point is that while we have had to use the rusty and outworn weapons they left to us, we have from the outset been making an attack on the root causes of our economic problems. We have attacked irrelevant and costly prestige defence projects. We have attacked the problem of our uncontrolled capital exports. We have attacked the problem of our unbalanced investment programmes and the problem of government expenditure. But above all through the National Economic Development Council, through the separate councils for individual industries, through the Ministry of Technology, we are engaged now on a great campaign to make this country technology-conscious and to speed the application of the fruits of scientific research to our industrial processes.

And, Mr. Chairman, they fought us: they fought us on the aircraft cuts – the Conservatives, aided and abetted by the Liberals in their Censure Motion on the aircraft cuts; they fought us on our attack on the debilitating freedom of the City to export abroad capital which we needed at home; they attacked us on our policies to modernise industries – all the things we have done have been resisted and opposed by day and by night by the Conservative Opposition.

The long process of filibuster and delay on the Finance Bill has been presented by certain sections of the Press as though all that was involved was a cliff-hanging exercise in Parliamentary majorities and a long drawn-out Tory selection conference. But what was really at stake was this: the most fundamental reform of our system of taxation which Parliament has seen for over half a century – and we did it with a majority of three. And let it be noted that in this Finance Bill battle, there were 107 divisions in which the Liberals – shades of the 1909 People’s Budget – voted 13 times with the Government for fiscal modernisation and 94 times with the Opposition against fiscal modernisation.

There they were, Conservatives and Liberals alike, with modernisation on their lips, voting with their feet against urgent measures of fiscal reform. And what they were fighting against was the Government’s attack on the expense account racket; against an effective capital gains tax; against the Corporation Tax, which when it is stripped of all its technical detail was a measure to get industry to plough back more of its profits into expansion and re-equipment and modernisation and to distribute less of those profits as dividends; and when it is stripped of all its detail was a measure to ensure that less of our investment capital is exported abroad and more of it is kept where it is needed, here in Britain. For that Budget and that Finance Bill were directly relevant to our industrial problems. But they were more than that, they were an essential part of the task of creating a fairer Britain, of eliminating economic and fiscal privilege, they were an essential element in creating the climate of social justice that we always said would be necessary if we were to appeal to all sections of the community for restraint, for sacrifice of personal advantage in the matter of prices and incomes and productivity. How could George Brown have gone to Brighton if we had not carried through the Finance Bill first?

Fourthly, we have the whole relevance of the National Plan to our future policies for industrial expansion. As George Brown will be dealing with this on Thursday, I don’t propose to say anything about it now. This is a breakthrough in national economic policy. It is more than that. It is also a breakthrough in the whole history of economic government by consent and consensus. In a very real sense, the publication of the Plan marks the beginning of phase two of the work of this Parliament and of this Government.

Because, after a year in which our first preoccupation was how to weather the storm, the whole world realises that despite the sour pronouncements of our opponents, we are now getting within measurable distance of balancing our overseas payments. The economy is strong. Sterling is strong. Employment is strong. But let no one under-rate the weight that we have been carrying in facing this economic problem over this last year. Indeed, because our first year, which is the period covered by this Report, has been utterly dominated by the economic situation they left us with, it would have been perfectly understandable if I had had to stand before you this morning and to say that because of that economic situation I was sorry but we had lost a year in starting the attack on the problems we were facing last October: if I were to stand up and say that we have not been able to build the New Britain because we had a demolition job to do first, to clear away the damage left by the Tory economic crisis. If that were what I had to report, I would not have apologised to this Conference.

But, in fact, this has been one of the most productive years in British Parliamentary history. It has been a year of Government. It has been a year of active and progressive legislation. The Parliamentary Report lists; – and I am not going to go through the whole list – the massive legislative programme that we have carried through the House of Commons, or will have carried into law by the time this session finally ends next month. As one reviews this record it brings back to me all that they were saying a year ago, when they said that Labour would not be able to form a government. ‘The chaps weren’t there.’ All right. Man for man, woman for woman, I challenge comparison between every member of the Labour Front Bench and their predecessors. I will go further. Man for man, woman for woman – I challenge any Tory editor to answer this (I hope you will pass this message on), and to make a comparison between every Labour Front Bencher and his Tory Shadow Cabinet opposite number – always supposing that any single Tory editor even knows at any moment of time who the opposite number is.

Indeed, I would go further. Even if – and heaven forbid – all of my colleagues and I were to get under an illuminated tram tomorrow – every one of us – you could form out of our present second-eleven, our Ministers of State and Parliamentary Secretaries, a Cabinet and top Ministerial team at least as good as we present to you now, and far better than anything our opponents could put forward. You don’t win either the F.A. Cup or the English cricket championship unless you have got good reserves.

So, ‘Labour could not form a government.’ That was one of the things they said a year ago. Another thing they said was that we would not have firmness of purpose, that we would not govern with authority, that we should be pushed around. We have not been pushed around. We have not been pushed around abroad, and we have not been pushed around at home – and we are not going to be. This is government of the people, it is government by the people, it is government for all the people. And the accent is on government.

Let me remind you of something else they said. That with a majority of three we could not get through major legislative programmes. And certainly all the time, while we have been doing this, there has been this anxious pulse-taking about our majority by pollsters and by Press alike. Day to day medical bulletins in the national Press. It has, in fact, been a diversionary Opposition tactic to concentrate attention on the size of our majority and not on the measures that that majority was systematically carrying through the House.

Let me give you the figures. In this session so far, there have been 268 divisions. Thirty-nine of these were free votes – an unusually high proportion. Two hundred and twenty-nine, therefore, were straight confrontations between Government and Opposition. Three of these we can dismiss. They were lost when the Tories were playing their midnight game of Cowboys and Indians in the houses of Smith Square and Lord North Street – which Tony Benn generously connected up with a telephone so that they could know what they were voting about. And they talk about proxy voting for sick MPs! The other 226 we won and our average majority was more than 13. In only a handful of divisions did we have a majority below our nominal three. And just to put Scarborough into its perspective, perhaps it is right that I should record that the Liberal Party – what Mr. Grimond quaintly calls the Radical Left, voted 68 times with us and 157 times with the Conservatives. To be fair, on four occasions, they abstained.

Five years ago, Mr. Chairman, you told Conference that you did not join the Labour Party to become a left-wing Liberal. To judge from the right-wing Liberal voting record in this Parliament, you would have been a lonely man if you had.

It would be utterly wrong in presenting this Parliamentary Report to Conference if I did not now pay tribute to the magnificent work of the Government Whips, led by Ted Short, Sidney Irving, and if I might draw the veil aside a little further, our pairing whip, John Silkin I do not believe any team of whips has ever done such a magnificent job in the history of Westminster, but it would be equally wrong not to pay tribute to the tremendous morale and loyalty of our Labour Members, not least the new Members whom you returned to Westminster last October. Our new Members are already veterans. They have already been through what is one of the greatest Parliamentary ordeals in history and they have enjoyed it. I don’t know how many times I have talked to some of our new Members during the small hours, even as dawn approached, talked to them a little anxiously perhaps, to be greeted with the rebuke ‘this is what we came here for.’

And if the House adjourned at 3 am or 3.30 am you could see them gaily claiming that they had been lucky – they had got a half day off. But day by day, and night by night, as the small majorities ticked their way across the scoreboard, we were carrying through a fundamental reform of our tax system. And the Finance Bill they said we couldn’t get through, and that we wouldn’t get through, is now the Finance Act.

But, sir, you would agree that no tribute to the unity, the morale and the loyalty of the Parliamentary Labour Party could possibly be complete without a tribute to the Chairman of the Parliamentary Party, that great and ever young veteran, Manny Shinwell.

In a lifetime of service to this movement, nothing has surpassed or will surpass his contribution in this past year.

So, despite the economic crisis, despite the obstructive time-wasting manoeuvres of the Tory Party on the Finance Bill, the Rent Bill and other measures, we succeeded in a little over eight months in carrying through the Houses of Parliament 65 Bills. That is two more than the Tories managed in the previous session with a majority of 100; it is 14 more than the average for the 13 years 1951 to 1964. What is more, many of these were major Bills and we had to produce them without having had the time or the opportunity before we came to power, of course, to get them drafted. So that with the usual delays that an incoming government has, we have still been able to present a formidable legislative programme.

I am only going to say a word or two about some of these Bills. The first one was referred to yesterday by Peggy Herbison. It was a small one but there are many here who know what it means in terms of real humanity when we carried out our pledge – in our first Bill – to introduce a Bill to give old-age pensioners on our housing estates and elsewhere the right to free or concessionary bus fares – the Bill the Tories refused to introduce, the Bill the Tories blocked for years.

2.  We said we would take urgent action to raise pensions, and as Peggy told you yesterday, within a fortnight of Parliament meeting, we introduced the Bill.

3.  We had given a pledge to abolish the earnings rule for widows and to increase the pension of the ten shilling widow. We honoured the pledge.

4.  We said we would abolish the prescription charge. We abolished it.

5.  We said we would provide security of tenure for families in their homes. Without waiting for our main Rent Act repeal measure, we put an immediate stop to evictions.

6.  We had promised to repeal the Tory Rent Act, to provide new machinery for fixing fair rents, and to give Government and all others who required them, the powers they needed to fight the evils of Rachmanism. That Bill is through the Commons despite Tory obstruction. It is in the Lords – within a week of Parliament meeting again, we intend it to become law. It was on the Bill to restore security of tenure, and it was on the Rent Bill that our new Members, not I imagine to their surprise, saw the full virulence of Tory Opposition tactics when the Tories were fighting for something near and dear to them, the rights of landlords and property interests.

7.  We had said that those who lost their jobs as a result of industrial changes should receive, as of right, severance pay. In the Redundancy Payments Bill – which you carried through Parliament, Mr. Chairman, we have kept that pledge.

8.  We said we would take action to bring new life to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The Highlands and Islands Development Act – what they call the ‘Marxist measure’ – is on the Statute Book.

9.  We gave a pledge about the Trade Disputes Bill. We have honoured that pledge.

10.  We have introduced a new Monopolies Bill to curb the abuses of monopoly power.

11.  We said we would provide machinery to overhaul our archaic and obsolete system of law. The Law Commissioners have been set up and they are at work under Labour’s Act of Parliament, and the Lord Chancellor is now due to present to Parliament the detailed and imaginative programme of law reform to which the Commissioners have set their hands.

12.  We said we would get rid of the restrictions on the right of railway workshops and other nationalised industrialised undertakings, to do work for export or for strengthening our industrial base. That was our pledge and the Minister of Transport has already acted. And we shall introduce a further measure to remove those restrictions which require statutory repeal.

This is just part of our record for one Parliamentary session. We have begun to lay the legislative foundations of the New Britain, though – I must repeat this – it takes time, it necessarily takes time, for the legislation to bear fruit. Dick’s Rent Act, when it becomes law, will take time to work through but, at this, stage we cannot put it to Conference.

When I talk about phase two, if you like, session two of this Parliament, I am not only referring to the improvement in our economic position, I am referring to the fact that starting with the Plan a fortnight ago, we shall now have a steady flow of new Government measures and new Government Bills.

Yesterday, Dick, the Minister of Housing and Local Government, told you something of our plans in the field of housing. Let me say that he did not tell you a half of it. He cannot yet, but he will soon, and he will have a great deal more to say when the National Housing Plan is published in a few weeks’ time. You see, we have had to spend so much of the first session in clearing up the festering debris of the Tory Rent Act legislation. Now we can go forward.

The housing problem, as every one of us said in the election, is the greatest social problem of this age, comparable in its impact, comparable in terms of human misery, to the problem of unemployment in those pre-war years. We said in the election that we would treat it as a priority operation. We said that if it were necessary to hold back any form of less essential building so that the Housing Programme could be increased, we should not hesitate to see what was necessary and to do what was necessary. Yesterday, Charlie Pannell, the Minister of Public Buildings and Works, gave you details of what this meant.

Dick told you what the programme was. Five hundred thousand houses a year by 1970, and a rising proportion of houses to let, but within that total is more to let and more for the owner-occupier. This is the only answer to the over-crowding problem in our towns and cities. The only answer to the problem of the slums, the only answer to the problem of Rachmanism – the evils of which the Tories, when they were in power first denied and then minimised – evils which were dramatically highlighted by the Milner Holland Report last autumn.

Last week, we announced our plan for London Housing and Dick yesterday rightly paid tribute to Bob Mellish who has worked day and night to get this London housing programme launched – and it has been a labour of love.

But you cannot build houses without land. Last week, the Minister of Land and Natural Resources published our White Paper with our proposals for a Land Commission. This, and the Bill which is to follow, make a reality of one of the central promises of Labour in the last election – our promise to deal once and for all with the problem of racketeering in the price of land, our promise to see that land is available when it is needed both for local authority housing programmes and for owner-occupiers; our promise that we would do this because otherwise Town and Country Planning is meaningless; our promise – a basic theme of Socialist belief – that profits arising through the action of the community should accrue to the community.

I call that a Socialist theme; yes, I should have thought a Liberal theme, too. That great ‘modernising’ Party on this theme at least at Scarborough last week carried through an exercise in recidivism which places its present leadership some years behind the Liberals of 60 years ago. In 1909, in 1910, they filled the land with song, ‘God gave the land to the people.’ Now, in 1965, we have the first fruits of Liberal revisionism: while they would not intend to throw doubt on the Almighty’s intention in this respect, their researches suggest that He did not intend this declaration to be taken too literally.

The Conservatives, predictably, condemned the proposals out of hand. The umbilical links between the Conservative Party and the landlords and property interests are too close to permit of much objectivity. But it is interesting to see in their first statement that they now support a levy on land profits. Since when? In Government, right to the last minute, they rejected all our proposals for a radical solution. On television, and throughout the election, their leader proclaimed his determination to die in the last ditch in defence of the free market in land.

Let this be clear. We regard our land proposals, worked out after an infinity of care and study, as essential to our housing programme and to our programme of rebuilding Britain. These issues cannot be discussed in the vulgar currency of Press comment about deals with this, that or the other political Party. Our land programme is a categorical imperative for this movement, for this Government, and for Britain.

We will not trade this or any other principle with those who may be faint of heart or infirm of purpose. We shall insist that all these measures go through. To take any other course would be an abdication of the responsibilities of Government.

As with land, so with financial provision. Dick referred to this yesterday. We shall announce our proposals for the long-term relations between the central Government and local government in the matter of finance. We shall announce our new and revolutionary proposals (that Dick was hinting at yesterday) for the finance of local authority housing. We are hard at work on rating reform.

And let me say to our friends from Wales – I opened the General Election campaign just a year ago last Saturday in Cardiff – to our friends from the Midlands, from London and other areas, we are pledged in this forthcoming session to deal once and for all with the leasehold problem.

Having referred to housing, I think it is right since this is referred to at length in the Parliamentary Report – and you would not want me to burke it – that at this point I should say something about immigration.

I do not propose to anticipate the debate which is to take place on Wednesday about the Government’s White Paper and our proposed legislation. But I want it understood that this is a decision, not of one Department of State, it is a Government decision, collectively taken and after the fullest consideration, by the highest authority in our system of government. But it is right, first, that I should stress our insistence on the positive attack on the problems presented by immigration. This is a positive White Paper. There has been too much talk about the negative side of it. We have legislated against racial incitement and against racial discrimination in public places. A number of senior Ministers have been, and are, spending, and will continue to spend, a lot of their time, and an energetic junior Minister is spending practically his whole time, on the practical problems of assimilation and integration of Commonwealth immigrants in our big towns and cities, especially in the fields of housing and education. We have sought to deal with the problem of immigration in consultation with other Commonwealth countries. But we must face the fact that largely because of the widespread evasion of the Act, in the concluding months of the Conservative Government – and, of course, the loopholes remain – there are towns and cities in Britain which are being asked today to absorb a degree of immigration on a scale beyond their social capacity to absorb, without serious risks, having regard to the time required for absorption.

There have been those – and we all know there have been those – who did not scruple to play on issues of race and colour for squalid and ignoble political motives. I want to say to you, with all the emphasis at my command, that the Government takes the view that we have a duty to act here and that failure to fulfil that duty might lead in a very short time to a social explosion in this country of the kind that we have seen abroad.

We cannot take the risk of allowing the democracy of this country to become stained and tarnished with the taint of racialism or of colour prejudice. I want to make it clear that in the positive policies set out in the White Paper for assimilation, for absorption, for integration, we proceed from the proposition that everyone living in this country, everyone who has come in or will come in is a British citizen, entitled to equality of treatment regardless of origin or race or colour.

Time will be required for assimilation and this is why we must have restriction, particu;larly having regard to the widespread evasions. But I repudiate the libel that the Government’s policy is based either on colour or on racial prejudice. We repudiate, and let me say for my part, I resent, the accusation of illiberality or of any desire whether on the part of the Home Secretary, or of the Government as a whole, to act in an arbitrary manner. Our concern was with evasion, and the new power – which I know has caused anxiety – in respect of repatriation relates only to those who have illegally or fraudulently entered this country.

Mr. Chairman, I have referred to the last session of the Commons. Sixty-five measures in the last session: and it would not be right or proper for me to indicate all the measures which we can expect to see passed in the session which is due to begin on 9 November. We have already announced that we shall. legislate to give effect to the forward looking measures in Fred Peart’s White Paper on Agricultural policies. Before Parliament meets, we shall be publishing our proposals for a Parliamentary Commissioner, the so-called Ombudsman, to investigate the grievances of individual citizens where a prima facie case is made out involving injustice or culpable neglect by great Departments of State. We shall be laying before the nation the reforms necessary in social security and our detailed plans for relating benefits to earnings.

And we plan to introduce another measure of which we gave notice in the Queen’s Speech at the Opening of Parliament last November. As part of our proposals to reform Company Law, so as to give shareholders greater information about the activities of the companies they own, we propose to introduce a statutory obligation on the part of members of boards of directors to give full details of any contributions of their shareholders’ money towards the funds of any political party, or of any front organisation which exists for political purposes. I think that it will be generally agreed and here I confidently count on the unanimous support of the House of Commons, that this will not only be a valuable reinforcement of existing statutory provisions within the field of Company Law and the protection of shareholders, but it will also provide a necessary cleansing agent – cleaning up one of the seamier sides of British public life and improving the standard of our democracy.

The Parliamentary Report I have just discussed gives the record of our achievement in our first session. By the end of our second session, we shall have carried into law almost the whole of the specific pledges which we laid before the country last October, and on which all of us fought that great campaign. Our manifesto was designed for a full five year Parliament. It was not our final programme: it was the first of a broadening series of Socialist programmes, and yet, though it is designed for five years, in two sessions the greater part of it will have become law – to say nothing of a great programme of social reform which we have introduced or shall be successively introducing outside the specific pledges we made a year ago.

I beg you, in your humanity, to consider what all this means for the Conservative Opposition. For their stock in trade is based on the repetitive use of two dying assets. One is their unscrupulous political use of the measures we have had to take to deal with their economic crisis. The second is their pathetic complaint that we have broken our election promises, and this complaint which, as we have seen in Parliament and outside, has taken the form of a newly discovered Conservative concern for many groups of people – or should I say groups of voters – whose needs they scorned for 13 years. They are suddenly concerned about aid for owner-occupiers, about aid for ratepayers, about the doctors, about the teachers. As I said on television last week, nothing is more pathetic than this repetitive complaint that in less than a year, we have not yet done everything that they failed to do, or neglected to do, or hadn’t the humanity to do, or refused to do, or didn’t know how to do, in 13 years.

And now, as the economic deficit moves slowly but surely into economic surplus, and equally, as we put into effect measure after measure in fulfilment of the mandate for which we asked in our election manifesto – as these two things happen – so will this discredited Tory Party be reduced to a querulous and impotent irrelevance, because during all this period they have not put forward a single positive proposal.

I call as witness 300 Labour Members of Parliament. In a year of almost unprecedented Parliamentary, activity, with measure succeeding measure in its passage through the House, we have not had from the Conservative Opposition, a single statement of alternative policy on any of the issues on which we have legislated. Negative opposition to one Bill after another, whether they are Bills for which we have sought and obtained a mandate, or whether they are corrective financial measures made necessary by the crisis they had bequeathed to us, on all these things their record has been not only negative, it has been nihilist. We have had from them no proposals, and, of course, anyone who looks at the political scene – even the Press will be admitting this in their leaders very soon – will say that when a country has to judge it is not judging between two parties on the record of how negative one of them has been in Opposition: it is judging between a government and an alternative government, and the Conservative Party have destroyed any claim they might have had to be regarded as a credible alternative government.

And so it goes on. Most measures they have denounced out of hand as soon as they have seen them. They have now set up a department in the Conservative Central Office to divide all our Bills and White Papers into two classes: those they attack on sight and those they attack before they have read them.

Month by month; we have been promised the new statement of Conservative principles. It was ready in January, it will be ready in March. It was ready for a spring election, we should have it in July. Now we are told it is going to be available before, during, or after the Conservative Party Conference. For my part, I shall neither praise nor condemn its contents until I have read it. But I will say this. In so far as it calls for changes in Government policies, or improvements in our system of society, or improved quality of management in industry – which they now keep talking about – or reforms in trade unions, in so far as it calls for a fairer distribution of our social services, then the publication of this policy statement will be a more eloquent and damning indictment than any words or comments of mine could be, on the Conservative record, of their failure to do all the things they now say are necessary, when they have just ended responsibility for the conduct of the nation’s affairs and the shaping of our social system – which lasted for 13 years.

Nye had a word for it, as always: Why look in the crystal ball when you can read the book? Thirteen volumes of it.

This is one reason why their efforts to produce a policy should command our sympathy; they can produce nothing new without utterly condemning their own record.

Another reason for sympathy – and I am sorry that I am not getting the sympathetic expressions on your faces that I hoped for – is that they are trying to produce a policy in a Party which is fundamentally divided not only on means but also on its basic philosophy. Weasel words cannot bridge the gulf between those who slowly and reluctantly have come to accept, at any rate, some measure of economic planning and those among their leaders – recently promoted some of them – who claim a policy of economic and social anarchy, a policy, a philosophy, which had already been repudiated by some of the more progressive Tories in the 1860s.

But there is something more serious than this. We are told that under their new leadership, the old slogans will go and that new and more inspiring themes will lie at the heart of their policies. What are these themes? Partnership? Co-operation? A combined operation to modernise Britain? None of these.

We are told, with authority, that the keynote is to be ‘conflict.’ That is to be the philosophy – ‘conflict.’ That the Conservative Party should now consciously ally itself with management against all other groups in the community.

That management must be set against labour, that equally, labour must be set against management. This apparently is what is meant by the fashionable new word ‘abrasive’ – a return to the bitterness of Taff Vale and to the class-war philosophy of Galsworthy’s ‘Strife.’ This is the modernisation. The Conservative Party, always materialist, is now logically getting itself ready to adopt a Marxist posture.

I warn these men that they are playing with fire for electoral purposes. Some of them showed that they were not above unleashing the evil passions of race and colour hatred, and none of them, even yet, has denounced what was done in their name a year ago.

But now, it is clear that in the top leadership of their Party there are men who will not scruple for electoral purposes to unleash a new source of conflict in Britain, in British industry, by incitement and provocation in industry. This Government of ours has not been slow to condemn nor slow to act where industry has faced paralysis through sporadic unofficial disputes and our condemnation, through your words and actions, Mr. Chairman, is directed against any – be they feudal managements, or irresponsible strikers – who have jeopardised our industrial recovery.

Now the Tories, who for 13 years did nothing, claim to have discovered the problem of industrial relations. Let them realise that the course on which they now appear to be set, so far from reducing industrial problems, could set industry ablaze.

The truth is that the new Conservative appeal to professional management is a diversionary tactic to conceal their basic preoccupation not with the functions of management and industrial efficiency with which we are concerned, but with ownership (following their tradition), with the rights of a privileged minority, by those who own money and make money out of that ownership, or those who own land and hold the rest of the country to ransom through the ownership of land. That was the inspiration of their Finance Bill fight when the Shadow Chancellor and his cub tycoons, that assembly of city acolytes, were fighting not for industry but for finance. It was also the spirit that informed the two successive Conservative leaders in their attacks on the Highland and Islands Bill and all other land legislation.

For what they are engaged on is not a question either of measures or of men. It is a desperate attempt to provide the admen with what they call the new image.

I have said before at this Conference that I don’t think much of this image stuff. For us men at any rate, our shaving mirror tells us what the image is. It is something never very far removed from the face that we present. Nikolai Gogol, so far as I am concerned, has the last word on these Colman, Prentiss and Varley techniques in his foreword to his play, ‘The Government Inspector,’ a century and more ago when he quoted this Russian proverb: ‘NA ZERKALO NYETCHA PYENYAT KOLI ROZHA KRIVA.’ For the benefit of any who are not familiar with that, in the words of the authorised translation, ‘Don’t blame the mirror if the mug is ugly.’

Enough of them. We have more important things to talk about. We are building the New Britain, and with this I close my introduction this morning. We do not claim to have built it yet. In our first year, we were building with the brokers’ men looking over our shoulder. We have had to clear from the building site the debris of wasted years. What we can say – it is a modest claim, perhaps – is that this year has been spent on the foundations, on putting the footings in. But in all we have done, whatever the difficulties, whatever bottlenecks we have had, and the two principal ones have been money and Parliamentary time, in all this difficult year, we have kept our eyes raised to the great design of the structure that we are seeking to build.

I began this morning by saying what I felt was the vision of the New Britain for which our people voted a year ago. I have shown how in this unprecedentedly difficult year, we have started to move towards that new Britain. The years that lie ahead will see our forward march.

Soon, we shall be announcing our plans for a great productivity drive, a great technological revolution, which will turn into a reality the vision that we proclaimed at Scarborough.

This new Britain that we are building will be a Britain of opportunity. An opportunity for the young; an opportunity under the forward looking proposals which Alice Bacon has worked out in the Home Office for children, deprived of a fair chance in life, to have that: chance. And opportunity to us means for every boy and girl, the right to the educational development which will enable him or her to develop their innate talents and qualities to the full.

This is why educational expenditure is running at a record level, why school building has been exempted from the restrictions of the past year, and why it is planned to raise it at so rapid a rate over the next five years. This is why we have made the purposive start on the ending of the 11 plus selection and on the creation of a truly comprehensive system. This is why the Secretary of State for Education and Science has moved to give effect to the plan set out in Signposts for the Sixties and approved by conference for the integration of the public school system.

But equally, if there can be no arbitrary selection at 11 plus, there can be none either at 18 plus hence our drive to build up the universities and to establish parity of esteem between those universities with a technological background and those founded on older disciplines. And I am proud to speak as the. Chancellor designate of Bradford University.

But this must be the Britain which releases the energies of our people at every age.

We do not regard the battle for production as a limited private war confined to Ministers and Government servants, and top industrial managers and trade union leaders. It must be a battle in which the whole British people is mobilised. That is why we have called for the establishment of production committees in every factory, allowing all who have contributions to make to increased production to play their full part regardless of outdated ideas about the sacred preserves of management.

We want to see – and here our great new regional councils can give the lead – the service of our young technologists and scientists mobilised in an assault on the technical problems of industry and I should like to see our junior chambers of commerce mobilise keen young business men, exporters, salesmen, marketing experts, for the attack on the export markets. We promised you two years ago it would be our aim to release the energies of the British people and we meant it.

But this cannot be judged in industrial terms alone. The new Britain must be related not only to the quantity of production but to the quality of life. At Scarborough, I said the automative age would at once make possible these facilities and create the demand for increased facilities for the use of leisure.

And even with the limitations which the last year has imposed, we all of us are proud of what Jennie Lee has achieved in providing for increased expenditure and increased investment in our national arts and amenities and especially for the extension of this programme to the provinces.

And she is working with equal determination to make a reality of another cherished Labour proposal – the University of the Air, to provide for our people an opportunity of higher education, perhaps a higher education they missed through no fault of their own, whether vocationally or in pursuing more liberal studies. Jennie and those advising her have already studied in depth all that will be involved in creating a new national university of the air, with its vice-chancellor, its system of degrees and diplomas, its courses, using television and radio, particularly local broadcasting stations, bringing into the service the work of colleges of further education, making use of residential and correspondence courses, the W.E.A., and the extra-mural departments.

There are those who are disappointed that we have not done more to alter the external trappings of our society. Frankly, we have been more concerned with the citadels of effective power than with its external embellishments. It has been more important to assert national and social responsibility in our economic and social life. This may be disenchanting, but we are more interested in the monthly trade returns than in Debrett, more preoccupied with reading what is said by the industrial correspondents and economic editors than what is said by William Hickey; more concerned with modernising the machinery of government, including the vitally necessary creation of modern regional machinery, much more with the action that will need to follow the Report of the Estimates Committee on the Recruitment, Training and Structure of the Civil Service than in altering the layout of Burke’s Landed Gentry. In the language of priorities, we are more concerned with the work of the House of Commons – a newly nationalised House of Commons – than with the future of the House of Lords. Though I should perhaps mention that since last October, there have been no hereditary peerages created, and no baronetcies either, nor has the Labour Chief Whip followed the example of his Tory predecessors who regularly used the Honours List as a means of rewarding, and corrupting, their Parliamentary Party.

That is our Parliamentary Report to you. We intend to get on with the job you gave us to do. I believe that is what you want. I believe that is what the country wants and for once, I find myself reinforced by the unity of the two public opinion polls – I have not seen an Express one lately – which show that an overwhelming majority of our fellow-citizens are sick and tired of manoeuvring, of Press gossip about an early and unnecessary election, and want to see what Labour can do with the mandate they gave to us.

Others may manoeuvre. We have a job to do. We have not been approached by any other Party with a view to a pact, a deal or a coalition. It is entirely right and proper that a Party leader should be concerned to show the fullest respect, as he does, to those who elected their 10 Members; it is equally right and proper for us to show our equal respect for the views of those who elected our 300. We are clear what our mandate means in terms of our Parliamentary programme and in terms of executive Government. I hope that others will feel able to support these measures which we put forward because we believe them to be in the national interest. If they can, we shall welcome their support. If they cannot, we shall have to go on without them.

So, if others find themselves unable honourably to support the measures we put forward – and I intend no reflection on their motives – this must be a matter for them. But if this leads to a seizure in our Parliamentary government, or a situation in which effective government cannot be carried on, then let this be understood – this will not then be an issue to be settled in the back corridors of the Palace of Westminster, it will be an issue to be settled by the sovereign and independent decision of the British people.

For the power you conferred on us is not a gift, but a trust; it belongs not to us but to the whole British people; and it will not be the Parties or the pressmen; the pollsters, the principalities and powers who will decide: it will be the people, who alone can refresh and reinforce our mandate, and it will be to the people that we shall render the account of our stewardship in carrying out the task they gave us of building a new and fairer Britain.