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

In his "white heat" speech Harold Wilson claimed that "the essence of modern automation is that it replaces the hitherto unique human functions of memory and of judgment"; computers now commanded "facilities of memory and of judgment far beyond the capacity of any human being or groups of human beings who have ever lived". As a result, the "programme-controlled machine tool line" could "without the intervention of any human agency" produce a "new set of machine tools in its own image"; they had acquired "the faculty of unassisted reproduction". Which shows, not that Wilson was prescient, but that when it comes to those elusive and confusing notions of "science" and "technology", intelligent people spoke much the same nonsense they do today. Rubbishy techno-futurism encapsulated in brain-rotting cliches is still the way elites want us to think about these matters. It appeals to cynical politicians too – it suggests the past or present are no guide, we must move on, wipe our minds of what we know, ready for the brave new world of the future. In British politics techno-futurism has been the refuge of scoundrels.

Wilson's speech was in part that of a cunning political operator, exploiting techno-futurism in just this way. It is why it has been recommended to more recent Labour leaders. But it also appeals because it is believed that Wilson put his finger on something vitally important that remains true today – that the British elite are speculators, financiers, aristocrats, hostile to the modern necessities of research, development, industrial modernisation. He tried and failed to bring technocracy to Britain. All this makes perfect sense in a world where CP Snow was a sage on to something important and Jacob Bronowski taken as a reliable guide to the nature of modern science.

But Wilson knew very well what the scientific intellectuals and other propagandists did not wish to be frank about: that the British state was by far the biggest investor in research and development other than the US and the USSR. He wanted to redirect this effort: as he put it, Labour would be "mobilising Britain's scientific wealth for the task of creating, not the means of human destruction, but the munitions of peace". Yes, he wanted more scientists, and endorsed the myth there were not enough, but he campaigned against the so-called independent, so-called British, so-called deterrent and the overemployment of scientists on "prestige" military projects that never got off the drawing board.

The white heat speech was a means of redefining Labour's policy to avoid the question of nationalisation, but it embraced two other radical policies – hostility to the common market and the over-inflated warfare state. Many Labour people were hostile to the rampant consumerism of the affluent society, and supportive of the poor of the world, particularly in the Commonwealth. Wilson pressed these buttons too. What was needed, he said, was an "increase in Britain's productive power", not "some new gimmick or additive to some consumer product" which television adverts would "tell us all to buy a little more of" when "we did not even know we wanted [it] in the first place". It was very nice, he said, to do research on colour television and bigger and better washing machines to sell in Dusseldorf, but instead "we should be mass producing simple ploughs and tractors", and researching "one or two horsepower steam engines, because that is what the world needs". The scientific departments of the new universities should be working on plant breeding, fertiliser, animal husbandry for the poor world, which should be supplied with transport equipment by otherwise redundant railway workshops.
Wilson was to shed most of these commitments: Polaris was bought, Britain sought entry to the Common Market once more, and there was no mass production of steam ploughs. But there were important novelties in research policy, the most important and the least understood being the use of military-style procurement for civil projects under a new and vast industry, energy and defence procurement ministry called the Ministry of Technology. Wilson was long committed to creating such a ministry, and it was no gimmick. But the ministry quickly realised that the problem with the British economy was not the lack of R&D, or scientists, but something else, perhaps investment, or management. In other words, it realised that the techno-declinist theses that helped launch it were untenable.

The "white heat" was not a failed attempt to insert technocracy into British politics; it was rather an only partially successful attempt to redirect an existing technocratic state. Alas, the speech is remembered, worse, celebrated, for its banalities and not its substance, and what Labour learned in office was consigned to the deep darkness where the truth about research policy is hidden. White heat has become one of those pernicious cliches like the "two cultures" which have corrupted our understanding of the operation of knowledge and power in modern Britain. We need to stop using them and begin, at long last, to think freely from them.