Gwilym Roberts
Energetic Labour MP who championed a minimum wage but considered pop music ‘deadly’
GWILYM ROBERTS, who has died aged 89, was an eloquent Labour MP for South Bedfordshire and later for Cannock, who combined a fundamentalist Socialism with a torrent of reforming ideas.
His one immediate success was his Bill, passed unopposed in 1976, to raise the minimum age for purchasing fireworks from 13 to 16, increase penalties for selling them to children and ban the sale of jumping crackers. He continued to campaign for a virtual ban on garden fireworks after leaving the Commons.
In much of his campaigning, Roberts proved ahead of his time. Necessity eventually forced Home Office ministers to drop the minimum height for recruits to the police, against which he had long argued.
Economic and demographic pressures brought an end to the different pension ages for men and women – though levelled up, not down as he proposed in several Bills, one introduced as Roy Jenkins waited to deliver his 1969 Budget. “The whole House will be seething, but I shall not keep them long”, he said.
Compulsory wearing of crash helmets, the minimum wage, the National Lottery, a referendum on Welsh devolution – which he opposed – and a May Day public holiday were all suggested by Roberts years before their adoption. But successive governments remained unconvinced of the case for an eight-day Christmas and New Year holiday, or keeping prices down by banning the advertising of items such as soap that people had to buy anyway.
Nor did his campaigning for single-class trains, for Gibraltar to become an English county, drug tests in schools, single messes for all Service ranks, a National Refuse Corporation to make an asset out of rubbish, a ban on pre-christmas toy advertising, moving Parliament to the Midlands or a weekend ban on L-drivers come to fruition.
Roberts was an early campaigner against ministerial patronage through the network of quangos, after attending a Whitehall meeting where the great and the good ran through their appointments and speculated on their next. But quangos continued to proliferate, despite the occasional cull.
Roberts stood apart from the Left at Westminster because of his awareness as a management expert of realities that his colleagues ignored. When Harold Wilson reshuffled his Cabinet in 1967, Roberts observed: “I would have expected a management economist like Mr Wilson to tend much more towards specialisation” by leaving ministers longer in their posts.
Nor was he a knee-jerk rebel. Though hyperactive in his first year, speaking 300 times, he abstained only once, reckoning the practice “ridiculous”. And despite his opposition to the Vietnam War, he was one of the few Left-wingers to appreciate Wilson’s success in keeping Britain out.
Roberts’s grounding in statistics – and a previous consultancy for Littlewoods – gave him a second string as a football pools expert. As Tom Craig he wrote weekly columns of permutations for newspapers and the Competitors’ Journal. Shortly before the 1970 election, in which he lost his first seat, two punters each won £70,000 following his system.
A decade later his voice was heard over the tannoy in a Staffordshire betting shop, not offering tips but conversing with a constituent. The Post Office put it down to a crossed line; Roberts suspected a phone tap gone wrong.
He had the distinction of asking the very first question when regular radio broadcasting of the Commons began in April 1978: to the Welsh Secretary, John Morris. He was soon complaining that broadcasts made the House sound like the “fourth form at St Trinians”.
Much effort in his first seat went into trying to tackle low productivity and pay anomalies at Vauxhall. He urged Ray Gunter, Minister of Labour, and Tony Benn to look into shop stewards’ ideas for raising productivity, and failed to interest Barbara Castle in probing the company’s arcane pay structure.
In 1967 Roberts got into a public argument with Rootes over the future of its van plant at Dunstable. He went public on local management’s plans to expand, only for them to be disowned by the parent company.
Gwilym Edffrwd Roberts was born in North Wales on August 7 1928, the son of William and Jane Roberts. From Brynrefail Grammar School at the foot of Snowdon, he read Economics and Maths at the University College of Wales, Bangor, and in 1957 took a BSC in Industrial Management at City University, London.
He combined a career as a polytechnic and university lecturer – at Hendon College by the time he won his first seat – with practice as a business analyst, economic forecaster and consultant in market and operational research.
Joining the Labour Party in 1953, Roberts was a councillor at Ormskirk, where he stood in the 1959 election. After Labour’s heavy defeat he grabbed the party’s attention with a conference speech urging it to return to Socialist fundamentals rather than “appease” public opinion.
After fighting Conway in 1964, he put down roots in Luton, winning a seat on the council and in 1966 capturing South Bedfordshire from the Conservatives.
Two years later he appealed to the Postmaster-general, John Stonehouse, to ban continuous pop music on Radio 1 because he and many constituents were getting headaches. He told the Commons that pop was a “new and deadly opium of the masses”, ruining young people’s mental health.
Roberts was a leading light in the campaign to site London’s third airport at Foulness, rather than Wing or Thurleigh on the fringes of his constituency. Marching with Robert Maxwell in 1969 against the Wing proposal, he described the choice of a site near Aylesbury as “stark raving bonkers”.
One of 100 MPS to demand cancellation of the 1970 South African cricket tour, Roberts was one of only five listing cricket as a recreation in Who’s Who.
In 1970 the Conservative David Madel defeated Roberts convincingly. Within a year he was selected for Cannock, where Aneurin Bevan’s widow Jennie Lee had been narrowly unseated. In the February election he stormed home by 11,064 votes as Labour returned to power.
This time round he was less vocal, partly because for three years from 1976 he was PPS to the industry ministers. But he nevertheless claimed that potatoes were being hoarded to push the price up, questioned why the fugitive Ronald Biggs had been entertained on HMS Danae off Rio, and complained that 12-year-old boys were helping to scrub and holystone Hermes under a Royal Navy “Sons at Sea” programme.
When the constituency was redrawn as Cannock and Burntwood in 1983 at the nadir of Labour’s fortunes, Roberts lost to the Conservative Gerald Howarth, failing to win it back four years later. He served on Cannock Chase council for 19 years, from 1992 to 1999 as its leader, and intermittently up to 2009 on Staffordshire county council.
Roberts had also been a director of South Staffordshire Healthcare NHS Trust and vice-president of the Institute of Statisticians.
Gwilym Roberts married Mair Griffiths in 1954; she predeceased him and they had no children.
Gwilym Roberts, born August 7 1928, died March 18 2018