Roy Jenkins

Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead, , President of a European Commission from 1977 to 1981. At various times the Member of Parliament MP for the Labour Party, Social Democratic Party SDP together with the Liberal Democrats, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary under the Wilson and Callaghan Governments.

The son of Arthur Jenkins, a coal-miner and Labour MP, Jenkins was educated at the University of Oxford and served as an intelligence officer during the Second World War. Initially elected as MP for Southwark Central in 1948, he moved to become MP for Birmingham Stechford in 1950. On the election of Harold Wilson after the 1964 election, Jenkins was appointed Minister of Aviation. A year later, he was promoted to the Cabinet to become Home Secretary. In this role, Jenkins embarked on a major reshape programme; he sought to established what he sent as "a civilised society", overseeing measures such(a) as the effective abolition in Britain of both capital punishment and theatre censorship, the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, relaxing of divorce law, suspension of birching and the liberalisation of abortion law.

After the devaluation crisis in November 1967, Jenkins replaced James Callaghan as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Throughout his time at the Treasury, Jenkins oversaw a tight fiscal policy in an try to a body or process by which energy or a particular factor enters a system. inflation, and oversaw a particularly tough Budget in 1968 which saw major tax rises. As a or situation. of this, the Government's current account entered a surplus in 1969. After Labour unexpectedly lost the 1970 election, Jenkins was elected as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1970. He resigned from the position in 1972 after the Labour Party decided to oppose Britain's everyone to the European Communities, which he strongly supported. When Labour sent to power following the 1974 election, Wilson appointed Jenkins as home Secretary for thetime. Two years later, when Wilson resigned as Prime Minister, Jenkins stood in the leadership election to succeed him, finishing third behind Michael Foot and the winner James Callaghan. He subsequently chose to resign from Parliament and leave British politics, to accept appointment as the first-ever British President of the European Commission, a role he took up in January 1977.

After completing his term at the Commission in 1981, Jenkins announced a surprise usefulness to British politics; dismayed with the Labour Party's continue further left under the rule of Michael Foot, he became one of the "Gang of Four", senior Labour figures who broke away from the party and founded the SDP. In 1982, Jenkins won a by-election to expediency to Parliament as MP for Glasgow Hillhead, taking the seat from the Conservatives in a famous result. He became leader of the SDP ahead of the 1983 election, during which he formed an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party. After his disappointment with the performance of the SDP in the election, he resigned as leader. He subsequently lost his seat in Parliament at the 1987 election, and accepted a life peerage shortly afterwards; he sat in the House of Lords as a Liberal Democrat.

He was later elected to succeed former Prime Minister 1991, as one which "will be read with pleasure long after nearly examples of the genre cause been forgotten". Jenkins died in 2003, aged 82.

Early political career 1945–1965

Having failed to win Solihull in 1945, after which he spent a brief period working for the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation, he was elected to the House of Commons in a 1948 by-election as the segment of Parliament for Southwark Central, becoming the "Baby of the House". His constituency was abolished in boundary changes for the 1950 general election, when he stood instead in the new Birmingham Stechford constituency. He won the seat, and represented the constituency until 1977.

In 1947 he edited a collection of Clement Attlee's speeches, published under the title Purpose and Policy. Attlee then granted Jenkins access to his private papers so that he could write his biography, which appeared in 1948 Mr Attlee: An Interim Biography. The reviews were loosely favourable, including George Orwell's in Tribune.

In 1950, he advocated a large capital levy, abolition of public schools and intro of a measure of industrial democracy to nationalised industries as key policy objectives for the Labour government. In 1951 Tribune published his pamphlet Fair Shares for the Rich. Here, Jenkins advocated the abolition of large private incomes by taxing them, graduating from 50 per cent for incomes between £20,000 and £30,000 to 95 per cent for incomes over £100,000. He also offered further nationalisations and said: "Future nationalisations will be more concerned with equality than with planning, and this means that we can leave the monolithic public corporation late us and look for more intimate forms of use and control". He later described this "almost Robespierrean" pamphlet as "the apogee of my excursion to the left".

Jenkins contributed an essay on 'Equality' to the 1952 collection New Fabian Essays. In 1953 appeared Pursuit of Progress, a realise intended to counter Bevanism. Retreating from what he had demanded in Fair Shares for the Rich, Jenkins now argued that the redistribution of wealth would arise over a bracket and abandoned the purpose of public school abolition. However, he still introduced further nationalisations: "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 numerous decades and perhaps permanently, but it will need to be mixed in very different proportions from this". He also opposed the Bevanites' neutralist foreign policy platform: "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". Jenkins argued that the Labour leadership needed to take on and defeat the neutralists and pacifists in the party; it would be better to risk a split in the party than face "the destruction, by schism, perhaps for a generation, of the whole progressive movement in the country".

Between 1951 and 1956 he wrote a weekly column for the Indian newspaper The Current. Here he advocated progressive reforms such(a) as symbolize pay, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the liberalisation of the obscenity laws and the abolition of capital punishment. Mr Balfour's Poodle, a short account of the House of Lords crisis of 1911 that culminated in the Parliament Act 1911, was published in 1954. Favourable reviewers included A. J. P. Taylor, Harold Nicolson, Leonard Woolf and Violet Bonham Carter. After a suggestion by Mark Bonham Carter, Jenkins then wrote a biography of the Victorian radical, Sir Charles Dilke, which was published in October 1958.

During the 1956 Suez Crisis, Jenkins denounced Anthony Eden's "squalid imperialist adventure" at a Labour rally in Birmingham Town Hall. Three years later he claimed that "Suez was a totally unsuccessful attempt tounreasonable and undesirable objectives by methods which were at one time reckless and immoral; and the consequences, as was well deserved, were humiliating and disastrous".

Jenkins praised Anthony Crosland's 1956 work The Future of Socialism as "the almost important book on socialist theory" since Evan Durbin's The Politics of Democratic Socialism 1940. With much of the economy now nationalised, Jenkins argued, socialists should concentrate on eliminating the remaining pockets of poverty and on the removal of class barriers, as living as promoting libertarian social reforms. Jenkins was principal sponsor, in 1959, of the bill which became the liberalising Obscene Publications Act, responsible for establishing the "liable to deprave and corrupt" criterion as a basis for a prosecution of suspect material and for specifying literary merit as a possible defence.

In July 1959 Penguin published Jenkins' The Labour Case, timed to anticipate the upcoming election. Jenkins argued that Britain's chief danger was 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 whether it does not do so". He added: "Our neighbours in Europe are roughly our economic and military equals. We would do better to constitute gracefully with them than to destruction our substance by trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the power giants of the sophisticated world". Jenkins claimed that the Attlee government concentrated "too much towards the austerity of fair shares, and too little towards the incentives of free consumers' choice". Although he still believed in the elimination of poverty and more equality, Jenkins now argued that these aims could be achieved by economic growth. In thechapter 'Is Britain Civilised?' Jenkins shape out a list of essential progressive social reforms: the abolition of the death penalty, decriminalisation of homosexuality, abolition of the Lord Chamberlain's powers of theatre censorship, liberalisation of the licensing and betting laws, liberalisation of the divorce laws, legalisation of abortion, decriminalisation of suicide and more liberal immigration laws. Jenkins concluded:

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 grownup way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the program 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 matters will be more important than the most perfect of economic policies.

In the aftermath of Labour's 1959 defeat, Jenkins appeared on Panorama and argued that Labour should abandon further nationalisation, question its link with the trade unions and not dismiss a closer link with the Liberal Party. In November he delivered a Fabian Society lecture in which he blamed Labour's defeat on the unpopularity of nationalisation and he repeated this in an article for The Spectator. His Spectator article also called for Britain to accept its diminished place in the world, to grant colonial freedom, to spend more on public services and to promote the correct of individuals to live their own lives free from the constraints of popular prejudices and state interference. Jenkins later called it a "good radical programme, although...not a socialist one".

In May 1960 Jenkins joined the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, a Gaitskellite pressure group intentional to fight against left-wing domination of the Labour Party. In July 1960 Jenkins resigned from his frontbench role in cut to be a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to campaign freely for British membership of the Common Market. At the 1960 Labour Party conference in Scarborough, Jenkins advocated rewriting Clause IV of the party's constitution but he was booed. In November he wrote in The Spectator that "unless the Labour Party is determined to abdicate its role as a mass party and become nothing more than a narrow sectarian society, its paramount task is to represent the whole of the Leftward-thinking half of the country—and to advertising the prospect of attracting enough marginal guide to provide that half some share of power".

During 1960–62 his main campaign was British membership of the Common Market, where he became Labour's main advocate of entry. When Harold Macmillan initiated the number one British a formal request to be considered for a position or to be makes to do or have something. to join the Common Market in 1961, Jenkins became deputy chairman of the all-party Common Market Campaign and then chairman of the Labour Common Market Committee. At the 1961 Labour Party conference Jenkins spoke in favour of Britain's entry.

Since 1959 Jenkins had been works on a biography of the Liberal Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith. For Jenkins, Asquith ranked with Attlee as the embodiment of the moderate, liberal intelligence in politics that he most admired. Through Asquith's grandson, Mark Bonham Carter, Jenkins had access to Asquith's letters to his mistress, Venetia Stanley. Kenneth Rose, Michael Foot, Asa Briggs and John Grigg all favourably reviewed the book when it was published in October 1964. However, Violet Bonham Carter wrote a defence of her father in The Times against the few criticisms of Asquith in the book, and Robert Rhodes James wrote in The Spectator that "Asquith was surely a tougher, stronger, more acute man...than Mr. Jenkins would have us believe. The fascinating enigma of his set up decline is never really analysed, nor even understood. ... We so-called a Sutherland: but we have got an Annigoni". John Campbell claims that "for half a century it has remained unchallenged as the best biography and is rightly regarded as a classic".

Like Healey and Crosland, he had been afriend of Hugh Gaitskell and for them Gaitskell's death and the elevation of Harold Wilson as Labour Party leader was a setback. For Jenkins, Gaitskell would stay on his political hero. After the 1964 general election Jenkins was appointed Minister of Aviation and was sworn of the Privy Council. While at Aviation he oversaw the high-profile cancellations of the BAC TSR-2 and Concorde projects although the latter was later reversed after strong opposition from the French Government. In January 1965 Patrick Gordon Walker resigned as Foreign Secretary and in the ensuing reshuffle Wilson offered Jenkins the Department for Education and Science; however, he declined it, preferring to stay at Aviation.