250. Return of the crisis man

When Harold Wilson formed his second government, he immediately faced a major crisis inherited from Heath’s administration: the coalminers were on strike, a state of Emergency (Heath’s fifth in four years) was in place and Britain was on a three-day week. That gave Wilson some quick wins as he dealt with all three.

Other things proved less straightforward. Heath had brought in a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland, under the so-called Sunningdale Agreement, between the Protestant and Catholic communities. Soon after Labour came back to power, however, a strike by Protestant organisations brought the Sunningdale Agreement to an ignominious end.

Wilson also came under sustained press attack over scandals in which he seems to have played no reprehensible role (though his cleverness and deviousness did tend to leave him open to accusations of not being entirely straight).

He also had to deal with his pledge to renegotiate the terms on which Britain had joined the Common Market. The renegotations achieved little but their real aim was simply to be seen to have been undertaken before the referendum was held. The process, however, left Wilson more convinced than ever that Britain had to stay in. That lost him support on the left of Labour, while the right behaved in ways that left Wilson suspicious of what it was up to.

All these pressures became hard to sustain and Wilson, who’d long said he’d go by the time he was sixty, stood down both from the premiership and from the Labour Leadership just a few weeks before reaching that age. That marked the end of an era.

Illustration: Ian Paisley addressing a crowd during the Ulster Workers Council Strike against the Sunningdale Agreement. Photo from the Irish News.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License