ABSTRACT
Assessments of the political sensibilities, convictions and ideology of Harold Wilson have tended to emphasise their pragmatic nature. Wilson has been viewed as a tactician, not a strategist; as someone noted more for his deft political footwork than for being an ideologically driven politician. Support for Bevan over the budget of 1951, the subsequent gravitation to the left, the challenge to Gaitskell for the leadership in 1960, the embrace and then de facto abandonment of planning in the 1960s, the determination to defend the international value of sterling whatever the deflationary cost and the eventual acceptance of devaluation – these have all been interpreted as driven by considerations of political expediency, rather than by any desire to realise or defend a particular vision of the political economy of socialism. Viewed kindly, all this could be seen in terms of the malleability necessary for political survival in the fraught economic circumstances of the 1960s; viewed more brutally, it furnishes evidence of a devious politician intent on retaining power at whatever cost to the labour movement or the Labour Party’s natural constituency.
