Roy Jenkins, Europe and the Civilised Society - Professor Vernon Bogdanor

ladies and gentlemen this is the third lecture in the series making the weather on post-war prime ministers sorry post-war politicians who did not become prime minister but had as much impact and I think more than those who did become Prime Minister the first lecture was on an iron Bevin responsible for national health service and a great spokesman for democratic socialism the second was Ian McLeod responsible for the rapid pace of decolonization and a great spokesman for progressive conservatism and this lecture is on Roy Jenkins who has three very great achievements to his credit in in my opinion his liberal legislation as Home Secretary in the 1960s his strong support for European unity and his support for the idea of realignment on the left but first let's listen to his voice and this is a recording of him speaking in 1975 at a rather rough meeting in East London where he was being attacked by militants from the left wing of the Labour Party who as you will see through flour bombs and so on rather difficult meeting but he handled it with great aplomb and if the IT people have got it we can hear his voice I think like sit down and listen to the speeches the essential of the property is a willingness secure the arguments with which you do not agree and I have never heard a more hypocritical demonstration than their share this evening who seem to be speaking in the name of some form of democratic socialism god knows what they think it is but whose contribution is to make excel but they cannot spare to listen to an argument they do not like it is hypocrisy carried to its ultimate degree and they have patient leaves on - and will leave on the minds of mineralogy that is which pretty stoked our little bit not anyway strictest goes down it will be the beginning of the endlessly speech in democracy well I think that conveys something of the flavor of Labor Party disputes in the 1970s but I wonder how many listening to Roy Jenkins would have been able to guess that he was in fact Welsh of Welsh origin someone once said to a now in Bevin that they didn't think Roy Jenkins was ambitious not ambitious Bevin replied anyone who comes from South Wales and learns to speak like that must be very ambitious in fact Roy Jenkins was born in a position in South Wales around 12 miles from Tredegar where a known Bevin himself was born more remarkable still I wonder how many would guess that Roy Jenkins background was in fact very similar to that of Bevins he too was the son of a miner when Roy Jenkins was born in a position in South Wales in 1920 his father had gone down the pits at the age of 12 and worked underground for 24 years in 1908 he won a scholarship to Ruskin College Oxford and then he went to France where he learned French after 1918 he became a district and county councillor for the Labour Party but the most striking episode in the career of Roy Jenkins father occurred in 1926 soon after the general strike at the time of the miners strike which continued when the general strike was over and Roy Jenkins father was a picket in that strike and he was accused after an affray and he was convicted of illicit assembly and sentenced to nine months imprisonment though he actually served only three months now many Labour MPs with such a pedigree would have made much of it and one Labour MP said two adjourns at the time if my father had been a Welsh minor who'd gone to prison during the general strike you would never have heard the end of it but Roy Jenkins never used or the part of the reason for that was his fastidiousness to speak of his origins or to exploit them for purposes of political advancement would have struck him as highly distasteful but there's another equally important reason and it's this his father wasn't proud of being arrested during the miners strike he was wronged ashamed of it because he was respectable and law-abiding figure and Roy Jenkins father said although he'd been organizing the picket he had not sought to incite he sought to pacify people and so while left-wing thought he'd been right to cause a riot and was a working-class hero Roy Jenkins father said he'd been seeking to prevent a riot but had been set up by the police and he insisted that trade unions like everyone else were subject to the law and indeed he later became a justice of the peace as his wife Roy Jenkins mother did also and the general strike had a paradoxical effect on Roy Jenkins father it made him more law-abiding and in a sense more sympathetic to the Labor Party establishment and less sympathetic to the left-wing then he'd been before indeed he was to the right politically of his son Roy and Roy Jenkins said the main effect on him of the of this business was to make him sceptical of convictions that were based solely on the evidence of the police and he said that was not a bad thing for a Home Secretary the being but all this was kept hidden from the youthful Roy Jenkins and as I say he never used it and he would was certainly not proud of it any more than his father was but it's fair to say he was sometimes accused of snobbery and when he was asked as Oxford where he came from he didn't say Wales but he said the Marches but meanwhile his father became a figure and what you might call the Labour establishment a trade union official councillor and in 1935 he became a Labour MP for pontypool and then he became a parliamentary private secretary to actly the leader of the Labour Party and he would undoubtedly have gone further in politics but he died in 1946 and this helped Roy Jenkins career he became close to Ackley and his first book was a short biography of Ashley written in 1948 now although Roy Jenkins background was similar to that of a known Bevins in in many ways the family were rather more comfortable and Roy Jenkins father had enough money to pay the fees for Roy to go to Oxford and unlike Bevan who didn't go to university he had a very good education at Bailey ol College Oxford now whereas in MacLeod my second figure wasted his time at university did very little but became a professional bridge player Roy Jenkins did not waste his time they did extremely well he gained the first in philosophy politics and economics which he claimed played no real part in his life didn't influence his life in any way but it must I suspect have increased his self-confidence and he also became involved in political activity and was a sign of his future he led a breakaway from the left-wing Indian communist dominated labour club at Oxford and formed a Democratic Socialist Club and that's a prefiguring perhaps of what happened in 1981 when he broke with the Labour Party to form the Social Democratic Party the SDP now after military service he hoped but failed to secure a safe seat in 1945 but was elected in a by-election for Southwark in 1948 but that was a seat which was to disappear in the boundary changes and in 1950 he won the seat which he held for 27 years in Birmingham Birmingham the state fir'd it's fair to say he never really fell in love with Birmingham and he's recorded in Richard Crossman's Diaries as saying once the train pulled out of Birmingham he lit a cigar and said don't you always feel an enormous sense of relief at this point he rapidly established his reputation in Parliament in a number of different ways firstly as an author I've already mentioned the book on Atlee the biography but he then wrote in in 1954 he published a short book on the battle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords in 1911 culminating in the Parliament act a book with the title which that I think he later regretted called mr. balford poodle and that comment refers to a remark made by Lloyd George at the House of Lords was not the watchdog of the Constitution but the poodle of mr. baltha the conservative leader but this wasn't misunderstood in some bookshops I gather and sold in the section devoted to pets rather than constitution and he then wrote two biographies one of Sir Charles dilka liberal leader of the 1880s and then of the Liberal prime minister Asquith that was published in 1964 shortly before labour won power but he also established his reputation as a prominent backbencher and rather remarkably and I think unusually he pioneered an important piece of legislation the obscene publication that and that established for a works which people intend to ban that there was a test of literary merit so that could overcome any accusation of obscenity and that was the legislation that enabled Lady Chatterley the lover to be published in 1960 after a famous trial Penguin Books versus the crown and I think it was and it led to in a sense the last gasp of the old establishment when the QC appearing for the crown said this a book you would like your wife or your servants to read but good majority didn't accept that and allowed Lady Chatterley's lava through and that was a remarkable achievement I think for a backbencher now when he entered Parliament in 1948 the Labour Party was coming to be split between the right and the left and the 1950s these battles became very strong and Roy Jenkins sided with the right-wing of the Labor Party and what that meant was he took the view that socialism was not fundamentally about nationalization about public ownership which tend to be view the left-wing but about equality and that equality could be secured without major public ownership by fiscal means by redistributed taxation and he became very friendly with Hugh gates Gill who was elected Labour leader in 1955 and he took the view with gates Gill did that Labour needed to ceased to be opposition minded and that the left-wing was - opposition minded and would never satisfy a rather conservative electorate with a small C that the left-wing would rather frighten the public and that an iron Bevin in particular would frighten the public Jenkins became very close to gates killer and he later said that he admired and indeed loved him more than anyone else with whom I have ever worked in politics and when he was unexpectedly asked 27 years after gates kills death which occurred by accident 50 years ago this week he was asked on Desert Island Discs who was his political hero he said immediately Gates killed but in the early 1960s a subject of dispute came between them and it's a subject which still racks British politics namely Europe the Common Market as the European Union was then known and Roy Jenkins was strongly a strong supporter of Europe was Gate schools what would now be called a euro skeptic and in 1960 Roy Jenkins for the firsts made the first of his resignations he resigned from Labour's front bench to campaign for Europe and he was deeply upset when Gaitskell came out against Europe and he made a famous remark which many people may may think it's still true he said that joining Europe would mean Britain would become subsumed into a federal state and that would mean in gates kills famous were at the end of a thousand years of history the grave mistake but the friendship was interrupted only briefly and respect will remain between the two of them but shortly after making this speech gates kill died tragically early and unexpectedly in in January 1963 as I say just fifty years ago and rather paradoxically Howard Wilson who succeeded Gates kill and who Roy Jenkins didn't care for very much it actually helped his advancement you know an ironic perhaps tragic way because with Wilson I think was more prepared to advance Jenkins and gates called Ben gates were very careful about the accusation that he was advancing only his friends and Wilson felt he needed to conciliate someone who'd been on the other side in politics so his political prospects were enhanced in an odd way by gates kills death and the succession of Wilson and when Labour came to power in 1964 he was appointed Jenkins were appointed Minister for aviation and then a year later in 1965 he became Home Secretary a key position in the government he was only 45 and as he said proudly he was rather addicted to collecting facts about previous politicians he said he was the youngest home secretary since Winston Churchill in 1910 and his tenure at the home of the Home Office was regarded by those who worked with him as an outstanding success and his permanent secretaries are Philip Allen who been at the home office since 1934 said that he was by far the best home secretary he'd ever known now in a book that he wrote in 1959 shortly before the election which labor lost called the labor case Roy Jenkins said that one of Labor's main aims should be that it should ensure the state should do less to restrict personal freedom than it did it should exceed not restrict freedom it should expand freedom people's personalized and the first thing that he wanted reformed what he called the ghastly apparatus of the gallows that is capital punishment now that was being abolished when he became Holmes home sect it wasn't due to him it it began under his predecessor it was abolished while he was Home Secretary but he would certainly have abolished it if it hadn't already been in process of being abolished he ended flogging in the Penal Code and the prison discipline code and he reformed the criminal justice system by a much wider use of bail and parole and more suspended sentences and he reduced the numbers going to prison he also introduced majority verdicts for juries which was a controversial matter at the time but the issues for which he's best-known I think are the reform of the homosexuality laws and the reform of the abortion law now in both of these cases the measures reforming the law were not government measures they were measures arising from private member's bills but in the normal course of events private member's bills will not get through Parliament because governments will not find time to debate them they are usually talked out on Fridays and the private member's bill has no chance of success unless the government will give it time now on these matters which were thought to be matters of conscience the government thought it was inappropriate to legislate and particularly on abortion there were Catholics in the government who were against on principle but the government did agree to give private members time so these bills had a chance of getting through and that was largely Roy Jenkins doing it was his pressure that led to extra time being found now the first of these major bills was homosexual law reform which was passed in 1966 despite the fact that opinion polls at the time indicated against the reform ii reform was on abortion making abortion legal it had previously been illegal and that resulted from a private member's bill from the future leader of the Liberal Party and colleague of Roy Jenkins in the liberal STP Alliance David Steele a private member's bill on his part and that too became law and thirdly Roy Jenkins introduced a race relations act which made it unlawful to discriminate on grounds of race color or ethnic origins in public places and he set out the race relations board has now been transmuted into equality and Human Rights Commission and he was instrumental in the abolition of theater censorship before Jenkins became Home Secretary there was a thing called a Lord Chamberlain who decided whether all players had to be submitted to him and he would decide off his own bat whether they could or could not be performed in in public and this was an invidious task which most Lord Chamberlain's heard like now the private member's bills caused some controversy because people said that this was wrong that the government was succeeding in the obtaining their passage of controversial laws without accepting responsibility for them and they were do trying to get the best of both worlds because much of this so-called permissive legislation was unpopular with voters and perhaps particularly labor voters but the argument against on the Ogden favored what Roy Jenkins did was that granting time merely allowed the House of Commons to decide and it didn't follow it would decide in favor of reform in fact with the Labor Party majority it did now Roy Jenkins was I think the by far the most liberal Home Secretary have had since the war and that was particularly unusual in labour party terms the Atlee government had been a much more successful government than the wilson one in its social and economic reforms the health service National Insurance and and so on but on the whole fairly authoritarian in connection with matters of morality and consciousness it was for example in favor of the retention of capital punishment it wasn't go to legislate on on homosexuality and so on and perhaps the working class constituency that supports the labor party is more authoritarian than people who voted for other political parties and critics of Roy Jenkins said that working-class people more like to be victims of crime and therefore would suffer from a more libertarian penal policy but be that as it may Roy Jenkins is I think the only really liberal Home Secretary the Labour Party's ever produced and more liberal even than some liberal conservative home secretaries now critics between the 1980s said that Roy Jenkins had introduced what they called the permissive society and during the nineteen eighties Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit tended to say that he was responsible for a lot of the social problems but Britain had at that time through his legislation now Jenkins replied that he hadn't created a permissive society but what he called a civilized society and he said that if you think my legislation is so poor why don't you amend or repeal it but in fact it hasn't been amended or repealed in any serious way no government I think would contemplate reversing the reform on homosexual law reform and there are of course suggestions for slightly tacking up the abortion laws but I don't think there's a serious move towards making abortion illegal as it was before the 1960s and so these reforms are permanent they have survived I think it's almost all that has survived of the Wilson labor government from 1964 to 1970 the economic reforms on the whole have not last in the planning machinery in comes policy and all the rest of it they haven't lasted but these reforms have so that I think is the first great achievement now a second great achievement was to come as chancellor of the exchequer he was appointed in late 1967 chancellor at a difficult and desperate moment for the Labour Party because the Labour Party coming into power in 1964 had fought a three-year rearguard battle which proved unavailing to prevent devaluation of the pound but the pound was eventually devalued in November 1967 we then of course had fixed exchange rates not flutter floating rate as we do now and this was seen as defeat for the government and destroyed confidence in the government which had fought so hard to prevent it sterling reserves were very low and there was a great possibility of a second devaluation people very worried about that Android Jenkins said that the only way to avoid that was what he called two years hard slog which were serious cuts in public expenditure and as a result many of the Labour Party's favourite policies had to be abandoned for example prescription charges were introduced the raising of the school leaving age from 15 to 16 was postponed for four years and there were severe cuts in roads and housing expenditure and in Roy Jenkins first budget in 1968 there were massive increases primarily in indirect taxation purchase tax which was the predecessor of e8e vehicle license fee betting tax petrol due to tobacco due to violence period every single indirect tax you can think of and he increased taxation by nearly a thousand million pounds which was over twice the increase in any previous budget including wartime budgets and there was a cartoon by the famous orbit Lancaster about this in the Daily Express at the time where Morty little Hampton says were our non-smoking teetotaler with a brand new car made on collecting savings certificates and living in an underdeveloped country I'd say mr. Jenkins has done a splendid job but oddly enough this very tough budget one enormous and one labor backbencher said never has pain been inflicted with greater elegance you could see that from that debate and Ian McLeod who I think didn't care for Jenkins very much he wrote in The Spectator mr. Jenkins is the vogue if he had stood up on budget day and recited a list of trains arriving at Victoria Station the trendier commentators would have been breathless with admiration now it was followed by two more tough budgets increasing taxation and by a further 600 million pounds but by 1969 the balance of payments was back in surplus and there was a government surplus not a deficit which is what we're more used to now indeed the only surplus that Britain had in the budget between 1936 and 1987 a Roy Jenkins reputation was at its height and had the Labour Party won the election in 1970 which appeared likely he would have been appointed foreign secretary and most likely have been the successor to Harold Wilson as Prime Minister now his budget in 1970 was moderately generous but not as generous as later critics would have liked but the fact that it was a moderately generous budget misled Harold Wilson to hold an early general election which he lost later on critics of Jenkins said he ought have had a more generous budget than he did it's fair to say the Treasury said he was being too generous so perhaps he was right he was in the middle and the defeat of labour was a great surprise to Jenkins as indeed it was to most commentators the week before the election the economists had a headline had a cover with a picture of Harold Wilson and Roy Jenkins together and underneath the caption was in Harold Wilson's Britain the assumption made by everyone was that labour would win the election but labour lost and the Conservatives were back in office and this was going to damage Jenkins because it was likely that the party in opposition would swing to the left as in fact it did but nevertheless Jenkins and again won golden opinions at the exchanges and his his permanent secretary Sir Douglas Allen said he was a finest Chancellor I ever worked with so he had these two in come--as from his top civil servants now the 1970 general election I think really led to a very considerable radical alteration in British politics because it Harold in an age of economic crisis and political polarization which was really unprecedented since the end of the war and in that happens fear Jenkins consensual Rama rational and moderate middle-of-the-road style would be at a discount he wouldn't he wouldn't be able to handle that as well as he could I think the earlier years of consensus and at the same time Jenkins began to question many of the assumptions he'd held about politics since 1945 so the 1970s was an era of transition both for the country an era of transition which ended up in Thatcherism and an era of transition for him which ended up in him leaving the Labour Party and joined and forming the so-called Democrat Party now the key question facing people on the right of the lane part throughout the seventies was whether if the party could be saved for the kind of moderate tolerant pluralistic form of social democracy which Roy Jenkins believed in and at first it seemed that it probably could but by the end of the decade the answer that Jenkins gave was it couldn't so he first sought to won over win over the Labour Party to try and conquer it for his own point of view but then he decided to break with it now labor in opposition swung as it so often does over current situations rather exceptional from that point of view but previously whenever Labour's lost an election it's one to the left and the issue on which the left/right battle was fought was Europe and the left-wing came to attack Wilson and Jenkins and the Labour leadership for supporting British entry into Europe and since Edward Heath was leading Britain into Europe it became a popular attack on the Tory government the Conservative government could easily be attacked people thought on the European issue and Roy Jenks was in difficult position because he supported Heath in securing entry to Europe now Wilson himself was faced with a challenge to his leadership by the shadow home secretary James Callaghan who although he'd support in European office was coming out against it in opposition and he used the opportunity of a speech by President Pompidou of France who'd said quite instantly I think that French ought to be a major language in the community and Callahan made a speech which was known colloquially in labour party circles as the language of chaucer speech because he said if you are saying that the language of Chaucer Shakespeare Milton and Wordsworth should be downgraded in Europe then I have only one thing to say to you he said and since there should be no misunderstanding I will say it in French and he said no merci beaucoup and that was a demagogic speech but as you can imagine I had some resonance for the British public as US perhaps a similar speech would today and it was a great threat to Wilson's leadership now Jenkins said to Wilson if you stay firm on the common market I will support you against the threat from the left and the threat from Callaghan against your leadership we are make sure that your leadership doesn't suffer is only you stick to the common market that you supported in office and Wilson took the view possibly correctly that Jenkins and the right wing was simply not numerous enough or powerful enough to achieve that Wilson veer and Wilson took up a middle position saying he was opposed to British entry on the terms negotiated by the Conservatives and that the Labour Party if it won office would renegotiate that again this is all a deja vue there'd be renegotiation and he would then put the result to a referendum it's funny how this comes round and round again and again the same is just a thought we're talking now about 40 years ago now this book Jenkins innovative position he didn't he didn't leave it and the first crisis he faced was whether to vote in principle for entry into the European community and the Labour Party as a whole was opposing it on conservative terms in Jenkins suggested to him that he take a middle position by abstaining and he said he couldn't do that he thought it was a crucial issue in British politics where you had to stand up and be counted it was like Munich or Suez or the lloyd-george budget or House of Lords reform or the general strike or any of those issues he wouldn't like it to be said when asked in later years by Pat's his grandchildren where he stood on that issue he wouldn't like to have to reply I abstained so he voted he ignored a three-line whip to vote for entry with 68 other Labour MPs but then in 1972 he resigned as deputy leader of the Labour Party and from the Shadow Cabinet on the issue of the referendum that's the wrong issue to resign on but in those circumstances no doubt it's difficult to find the right issue and he then ran a campaign in the country on Europe and other issues in which he thought the Labour Party was varying too far to the left and he took the view that Labour was going so far for left that it would lose the next general election and the pendulum would then swing back to the right probably to his benefit and he says in his autobiography that 1974 according to his strategy was the year in which temporizing Labour leadership was due to receive its just reward in the shape of a general election defeat but just as in 1970 the voters had very perversely declined to help Roy Jenkins by voting for the Conservatives in the February 1974 election the voters were equally perverse and declined to help him by defeating labour they actually voted labour back into office by the narrowest of majorities for seats in fact the Conservatives won more votes but labour had four more seats and Roy Jenkins said rather ruefully in his autobiography to paraphrase Wilde getting one election result wrong might have been excused as a misfortune but to make a mistake about two pointed to carelessness though he said in mitigation of mine miss appraisal no one could have been expected to foresee how much help Edward Heath would give to Harold Wilson's return to Downing Street now I think the February 1974 election was the crucial election of the post-war period it was not only a defeat for Edward Heath brand of centrist conservatism but also a heavy defeat for the Social Democrats led by Roy Jenkins in the Labour Party because it seemed to show that the Labour Party could swing to the left and still win a general election so it was defeat I think not only for Roy Jenkins personally but to defeat for the brand of social democracy that he represented now in that government he became Home Secretary again with rather less enthusiasm than the first time I think but again he introduced important legislation he strengthened race relations legislation by an act of 1976 which banned indirect discrimination on grounds of race and he introduced a Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 but during this government he gradually became more and more disillusioned with the labour party he saw himself I think as a semi-detached member of the government on the outside he was further upset when Margaret Thatcher won the conservative leadership in 1975 because he thought that was swinging the conservative part of the right just as Labour had swung to the left and this would be a period of adversary politics which wouldn't do the country much good but also in 1975 he took a leading part in the referendum again we're here deja view the referendum on Europe the only one we've ever had on Europe - a referendum after we were in the European community we joined in 1973 but the referendum in 1975 was whether we should stay in on the terms renegotiated by Harold Wilson largely I think a cosmetic renegotiation whether we should stay in or leave and the referendum was one for the pro Europeans by two to one and Jenkin worked with people from other parties in that referendum conservative Pro Europeans such as Edward Heath and William Whitelaw but that's more important for the future with a Liberal leader David Steele and he rather enjoyed working with members of other parties even against some in his own part in Cepero docks because he'd resigned on the issue of the referendum he tried to ensure it didn't take place but when a dig take place it rather reinvigorated him I think and led him to a different view of what politics could be about and he came gradually to sympathize with proportional representation which would as it were institutionalized coalition in British politics and at that time the Labour Party's bitterly opposed to proportional representation and it was mentioned in Barbara castles Diaries in 1930s 1974 there was a very interesting reflections you had a Roy Jenkins mind that he was getting interested in proportional representation and coalition's now in 1976 Wilson rather unexpectedly resigned the leadership and there was a contest for the leadership of the Labour Party between six candidates of whom Roy Jenkins was once but his appeal in government and perhaps the public was always greater than his appeal to the average labor back-bencher partly because his style of life was very different now their average labour backbencher and he made no attempt as father pulcher politicians would have done to pretend otherwise he didn't pretend that he liked beer and sandwiches when he in fact didn't do so he didn't batter up back benches in the tea room of the House of Commons and so on he was a man of government and the opinion of civil servants has disabilities and those would work with him in government and perhaps the opinion of the public was i think much greater than that of the average labour backbencher but when it came to the outcome of the election he gained 56 votes and James Callaghan was a leading figure of the right with 84 votes and Jenkins then withdrew but he did say that it would only have required 15 switches from Callaghan to himself to have got the leadership but anyway he didn't he didn't get it and he gradually I think felt that he wasn't deriving much satisfaction from his membership of the government and that he ought really to leave and the opportunity came up in January 1977 when he became president of the European Commission he resigned his seat in parliament and went into Europe and in the first British president the European Commission so far the only one and I suspect if we remain on the outer fringes of the European Union there won't ever be another but anyway he was the first and so far only president of the European Commission and here too he was a very creative figure because he it was he who raised the question or rather resurrected the question it had been there in the early 19th sentences but it n died of European monetary union that is the eurozone and he secured support a great achievement I think in his own terms for the European monetary which was which meant that exchange rates should be fixed by the European countries each country would maintain its own currency the pound the mark the franc and so on but they will be fixed in terms of other European currencies so it was a step towards the euro as he saw it that came into existence in March 1979 Britain did not join Britain joined in October 1990 in the last month's of Margaret Thatcher's term in office shortly before she resigned as Prime Minister and against her better judgment and we left perhaps we were forced out in 1992 in September which pro Europeans called Black Wednesday and anti Europeans called white Wednesday and confirmed many in their hostility to the euro but whatever one thinks of that Roy Jenkins were one of three presidents of the Commission to have a real substantive impact now in 1979 when Callaghan labor price went to the country Roy Jenkins did not vote and he found the election depressing the labor switching to the left and the conservative the right and later in that year he gave a BBC lecture called the Dimbleby lecture called home thoughts from abroad in which he advocated a realignment of British politics based on proportional representation and coalition government and his chance of doing that came in 1981 when three people remained in labour politics joined with him to form the so-called Gang of Four Shirley Williams David Owen and Bill Rogers to form a breakaway party which allied with liberals and courageously Jenkins decided to stand in what seemed an promising constituents you're safe labour seat in Warrington and a by-election in 1981 where he was defeated by just 1700 votes which he said was his first defeat in 30 years in politics but nevertheless the greatest victory in which I've ever participated because it showed that the Liberal SDP alliance was a living force and then in the spring of 1982 he was returned for Glasgow he'll head as an SDP Member of Parliament into a brief heady moment it looked as if the Alliance would in the terminology of a time break the mold break the two-party system its support in the polls at one time was 50 percent but then it gradually fell and after the Falklands War support swung back to the Conservatives and the Alliance proved to be a victim of the per first-past-the-post system in politics it won 25 percent of the vote in 1983 the heart for a third party since the 1920s but not enough to break through just 23 seats and Jenkins then resigned the leadership and in 1987 he lost his seat in Glasgow his last speech in the House of Commons interestingly enough was against the restoration of capital punishment and after his resignation the SDP collapsed under the leadership of David Owen in recriminations and squabbles so it really got nowhere now there was compensation for him at the time of the defeats in 1987 because he was elected Chancellor of Oxford University or on a ceremonial position which he greatly prized and he became a member of the House of Lords and he went back to his earlier career writing books and he wrote a very good biography of Gladstone and then a very good biography of Churchill the book on Churchill was written when he was 80 fifty years after his first book on Churchill's great opponents at Lee and he said I I think this is right not that I've got any basis for comparison but he said it was it was harder to be a writer than a minister harder when you faced a sheet of blank paper to actually write something to be a minister when your civil servants help you through the committees and so on I suspect that is actually true he became a mentor late in life to tony blair and hope for a realignment of politics in 1997 Blair was himself sympathetic to that but Labour's majority was too large to make that possible if they're in Holland parent or small labour majority that would have happened and he chaired a committee on electoral reform which not surprisingly recommended a moderate form of proportional representation and Tony Blair promised to referendum but that was rather a politician's promise because he didn't say when there would be a referendum and it hasn't actually happened the last book he wrote appeared before he died was called 12 cities and very much written in his own style and he said of Birmingham which he'd represented of so many years it was not a city which easily clutches at the heartstrings and there was a brilliant parody of it by Craig Brown the satirist in private I which I read an expert excerpt from it it can't quite catch his tone of voice but you remember that it's um Craig Brown said hey malt is why matter one might almost suggest the most oxymoronic of tube stations being on a central line but very far from central east of Woodford yet south of Grange Hill it is not a station with which I would claim an instinctive and intimate relationship rather one which I would say has always greeted me most warmly offering to carry my bag while stopping shorts at worth asking me in for a bottle of halfway decent claret shortly before his death Roy Jenkins wrote to Craig Brown praising what he called his very funny and wounding and even affectionate parody he rather liked it near the end of his life he had lunched with John Major who asked him did he regret not being Prime Minister - which Jenkins said whether John Major ever regretted that he had been Prime and jenkins said i think rather typically he said I rather think I would have liked being Prime Minister in retrospect rather more than I would have enjoyed it at the time and he said this thought raises the question of how much I was truly at ease with power it is not a thought which I suspect much troubled the minds of the great determined leaders of history Napoleon was not looking forward secretly to writing his memoirs whether it's st. Helena or elsewhere and even those multi-volume memorialist sand politicians of genius Lloyd George and Churchill never doubted that they were happier in 10 Downing Street even in the darkest days of war than they could ever be on the hills of Wales or in the painting growth of the South of France and he said I may of avoiding doing and never avoiding doing too much stooping but I also missed conquering he said but then he said that but at a personal level looking around does not lead me to feel envy of those who have been prime minister and he said in the memoirs perhaps he wasn't ruthless enough possibly he could have seized it from Wilson when Wilson was very unpopular in the late 60s and he said people who effectively seize the prime ministership Lloyd George Macmillan Margaret Thatcher do not let such moments slip I'm slightly doubtful whether he could have seized a friendship but it's an open question now I think it's reasonable to say those influence on politics was as great as if not greater then men who've held the office of Prime Minister he was the leading libertarian and internationalist of post-war British politics and showed great political courage on many occasions on his resignations on the European issue his list of liberal reforms obscene publications abortion homosexuality and his willingness to court unpopular his Chancellor by increasing taxation now Roy Jenkins died in 2003 and even before he died he felt that some of his great causes were not prospering he sent to the writer Robert Harris with whom he formed a late friendship he said in 1999 he said I have three great interests left in life a single currency electoral reform and the union of the Liberals with labor and all three are languishing he dreamt near the end of his life of a reconciliation with David Owen but he says dream was ruined because Owen said in the dream Roy it really is wonderful to see you again especially as you will now agree that on everything we disagreed about I was right and you were wrong so that never occurred but I think it's causes it's fair to say have languished since his death there's been the political realignment but on the right through the current coalition which I think though it's only getting I think Roy Jenkins would have opposed because although on the right of the Labor Party he was strongly anti conservative he never sympathized with Thatcherism he was against the the rule of the market and he was in no sense a strong nationalist but a strong European which probably can't be said I think of this government so I think he would have opposed the present government and his closest allies in the House of Lords of veterans Shirley Williams lady Williams and Bill Rogers Lord Rogers I think are also moderately skeptical towards this government come on Europe of course he wanted Britain to join the euro and for him Europe was arguably more important than the Labour Party it was fundamental cause and obviously we're much further from joining the euro than we are than we were when he was alive and the euro table seen much greater difficulties than he might have anticipated but there is a great deal that's left of course the main element that's left is the liberal society the emphasis on much greater personal freedom which i think is irreversible the fact that the Labour Party is much closer to the SDP that Jenkins helped form in in 1980s than it is to the Labour Party that he left in 1981 I think is also important the Labour Party is broadly the sort of Social Democratic Party that he could have supported so the Labour Party has changed in the direction he would have favoured he is also I think to be remembered for his tremendous executive ability arguably one of the top five ministers in government since the war a great executive ability in all the positions he held Home Secretary Chancellor and presidents of the European Commission a brave honorable and clear in what he believed in and prepared to fight hard for it he was a man of great integrity and loyalties friends and perhaps the last really literate member of the House of Commons who read very widely he said of his greatest digital friend in his early years Hugh gates Gill he said he'd left a memory which is in standing contradiction to those who wish to believe that only men with cold hearts and twisted tongues can succeed in politics and I think the same can be said of him and like an Aaron Bevin and Ian MacLeod he needs behind of the thought of what might have been

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 20,075

Rating: 4.7862597 out of 5

Keywords: Politics, History, UK, Law, Homosexual, Gay Rights, Abortion, United Kingdom (Country)

Id: dimAWlJfNOY

Length: 53min 50sec (3230 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 25 2013