Harold Wilson's Cold War: The Labour Government and East-West Politics, 1964-1970. By Geraint Hughes.

Abstract

A much maligned Prime Minister, Harold Wilson's governance of Britain continues to fascinate, intrigue and irk scholars in equal measure. A skilful politician he may have been, but relatively few commentators have been willing or able to stand outside the contemporaneous critiques of the Wilson premierships to try and understand his worldview and policies on their own terms, as it were. The release of official government records under the Thirty Year Rule has, finally, given scholars more of an evidence base, and we are now seeing an array of studies into British politics and diplomacy in the later 1960s and beyond. Geraint Hughes’ book makes one such contribution to the historiography by focusing on the dynamics of Wilson's foreign policy over his first two terms in office. In terms of scope, the study is fairly broad, taking the British policy towards the European Economic Community, leading West European countries such as France and Germany, the USA, Russia and détente with major Warsaw Pact countries and the Eastern bloc. As Hughes sees it, Wilson saw these different dimensions of Britain's external relations as interlinked and this is reflected in the structure of the book, which picks out nodal events during the 1964–70 period, such as Vietnam and the Prague Spring, and uses these to elucidate Wilson's foreign policy thinking and how he tried to position post-imperial Britain in a fast-changing international system. Hughes has consulted a rich array of primary sources, leading off with records of British government, diplomatic and Cabinet discussions on foreign policy and supplementing these with private paper collections from key figures and American archives. If one were to be picky, it is disappointing that in a study so heavily focused on Anglo-Soviet relations, there were no primary Soviet documents consulted. Having said that, the state of Soviet archives can be something of an unknown quantity; language was probably an issue, and Hughes has included secondary work looking at things from the Soviet perspective. All in all, then, it would be overly harsh to judge here on what it does not feature; instead, let us look at what does feature.