Best Labour leaders we never had: Anthony Greenwood

In 1960, the Labour Party was split on one policy above all: unilateral nuclear disarmament. After the 1960 Scarborough conference had decided in favour of adopting the policy, Hugh Gaitksell stood up as leader and ruled out supporting the decision of conference. He vowed to “fight, and fight, and fight again, to save the party we love”. This necessarily begged the question of who exactly he would be fighting.

History tells us that it was Harold Wilson (later Labour leader and Prime Minister twice in the 1960s and ‘70s) who answered that call, but history sadly overlooks that it was Anthony Greenwood who was first to carry the banner of the left against Gaitskell.

Anthony Greenwood was the son of Arthur Greenwood MP, who is perhaps most famous in Labour’s mythology for being the man who was implored to “speak for England” in the Norway Debate of 1940.

Greenwood junior’s relatively conventional progression from Merchant Taylors’ to Oxford University to the wartime civil service and RAF intelligence belied an unconventionally radical politics in his heart. He was a member of the Marxist ‘October Club’ at Oxford and, in 1936, briefly attempted to leave Britain to join the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War until his parliamentarian father intervened.

Elected for Rossendale in 1950, he associated with the more junior Bevanites in the party and made a name for himself as a leading member of the Movement for Colonial Freedom and as a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. By the time of the 1960 split within the party, Greenwood was a well-known figure among the grassroots of the party and commanded enough support to repeatedly see him voted onto Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) through the constituency Labour parties (CLPs) section. 

Woodrow Wyatt once wrote that Greenwood “trudged through unattractive tours in remote districts” and “made a speciality of remembering names and incidents” that mattered to the grassroots membership. Such qualities are admirable in any politician, one would think, but Wyatt wrote of them disparagingly as fripperies covering up Greenwood’s political defects.

Though harsh, assessments of his career have been rare overall but predominantly negative when undertaken. Richard Crossman called him a “clotheshorse” in his diaries and retrospectives have typically rendered him as a political lightweight caring more for his own vanity than for the realities of politics.

As fair as some critiques may be, they tell us far more about the constraints of pursuing active government under Harold Wilson in the 1960s than they do about the personal failings of Labour ministers, Greenwood included.

Whilst his time as minister of housing and local government left a number of targets unmet, he still managed an impressive expansion in housebuilding and successfully scuppered a nascent ‘right-to-buy’ scheme that Richard Crossman floated in the late 1960s.

Anthony Greenwood also served as Wilson’s first Colonial Secretary, a role in which he pledged to work himself out of a job by radically accelerating the process of decolonisation and working with independence movements rather than lecturing from on high as the patrician Tories had done while in power. In Aden, in modern-day Yemen, it is easy to see the clash between Greenwood’s vision and the small-c conservative nature of Wilson’s colonial and foreign policies.

The Colonial Secretary wished to see the immediate withdrawal of British troops and the speedy handover to the socialists and trade unionists of the local independence movement; the government wanted to hold firm, refused to give in to the nationalists’ demands, and ultimately kicked the British withdrawal into the long grass. The powers-that-be around Wilson ran roughshod over Greenwood’s principles – not for the first time and certainly not for the last. 

Had Greenwood been leader, it is clear that Labour’s complicated and oftentimes miserable history with imperialism would have been ended far sooner and on far more positive terms. His european policy reflected this internationalist outlook as well, as in 1962 he advocated “that we should work for a world common market open to everybody who wanted to join” and vehemently opposed joining the EEC on the grounds that it was an exclusionary organisation built on cold war divisions and the exploitation of the global south.

Barbara Castle wrote in her diary shortly after the 1960 Labour conference at Scarborough that Harold Wilson, were he to dither any further on the leadership question, would be “finished as far as the left was concerned, and become a prisoner of the right wing”.

This was the trajectory that most onlookers expected, especially with Hugh Gaitskell in such a belligerent move after the unilateralist turn of the party. Realising that it was likely the best opportunity he would get, however, Wilson stood and the man who declared before him – Anthony Greenwood – gave way in the name of unity.

Having boldly resigned from the shadow cabinet and made his intention to fight for the leadership clear, Tony Greenwood checked any possible egotism on his part. Rather than jockeying opportunistically for power like so many aspiring leaders are expected to do, he showed a humility that many would assume is rare in a politician. 

Had Wilson lacked the chutzpah to stand, Greenwood would have been the standard-bearer of the Labour left and keeper of the party’s conscience in the 1960s. That might have been enough to earn him the leadership following Gaitskell’s death in 1963 and, perhaps, even Prime Minister thereafter. ‘What if Britain was led by a sincere and radical anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-militarist in the 1960s?’ is a question without an answer, but its consideration is well-deserved.

Asking what Labour and Britain would have been like if it had lived up to its – in Harold Wilson’s famous phrase – “moral crusade” should be an inspiration to party members and leaders alike to aspire to fulfil that historic mission. If there were more Anthony Greenwoods, the Labour Party would be all the better for it.