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Is Sir Keir Starmer the new Harold Wilson? - survey

Report by Labour History Research Unit highlights Labour’s economic successes

Labour’s successful General Election campaign was run on the platform of “change” but a report featuring 34 political historians has identified strong parallels with previous Labour governments.

The Labour History Research Unit at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) asked the experts to compare the new government with the six previous Labour governments – 1924, 1929-31, 1945-51, 1964-70, 1974-79, and 1997-2010 – in terms of political philosophy, and political and economic inheritance. 

Sir Keir Starmer has previously said that the Labour leader he most admires over the last 50 years is Harold Wilson and the historians surveyed also believe the period this current government is most likely to resemble is the Wilson governments of the 1960s.

These governments had to deal with serious economic shocks, including the devaluation of the pound, and also produced social legislation that has stood the test of time, such as legal abortion, equal pay, and the abolition of capital punishment.  

With the state of the economy one of the biggest issues for the current government, a key theme from the survey is how Labour’s economic record over the last 100 years is more positive than the party is given credit for, with the majority of respondents arguing that the familiar Conservative claim that Labour cannot be trusted with the economy is not backed up by evidence. 

Pat Thane (Birkbeck, University of London, and author of Divided Kingdom) argues that Labour’s economic record has been massively under-estimated. The Attlee government created full employment in peacetime and this was sustained by subsequent governments through to the 1970s. Even the Callaghan government during the 1976 IMF Crisis managed to keep the economy steady.  

The memory of so-called economic failure in the 1960s and 1970s still haunts the Labour Party but historians have pointed out how complex the economic history of that period was, with a rise in living standards and a broad reduction of economic inequality. Jeremy Nuttall (Kingston University) says that “Labour is more fiscally prudent than it is given credit for”, pointing to Blair retaining the Conservative’s spending limits for the first two years of his administration.  

Tony Taylor (Sheffield Hallam University) believes there is a form of amnesia about the economic positives of Labour governments and an over-emphasis on the negatives, which can damage the party. He said:

“The debate about who ‘crashed’ the economy in 2010-2015 forced Ed Miliband into a position of recognising Labour’s apparent failings on the economy – not helping Labour’s position on economic competence and apportioning blame where it wasn’t needed.”

However, Malcolm Petrie of St Andrews University and the author of a study of post-war Scottish politics titled Politics and the People, struck a note of caution. He said:

“The plans of Labour governments have always been predicated on economic growth, which removes the need for difficult decisions on fiscal and monetary policy – when that growth doesn’t arrive, the problems are often insurmountable.”

Report author Professor Rohan McWilliam, Director of the Labour History Research Unit at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said:

“To date, Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership has shown relatively little interest in Labour’s past. This is entirely understandable. Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing and successful parties need to grapple with the problems of the present moment.

“The Labour leaders who have been most aware of the party’s history – Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock – have been the least successful. Nevertheless, there are things to learn from the past to help guide the future.  Labour needs to be clearer about its successes and to dispute claims about its record made by its detractors.  

“One thing that the party of 2024 has learned from Labour history is that it is better to under promise and over deliver. In contrast to previous Labour plans to transform society – for example Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto – the party now prefers to settle for small victories.  

“Some of the soaring Labour rhetoric of the past is absent in the party’s presentation: it now seems more comfortable with the Union Jack than the red flag. Starmer talks both about ‘change’ and a ‘changed Labour party’ but he may find he has more in common than he thought with the six previous Labour Prime Ministers.”