Bernard Ingham: Harold Wilson was a gifted leader weighed down by the political Left

IF the Labour Party had any self-respect, it would be doing penance on Friday before Harold Wilson’s statue on the forecourt of Huddersfield railway station.

It would be marking the centenary of the former Prime Minister’s birth in Milnsbridge with a profound apology for what it has become.

It owes it to Wilson, who wore himself out trying to hold the Labour Party together, to recognise that it has gone full circle in the last 50 years and now has a leader who positively generates internal division.

Let’s be clear, Wilson was not a great post-war Prime Minister.

There are only two – Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher – both of whom changed the nature of Britain.

Gifted though he was, he was prevented from achieving much – certainly economically – by his very own fissiparous party and its power-mad trade union wing.

He was unable to harness “the white heat of the technological revolution” because the unions were dead set on preserving clapped-out, uncompetitive industries when they were not driving others, notably the motor car industry, into bankruptcy.

His government’s union backbone, led by Jim Callaghan, threw out Barbara Castle’s White Paper In Place of Strife which sought to complement trade union power with responsibility. Political history might have been different had it embraced it. Instead, his passion for indicative planning and prices and incomes policies all too often ended with beer and sandwiches in No 10.

I had a ringside seat to all this at the Prices and Incomes Board and the Department of Employment where scarcely a day seemed to pass without a strike to conciliate.

Sadly, Wilson made a fool of himself with his post-devaluation claim that “the pound in your pocket” was worth no less when imports would cost more.

He was also part of the deception about the nature of our membership of the Common Market in the 1975 referendum.

History is now repeating itself with the Tory government’s misrepresentation about Britain’s need to remain in the EU and the dire consequences of departure.

On the other hand, Wilson did keep us out of the Vietnam War. He also went along with Roy Jenkins’ social liberalisation on capital punishment, divorce, homosexuality and abortion, and he established the Open University. He tried. By heavens, he tried from within his trademark cloud of tobacco smoke.

But it could have been so much more impressive without the deadweight of the unions and the daft Left.

And there’s the rub. That is why there ought to be obeisances to his memory in Huddersfield today. Otherwise, it will seem as if Labour over the last 50 years has, like the Bourbons, learned nothing from history.

Jim Callaghan was rewarded for his opposition to In Place of Strife by the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent that made way for Margaret Thatcher.

We then had to wait 18 years before Tony Blair arrived without any experience of government to give Labour a new chance.

Even with massive majorities, he not only blew it with his “sofa government” of cronies and media obsession. Indeed, if Tom Bower’s current book on his tenure is any guide, he also cost us the earth in blood and treasure with his freelance conduct of government.

Whatever he touches now seems to turn to money for his complicated business empire. Whatever he touched in government came at a price for we poor suckers – the taxpayers. And then came Gordon Brown with a temper that led him to throw things, an irrational belief that boom and bust had been abolished and the consequent monumental budget deficit of £156bn.

As if this wasn’t enough, Labour’s leadership passed to a Brown underling – “Red” Ed Miliband – who proved conclusively that he had learned nothing along life’s road. He introduced £3 membership for the party, thereby instantly undoing all the good Neil Kinnock had achieved in routing the Trots with their militant tendencies.

The result: Jeremy Corbyn, the shabbiest politician in the West. He is so way out that he cheerfully rubbishes Blair and Brown for the financial crash and NHS deficits before outraging his women members by wanting to decriminalise prostitution. This is not a legacy that Wilson would be proud of.

It is the inevitable consequence of the Left’s self-destructive tendencies. As things stand, they could be terminal. Worst of all, the lack of real, live opposition is doing the Tories no good at all.

Harold Wilson lies incredulous in his grave. To think the Labour Party has been reduced to this.

* Tomorrow: Jayne Dowle on higher education’s debt to Harold Wilson.