Richard Crossman

'Go on and publish it. No one will believe you.' 'That's precisely what we're going to do. The Times have copy of our memorandum now.'

Dick Crossman was a powerful figure in every sense of the term. He was large in stature, had a booming voice (rather like Hugh Dalton) but also had a huge muscular intellect. He must have been the cleverest person intellectually in the Wilson government, although not the most original of thinkers. That title surely goes to Anthony Crosland. Crossman was a philosophy tutor and taught Plato and Aristotle at Oxford before coming into Parliament for one of the Coventry seats.

He had been a Bevanite, which now seems tame enough given what has happened in the Labour Party as of recent, but that presented then a real challenge to the right-leaning Labour leadership of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Clement Attlee didn't rate him on the basis of what Attlee saw as his unstable political behaviour. Pre-empting a conversation, Attlee would cut Crossman dead: 'I saw your mother last week. She's looking very well' was an example of an Attlee put-down to a person whose behaviour fell short of what he believed acceptable. That wouldn't prevent Attlee, of course, asking how Crossman's parents were every time they met.

While being one of the Bevanite group organising a more radical alternative to Herbert Morrison's safety-first electoral approach, Crossman had been excluded from power. It was only the death of Hugh Gaitskell, in 1963, and the extraordinary rise of Harold Wilson, that off ered Crossman an opportunity for his talents. The same was true of Barbara Castle.

Crossman had already used his position on the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to help Labour rethink its welfare state strategy. From this power base, Crossman used his massive energy and talent to begin thinking anew what Beveridge should mean for the 1960s. He turned to Richard Titmuss, academic at the LSE, and to his followers, who were known as 'the Titmice', to help him. In some ways it was a wise choice for those wishing to revise Beveridge by striking down the main principle that underpinned Beveridge's reforms.

Titmuss, no doubt through the work of his fellow academic and assistant Tony Lynes, came up with superannuation proposals that broke with the flat rate contribution benefit levels then central to the Beveridge scheme. These new superannuation proposals were wage- and salary-related, both for contributions and benefits. Thus, the inequalities in work were taken forward into retirement; the price the Titmuss group believed had to be paid to gain widespread support for the necessary funding arrangements to any new scheme.

Crossman skilfully negotiated these proposals through the National Executive Committee and through the Labour Party Conference, which was Labour's all-powerful sovereign decision-making body in those days. When Wilson came to power in 1964, he wisely brought Crossman and Castle into his government but, like so many prime ministers, didn't capitalise on the work these two figures had developed in opposition. They were, instead, both allocated to departments where they had to learn their new briefs. Crossman had the local government brief and was up against one of the great permanent secretaries of the day, Dame Evelyn Sharp.

He moved back to the social security brief a couple of years after Labour's landslide 1966 election win, when he was awarded the mammoth health and social security brief. He approached this task from his concrete tower at the Elephant and Castle with nothing but confidence. But confidence itself does not necessarily lead to political success.

The CPAG had been formed in 1965, both to draw attention to the numbers of poor children and their families, and to seek government remedy. When I joined CPAG in 1969 the poverty agenda was becalmed. The government had set up a range of inquiries after its 1964 election. Nothing followed from the series of reports that flooded on to ministers' desks in the run-up to what became the 1970 General Election. One has to doubt whether the intention was to receive the reports and then follow them with a programme of total inaction. Likewise on the CPAG front. When I arrived at the CPAG offices in 1969 the cupboard was bare of strategy or detailed policy proposals except for the beginnings of a memorandum that Tony Lynes had drafted. Tony was the first paid full-time secretary of the CPAG.

The memorandum would do nothing either to awaken the debate or, as I saw it, reposition CPAG as the premier independent poverty-lobbying organisation. I record elsewhere the chairman of CPAG, Peter Townsend's, unease at my suggestion of politicising the group manifesto by making it an attack on one of Labour's core 'myths'. I was also only too aware of my lack of knowledge of the poverty data.

When Peter first expressed his unease, I agreed to resign as the new head of CPAG if the strategy I was advocating to champion the poor and, at the same time, move the group from being seen as a mere appendage of the Labour Party to one of full independence as a lobby organisation, was unacceptable to the group. But I had warned Peter that CPAG was wasting away, and it would continue to wither unless it was reinvented. The campaign of 'The Poor Get Poorer Under Labour' was born from that memorandum I wrote.

I joined CPAG and had ringing in my ears a framework that Dick Crossman himself had used to teach students. It was in his reinterpretation of the classic 1867 study of the workings of the British constitution, by Walter Bagehot, that Crossman spelt out the power of political parties and their limitations. Parties were great mobilising forces, and their myths were crucial to their mobilising power over activists. A myth for Labour was its bias to the poor.

I initially believed the myth, but as I slowly built up my notebooks at CPAG I found that I couldn't square the myth with the reality of the government measures taken since 1964 - ones that I measured against protecting the poor. The reinvention of CPAG came from the document I drafted from material in those notebooks. Hence the memorandum's almost total repositioning of CPAG as an independent campaign for the poor that did not fear any government if it meant that the interests of the poor were at stake. I knew that blowing up Labour's central myth on its protection of the poor was political dynamite.

Peter Townsend and I were ushered into Crossman's room in the Cabinet Office. There before us was a polished table that looked the size of a football pitch. On Crossman's right was Brian Abel-Smith, along with Peter one of the central figures of the Titmice. He was much cleverer than Peter and had been the great innovator in health statistics and health policy ever since he joined the LSE from Cambridge.

Nothing could have prepared me for what followed. Crossman launched into Peter, attacking the document, shaking the document, shouting about the document and threatening him. How could we make such absurd claims that the poor were getting poorer under Labour?

Peter was sweating profusely and I witnessed Brian Abel-Smith sitting at his ring-side seat sniggering. It was an appalling sight for here were two friends who had done much to resurrect the poverty debate. The roaring continued. The table was banged. The one thing that Crossman didn't do was swing on the huge chandelier whose light fell on that extraordinarily well-polished table.

After three-quarters of an hour of this 'conversation' we left with Crossman roaring at us.

'What are you going to do with this?'

'We are going to publish it,' was my reply to Crossman's jeering. The Times already had a copy and we would see whether we were believed or not.

As we left, Brian Abel-Smith, in a snake-like manner, moved to our side and started talking to me about the tax threshold. I hadn't a clue about what he was muttering to me. In trying to draft the memorandum I discovered that no one on CPAG's executive committee could work out the clawback proposals that were central to the group's reform. I sensed we were in trouble. Since its first memorandum the group had proposed increasing family allowances (as cash benefit to families was then known) and clawing the increase back through child tax allowances from taxpayers who could reduce their tax liability by claiming their child tax allowances.

The group's weakness, of not understanding how the technicalities of its central reform operated, acted as a cover. What Abel-Smith was alerting us to, when muttering 'tax threshold, tax threshold.' out of the corner of his mouth, was that the point at which tax was being levied on income was below the tax threshold. Hence any increase in family allowances clawed back by adjusting child tax allowances would take the increase away from many families who were below what was beginning to be thought of as the official poverty line. But as the group did not understand the importance of this point, neither did almost anybody else in the country. Hence the...