Barbara Betts, the daughter of a tax inspector,
was born in Bradford in 1910. Her father
was a member of the Independent Labour Party
and she was converted to socialism at
an early age.
Educated
at Bradford Girls' Grammar School and St Hugh's
College, Oxford, she joined the Labour
Party and in 1937 was elected to St. Pancras borough council.
In
1937 she helped establish the radical weekly, The
Tribune. The group behind the journal included Victor
Gollancz, Stafford Cripps, Aneurin
Bevan, Ellen Wilkinson, Harold
Laski, Michael Foot and Noel
Brailsford. Their declared mission was to recreate the Labour
Party as a truly socialist organization. This soon brought them
into conflict with Clement Attlee and the
leadership of the party.
In 1943
she made her first speech at the national conference of the Labour
Party. This included an attack on the leadership of the party for
not doing enough to force the government to implement the Beveridge
Report. In July 1944 she married the journalist,
Ted Castle.
Castle
worked as housing correspondent of the Daily
Mirror during the Second World War and
in the 1945 General Election she was elected
to represent Blackburn in the House of Commons.
Soon afterwards Stafford Cripps,
the Minister of Trade,
appointed Castle as one of his aides. Over the next
few years she was associated with the left-wing of the party led by
Aneurin
Bevan.
Castle
was Chairperson of the Labour Party (1958-59) and after the party
won the 1964 General Election the new prime minister, Harold
Wilson, appointed her as Minister of Overseas Development (1964-65)
and Minister of Transport (1965-68). In this post she introduced the
70 mph speed limit, breathalyzer tests for suspected drunken drivers
and compulsory seat belts.
In
1968 Castle became Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity
(1968-70) and attempted to introduce the government's controversial
prices and incomes policy. The publication of the white paper, In
Place of Strife (1969) brought her into conflict with the
trade unions and the left-wing of the Labour
Party. Her critics were particularly hostile to the proposal for
compulsory strike ballots.
Castle
lost office when the Conservative Party
won the 1970 General Election. When the Labour
Party returned
to power in 1974 she became Secretary of State for Social Services
(1974-76). In this post she introduced child benefit and established
the link between pensions and earnings. She also attempted to bring
an end to pay beds in the NHS. This led to doctors taking industrial
action which closed accident and emergency wards in hospitals. When
Jim Callaghan replaced Harold
Wilson as prime minister he sacked Castle by claiming she was
too old too serve in the cabinet.
Castle
was a member of the European Parliament (1979-89) where she served
as vice-chairperson of the Socialist Group (1979-86) and in 1990 joined
the House of Lords. Over the next few years
she successfully campaigned to restore the link between pensions and
earnings.
Castle
published her political diaries and an autobiography, Fighting
All the Way (1993). Barbara Castle
died at her home in Buckinghamshire on 3rd May 2002.
(1)
In the early days of the Second World War Barbara
Castle became involved in the campaign for deep air-raid shelters.
Castle wrote about it in her autobiography, Fighting All The Way
(1993)
What we also lacked was an adequate shelter policy, and I had been
agitating together with our left-wing group on the Council for the
deep shelters which Professor J. B. S. Haldane had been advocating.
Haldane, a communist sympathizer and eminent scientist, had studied
at first hand the effects of air raids on the civilian population
during the Spanish Civil War and had reached conclusions on the best
way to protect them, which he had embodied in a book ARP published
in 1938. In it he argued that high explosive, not gas, would be the
main threat. He pointed out that modern high explosives often had
a delayed-action fuse and might penetrate several floors of a building
before bursting and that therefore basements could be the worst place
to shelter in. He stressed the deep psychological need of humans caught
in bombardment to go underground and urged the building of a network
of deep tunnels under London to meet this need and give real protection.
The government did not
want to know. In 1939 Sir John Anderson, dismissing deep shelters
as impractical, insisted that
blast- and splinter-proof protection was all that was needed and promised
a vast extension of the steel shelters which took his name. These
consisted of enlarged holes in the ground covered by a vault of thin
steel. They had, of course, no lighting, no heating and no lavatories.
People had to survive a winter night's bombardment in them as best
they could. In fact, when the Blitz came, the people of London created
their own deep shelters: the London Underground. Night after night,
just before the sirens sounded, thousands trooped down in orderly
fashion into the nearest Underground station, taking their bedding
with them, flasks of hot tea, snacks, radios, packs of cards and magazines.
People soon got their regular places and set up little troglodyte
communities where they could relax. I joined them one night to see
what it was
like. It was not a way of life I wanted for myself but I could see
what an important safety-valve it was. Without it, London life could
not have carried on in the way it did.
(2)
Barbara
Castle, Fighting All The Way
(1993)
It was not until January 1940 that food rationing was introduced and
even then only for butter (4 ounces per head per week), sugar (12
ounces), uncooked bacon or ham (8 ounces), cooked bacon or ham (3.5
ounces). Margarine was not included and butcher's meat not rationed
till March. It was all part of the government's attitude. Unemployment
was still high and factories were far from operating at full blast.
Yet the war news was grim. In April Hitler invaded Norway and Britain's
attempts to come to the rescue ended disastrously. On 10 May Hitler
swept through Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg and started bombing
France. The House of Commons' patience with Chamberlain's dilatory
war effort finally broke. His pathetic attempt to save himself by
forming a national coalition government was foiled by Labour's refusal
to serve under him. For a short dangerous spell it looked as if he
might be succeeded by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, one of
Michael Foot's "guilty men", when Attlee and Dalton told
Rab Butler that they would be willing to serve under Halifax.
But when Hitler attacked
France they changed their minds: Winston Churchill must be in charge.
It was fortunate that they
did, for there would have been an outcry in Labour's ranks if they
had taken office under the hated appeaser, Halifax. Instead there
was relief when Attlee, Morrison, Bevin and Arthur Greenwood entered
Churchill's War Cabinet.
The phoney war was at
an end and the impact of the new government began to be felt immediately.
An Emergency Powers (Defence) Act was rushed into law under which
all citizens were required to place "themselves, their services
and their property" at the disposal of the government. Those
not serving in the forces were mobilized in a nationwide Home Guard.
Food rationing was tightened up. The butter ration was cut to 2 ounces,
sugar to 8 ounces and uncooked bacon to 4 ounces. Margarine and other
fats were included at last and - the cruellest blow of all - tea rationing
was introduced at the devastating rate of 2 ounces per week. We were
all exhorted to dig for victory. Exotic fruits like
oranges, lemons and bananas almost disappeared from our diets.
(3)
Barbara
Castle, Fighting All The Way
(1993)
As news of these feats of endurance seeped through to Britain the
suspicion began to grow that some people in the British establishment
would not be too unhappy to see Russia expend herself unaided in tying
Hitler down, and the clamour for the opening of a second front to
relieve Russia's agony grew in intensity. Aneurin Bevan was its most
vociferous advocate both in the columns of Tribune and in Parliament.
He was rapidly emerging as the most challenging figure on the left
of politics, a thorn in the flesh of the Labour leadership and the
favourite bogeyman of the right-wing press. He was politically and
physically the product of the South Wales mining community from which
he sprang; of stocky build and defiant temperament he was blessed
with the gift of Welsh oratory that could encapsulate the experience
of less articulate people in a vivid phrase. He once summed up his
socialism with the words, "You can get coal without coal owners,
but you cannot get coal without miners." It was the sort of phrase
to set alight the political imagination of the most moderate. He had
climbed from the pits to Parliament by fighting the coal owners and
it had left him with bitter memories of the struggles he and his fellow
miners had had to wage.
This bitterness was to
be the source of both his strength and his weaknesses. He came into
Parliament with a heavy sense of responsibility to the people among
whom he had grown up and to his own class, and it gave him an outsize
courage which few other politicians possessed. I did not know him
well personally at that time but I was stirred by the accounts of
his one-man battles in the House with Churchill the Goliath. The audacity
of it was breathtaking, for Churchill was our war leader at the peak
of his authority and a hero to everyone else.
Aneurin also deeply distrusted
Churchill politically. He had warmly supported his replacement of
Chamberlain, but was
shocked when he proceeded to appease the appeasers by keeping so many
of them in his War Cabinet. Even Chamberlain was retained as Lord
President of the Council and Leader of the House, while the arch-Municheer,
Lord Halifax, remained Foreign Secretary. Nor could Nye forgive Churchill's
sudden assumption of the leadership of the Conservative Party in the
middle of the war.
(4)
Harold
Wilson,
Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)
I brought Barbara Castle
into the Cabinet as Minister for Overseas Development in a substantially
enlarged department. This had been another hobby horse of mine ever
since I had started the War on Want movement in the Attlee days. Barbara
proved an excellent minister. She was good at whatever she touched.
I doubt if any member of the Cabinet worked longer hours or gave more
productive thought to what they were doing. I was also able to repay
a a long-standing political debt to Nye Bevan's widow, Jennie Lee,
who had been denied all preferment during the Attlee years. I made
her Minister for the Arts and asked her to take over my University
of the Air. It was her total commitment and tenacity which gave it
form and being.
(5)
Anne Perkins, The
Guardian (4th May, 2002)
Wilson wanted Barbara to bring her dynamism and popularity to selling
the pay restraint to an increasingly nervous parliamentary party.
He created a new department for her, Employment and Productivity.
And she was brought in to the heart of government as first secretary,
a title generously foregone by another political intimate, Richard
Crossman. It was the pinnacle of her career, and, from it, she heroically
flung herself, convinced of her own rightness, down into the deep
gulley of union reform.
Convinced that a statutory
pay policy was an instrument of socialism - a brake on the industrial
might that won inflationary pay claims at the expense of the economy
and of weaker unions - Barbara was brought up short by trade unions
totally resistant to any restraint on free collective bargaining.
Under pressure from the Tories, and wrapped in an unshakeable confidence
in the duty of government to bring order to the chaotic state of British
industrial relations, she attempted to deliver a socialist solution
- "The trouble with Barbara is that she thinks anything she does
is socialism," sniffed a contemporary. In Place Of Strife was
the inflammatory title of a white paper that proved to be the most
divisive attempt at legislation for 35 years.
Although there were many
worthy proposals intended to strengthen trade unions, all anyone saw
were plans for compulsory strike ballots and a cooling-off period,
both to be underwritten by sanctions. Barbara, who believed that,
given time she could make anyone love her, wanted a long, evangelical
campaign to build up popular support. Roy Jenkins, the chancellor,
was desperate for some reassuring morsel to feed the bankers hungrily
circling the floundering pound. She was forced to accept a short bill
to enact only the penal clauses.
In the face of a campaign
illuminated by the startling duplicity of senior colleagues, including
the then home secretary, James Callaghan, and an entirely hubristic
challenge from the unions, pathfinding for the Thatcher assault on
trade union rights 10 years later, Barbara and Wilson rashly made
the legislation an issue of confidence. Egged on by an enthusiastic
press (with the exception of the Guardian), Barbara took the battle
to seaside resorts and spa towns around the country in a dramatic,
and hugely popular appeal, to individual union conferences. In barrister's
black, the taut passionate figure aroused the admiration of millions.
But trade unionists, led
by Vic Feather at the TUC, found her ignorant, inflexible and hectoring.
Friends on the left could not understand why she was doing the Tories'
work for them. And Wilson's more ambitious enemies planned for what
they were sure was his imminent downfall. There were genuine fears
the party could be split into union-sponsored and independent MPs,
another 1931.
The cabinet - and, ultimately,
even the chancellor - deserted the bill. Wilson and Barbara were forced
into a humiliating defeat, behind a fig leaf of "solemn and binding"
agreements that the TUC and the unions would work together to try
to restrain the unofficial strikes that were undermining economic
recovery.
Barbara's stock crashed
to earth. But the ramifications went far beyond personal disaster.
The episode accelerated a renewed alienation between party activists
and the Labour leadership. Local parties became vulnerable to infiltration
by Trotskyite groups, like Militant, preaching the politics of betrayal.
(6)
Philip Webster, The
Times (4th May, 2002)
Barbara Castle, the fiery former Labour Cabinet minister and the best-known
woman parliamentarian of her day, died yesterday aged 91. The architect
of the Breathalyser who was tipped to become Britain’s first
woman Prime Minister, was hailed by political friend and foe alike.
Tony Blair, who found himself
the target of one of her withering attacks over the Government’s
treatment of older people, described her as a heroine of the Labour
movement, a radical independent spirit and an extraordinary pioneer
for women in politics.
Lady Castle of Blackburn,
a passionate socialist of the old school, kept up her scrutiny of
government well into her eighties. At the 1999 Labour Party conference
she savaged ministers for tying pensions to inflation, a move that
led to the infamous 75p increase.
As a minister, Lady Castle
was not only behind the Breathalyser but also the Equal Pay Act, but
she will be remembered most for In Place of Strife, her doomed attempt
to reform the trade unions and end wildcat strikes, which split Harold
Wilson’s Cabinet and threatened to damage the Labour Party irreparably.
(7)
Marie Woolf and Ben Russell, The
Independent (4th
May, 2002)
As Transport Secretary, a post she accepted even though she could
not drive, she introduced the breath test, which brought her much
criticism and the tag "bloody Barbara".
Among her many achievements
for women was the introduction of the Equal Pay Act, which made it
illegal to hire a woman to do the same job as a man for less money.
She had a keen intellect,
was popular with her male colleagues and always well turned out. Even
in her nineties she took care of her appearance: she was often spotted
refreshing her lipstick before making speeches and had several wigs,
to which she gave nicknames.
Lady Castle was a renowned
orator. While an MP she took her speeches so seriously that if she
was not called on in the chamber she recited the speech at home to
her husband, Ted, a journalist, who died in 1979.
She wrote of her bereavement:
"I keep the agony at bay by being very busy at something or other
all the time. How does one come to terms with such a loss? Keep him
alive by endlessly remembering ... move on briskly ... or just go
numb and wait for death? I fluctuate between the three."
Last night, tributes flooded
in from all sides of the political world. Mr Blair said she was "courageous,
determined, tireless and principled, never afraid to speak her mind
or stand up for her beliefs. She was loved throughout the Labour movement
and recognised as an outstanding minister."
Lady Castle famously fell
out with James Callaghan after he sacked her from the Cabinet because
she was too old. He said: "She was a great fighter, a superb
fighter. She rejoiced when she won and was never despondent when she
lost. I had to oppose her but I never doubted her tenacity."
| Barbara
Castle was the person most people expected to be Britain's first
woman prime minister: the most colourful, the most successful
and the most controversial woman in British politics. Drawing
on much previously unpublished material, this warm and human portrait
of one of the most vivid personalities of the post-war era examines
the battles she fought and the weapons she used in what was less
of a career than a crusade. Anne Perkins's compelling biography
is the inside story of what it was really like for a woman in
twentieth-century British politics and public life. (Anne Perkins,
Red Queen, Macmillan, ISBN 0 333 90511 3, £20.00) |
Anne
Perkins, Red Queen (Macmillan)
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
