Harold Wilson

Biography

James Harold Wilson was born on March 11, 1916, in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. He was the son of an industrial chemist and a teacher, educated on scholarship at Wirral Grammar School and then at Jesus College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and graduated with first-class honours. He became the youngest don at Oxford, and his early career was defined by extraordinary intellectual precocity. Wilson became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in October 1964, leading a Labour government that promised modernization and social democracy. By 1967, however, his government was facing serious economic difficulties — the pound was under pressure, and devaluation was looming. In this context, the Nigerian Civil War presented Wilson with a dilemma that he resolved in favour of strategic interest over humanitarian concern. Britain supplied the Nigerian federal government with weapons, ammunition, and military advisors throughout the civil war. The justification was that Nigeria was a major Commonwealth member, that British oil interests in the Niger Delta were substantial, and that the alternative — a fragmented Nigeria in which Soviet influence might fill the vacuum — was unacceptable. Wilson insisted publicly that the arms supplies were not enabling the starvation blockade and that reports of famine were exaggerated. The British position was the most consequential foreign policy decision of the war. Without British diplomatic cover and weapons supplies, it is doubtful that Nigeria could have sustained the blockade against international pressure. Britain blocked serious UN discussion of the conflict, abstained from humanitarian interventions that might have forced open food corridors, and consistently supported Nigerian sovereignty over the right of the Biafran population to receive food aid. Wilson's Biafra policy remains among the most criticized aspects of his government's record. The images of starving Biafran children appeared in British newspapers and on British television while Wilson's government supplied the weapons that enforced the blockade. He lost the 1970 general election — the same year the war ended — to Edward Heath. He returned as Prime Minister from 1974 to 1976.

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