'Judith Hart: Labour's Lost Heroine' - Ella Staddon

'Judith Hart: Labour’s Lost Heroine' - Ella Staddon

Following the announcement of Judith Hart’s death in 1991, Labour Leader Neil Kinnock described her as “a woman of high abilities who will long be remembered and admired for her distinguished work to advance human rights”. And yet, 30 years on, Judith Hart is largely forgotten. A brilliant campaigner for the marginalised across the globe, against nuclear weapons, and for the advancement of women in politics, Hart should be considered up there as one of the greats of our movement’s past. In reality, she is usually lucky if she gets a footnote in Labour history books. In the context of Putin’s war in Ukraine and Tory cuts to the foreign aid budget to fund our breaking of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Hart’s life’s work is just as relevant now as it was 50 years ago.

Born Constance Mary Ridehalgh in 1924, Hart grew up amongst the poverty and mass unemployment of the 1930s. Her mother, a schoolteacher and active pacifist campaigner, died when she was 11, after which she changed her name to Judith. Having gained a full scholarship to study at the local grammar school, she went on to study at the LSE, which had relocated to Cambridge during the war. It was in Cambridge that she became active in Labour politics, rising to becoming Secretary of the Labour Club and later its Chair. Her political pursuits at university had little impact on the outcome of her degree, and she graduated in 1945 with a first.

Though not yet pursuing political office, she remained active in Labour politics and her trade union. It was during a trade union meeting that she met Dr Tony Hart, who joined her in speaking out against nuclear weapons. They married in 1946. Against the convention of the time, Hart continued to work as a researcher and began to stand in council elections. In 1951 she made her first conference speech, warning her comrades “not to underestimate the womenfolk”, who wanted to live in a world free of nuclear weapons. After standing unsuccessfully for parliament twice in 1951 and 1955, she was selected to stand for Lanark- the largest constituency in the UK. That same year Tony Hart had also been selected for a parliamentary seat, however upon Judith’s selection he withdrew his candidacy, believing her to be the better candidate. Later, when she was a minister, he took a demotion in order to move the family to London to better support her.

Despite Labour’s decimation at the 1959 election, Hart won the seat and overturned the Tory majority. She quickly gained a reputation for working beyond what would be expected of any MP, personally replying to all correspondence from constituents and sending follow up letters.

Unsurprisingly, she opposed Polaris submarines being based in her constituency. On the 2nd March 1961, she spoke out against their installation, arguing “when we are providing money […] for Polaris submarines which are armed with nuclear weapons capable of wreaking the most tremendous damage—it is a killer weapon on a massive scale—then we are likely to increase provocation. […] As soon as a weapon is developed by one side a counter weapon is developed by the other […] We are not providing a contribution to peace but a contribution to the greater danger of the outbreak of war”. The Tory benches heckled and ridiculed her, to which she retorted that nuclear annihilation was not a laughing matter.

By 1964, she had been an MP for five years and had increased her majority nearly tenfold. She entered the government as the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, where she was given free range to pursue issues that interested her. Her two main achievements were changing the law around children’s hospitals visiting hours and the introduction of the Scotland Plan, which created 130,000 jobs and provided Scottish industry with £2 billion in investment.

In 1966, Hart was promoted to the Commonwealth Office. Her main task was dealing with Rhodesia, whose white supremacist Prime Minister Ian Smith declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence around the time of Hart’s appointment. Instinctively siding with the African majority and Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda, she successfully “fought like a tigress” to increase the aid budget of Zambia to £13.85 million. Zambia remained unconvinced of Britain’s opposition to Smith’s regime, so Hart negotiated a further £21 million aid package and forced Wilson to commit to No Independence Before Majority African Rule. Wilson began to ignore Hart’s advice regarding sanctions, resulting in Hart and Barbara Castle threatening a joint resignation in protest. In December 1966, Castle, Hart and Shirley Williams threatened resignation again in opposition to the possibility of a settlement. Shortly afterwards Hart was given a promotion within the department to move her away from the Rhodesia issue.

In 1967 Hart was appointed Minister of Social Security. She didn’t enjoy the bureaucracy of the DHSS, and didn’t last long in the job- as her boss Richard Crossman wrote in his diary, Hart was destined for bigger things. On the 15th October 1968, Harold Wilson called Richard Crossman into his office to inform him that he needed to find a new minister. The following day Hart was appointed the first woman Paymaster General, and for the first time in history there was more than one woman in the Cabinet. That year, eleven of the nineteen women elected for Labour in 1966 were given government posts. The Guardian was appalled, and accused Wilson of promoting “anything articulate in a skirt”.

Her first task was to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the 2.5 million under-21s now eligible to vote, a job made easier by her interest in anti-racism and women’s equality. She was also tasked with ensuring Minister’s speeches were in line with government policy, which later led to the establishment of a committee at Transport House to enforce just that. Thirdly, she worked towards Scottish devolution, which she hoped would reduce the growing support for the SNP. Finally, she was left in charge of Labour’s policy regarding women’s rights, becoming the first ever Chair of the Women’s National Commission. The Commission lobbied ministers ‘on everything from health, education, women in society, to even general problems like race relations’. It instigated divorce law reform, backed Barbara Castle’s campaign for equal pay, worked to improve the rights of single mothers and the overall status of women in society. A self-confessed raging feminist, Hart enjoyed this job immensely. Within a year Hart fell seriously out of favour, and she was moved to the Overseas Development ministry.

Back in a department she cared deeply about, she immediately set about defending foreign aid programmes against budget cuts. Unfortunately Labour was out of government before she could make any lasting impression. She did, however, successfully move half the department to East Kilbride, which continues to employ over six hundred people to this day. She also began work writing her book Aid and Liberation: A Socialist Study of Aid Politics.

In September 1973, the democratically elected socialist government in Chile was deposed by General Pinochet and backed by the CIA, ending 160 years of democracy and beginning seventeen years of dictatorship. The junta banned all left-wing parties, outlawed trade unions, censored the press, abolished Congress and filled government posts with military leaders. Universities were closed and books were burnt. Planes and weaponry sourced from Britain were used to commit flagrant human rights abuses, massacring over 3,000 people, and tens of thousands were tortured. One of Pinochet’s favourite methods of murder was to drop pregnant women out of aeroplanes- aeroplanes that continued to be sourced from Britain.

For Judith Hart, this was a personal- many of those killed and tortured were friends from the Socialist International. Hart campaigned relentlessly to impose sanctions, and helped found the Chile Solidarity Campaign and Chile Campaign for Human refugees, personally funding escape routes and using underground education networks and foreign aid workers to smuggle people out, and later housing them in her own home. One such family she saved and housed was Salvador Allende’s widow and children. Every refugee from Chile had references written by Hart. Back in government in 1974, she used the Overseas Development ministry to fund escape routes, and worked with the World University Service to organise transportation, saving thousands from state sponsored murder. Her final speech in Parliament in 1987 was dedicated to the plight of Chilean refugees, arguing that the government’s new bill provided no legal routes for those escaping brutal military regimes, and as such they would not only be refused entry but be deported back to the nations they had only just escaped, probably to be slaughtered on return. Shortly before her death, the regime collapsed and she was the first non-Chilean to be offered the Chilean Order of Merit. She passed away before she could receive it in person.

In 1974, she returned to government as the Minister for Overseas Development, where she negotiated the Lomé convention- a trade and aid agreement between the EEC and seventy-one African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. Her left-wing colleagues would later say her successes at Lomé undermined their argument that the EEC was not an internationalist organisation. During this time she also chaired the Public Sector Working Group, which proposed the founding of the National Enterprise Board, set up in 1975. One of its investments went on to prosper in Silicon Valley, and its technology can be found in our phones and laptops. It was during this time that she mentored a young Margaret Beckett, who she had initially found in Labour HQ’s research department and decided was the future of the Labour movement. After encouraging her to become an MP, she appointed Beckett her Parliamentary Private Secretary with the intention of training her up for high office, particularly surrounding issues of foreign policy, industry and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Following the 1975 referendum on EEC membership, Hart was sacked by Wilson. Upon discovering Wilson’s intention to sack Hart, Barbara Castle stormed into his office looking like a drowned rat with a burnt fried egg sandwich in hand to demand Hart get her job back, unfortunately with little success. Hart resigned in the House of Commons the next morning. She was reappointed Minister of Overseas Development mere months later. This time, she cancelled Third World debt and replaced interest-free loans with grants.

Back in opposition, she continued to campaign for Chile and for women’s rights. In 1982, the Thatcher government attempted to remove women from unemployment figures, resulting in Hart calling the Tory minister defending the proposals a ‘male chauvinist pig’. She was, by this time, the only remaining woman MP in Scottish Labour’s ranks, and ill health forced her to retire in 1987. She entered the House of Lords shortly afterwards, but was unable to take an active role.

After a long period of illness, Hart died in 1991, aged 67. It is thought that her bone marrow cancer was caused by exposure to a significant amount of radiation in 1957 following the explosion of a nuclear power plant in Cumbria, where she had gone to aid survivors. What she saw there only reinforced her belief in the evil danger of nuclear weapons. She never lived to see the next Labour government, nor the achievements of her protégé Margaret Beckett, whose work on multilateral nuclear disarmament and the Non-Proliferation treaty can only be seen as a continuation of Hart’s work. At a time when Labour is promoting the largely catastrophic foreign policy that was overseen by Ernest Bevin, its historical figures like Judith Hart who we really should be looking to. A woman who, despite being on opposition benches, or repeatedly being sacked, managed to not only outline what a socialist foreign aid plan should look like, but campaigned to save the lives of refugees, even to the detriment of her career. While Putin bombs nuclear power plants in Ukraine and Johnson breaks the Non-Proliferation treaty, we are yet again faced with the growing threat of nuclear weapons. Now is the time to not only remember Judith Hart, but to have the courage to continue her fight, and create a world free of suffering and injustice.

[Ella Staddon is a first-year History student at Merton College. She was OULC’s Women*s Officer for Hilary Term 2022]