Historians From Wales

"I went to the BBC for Question Time... Roy Jenkins was going on about Militant being a "cancer in the Labour Party", so when it came to me I turned on him and the SDP. "You talk about cancer! Everything you have achieved in your life has been on the backs of the working class. Your father was a miner; he was imprisoned in 1926; and every office you have ever held was because of the Labour Party, and then you kick away the ladder." I thought he was going to have a stroke. His face went absolutely scarlet. He is used to being buttered up as a man of principle."

"He was not a good Chancellor. He was really responsible for the inflation which began in 1970 and continued in the years after and it was his fault."

"I thought it was horrifying that they threw him out at Hillhead. A man of such great distinction and stature. It was dreadful. It tells you something about the Scots."

"In Bruce Anderson's Sunday Telegraph...article he writes about the idea that Roy Jenkins might have become Chancellor of the Exchequer in her (Mrs Thatcher's) first government... We had discussed it quite frequently and she was very interested in it, having some doubts about Geoffrey Howe at the time and recognizing how good Roy Jenkins had been at cutting expenditure."

"In my view, Roy's best period in office was as Home Secretary in the Cabinet of 1966; he then succeeded in stamping his liberal humanism on a department not notorious for that quality. He was not well suited to the politics of class and ideology which played so large a role in the Labour Party. His natural environment was the Edwardian age on which he wrote so well... His appearance had the sleek pomposity of Mr Podsnap; behind it there was a sharp and unsentimental mind... Above all, he was never satisfied with second place in any field; he always wanted to be top. I believe this explains much in his career after his poor showing in the election for Labour Party leadership in 1976."

"Callaghan resigned as Chancellor after devaluation. His place was taken by Roy Jenkins who was, in my judgment, the ablest of the four Chancellors I served. He listened to advice, but made up his own mind, explaining to his advisers the grounds for his decision. He was at times able to foresee contingencies of which his staff had not warned him, such as the possible devaluation of the French franc, and was judicious in assessing such contingencies and deciding what measures were appropriate to the circumstances. He was not afraid to take extreme measures to overcome major dangers, adding more to taxation and cutting more from public expenditure than his advisers suggested and showing a sound judgment of what was at stake. This resoluteness in the circumstances in which he took office enabled him to carry the Cabinet with him after three years in which they had shrunk from much milder action."

"A. J. P. Taylor told me in 1970, in one of those impromptu addresses to individuals that made the Beaverbrook Library so entertaining a place, that Wilson was transparently Lloyd George redivivus and Roy Jenkins an aspirant Asquith."

"It was better to have a somewhat harsh Budget, which would cure inflation, rather than a generous, popular Budget which would merely undermine the purchasing power of the pound."

"And in persona, though clearly self-regarding and de haut en bas, he is also amused, self-critical, unbitter and detached. He is one of the few retired senior politicians who do not seem warped or broken by the career they have chosen. Perhaps this is because Jenkins knows that he has striven for what he believed in most of the time, and achieved a good deal of it. We are a "liberal" society in the sense in which he meant it. We are in the European Union. We have a Labour government in which the power of the labour movement has been weakened beyond Roy's wildest hopes. It's thanks to him more than any other single person. True, the whole thing is pretty ghastly, and far from the "civilised" polity he wanted. But that is not because of any personal failing: it is simply because he is, by and large, in the wrong."

"One of the outstanding statesmen of his era."

"As a founder of the SDP he was probably the grandfather of New Labour."

"One of the most remarkable people ever to grace British politics. He was a friend and support to me."

"An outstanding British statesman and a great European. He will be remembered with great esteem for his historic role in the birth of the euro."

"Roy Jenkins was both radical and contemporary; and this made him the most influential exponent of the progressive creed in politics in postwar Britain. Moreover, the political creed for which he stood belongs as much to the future as to the past. For Jenkins was the prime mover in the creation of a form of social democracy which, being internationalist, is peculiarly suited to the age of globalisation and, being liberal, will prove to have more staying power than the statism of Lionel Jospin or the corporatist socialism of Gerhard Schröder."

"Roy Jenkins was the first leading politician to appreciate that a liberalised social democracy must be based on two tenets: what Peter Mandelson called an aspirational society (individuals must be allowed to regulate their personal lives without interference from the state); and that a post-imperial country like Britain could only be influential in the world as part of a wider grouping (the EU)."

"He [James Callaghan] also rightly sensed that though the years of Roy Jenkins at the Home Office had been stellar in their action on discrimination – and he was fully supportive of that – liberalism was not necessarily the correct response to the growing disrespect and lawlessness that in the 1960s and 1970s saw crime rise... In this instance, we need less Jenkins and more Callaghan."

"Roy Jenkins made a classic speech, which I contributed to, in which among other things he defined integration not as a flattening process which would turn everybody out in some kind of mould of a stereotyped Englishman but would be a combination of equal opportunities accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of tolerance."

"I learned to admire his unflinching commitment to liberalism and his fastidiousness when it came to the corruption of language and ideas in modern public life. He was unquestionably a great man, and his biographies, as much as his political record, ensure that he will be remembered."

"The model we had was that everyone would share the broad values of being British. What we did not expect was there would be those who unwisely suggest that, for example, Sharia Law should be applied in this country, or that punishment of stoning for adultery might be looked at depending on the kind of stoning ... It never occurred to us that there would be those kind of unwise challenges to the broad values of a liberal democratic society. And I remember towards the end of Roy Jenkins' life him saying to me that we just didn't realise that in the struggle for race equality we would also have to struggle for a secular society and for the universal value of human rights."

"[Roy Jenkins] was one of the great figures in the Liberal and Social Democratic tradition in British politics. A great reforming home secretary, a much-admired chancellor, a great European and somebody whose values and life that in many ways I have followed"

"This was the era of Mary Whitehouse, an attempt to restore old fashioned values ... there was this enormous sort of mood, particularly amongst young people to sweep away all the rather old fashioned values which seemed to exist at that time ... and he, more than anybody else, lifted the barriers. It changed the face of the country, it modernised it, in a way that we would regard as perfectly normal today."

"[H]e is the second most successful British politician of modern times. The first is Margaret Thatcher... Roy Jenkins is one of those characters, best portrayed by Trollope, who is thoroughly worldly and yet has integrity. Power and glamour and party (and parties) all matter to him, but they matter only in a context that is, though he would avoid the phrase, morally serious. Despite his accent and demeanour (only his pronunciation of the word "sitooation" discloses the Welsh background), Jenkins has deep roots in the Labour movement. His opponents say that he severed them for snobbish reasons, but it is more likely that he did so because of a principled preference for the liberal over the tribal."

"Future nationalisations will be more concerned with equality than with planning, and this means that we can leave the monolithic public corporation behind us and look for more intimate forms of ownership and control."

"Neutrality is essentially a conservative policy, a policy of defeat, of announcing to the world that we have nothing to say to which the world will listen. ... Neutrality could never be acceptable to anyone who believes that he has a universal faith to preach. And those countries which have successfully adopted it in the past have paid the price of becoming little islands full of frustrated hedonists. Switzerland and Sweden are as ideologically sterile as they are physically undevastated."

"It is quite impossible to advocate both the abolition of great inequalities of wealth and the acceptance of a one-quarter public sector and three-quarters private sector arrangement. A mixed economy there will undoubtedly be, certainly for many decades and perhaps permanently, but it will need to be mixed in very different proportions from this."

"The first duty of a party of the left is to be radical in the context of the moment, to offer the prospect of continuing advance, and to preserve the loyalty of those whose optimistic humanism makes them its natural supporters."

"Representative democracy demands a clear division of function between the electors and the elected. The former choose their representatives and retain the essential right of sacking them, if they are not satisfied with their work, at the end of a fixed period. But in the meantime the elected representatives, whether they are members of Parliament or city councillors, should be given full freedom to do their jobs. Any form of referendum is an infringement of this freedom, and the more complex and detailed the issue upon which it is held the more absurd an infringement it becomes."

"It is hard to understand why an attempt to get more of the national product for those who at present get least is to be dismissed as pandering to envy, while an attempt to tilt it the other way by securing more concessions for the discontented Conservative electors of Tonbridge is not denounced as rapacity, and why the one is manifestly more worthy than the other."

"The chief danger for a country placed as we are is that of living sullenly in the past, of believing that the world has a duty to keep us in the station to which we are accustomed, and showing bitter resentment if it does not do so. This was the mood of Suez; and it is a mood absolutely guaranteed, not to recreate our past glories, but to reduce us to a level of influence and wealth far lower than that which we need occupy. ... Our neighbours in Europe are roughly our economic and military equals. We would do better to live gracefully with them than to waste our substance by trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the power giants of the modern world."

"Suez was a totally unsuccessful attempt to achieve unreasonable and undesirable objectives by methods which were at once reckless and immoral; and the consequences, as was well deserved, were humiliating and disastrous."

"Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide, in an adult way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side of experiment and brightness, of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach) and better books, of fuller lives and greater freedom. In the long run these things will be more important than the most perfect of economic policies."

"There is also the point, put by my hon. Friend the Member for Grimsby yesterday, that if we are to devote absolute priority constantly to shrinking the total of public expenditure as a proportion of our national income, what sort of community are we to live in? Do hon. Members opposite really want to see, in Professor Galbraith's striking phrase, "Public squalor in the midst of private affluence", as the future for this country? Let hon. Members make no mistake about it: that is what this involves, and our hospital, education and public services will become even more inadequate than they are at present if we devote our attention primarily and exclusively to the task of shrinking the proportion of public expenditure."

"We exist to change society. We are not likely to be very successful if we are horrified at any suggestion of changing ourselves. One of the things from which we are suffering is a misplaced national complacency: a belief that we do things better than anyone else. Do not let us be too afraid, as a Labour Party, of learning from some of our friends abroad. Parties all over the world have been modernizing themselves. There are only two unreconstructed socialist parties in the world—the French and the Australian. Do not let us be too conservative, complacent, and insular."

"I am myself convinced that the existing law on abortion is uncertain and is also, and perhaps more importantly, harsh and archaic and that it is in urgent need of reform. I certainly shall have no hesitation in voting for the Second Reading of the Bill. I take this view because I believe that we have here a major social problem. How can anyone believe otherwise when perhaps as many as 100,000 illegal operations a year take place, that the present law has shown itself quite unable to deal with the problem? I believe this, too, because of the danger which exists at present to those who are forced to resort to back-street abortionists and to the misery which is caused to some of those who fail to get an abortion. I believe it also because we all know...that the law is consistently flouted by those who have the means to do so. It is, therefore, very much a question of one law for the rich and one law for the poor."

"It would be a mistake to think...that by what we are doing tonight we are giving a vote of confidence or congratulation to homosexuality. Those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of loneliness, guilt and shame. The crucial question, which we are nearly at the end of answering decisively, is, should we add to those disadvantages the full rigour of the criminal law? By its overwhelming decisions, the House has given a fairly clear answer, and I hope that the Bill will now make rapid progress towards the Statute Book. It will be an important and civilising Measure."

"No one contemplating the present position and looking back at the whole series of vicissitudes which has beset the British economy throughout the past 20 years can find the prospect other than very difficult at present. But I believe that there is also a great opportunity at present. There is certainly no quick, easy road to prosperity for this country, but the changes which must be made are fairly marginal. They must be made with absolute determination, but if they are so made, and accepted by the people, the whole outlook can change. The Government can only provide the right framework. Unless they do that, our national energies will be misdirected, but once they have done it the opportunities for export and growth and efficiency must be seized by everyone. There will still be two years of hard slog ahead. But at the end of it we could have a more securely-based prosperity than we have known for a generation."

"It is not some malevolent quirk of international bankers which makes the balance of payments surplus necessary. It is the hard facts of life. Quite a few of the resolutions mention the need to get rid of the shackles of international finance. These shackles can be exaggerated. If you want less to do with bankers and fewer International Monetary Fund visits the answer is straightforward: Help us to get out of debt. It is no good urging independence and denying policies to that end."

"In these circumstances it is essential we should be able to speak with sanity and authority in world monetary affairs. You cannot do this from a position of perpetual deficit."

"[The "permissive society" had been allowed to become a dirty phrase.] A better phrase is the 'civilized society', based on the belief that different individuals will wish to make different decisions about their patterns of behaviour and that, provided these do not restrict the freedom of others, they should be allowed to do so within a framework of understanding and tolerance. ... And the idea that our moderate progress towards giving the individual greater freedom from the law in matters of social conduct is responsible for the troubles of modern society is plain nonsense."

"One of the central purposes of democratic socialism was to extend throughout the community the opportunity of freedom of choice which used to be the prerogative of the few."

"Three years ago it [public opinion] was strongly in favour of entry [into the EEC]. It may change again...and in any case I do not believe that it is always the duty of those who seek to lead to follow public opinion."

"At conference the only alternative [to the EEC] we heard was 'socialism in one country'. That is always good for a cheer. Pull up the drawbridge and revolutionize the fortress. That's not a policy either: it's just a slogan, and it is one which becomes not merely unconvincing but hypocritical as well when it is dressed up as our best contribution to international socialism."

"In spite of half a century of effort, our society—and still more our world—is still disfigured by gross unfairness. ... Concern is indivisible and so is selfishness. A society which says 'to hell with famine and disease in Bangladesh, it's all their own fault, isn't it?' is extremely unlikely to balance this with compassion and justice for its own pensioners and its own low-paid."

"The next Labour Government can be content with nothing less than the elimination of poverty as a social problem. ... The Labour movement was created to fight against a wealthy minority on behalf of a poor majority. Now it has a more complex and demanding task. It has to enlist the majority in a struggle on behalf of a poor minority, who on grounds of age or health or family circumstances or disgracefully low pay are unable to help themselves. No one has a right to expect a fair deal for himself unless he is prepared to work for one for others too."

"We have to persuade men and women who are themselves reasonably well off that they have a duty to forgo some of the advantages they would otherwise enjoy for the sake of others who are much poorer. We have to persuade car workers in my constituency that they have an obligation to low-paid workers in the public sector. We have to persuade the British people as a whole that they have an obligation to Africans and Asians whom they have never seen. Our only hope is to appeal to the latent idealism of all men and women of good will, irrespective of their income brackets, irrespective of their class origins. In place of the politics of envy, we must put the politics of compassion; in place of the politics of cupidity, the politics of justice; in place of the politics of opportunism, the politics of principle. Only so can we hope to succeed. Only so will success be worth having."

"What is more likely [if there were a referendum]...is that party loyalties would be strongly mobilized and that in order to frustrate the government of the day the Opposition would form a temporary coalition of those who, whatever their political views, were against the proposed action. By this means we would have forged a more powerful continuing weapon against progressive legislation than anything we have known in this country since the curbing of the absolute powers of the old House of Lords. Apart from the obvious example of capital punishment, I would not in these circumstances fancy the chances, to take a few random but important examples, of many measures to improve race relations, or to extend public ownership, or to advance the right of individual dissent, or to introduce the planning restraints which will become increasingly necessary if our society is to avoid strangling itself."

"There has been a lot of talk about the formation of a new centre party. Some have even been kind enough to suggest that I might lead it. I find this idea profoundly unattractive. I do so for at least four reasons. First, I do not believe that such a grouping would have any coherent philosophical base...A party based on such a rag-bag could stand for nothing positive. It would exploit grievances and fall apart when it sought to remedy them. I believe in exactly the reverse sort of politics...Second, I believe that the most likely effect of such an ill-considered grouping would be to destroy the prospect of an effective alternative government to the Conservatives...Some genuinely want a new, powerful anti-Conservative force. They would be wise to reflect that it is much easier to will this than to bring it about. The most likely result would be chaos on the left and several decades of Conservative hegemony almost as dismal and damaging as in the twenties and thirties. Third, I do not share the desire, at the root of much such thinking, to push what may roughly be called the leftward half of the Labour Party...out of the mainstream of British politics...Fourth, and more personally, I cannot be indifferent to the political traditions in which I was brought up and in which I have lived my political life. Politics are not to me a religion, but the Labour Party is and always had been an instinctive part of my life."

"It is not much good talking about fundamental and irreversible changes in our society and being content with a 38 per cent Labour voting intention. ... Democracy means that you need a substantially stronger moral position than this to govern effectively at all, let alone effecting a peaceful social revolution. The programme we put forward must be capable of being carried out in what may well be difficult economic circumstances."

"[Roy Jenkins] agreed with many of the criticisms levelled against the performance of private industry and he agreed that the country needed a sharp change. There was a case for a significant extension of public ownership. (Applause.) But public ownership must be related directly to the ordinary Labour voters and the potential Labour voters in their day to day lives, particularly in development areas, to inflation, housing, and land use. "It is no good taking over a vast number of industries without a clear plan as to how and by whom they are going to be run. It is no good pretending that a transfer of ownership in itself solves our problems.""

"The sense of shame that the Chancellor should have felt is far more personal. It is a sense of shame for having taken over an economy with a £1,000 million surplus and running it to a £2,000 million deficit. It is a sense of shame for having conducted our internal financial affairs with such profligacy that our public accounts are out of balance as never before. It is a sense of shame for having presided over the greatest depreciation of the currency, both at home and abroad, in our history. It is a sense of shame for having left us at a moment of test far weaker than most of our neighbours...There is, I believe, a greater threat to the effective working of our democratic institutions than most of us have seen in our adult lifetimes. I do not believe that it springs primarily from the machinations of subversively-minded men, although no doubt they are there and are anxious to exploit exploitable situations. It comes much more dangerously from a widespread cynicism with the processes of our political system. I believe that the Chancellor contributed to that on Monday. I believe that it poses a serious challenge to us all...None of us should seek salvation through chaos. There is a duty too to recognise that we could slip into a still worse rate of inflation and a world spiral-ling downwards towards slump, unemployment and falling standards, with our selves, temporarily at least, well in the vanguard. What is required is neither an imposed solution nor an open hand at the till. The alternative to reaching a settlement with the miners is paralysis...The task of statesmanship is to reach a settlement but to do it in a way which opens no floodgates for if they were opened, it would not only damage everyone but it would undermine the differential which the miners deserve and which the nation now needs them to have."