Harold Wilson’s Moral Crusade & Keir Starmer’s cut to international aid
Keir Starmer has made what he describes as the difficult decision to cut significantly international aid and use the money to boost funds for defence.
Starmer is not much of a history man but a brief thought that socialist historians would point to Labour’s back pages may have very briefly troubled him.
If we travel to another era, February 2021 Keir Starmer made a speech on 17th February about the way forward for Britain post-pandemic and referenced more Labour history than is usual in a Labour leader’s speech, at least since the arrival of Tony Blair.
He spoke a fair bit about the 1945 Labour Government and concluded with quoting a line that Harold Wilson made in a speech on the 1st October 1962 to that year’s Labour Party conference
Harold Wilson once said that the Labour party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.
He was right.
Our moral crusade now is to address the inequalities and injustices that this crisis has so brutally exposed – and to build a better, more secure future.
Keir Starmer 17th February 2021
Wilson is credited with being the founder of War on Want (the idea more than the organisational detail) after reading a letter from Victor Gollancz (a left-wing publisher) in the Guardian in 1951. The use of the term ‘crusade’ reads, at best, a bit oddly in 2021 but decades ago frames of reference and thinking were different. That is an historical point not a judgement.
Anyone familiar with the Wilson Premierships (1964-70 & 1974-76) would probably struggle with a link between Wilson and morals and morality although as time goes on it might be argued his positive achievements- and there were some-do stand out more.
There is an argument that the left is after not so much industrial power (though some of us still are) but what the historian E.P Thompson called a moral economy.
That is a society where other things than profit and the market are the priorities. When Harold Wilson’s early involvement with War on Want termed the Labour Party a ‘moral crusade’ it was not necessarily all that left-wing and certainly not revolutionary but it did suggest that there are other values than those of the market worth pursuing.
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