Castle, Barbara: Firebrand MP who wanted 'jam today'

Barbara Castle: Firebrand MP who wanted 'jam today'

Nicola Rippon considers the impressive legacy of Barbara Castle’s entrance into politics...

Barbara Castle

There was a time when a police officer’s immediate estimation of whether a car driver might have had too much to drink relied upon the suspect being asked to walk as straight as possible for a few yards.

There was also a time when anyone riding in a vehicle ran the risk of being catapulted through the windscreen, for there was nothing provided to stop them.

So, as the Government’s annual Christmas drink-driving campaign gathers momentum, it is an appropriate time to remember the Derbyshire-born politician responsible for introducing road safety measures that have been credited with saving the lives of tens of thousands of British men, women and children.

It is also appropriate because it is exactly 60 years ago that Barbara Castle was first elected to Parliament at the beginning of a political career, occasionally controversial, always high profile.

Born Barbara Annie Betts, at 67 Derby Road, Chesterfield, on October 6, 1910, Castle was the youngest child of politically active parents in the Derbyshire town.

Her mother, a Labour councillor, later opened a soup kitchen for unemployed miners and their families during the Depression of the 1920s.

Castle’s father was a member of the Independent Labour Party.

His job, as a surveyor of taxes, caused the family to relocate several times – first to Hull, then to Pontefract and finally to Bradford, where he edited the local socialist journal, The Bradford Pioneer.

After grammar school, Castle attended St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she, too, became active in politics.

Soon after graduation, she conducted a semi-secret affair with the married socialist journalist, William Mellor.

When Mellor died, in 1942, Castle was heartbroken.

By then, she had joined the staff of the left-wing weekly Tribune, which she had helped establish with Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot and others, and of which Mellor had been editor.

In 1937, Castle was elected as a councillor on St Pancras Borough Council and, in 1943, made her first speech to the national conference of the Labour Party.

She impressed fellow delegates with her passionate oration which attacked the leadership’s reluctance in promoting the Beveridge Report into eliminating poverty in Britain, declaring: “We want jam today, not jam tomorrow!”

During the Second World War, Castle worked at the Ministry of Food and as an ARP warden, and campaigned for the building of public deep underground shelters, particularly in blitzed London.

The Government largely ignored her pleas, and Londoners sought their own shelters, deep within the Underground system.

Castle had begun writing for the Labour-sympathetic Daily Mirror, whose night editor, Ted Castle, she married in 1944.

In the Labour landslide General Election victory of 1945, she was elected as MP for Blackburn – a post she would hold for 34 years.

Although she had no prior connection with the town, Castle had spent her childhood in industrial, working-class Northern towns and felt very much at home there.

To reassure her constituents that she had their interests at heart, Castle studied weaving and spinning, and spent time living with a local family.

She also became the first MP to introduce surgeries to meet her constituents.

Quickly nicknamed the Red Queen, as much for her socialism and firebrand speeches as for her striking, perfectly coiffed, auburn hair, Castle said her ambition was to “inch people towards a more civilised society”.

She served in junior roles in successive Labour governments, held back by the reluctance of party leaders to grant a woman her own department.

She became chairperson of the Labour Party (1958-59) and, finally, a minister in her own right – for Overseas Development – when Harold Wilson came to power in 1964.

The following year, Castle became Minister of Transport.

As a non-driver she brought a fresh outlook on transport issues and implemented, not only a road-building scheme, but also a series of radical road safety measures, as part of the 1966 Road Safety Act.

The introduction of breathalyser tests for drivers suspected of exceeding new blood alcohol limits, already common around the world, a national upper speed limit of 70 mph, and the first legislation towards mandatory wearing of seat belts, were all unpopular with drivers.

And, in common with most new public protection measures, protestors raised objections on the grounds that they infringed personal liberties.

While it would be almost 20 years before the wearing of seat belts would become law, the breathalyser had an immediate effect, with the number of those killed or injured in alcohol-related accidents plummeting.

In 1997, the Institution of Alcohol Studies held a luncheon in Castle’s honour at which Professor Brian Prichard declared: “Everyone has cause to be grateful for the courage of Barbara Castle, who pioneered the greatest life saving Act in road safety.”

He added that, over the past 30 years, the legislation she had introduced “may have prevented more than 62,000 people from being killed on our roads – equivalent to an average MP’s constituency.”

Castle, the Derbyshire girl born into a family determined to make life fairer for all, was occasionally touted as a future Prime Minister.

But her determination to drive through policies based purely on her ideals outweighed her desire to conform to bland acceptability, and she was considered too controversial for possible future leadership.

In 1968, she was appointed Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity.

It was in this role that she courted much controversy in her bid to protect the rights of workers, introducing the Equal Pay Act, which made it illegal to hire a woman to do the same job as a man for less money.

More controversially, in 1969, she published the White Paper In Place of Strife, which brought her into direct conflict with the trades’ unions and members of her own party.

The contentious paper called for modernisation of the unions and, while many of its suggested measures were widely acceptable, the proposal of compulsory strike ballots was just one aspect that the unions opposed.

When Wilson decided to make an issue of it, many feared the Labour Party would split in two.

Vic Feather, general secretary of the TUC, who had worked for Castle’s father at the Bradford Pioneer, dismissed the Minister scathingly as “a lass [he knew] when she was still in dirty knickers”.

If the paper had been designed to loosen the unions’ stranglehold on the Labour Party, its outright rejection served only to tighten it.

In 1970, Labour lost power, but when Wilson again became Prime Minister in 1974, Castle was appointed Secretary of State for Social Services.

She was responsible for the introduction of child benefit payments, and ensured these were paid directly to mothers, rather than as part of fathers’ pay packets.

She also developed the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme.

However, Castle’s attempts to reform the NHS caused dissent from all quarters and her tenure was tainted by almost constant industrial unrest in the Health Service.

When Wilson resigned in 1976, his successor, James Callaghan, who had clashed with Castle seven years earlier over In Place of Strife, dismissed her from his Cabinet.

It was reported that Castle was, at 66, considered too old for a ministerial post. The truth was that she and Callaghan had never got on, and it was no great surprise that he wanted rid of her.

In 1979, Castle left the Commons to become an MEP, less than a decade after she had opposed Britain’s entry to the Common Market under Edward Heath.

In 1990, she was created Baroness Castle of Blackburn, although she always preferred to be known as Mrs Castle.

From the Lords, she continued to campaign on pensioners’ rights well into her 80s.

And she made no secret of her distaste for the New Labour policies of Tony Blair.

In his memoirs, Harold Wilson wrote of her: “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.”

Others, both allies and opponents, echoed his thoughts after Barbara Castle’s death at Ipstones in May 2002, aged 91.

Sir Bernard Ingham, who spent 10 years as chief press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, a woman for whom, ironically, Castle had in some ways paved the way, remembered his time working for Castle well.

He said of her: “She had enormous guts...she was a tremendous personality.

“She was a very feminine person, but at the same time...Boudicca.”