Castle of Blackburn, Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness

▪ 2003

  British politician (b. Oct. 6, 1910, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, Eng.—d. May 3, 2002, Ibstone, Buckinghamshire, Eng.), was a staunch socialist and longtime Labour MP (1945–79) who fought for and won a series of social reforms, but her attempt to legislate sweeping changes to the powerful trade unions ended in ignominious defeat in 1969 and helped to split the Labour Party. Castle was born Barbara Betts, the daughter of a socialist tax inspector. While studying at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, on a scholarship, she became active in Labour Party politics. After graduating with a disappointing third-class degree, she worked as a journalist on the left-wing weekly Tribune and on the Daily Mirror, whose night editor, Ted Castle, she later married. Barbara Castle was elected to Parliament in 1945; she quickly became a force in the socialist wing of the Labour Party and gained a new nickname, the “Red Queen” (for both her red hair and her fiery speeches). As a cabinet minister in Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government, her triumphs far outnumbered her defeats. As minister of transport (1965–68), she expanded road building, deflected a railway strike, and introduced mandatory seat belts and the Breathalyzer to test for drunk drivers; as secretary of state for employment and productivity (1968–70), she pushed through the Equal Pay Act; and as secretary of state for social services (1974–76), she instituted a plan to tie state pensions to income and ensured that child benefits would be paid directly to the mother rather than being included in the father's paycheck. In 1969 she issued a devastating White Paper, In Place of Strife, which called for the modernization of trade unions. Union leadership fiercely opposed any changes (even some Castle considered pro-labour), and union power within the Labour Party prevailed. Prime Minister James Callaghan, a longtime Labour opponent, dismissed her from the cabinet in 1976. Three years later, despite having opposed Britain's entry into the Common Market, Castle was elected to the European Parliament, where she remained a leading socialist until her retirement in 1989. Castle published two volumes of her extensive diaries (in 1980 and 1984), a 1987 biography of suffragists Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, and an autobiography, Fighting All the Way (1993). She was granted a life peerage in 1990.

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