Fighting On The Home Front
Richard Crossman had hoped for the Foreign Office, but that particular Great Office of State was reserved for the staunch Gaitskellite, Michael Stewart. At the Home Office, however, Crossman would come to dominate an era of social progress at a pace unknown since the Second World War. That, at least, would become the official history of the “Crossmanite reforms”. But, behind it, the nature of Britain’s progress in the Sixties was much more akin to Tory economics – “stop-go”.
His early days as Home Secretary saw Crossman dump most of his civil servants, including his Principal Private Secretary, Head of the Press and Publicity Department, and Permanent Under-Secretary. Labour’s reforming agenda couldn’t be impeded by civil service obstinacy and Crossman was more than willing to ease the way for new, liberalising acts of Parliament. This was, of course, in spite of his own debatable opinions on equal rights for homosexuals and relaxed immigration laws. Still, the progressive, forward-looking thrust of Britain’s new Labour government was to cover all areas. This included social reform.
Under his leadership at the Home Office and the campaigning of Sydney Silverman (Labour’s most prominent and most colourful opponent of capital punishment), the death penalty was temporarily suspended in 1965 and then formally abolished for murder and corresponding crimes in March 1966. This was the first major piece of social reform to be passed with Crossman’s steering through the Commons, though it wasn’t to be the last.
Before long, abortion was on the agenda.
In November 1965, the young director Ken Loach had directed a television drama for the BBC called Up the Junction. Providing British audiences with a brutal depiction of the struggles of three young women from North Battersea and Clapham Junction, this television play provoked a public debate on the horrors of illegal abortions. Legalising abortion and providing the procedure on the NHS was the next logical step if the danger of illegal, backstreet abortions was to be ended for the women of Britain. Morality campaigners on one side were filled with revulsion at the idea of young women being given the choice to terminate, what they saw as, human life; social progressives, however, were adamant that the choices and physical health of Britain’s women had to be protected from the outdated interference of the state. The number of reported abortions in 1959 had been 1,880 – by 1965, that number had risen more than tenfold.
The Abortion Act passed in February 1967 after a year-long battle between the pro-choice and pro-life sides of the national argument. It was almost one year and three months since the original broadcasting of Up the Junction.
What drove Crossman’s reforming zeal, especially in the case of the Abortion Act of 1967, was his belief in aiding working-class communities beyond what was known as “metropolitan elitism”. Those people in Labour’s heartlands who, even though their hearts were socially conservative and their heads were firmly with their hearts, could benefit from some of the liberal changes in Westminster were the main concern of Crossman. That is why homosexuality and immigration became such bugbears for Crossman in the latter half of Greenwood’s premiership and would come to frustrate Labour MPs’ relationships with their constituents for over a generation.
Crossman’s battles were not the only ones in the public sphere, it must be noted.
Fred Peart had been made Education Secretary by Greenwood immediately following the 1964 general election, a move that secured the primacy of left-wing thinking at the Department of Education and Science. An anti-EEC left-wing Durhamite, Peart was a man with limited experience in government: his only appointment prior to 1964 had been as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in Attlee’s government, Tom Williams. Still, he had the grand ambition of bringing the many tiers of Britain’s education system in line with one another and this was attractive to the Prime Minister. His father, Arthur Greenwood, was effectively a self-made man who’d risen from West Yorkshire to become a graduate of Leeds University, then educator, and then a major Labour politician from the late 1920s to the 1940s. Anthony hadn’t risen in such a way, admittedly, and his rise from Leeds to President of the Oxford Union was eased considerably by his attendance at Merchant Taylors’ School (a public school in the South of England).
Greenwood, in the time between Merchant Taylors’ and becoming Prime Minister, had evidently moved on from his public school days and was not so infected by the patrician conservatism that changed the minds of so many of his peers. When Peart suggested bringing the old public schools of the United Kingdom into the state sector, Greenwood backed him with the fullest sincerity.
In January 1965, Peart came to blows with his cabinet colleagues over the proposal to end the public school system. Richard Crossman, just as Bevan and Gaitskell had before him, felt uneasy at such an “interference with the liberty of the people”. It was argued that the choice should remain for Britain’s parents to send their children to public school: the means to send them came first, according to Peart’s rivals. Thankfully, the removal of Harold Wilson from the Treasury allowed for a new consensus to build up within the cabinet. Government Circular 10/65 had passed around the many Local Education Authorities since the first cabinet arguments, urging the LEAs to start converting their secondary schools to the comprehensive system introduced by Peart to begin streamlining the education system. Tony Crosland, who remained Chief Secretary to the Treasury throughout 1965, recorded that the news was “fucking fantastic” in his diaries. Though he was opposed to Peart’s more radical reforms, he was more than happy to see the end of the two-tier education system that had routinely failed working-class children due to the dreaded 11+ primary school examinations.
The new consensus was created by a feeling of jubilation at the economy’s first strides towards recovery in the summer of 1966 and the confused nature of the Conservative leadership since Quintin Hogg’s departure in the winter of 1965. The Public Schools Act of 1967, passed in the May of that year by a slight margin caused by many Labour abstentions, began the process of integrating Britain’s smaller public schools (with the provision that the larger schools, such as Eton, Harrow and Westminster, would enter the state system at the end of the timetable for practical reasons) into the wider state education system. Effectively, it was the end of hundreds of years of privilege and power concentrated in a handful of educational institutions. The Conservatives and the right-leaning press condemned it as an attack on British tradition and warned that “national integrity”, the House of Lords, and even the monarchy would not be safe in future.
Britain was changing, but not everyone believed it was for the better.
