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Barbara Castle

Barbara Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn PC (October 6, 1910 – May 3, 2002) was a British left-wing politician, born Barbara Anne Betts in Chesterfield, Derbyshire (and brought up in Pontefract and Bradford, Yorkshire), who adopted her family's politics, joining the Labour Party.

Barbara Castle

After an education at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, she was elected to St. Pancras Borough Council in 1937, and in 1943 she spoke at the annual Labour Party Conference for the first time. She was a senior administrative officer at the Ministry of Food and an ARP warden during the Blitz.

Following her marriage to Ted Castle in 1944, Barbara became a journalist on the Daily Mirror, which by this time had become strongly pro-Labour. In the 1945 general election, which Labour won in a landslide, she became MP for Blackburn, Lancashire. The fiery redhead soon achieved a reputation as a left-winger and a rousing speaker. During the 1950s she was a high-profile Bevanite and made a name for herself as a vocal advocate of decolonisation and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. In the Wilson government of 1964–1970, she held a succession of ministerial posts. She entered the Cabinet as the first Minister for International Development. As Minister of Transport (December 23, 1965–April 6, 1968), she introduced the breathalyser to combat drink-driving, and presided over the closure of approximately 2050 miles of railways as she enacted her part of the Beeching cuts. As First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Employment, she was never far from controversy which reached a fever pitch when the trade unions rebelled against her proposals to reduce their powers in her 1969 white paper, 'In Place of Strife'.

In Place of Strife (Cmnd. 3888).In 1974, after Harold Wilson's defeat of Edward Heath, Castle became Secretary of State for Social Services, but lost her place as a minister after clashing with the new prime minister, James Callaghan, who took over from Wilson in 1976. Despite having taken an Eurosceptic stance in the 1975 referendum debate, she later became a Member of the European Parliament (1979–1989). In an interview many years later, discussing her removal from office by James Callaghan, she claimed that the Prime Minister had told her he wanted "somebody younger" in the Cabinet, to which she famously remarked that perhaps the most restrained thing she had ever achieved in her life was to not reply with "then why not start with yourself, Jim?"

The Castle Diaries were published after the 1979 General Election, and chronicled her time in office from 1964-1976 and provide an insight into the workings of Cabinet Government. A review in the London Review of Books at the time of their publication claimed, "Barbara Castle's diary shows more about the nature of Cabinet Government than any previous publication...it is, I think, better than Crossman", a reference to the published diaries of former Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman. However, when Enoch Powell reviewed her diaries he remarked that the "overpowering impression left on the reader's mind by her diary is that of triviality: the largest decisions and the profoundest issues are effortlessly trivialised".[1]

In 1990, she was made a life peer in her own right, as Baroness Castle of Blackburn, of Ibstone in the County of Buckinghamshire (having previously enjoyed the courtesy title of 'Lady' as a result of her husband's life peerage, but having refused to use it). She remained active in politics right up until her death, attacking Chancellor Gordon Brown's refusal to link pensions to earnings at the Labour party conference in 2001.

Barbara Castle's autobiography, Fighting All The Way (ISBN 0-330-32886-7), was published in 1993.

A biography by Lisa Martineau, Barbara Castle: Politics and Power[1] (EAN 0233994807), was published in 2000.

Visit her tribute page here

• Barbara Castle

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