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Harold Wilson at No 10 Downing Street after winning 1964 election
Harold Wilson arriving at 10 Downing Street on 17 October 1964 after Labour won power. Previously the party had lost three general elections in a row. Photograph: Roger Jackson/Getty Images
Harold Wilson arriving at 10 Downing Street on 17 October 1964 after Labour won power. Previously the party had lost three general elections in a row. Photograph: Roger Jackson/Getty Images

Harold Wilson's 'white heat' speech was aimed at the 'squeezed middle'

This article is more than 10 years old
When Harold Wilson sat down after a speech opening the 1963 Labour conference debate on science, he probably didn't realise he had just delivered one of post-war British politics' most cited pieces of rhetoric. He just wanted to win a general election

Contemporaries hailed Wilson's invocation of the promise of "the scientific and technological revolution" and of the need for government to plan Britain's response to "the white heat of technological change" as outlining a new vision of socialism. Many historians have also subsequently praised the Labour leader's evocation of a spirit of optimism in a Britain emerging from austerity into affluence, albeit with an economy starting to lag behind the likes of West Germany and France.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, Wilson's speech was designed to address more than the country's alleged failure to apply science to industry. It formed part of Labour's attempt to make itself relevant to what its leaders were assured was a new electoral landscape, one in which the "traditional" working class was in decline and nationalisation outmoded. That at least is what Labour leader Hugh Gaistkell told his party's conference in 1959 a few weeks after it had lost its third general election in a row.

Those who accepted Gaitskell's revisionist analysis believed Labour had to focus its appeal on those "intermediate voters" found in the skilled working class and lower middle class who were enjoying rising real incomes on an unprecedented scale. They believed this group had rejected the party in 1959 because they thought it out of date and only standing for the lowest in society.
Labour's leaders and officials also accepted the view that: "Elections are won by the picture the party … has presented over a period of time prior to the election." The intermediate voters were deemed to be uninterested in the substance of policy and only reachable through catchy slogans and images.

With that in mind, in 1961 the party launched a competition to improve the appearance of its local offices. Constituency agents were asked of voters: "Do they, from looking at YOUR premises, get the idea that Labour is finished, down-at-heel, out of date, or do they get the impression of a modern forward looking Party, clean, efficient and belonging to the space age?"

'Let's Go with Labour' campaign poster, 1963
'Let's Go with Labour' campaign poster, 1963. Photograph: Labour Party/James Boswell

In the summer of 1963 Labour also launched an expensive national campaign based around the slogan "Let's Go With Labour and we'll get things done", one accompanied – as in the poster illustrated above – by a thumbs-up symbol, as well as the promise to make Britain "Dynamic and Prosperous Again".

By this point, however, Gaitskell was dead. Wilson's "white heat" speech – the first he made to Labour's conference as leader – was nonetheless part of the effort begun under his late predecessor. So, Wilson's invocation of science was meant to appeal to the intermediate groups and impress them that Labour was "modern" and able to address their own material concerns.

As Wilson confirmed in subsequent speeches, which expanded on the "white heat" theme, the full exploitation of the possibilities of science would only take place if Britain could unlock the talents of the intermediate groups, talents he claimed were frustrated by companies run by public school boys whose authority was based on aristocratic connections not ability. By helping the intermediate groups get on through taking science and technology seriously a Labour government would help Britain prosper: but it also meant that their interest was the national interest.

As Gaitskell had told the 1959 conference: "the typical worker of the future" would be "a skilled man in a white overall watching dials in a bright new modern factory". Wilson used the rhetoric of science to appeal to these watchers of the dials.

Harold Wilson's 'white heat' speech
Wilson delivers his first speech as leader to the Labour Party Conference in Scarborough. Photograph: PA Archive

The speech was the product of a very different age: Wilson's words were delivered in Scarborough and he mentioned "socialism" a few times. The political calculations that underpinned his speech are very contemporary, however, at least with regard to how Labour's leaders looked upon "intermediate voters" – "middle England" and the "squeezed middle" by another name.

Wilson was also adept at what would subsequently be called "spin" to reach these voters. Yet, while apparently effective in the short term – Labour ended 13 years of opposition in 1964 – historians now debate how far "white heat" was underpinned by a real strategic vision. A highly regarded and effective Leader of the Opposition, Wilson's reputation as prime minister is less positive, lurching as he did, directionless, from crisis to crisis.

The suspicion now is that "white heat" and the rhetoric of science of which it was part was, so far as Wilson was concerned, simply meant to beguile those voters deemed too busy watching Rawhide on their new television sets to take politics seriously.

Steven Fielding is professor of political history at the University of Nottingham, is the author of A State of Play. British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page (Bloomsbury, 2014) and was co-organiser of the conference on the White Heat speech from which this blog series sprang. He is on Twitter as @PolProfSteve

This post is one of a series to mark the 50th anniversary of the speech. The speech itself can be found in full here. On 1 October, the speech will be read out by an actor at a special event at the People's History Museum in Manchester

More on this story

More on this story

  • Harold Wilson's 'white heat of technology' speech 50 years on

  • Harold Wilson's 'white heat' speech re-enacted, 50 years on

  • White heat at 50: Wilson's techno-futurism distracts us from his real goals

  • White heat at 50: Harold Wilson and scientific collaboration with Europe

  • How Harold Wilson came to write his famous 'white heat' speech

  • Harold Wilson's 'white heat' speech has never mattered more

  • White heat at 50: Harold Wilson and scientific collaboration with Europe

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