Evaluations

=__**Harold Wilson**__= Harold Wilson was a grammer school boy, from a lower middle class background. He was intelligent,cocky and self confident. He presented himself as an ordinary guy - he liked his beer and was a golfer - and his common tastes made him seem more in touch with the public. His strong personality and charasmatic style of speech gave him the backing of the public. His quick wittedness also gained him respect, and he was better at handling trouble, e.g. when making a speech somewhere, Wilson was hit in the eye by a stink bomb, and he quickly commented "With an aim like that, the boy ought to be in the England eleven".

Wilson wanted to move Britain into the future, and made plans for the Post Office tower, and tried to modernise by building shopping centres, motorways and flyovers. It wasn't just the technological revolution that was used to improve Britain, Jenkins reforms were under Wilson's government, and also lead to a more permissive and civilised society. Examples of Jenkins reforms were liberating homosexuality, getting rid of capital punishment, legalising abortion, giving women more access to birth control and making divorces easier. There was also a race relations act which aimed to investigate discriminations in works and created a fairer society. The Open University, which was campaigned by Jennie Lee (Minister of the Arts), was fully backed by Wilson.

However all this reform was being paid for by US funding, and the economy was still in a bad state. To try and tackle the economy Wilson implemented a new Department of Economic Affairs (DEA), which was aimed to draft the National Plan. It was supposed to work together with the Treasury to get better results, but it had an opposite effect and they were in constant competition with one another. Wilson also appointed Brown and Callaghan, two of his enemies, to be the head of these ministries, and played them off against one another. This was one of his ways to maintain his position of power, but it made the party less effective.

Wilson also tried to take on trade unions, and employed Barbra Castle to improve the behaviour of them because there was a series of wild cat strikes which were damaging the country, especially the seaman strike which effected exports and the balance of payments. Castle wrote the white paper, which claimed that there would be a concillatory period of 28 days before a strike could take place. It also said that the court could order a strike ballot before a strike. However the unions disagreed with this, and even other politicians within the party were against the white paper, for example Jenkins and Callaghan who were more liberal and decided that the workers deserved the right to protest. This lead to a failure in taming the unions, and made Wilson look weaker as PM.


 * I think I understand the Wilson bit quite well and he's probably the most interesting person so far. It would probably be a good idea to go over all the policies that were made under his government because there were quite a few, but I think the Wilson area we've learnt is generally okay.**