Harold Wilson’s major policy shift from Hugh Gaitskell was backing measures that introduced a colour bar into UK immigration!
You can say what you like about Harold Wilson and Tony Blair in their pomp, but they'd have battered Farage and Reform out of sight without really breaking a sweat.
May 6, 2025 20:03Think ultimately we’re seeing an old, old, old story in politics of “new wave of immigration followed by backlash”, a story that is older than the passport. Indeed it is why we have passports! But made harder by the fact that the West is so much older than it was a a century and a half ago.
The trade-offs of “oh, people are angry, let’s have some restrictions” become more brutal in a country where almost everyone is three degrees of separation from a living nonagenarian than they were in 1906 or 1961.
Also become less popular when most working age voters really don’t want to bear the additional costs: most Labour voters did think the 1961 Act was right and cared about it a lot. Most Labour voters now are in the “not one penny spent on this” zone.
Yes, Wilson throwing the Kenyan Asians under the bus is one of the most shameful (and least remembered) incidents in British immigration/citizenship politics
And refusing military action against Rhodesia for fear of British people refusing to take up arms against 'kith and kin'!
Right, this is an Old Labour government, and not in the way it was useful for Blair and Corbyn to use that term!
I also see the Wilson Government of 66-70 as a failure that lead the door to thatcher; the dithering around devaluation, the failure around the common market and his own failure to have a plausible successor who wasn’t Callaghan all stand out as things that didn’t help the labour movement!
The weird side effect of the Wilson revionism of the last decade is that he’s now seen as some form of titan when in fact the original view of his government and him was largely correct- he was very good at protecting himself and finding a way to keep his show ongoing
I’m also not sure that Blair even in his pomp, for all his communication skills, could have successfully countered Farage’s beefy pseudo-authentic nostalgia, which taps into discontent by a narrow audience. Blair’s skill was to channel optimism & there’s non-comms reasons for widespread pessimism.
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IIRC he was flirting with US annexation during the last years of his life, which is probably a sign of his mental decline more than anything else
Kept the UK out of the Vietnam wardespite bullying from the USA.
The color bar obviously a negative
Totally. I remember being told by my dad that unions used to support Colour bars
Slightly different but the unions didn't really
do much for the grunwick strikers either
