The Battle for Britain: Citizenship and Ideology in the Second World War

The battle for Britain This book re-assesses the impact of the Second World War upon changes in ideology and social policy in Britain. In particular, it analyses the mixed and often contradictory pressures which influenced the formation of a postwar social democratic ‘consensus’ and the expansion of citizenship under a welfare state. However, whilst offering a sociological history of the period, the analysis is framed by a critique of the Thatcher years which have castigated in principle and all but dismantled in practice postwar social reforms. In retrospect, the authors suggest that the postwar consensus represented an ideological deviation in the history of British class politics. Its peculiar achievement was to assimilate the spirit of wartime radicalism into programmes of reconstruction that inhibited radical change and prefigured a return to right-wing policies and the ruling assumptions of the past. Alert and timely, this book will be read by historians, sociologists, political scientists and others interested in contemporary Britain. The book will make a useful contribution to current debates about citizenship. But most importantly it will raise further questions about the nature and extent of the so-called postwar consensus and its origins…. Important and challenging. Robert Moore, Professor of Sociology, Liverpool University David Morgan is director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Kent. Mary Evans teaches Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Kent.

The battle for Britain Citizenship and ideology in the Second World War

David Morgan and Mary Evans

London and New York

First published 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © David Morgan and Mary Evans, 1993 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Morgan, David, 1942– The battle for Britain: citizenship and ideology in the Second World War / David Morgan and Mary Evans. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—1936–1945. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Great Britain—Influence. 3. Great Britain—Social conditions—20th century. 4. Reconstruction (1939–1951)—Great Britain. I. Evans, Mary, 1946– . II. Title. DA587.M63 1992 940.53' 1—dc20 92–11717 CIP ISBN 0-203-19151-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19154-4 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-01722-X (Print Edition)

Very frequently the world images created by ideas have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. From what and for what one wished to be redeemed and, let us not forget, could be redeemed, depend upon one’s image of the world. (Max Weber, The Social Psychology of the World Religions, 1915)

For Tom and Jamie

Contents Introduction: the road to 1984

1

1

Whose war?

11

2

Production for victory

27

3

Keeping the home fires burning

44

4

The spirit of the times

61

5

When the war is over

77

6

Reconstructions from the past

95

7

Postscript: On the political economy of citizenship

113

Bibliography

125

Name index

130

Subject index

134

Introduction

1

Introduction The road to 1984 Britain emerged from the Second World War bombed, exhausted and heavily in debt, yet with its empire, social structure and hierarchies of privilege largely intact. The British concluded that by winning the war their institutions had survived the ultimate test – that ‘somehow or other things in their own country were arranged much better than elsewhere in the world’.1 This confident belief sustained successive governments in their efforts to build a better society after the war. The agenda of that society was shaped by the war itself, by the struggle against fascism and the intolerance of Hitler’s Reich, and by the no less patriotic endeavours of ordinary people to create a future that was compassionate, open and fair. The staple properties of this new order were not in dispute: between the main political parties there was a broad commitment to full employment, social planning, prosperity and a measured redistribution of income and wealth. Popular aspirations for a more caring, egalitarian society found practical expression in plans for extended benefits under a ‘Welfare State’. Universal entitlements to free education, free medical care and a civilised standard of domestic life substantially enhanced the status of citizenship, establishing elementary principles of distributive justice as a democractic right. Yet the unstated premise of this liberal order took for granted that equality and efficiency are mutually compatible within a predominately capitalist state. Indeed, in some quarters, the war effort encouraged the utopian belief that greater equality would increase productivity through a fairer distribution of national wealth. It was an assumption that underwrote the corporate contract between governments and the trade unions which continued long after the war. Yet as Britain’s economic performance progressively declined, it was a belief that frustrated hopes and expectations on all sides. Those who grew up in postwar Britain had little sense that the foundations of this new society, with its National Health Service, welfare provisions and public housing estates, were laid on politically contested ground. The Labour government elected in 1945 had caught the mood of the country as wartime ideals were rapidly translated into popular programmes of social reform. For a time, the emerging compromise between corporatism, welfare democracy and private enterprise appeared to work: for over a decade it delivered a remarkable combination of full employment, low inflation and economic growth. Amongst older generations who recalled the Depression, the Household Means Test and the General Strike, there was every reason to suppose that with the defeat of fascism, Britain’s postwar reconstruction had achieved an irreversible break from the ruling assumptions and deprivations of the past. However, at the heart of this unfolding world lay a contradiction between the formal equality bestowed by newly acquired rights of citizenship and the persistence of economic inequalities rooted in the market-place. As the needs of capital became more competitive and increasingly global in their reach, the tensions around this contradiction became difficult to contain by political compromise and technical adjustments by the

The battle for Britain

2

State. Rising public and military expenditure added to the burdens of the economy which, by the 1960s, was conspicuously less efficient than the competing economies of Europe, the United States and Japan. A decade later, under the strains of a world recession, the postwar reconstruction began to collapse in acrimonious disputes between the chief defenders of the consensus, notably the trade unions, and a Labour administration elected in 1974. For the first time since the war, it was an opportunity for the Right to recapture the political initiative that had been to popular demands for a social democracy at the end of the Second World War. The return of a right-wing Conservative government in 1979 introduced a decade of change openly antagonistic to the postwar reconstruction and the politics of compromise. In the opinion of the New Right, the reconstruction undermined the very freedoms Britain had fought to defend. Instead of protecting individual liberties, the egalitarian ethic and corporate policies of successive postwar administrations had bureaucratised the economy, stifled the vitality of private enterprise and increased people’s dependence upon the state. These ‘socialist’ tendencies were held to be deeply implicated in the multiple problems of Britain’s economy and international decline.2 By contrast, the underlying dynamic of Thatcherism assumed that liberty and economic efficiency are inseparable from a free market economy and a strong state. It is a belief that underwrites the present unbending commitment to market forces, the privatisation of nationalised industries and stringent cuts in public expenditure and welfare support. Since the early 1980s, these policies have transformed standards of public morality and the political map. Gradually – though sometimes grudgingly – traditional Tory ideas of ‘One Nation’ have given way to an acquisitive culture of private enterprise, self-reliance and the assertive pursuit of property and wealth. Conservatives of an older school who retain a continuing attachment to a mixed economy, full employment and the corporate state, have been marginalised by the success of this ideological assault upon the social democratic values of postwar society and branded as ‘wets’. This attack upon the postwar reconstruction has sharpened attitudes towards the radical shifts that occurred in British society during the war itself. The war summarily pushed aside a fading Victorian legacy of natural liberty and laissez-faire that in a modern idiom Thatcherite policies have revitalised. In retrospect, the corporate postwar state with its vaguely socialist aspirations now appears from the Right as an ideological deviation from this former tradition that was eclipsed by an upsurge of popular radicalism between 1940 and 1945.3 It is here that we find the onset of those tendencies towards collectivism and corporate planning that modern Tories freely associate with socialism in all its forms. The de-stabilising pressures of war and their influence upon the postwar social reconstruction have thus assumed a strong contemporary relevance in the context of right-wing critiques of Britain’s wasting decline.4 From a different and somewhat less polemical perspective, the chapters in this book are linked by a related theme. Exposure to total war, we suggest, lit up as if by lightning divergent strains of vitality and resistance in British society which tempered the spirit of the war effort and the subsequent direction of social change. Amidst the realities and illusions of war, this characteristically English blend of insularity and innovation surfaced, we shall argue, in industry and labour relations, the position of women, attitudes to family life, and the culture of the war effort itself. Much the same strains coloured images of the ‘new society’ and the process of change. In particular, the

Introduction

3

patriotic front against Nazi Germany obscures a diversity of conflicting and cross-cutting interests both within and between political parties over plans for social reconstruction and reform. The emergent ‘consensus’ favoured a pragmatic, though weakly integrated compromise between corporatism, capitalism and the Welfare State that repudiated in principle but did little in practice to change the inequalities and privileged establishment of the past. Nevertheless, the massive swing to Labour in the general election of 1945 confirms that significant quantitative changes had occurred. The nature of these changes and, indeed, the impact of war in bringing them about, is still a matter of political and academic debate. Amongst academic historians, for instance, Marwick argues that the effects of war were so radical and far-reaching they should be compared to a ‘social and economic revolution’.5 On the other hand, Pelling claims the war was more or less irrelevant to postwar trends, most of which had their origins in the 1930s or before.6 A similiar conclusion, though from a different standpoint, is reached by Calder in his impressive study The People’s War,7 while Barnett takes the polemical view that the victory was lost to social instead of economic and industrial change.8 This book does not pretend to settle outstanding differences between the historical sources upon which we draw; rather it attempts to re-interpret the experience of the war as a contemporary social and historical fact that has shaped the nation’s perception of its past and throws into sharp relief the political preoccupations of the present time. At the time of writing, the nation is preparing to commemorate its ‘finest hour’. The fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain is a timely moment to recall that for the second time this century Britain emerged undefeated from a global war. Alone amongst major European nations, Britain escaped the shock and dislocation of enemy occupation that elsewhere fragmented social systems, bringing a sense of historical discontinuity and the potential for revolutionary renewal.9 In the British case, participation in two world wars radicalised the voice of the working class, projecting Labour from a minority party in 1914 to a popular government in 1945. Yet compared with revolutionary movements in societies elsewhere, Britain’s postwar reconstructions produced only mod-est social reforms. Moreover, the radical impetus for change was short-lived: as we suggest in chapter six, the ideological alignments of the Cold War cemented the connection between political freedom and a free market economy, thus strengthening the consensus against left-wing pressures for further change. That enduring sense of continuity, unbroken by revolution or invading powers that for so long maintained the insularity of the British ruling class, diffused and eventually defeated postwar expectations of a new and progressive age. By contrast, the defeat of Germany and the Axis powers passed into the political culture as a lasting affirmation of national solidarity and pride in all that is worth defending in the British way of life. All wars tend to leave behind a mythical tradition through which the contestants see their past. From the start, the war against Nazi Germany was presented as a struggle against the ‘forces of darkness’ that threatened civilised society, and British interests around the globe. Few doubted that Hitler’s grandiose schemes had to be stopped; however, there was little of the chauvinism that stoked the First World War, and no rush of volunteers. To a mostly conscript, working-class army, the war was legitimated by appealing to common beliefs in justice, equality and democracy – sentiments that ironically became part of the reality of the time. Meanwhile, Chamberlain and his government procrastinated in hope of a diplomatic settlement with the Third Reich.

The battle for Britain

4

When war was eventually declared, the news was greeted with resignation and uncertain relief. The Press said ‘Let’s get it over with’, and echoed Chamberlain’s belief that the German economy was all but exhausted and Hitler would shortly come to terms. Most people thought the Second World War would be a short affair. Officially, war was declared to honour a pledge to Poland by the allied governments of Britain and France. It was a pledge that carried little conviction within the British government, or the German High Command. Little could be done to help Poland by the autumn of 1939: in A.J.P. Taylor’s opinion, the declaration of war was ‘merely a diplomatic gesture’ to save British honour and the Government’s face.10 Chamberlain and his associates were still hoping for appeasement as Poland collapsed. The German invasion of the Low Countries and France in May 1940 shattered their complacent beliefs. Amidst recriminations, the equivocal stance of the Tory ‘old guard’ was openly discredited and Chamberlain was forced to resign. Churchill became prime minister on the day the Germans invaded France. Three weeks later, the British Expeditionary Force was driven on to the beaches of Dunkirk. Expecting the worst, the country braced itself for a disastrous rout. Yet the astonishing evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk was received more like a victory than a defeat. Some 225,000 British troops were rescued by the navy and a courageous flotilla of small craft. It was an ignominious end to the Anglo-French alliance – leaving the French feeling abandoned in their hour of need. Cut off from continental Europe and heavily dependent upon transAtlantic supplies, Britain now faced the threat of German invasion ill-equipped, without allies and exposed. The invasion was set for 15 September. With his attention already drawn towards Russia, Hitler prepared to negotiate a truce.11 But his appeal for ‘reason and commonsense’ was rejected with uncompromising defiance: on the brink of invasion, Churchill demanded nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender and immediate withdrawal from all occupied lands. It was a remarkable gesture that, in the wake of Dunkirk, quickened the pace of the war effort and lifted civilian morale. But in reality, Britain was ill-prepared for war. Industrially unmodernised and poorly armed, neither the economy nor the armed services were equipped to survive a lengthy campaign. Within a year, war had laid bare the vulnerability of a social system that was unable to defend or feed itself without massive transfusions of American aid.12 What had begun as a distant, rhetorical stand for freedom had turned into a perilous struggle in which British sovereignty and the Empire were now at risk. All through the summer of 1940, the Battle of Britain filled the skies above Kent and adjacent counties along the Channel coast. It was a prelude to the Luftwaffe’s indiscriminate bombing of English towns and cities in an effort to break civilian morale. Yet if anything, the Blitz had the unintended effect of strengthening social cohesion and national resolve. Despite devastating air attacks which continued throughout the war, the Battle of Britain was won and Hitler’s plans for invasion were indefinitely postponed. On the home front, the urgency of the war effort encouraged a spirit of collective endeavour and an appetite for change. It was a period of innovation and social renewal. The need for essential supplies brought full employment, rising wages, and new life to the rusting industries of Scotland, Wales and the North. Food rationing, conscription and shortages of all kinds established the principle of ‘fair shares for all’, while the need to control productive resources more or less rapidly transformed the economy with directives that resembled the centralised command of a socialist state. Amongst urban

Introduction

5

populations, the Blitz and mass evacuation revealed the squalor of inner cities and the hidden poverty of working-class life. Benefits were extended to the sick, the young and the old as the State accepted wider responsibilities for the quality of civilian life. With an immediacy that transcended – or at least muted – class antagonisms and party strife, the struggle against European fascism became inseparably linked with ideas of social democracy and equality at home. Other wars have mobilised populations, inspired inventions, new institutions and utopian ideas, yet the ideals raised by the Second World War appeared at the time as a quantum leap towards a more modern and civilised age. Under the pressures of war, a new set of priorities emerged which raised fundamental questions about the rights and expectations of working people, and how Britain as a nation should live. It was not a political revolution in any accepted sense – more a radical reaction to the past which transformed visions of the future and society’s image of itself. In particular, it was broadly acknowledged that the life chances of ordinary families should no longer solely depend upon market forces but that the state should ensure a minimum standard of living and the conditions for a productive and healthy life. Practical interpretations of this idea varied in emphasis, but there was a broad consensus that in an enlightened democracy it is unacceptable to leave people to the mercy of what Ernest Bevin called ‘the economic whip’. These ideas were seen at the time as opening a new era of citizenship and modernisation – a fresh start, blending accumulated experience with sweeping attacks upon vested interests of the past.13 The objectives of this movement were coloured by current images of Bolshevism and Fascism, as much as the weight of tradition and the exigencies of war. Ideologically, these alternatives pointed to the reconstruction of a middle ground, to which all the main political parties had previously laid some claim. Within pressure groups, working parties and committees in Whitehall, visions of postwar society were translated into competing manifestos, budgets and programmes of legislative reform. However, the shape of this new society found general accord: it was to be a social democracy, harnessing the energy and dynamic of capitalism to the welfare of the people as a whole. The pernicious and destabilising excesses of capitalism would be tamed by broadly Keynesian strategies, while publicly-managed programmes of distributive justice would balance individual freedoms with the common good. It was patriotic and unashamedly utopian, yet during the war two basic assumptions were established which continue to distinguish the postwar consensus from the politics of the Right. Firstly, in assuming corporate responsibility for the welfare of its citizens, it was accepted that the state should actively intervene in the management of social and economic life. Secondly, it was acknowledged that social and economic problems are interrelated and thus have to be tackled by comprehensive planning, rather than left to market forces or treated ad hoc.14 Neither assumption was in any way new: the idea of a planned and expertly managed social democracy had been a convergent theme in European political thought for a century or more. Nor was social planning and state intervention without precedent in Britain: though alien to prevailing ideas of laissez-faire, it had covertly evolved as an instrument of economic and social policy since the beginning of the Great War.15 However, the challenges and corporate spirit of the war effort elevated planning to new heights: it was seen as an indispensable condition of victory, and beyond that, as the key

The battle for Britain

6

to a fair and efficient society when the war was won. ‘Democracy’ and ‘science’ became the watchwords of this promising new world. Expert committees applied the principles of scientific management to the reconstruction of education, employment, social security, medical care, housing, urban development, the countryside, leisure, and much else besides. An optimistic sense of what could be done fused with scientific realism to extend the possibilities of democracy beyond the receding horizons of the past. But it would be mistaken to suppose that this tide of enthusiasm carried all before it. As we shall see, dissenting voices were raised against the very idea of social planning and the state’s encroachment on social life. For some, a ‘rationally planned democracy’ seemed a contradiction in terms: planning presupposed government intervention and the consequent erosion of individual liberties and freedom of choice. This was reason enough for advocating the return to a free market economy, and even for the relaxation of ‘essential’ wartime controls. Again, the belief that the Welfare State would ‘take the country half way to Moscow’ was common amongst reactionary Conservatives and the libertarian Right. Others, while not opposed to specific reforms which would benefit the working class, were fearful of the general direction of change. Their anxieties were caught, for instance, by George Orwell who foresaw in the tightening mesh of state controls a future that was progressively ugly, totalitarian and grey. Equally agnostic but more sophisticated critics, such as Hayek, questioned the supposedly ‘rational’ link between theory – particularly economic theory – and social planning, arguing that the underlying premises of corporate planning were necessarily ideological rather than rational and scientific.16 At a more mundane level, it was reasonable to ask how the country, depleted after war, could finance apparently open-ended reforms without punitive increases in taxes on incomes and corporate wealth. But these voices, though often articulate, were overwhelmed by an optimistic sense of common purpose eager for change. A flood of wartime White Papers and reports stimulated public debate and later informed the massive legislative programme – beginning with the Education Act of 1944 – that over the next six years brought essential industries under public control and founded the National Health Service and the Welfare State. However, that feeling of pulling together upon which hopes for the future were pinned began to evaporate when confused by the more complex and sombre realities of peacetime. The extension of wartime controls which rationed austerity in the high street offered cold comfort to those who thought victory would bring prosperity as well as peace. In spite of this, electoral support for the postwar Labour government numerically increased;17 but by the end of the decade its radical spirit was almost spent. Just as the sweep of wartime radicalism had shifted the centre of gravity within the Conservative Party further to the left, so by degrees the constraints of the emerging postwar ‘consensus’ pushed Labour’s leadership further to the right. By the early 1950s, both parties were beginning to show signs of ideological splits, effectively fusing their common ground against the relative extremes of the Socialist Left and the incipient regrouping of the Tory Right. By the 1960s, there was little effective difference between the major parties whilst in power.18 The entrenchment of the Cold War had consolidated broad agreement on foreign policy and defence, whilst domestic priorities were constrained by Britain’s ailing economic decline. As successive Labour and Conservative governments struggled with balance of payments crises, inflation and industrial unrest, wartime hopes of achieving a

Introduction

7

working balance between equality and economic efficiency faded into a minority cause of the Labour Left. On other issues, however, the Left emerged as a significant extraParliamentary voice. Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent attracted a broad spectrum of radical dissent to CND. Later, the student movement and the war in Vietnam globalised domestic issues into an angry protest against the entire capitalist system of the industrial West. The electorate was not ready for this: it had little understanding of radical politics, and even less sympathy for long-haired demonstrators who confronted the police. Alarmed by these militant tendencies, the Labour leadership distanced itself from left-wing factions, deepening splits within the Party which was accused – and not just by the Tory press – of being in the grip of Marxists and the hard Left. Equally alarmed, and facing the prospect of recession and falling profits, the business community called for government intervention against militant trade unionists and tighter controls on wages and costs. By the mid 1970s it was clear that the credibility of the postwar consensus was being undermined by unsustainable compromises on all sides. Accelerating inflation, world recession and Britain’s competitive decline presented a set of political choices which openly challenged the ideological assumptions of social democracy not only in Britain but elsewhere in the western bloc.19 For the Right, it was the first real opportunity since the war to advance radical alternatives to Keynesian strategies of economic management and the political order that had prevailed for thirty years. The election of Maragaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 marked the end of the postwar consensus. Her rejection of ‘One Nation’ Toryism associated with Churchill, Macmillan and Heath divided the Party but united disparate elements of the ‘New Right’.20 As the centre finally collapsed in a ‘winter of discontent’, Mrs Thatcher promised a new reconstruction to restore a free market economy and a strong state, ‘not merely to put a temporary block on socialism but’, as she said, ‘to stop its onward march once and for all’.21 Yet socialism had never been on the agenda. The legislative programme of the 1945 Labour Government had done little more than translate the aims of the Second World War into accessible social rights. The election manifestos of the Conservative and Liberal Parties had promised much the same reforms – as, indeed, had Churchill’s Coalition during the war. None of the major parties called for the nationalisation of financial institutions, private assets or land, nor for that matter, the abolition of inherited privilege or the public schools. The principal architects of postwar society were not radical socialists but – in the case of Beveridge and Keynes – Liberals by party affiliation and belief. Their idea of reform was not to abolish capitalism but to render the system more efficient and humane by balancing private interests with the public good. The enormous appeal of this vision in the midst of war created a contraflow, forcing the pace of modernisation against outmoded assumptions of shopkeeper Toryism and procrustean attachments to laissez-faire. But the same momentum rallied to a common cause those who believed the war had been fought to defend freedoms of a less liberal sort. Even before the war was over, reactionary elements were fighting back to keep established patterns of order and authority intact. A generation later, the social democractic experiment with its corporate and liberal values presented a broad target on which to pin Britain’s postwar decline. Inflation, rising crime rates and the erosion of traditional patterns of family life were grist to an ideological mill which advocated a return to free market individualism and the discipline of self-reliance. With the ascendancy of

The battle for Britain

8

Thatcherism, the wheel appeared to have come full circle as a triumphant right-wing government challenged the postwar political economy and the extension of citizenship by reasserting the ‘true’ principles of Toryism against the compromises and dependency of the ‘socialist years’. The hegemonic aspirations of Mrs Thatcher’s project have been analysed in a spate of studies over the last few years.22 The following chapters look back to the no less radical transition when the very different priorities of the nation at war pushed aside the values of this older Tory order in favour of a society which places the welfare of ordinary citizens above transient interests in the market place. Visions of this new society were formed as much by the hardships of the inter-war years as the aims and experience of total war. As we shall see, the variant of ‘democratic-welfare-capitalism’ which emerged proved an unstable compound, yet its underlying premise was never seriously in dispute: for the next thirty years, there was a broad consensus that unregulated market forces do not optimise socially productive resources or satisfy acceptable standards of welfare in meeting human need. It is the legacy of these wartime ideals that has been vigorously challenged – once again in the guise of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ – by Thatcherism and a resurgent new Right.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 H. Pelling, Britain and the Second World War (London, Fontana, 1970), p. 326. 2 According to Sir Keith Joseph, the postwar reconstruction infected British society with six ‘poisons’ which he claims have progressively undermined the economy: egalitarianism, an anti-enterprise culture, nationalisation, excessive government spending, high direct taxation and a politicised trade union movement. See P. Donaldson, A Question of Economics (London, Penguin, 1985), p. 194. 3 See R. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher (London, Fontana, 1985). 4 In an influential diagnosis of Britain’s decline, Correlli Barnett argues ‘Its root causes do not lie in the postwar era, as some have argued. Nor did it derive from the unfair fate, which according to later popular myth, penalised the victor and favoured the vanquished. Britain’s postwar decline began in wartime British dreams, illusions and realities’. The Audit of War (London, Macmillan, 1986), p. 8. 5 A. Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War (London, The Bodley Head, 1968). See also R. Titmuss in Problems of Social Policy (London, HMSO and Longmans, 1951). 6 H. Pelling, Britain and the Second World War (London, Fontana, 1970). 7 Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, Panther, 1971). 8 Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War (London, Macmillan, 1986). 9 For instance, the collapse of the Eastern Front in 1917 set in motion the Russian Revolution. Defeat and invasion in the First World War produced the Spartakist rising in Germany, the Bavarian Communist Government and the social-democratic dominance in the Weimar Republic. The occupation of France and Greece, and the military campaigns in Italy from 1943–5, produced politicised resistance movements with pronounced socialist-communist tendencies, while the occupation of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania was followed by Soviet-inspired revolutionary governments after 1945. 10 A.J.P. Taylor, The Second World War (New York, Paragon Books, 1979), p. 36. 11 Hitler had long regarded the British Empire as one of ‘the cornerstones of Western civilisation’ and Britain as a potential ally. He had no wish for a war with Britain and was prepared for a settlement on favourable terms. See Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London, Penguin, 1962), pp. 588–9.

Introduction

9

12 Under an arrangement known as ‘Lend-Lease’, the United States supplied Britain with armaments, food, machine tools and financial aid worth approximately £27 billion during the Second World War. 13 At the time, these proposals were seen as genuinely revolutionary. Referring to his own report on social insurance, Beveridge claimed, ‘A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching’. Quoted by Jose Harris in William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 420. 14 In marked contrast, Mrs Thatcher’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, summed up the Cabinet’s attitude to state intervention and economic planning when he announced ‘the business of government is not the government of business’. His statement was made following the stock market crash of 1987. 15 Especially during the 1930s, the Government’s commitment to laissez-faire relaxed to allow a degree of intervention and rationalisation in ship building, the mining industry, textiles and the railways. Nationally owned corporations were established in broadcasting, air passenger transport, electricity production and supply, whilst in agriculture, farmers were cushioned from the devasting effects of market forces by price regulations and quotas. See J. Stevenson, ‘A Planner’s Moon?’ in H.L. Smith (ed.) War and Social Change (Manchester University Press, 1986) pp. 58–77. 16 F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London, G. Routledge & Sons, 1944). 17 In the 1950 general election, Labour support increased by almost one million votes above the poll of 1945, but its majority over the Conservatives was cut by sixty seats. The electorate had broadly endorsed Attlee’s brand of social democracy and economic growth, but the support of middle class voters was beginning to fall away. 18 On matters of economic and social policy, Labour consistently emphasised the need for greater social investment, whereas the Tories continued to give more weight to private consumption. In practice, however, these differences were largely rhetorical rather than matters of substance. 19 Similiar challenges were launched in Australia, New Zealand and especially in the United States, where the American Right closed ranks behind Reagan’s attack upon ‘the Great Society’ and its liberal reforms. 20 The ‘New Right’ is new only in so far as it has brought together disparate factions and pressure groups opposed to the idea of welfare democracy and the collectivist solutions of the postwar reconstruction. Most of these groups cluster around one of two ideologically related positions. The ‘Libertarian Right’ is committed to ‘rolling back the State’ in favour of free market individualism and is thus opposed to most forms of state intervention, especially in the economy. During the Second World War this tendency was represented by numerous antigovernment splinter groups, such as the National League for Freedom, Aims of Industry, the Society of Individualists, whose leading members – mostly industrialists and businessmen – were fearful of wartime controls being extended and imposed upon civil society after the war. Their cause was continued by the Institute of Economic Affairs (founded in 1957) and more recently by numerous right-wing policy units, including the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. On the other hand, the ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’ Right goes back to Tory traditions associated with Salisbury and Balfour. Against the political pluralism and moral tolerance associated with postwar social democracy, this strand aims to restore social and public order throughout all levels of society and thus supports an authoritarian interventionist state. The Salisbury Group is currently the most influential and articulate advocate of this position which is more crudely represented by the Monday Club and favoured by various anticommunist, cold war organisations, such as the Institute for the Study of Conflict. Although the membership and sponsorship of these organisations overlap, it is mistaken to assume the new Right presents a single, coherent ideology, for whilst one faction opposes state interference in civil society, the other favours highly centralised and politically directive government. Both

The battle for Britain

10

strands are represented under Thatcherism which demands, without apparent inconsistency, a free market economy and freedom of individual choice with unquestioning compliance to the moral standards of the State. 21 Quoted in the Guardian, 21 December 1988. 22 See Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, The Politics of Thatcherism (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1983); Dennis Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987); Philip Norton and Arthur Aughey, Conservatives and Conservatism (London, Temple Smith, 1987); Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State (London, Macmillan, 1988).

Whose war?

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Chapter 1 Whose war? From the very beginning, the war against Hitler’s Germany was presented to the British people as a fight against tyranny and the destruction of civilised ways of life. In that respect, the confrontation was as much ideological as territorial. Chamberlain’s broadcast to the nation at the outbreak of war was unequivocal in its condemnation of National Socialism: ‘It is evil things that we shall be fighting against: brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution’.1 Against this, Britain stood in defence of liberty, democracy and the rule of law. Unlike the politically complicated alliances that drew Britain into the First World War, the reasons for engagement were readily understood: it was a ‘just’ war that would allow no compromise short of Hitler’s unconditional surrender and the restoration throughout occupied Europe of democracy and civil rights. The war against the loose alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan was thus much more than a conflict of economic interests and military might. It is true that during the 1930s the imperialist aspirations of the Axis powers extended across Eastern Europe, North Africa, China and the Far East, but territorial incursions were not in themselves a justification for war: Britain and the United States were largely content with the world as it was. German fascism, however, was a threat of quite a different kind: it challenged the moral order of western democracy, repudiating international conventions and the contractual basis of consent. Nazi occupation brought exploitation, servitude, the loss of liberty and human rights. For Jews, gypsies, communists and liberals brave enough to dissent, life itself was at risk. Within Germany, opposition parties had been destroyed, trade union leaders imprisoned and free speech had ceased. Jews and other minorities had been expelled from public life and their property attacked. These acts of political violence were rendered all the more abhorrent by bizarre beliefs in the supremacy of the German race. The atrocities committed in the name of National Socialism were well known to foreign governments and widely reported in the world’s press. But apart from diplomatic protests, the British government was no more willing to intervene against Hitler than it had been against Franco and the fascists in Spain. Its response was based upon the optimistic if guarded belief that by acquiescing to Hitler’s territorial claims, the German threat could be ‘contained’. In 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich having conceded the partition of Czechoslovakia to announce an agreement with Hitler that would give ‘Peace with honour…. Peace in our time’. It was not the first nor the last occasion that the British government tried to appease the Third Reich, but it was the only time an understanding had apparently been reached. Hitler personally regarded the Munich Agreement as a diplomatic nuisance,2 but at home it was greeted with enthusiasm and relief by all except minority opinion on the British Left. Enough was known of Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s regime in Spain for the Left to recognise that the defeat of

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fascism was a priority, and a priority that called for a united front. As G.D.H. Cole wrote in 1937, In the present state of the world I, as a socialist, am fully prepared to collaborate in preventing war with non-socialists who believe that it is possible to preserve the institutions of liberal democracy and to use them to a peaceful advance. I want socialism to come, if it can come, peacefully and not by violence; and most urgently of all I want to stand shoulder to shoulder with everyone who hates Fascism, with its exhaltation of militarism and its determination to supress every liberal movement.3 Public opinion swung in favour of a more decisive stand when Hitler annexed the rump of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939. Those who had expected ‘appeasement’ to work now had to accept the reality of the Nazi threat. In response to Hitler’s manifest bad faith, the British and French governments guaranteed the independence of Romania and Poland, and Britain hastily stepped up preparations for war. The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 confronted the British Government with a diplomatic and political crisis. Chamberlain tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Poles to accede to Hitler’s demands, and still appeared to be seeking a negotiated settlement rather than go to war. On 2 September, Chamberlain addressed the House of Commons in such a way as to suggest that another Munich agreement might be under consideration. His reluctance to take a stand against Hitler angered Labour and Liberal MPs. Arthur Greenwood, Labour’s Deputy Leader, asked the House of Commons, ‘I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate, at a time when Britain and all Britain stands for, and human civilisation are in peril?’ Greenwood’s speech rallied both sides of the House of Commons. Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary, The House gasped for one moment in astonishment. Was there to be another Munich after all? Then Greenwood got up. The disappointment at the P. M.’s statement, the sense that appeasement had come back, vented itself in the reception of Greenwood. His own people cheered, as was natural; but what was so amazing was that their cheer was taken up in a second and greater wave from our benches. Bob Boothby (sic)4 cried out, ‘You speak for Britain’. It was an astonishing demonstration. Greenwood almost staggered with suprise. It was a crucial moment for the Labour movement. The bitter antagonisms of the preceeding years – the General Strike, the Household Means Test, the violation of trade union rights – were set aside. In a quite unprecedented moment, the Labour Party became associated with everything that was valued and worth fighting for in the British way of life. The appeasers and the ‘guilty men of Munich’ were left vulnerable and exposed. Even Chamberlain and his close associates recognised that some kind of watershed had been reached. On the following day, Sunday, 3 September, he announced on the radio that the nation was at war. Nicolson’s anecdote illustrates just how fluid ideological alliances had become by the beginning of the war. Opposition to Nazi Germany united left-wing and moderate

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opinion on a common front. Others much further to the right had equally patriotic reasons for supporting the war. Calder summarises these diverse interests that converged with the onset of war: At this stage only the most literal-minded Englishman could have believed he had gone to war for Poland. There was, by now, some purpose in this for everyone. Jews, of course, had a special stake in the struggle; but anti-semitic right wing patriots hated Hitler as a reincarnation of Kaiser Wilhelm, if nothing worse, and fought to defend the British Empire from the Huns. Catholics, after the Nazi Soviet pact, could deceive themselves for a while that they were fighting Russia, and most Christians identified Nazism with paganism. Conservatives fought to conserve Britain’s power; Liberals on behalf of liberty; Socialists to preserve the modest gains of trade unionism.5 It is not suprising that the Second World War remains such a potent symbol of validation for all shades of opinion in British political life. Here was a grossly inegalitarian and socially divided capitalist society prepared to suspend domestic conflicts to defend common beliefs in freedom, equality and democracy against a foreign and no less divided capitalist power. There is little doubt that ordinary people detested Hitler and his fascist Reich, but such feelings did not obscure the fact that the freedoms people were asked to defend in the name of democracy and liberty were often more rhetorical than real. The same freedoms had been invoked in justification for the First World War, yet poverty, unemployment, illness and social deprivations had stalked the working population since the end of that war. The ‘land fit for heroes’ promised to volunteers had proved to be at least as inhospitable and insecure as British society immediately before the Great War.6 When the TUC conference voted in 1939 in favour of war, it was a vote against fascism, not an expression of solidarity with the ruling class. Trade union leaders had repeatedly urged the Government to make a determined stand against Hitler and were suspicious of its motives for delaying so long. Indeed, without a firm commitment against fascism, the TUC was reluctant to support increased production of arms, fearing these might be sold to fascists in Italy and Spain. Furthermore, Labour leaders remembered with bitterness the fortunes made from armament contracts during the First World War. So deep was their distrust of the Government and its financial backers that to win their co-operation, Chamberlain had to promise to tax ‘excess profits’ in the event of another war.7 Labour’s hostility to the National Government was not unexpected in view of the experiences of working people between the wars. Chamberlain personified the interests of capital, while his complicity in the invasion of Czechoslovakia and his last-minute equivocation over Poland, damaged his government’s credibility on both sides of the House. However, while a war to stop Hitler was hailed as a just and necessary cause, wider comparisons between British and German society were morally less clear-cut. For many on the Left, it was a case of defending what C. Day Lewis described as ‘the bad’ against ‘the worse’. But for others, including many Conservatives on the Right, the rise of National Socialism and a war with Germany was seen in a rather different light. Throughout the 1930s, Hitler had been admired as a dynamic leader, a champion of

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capitalism and a committed enemy of Bolshevism and trade union power. He had revitalised the German economy, overcome problems of inflation and unemployment and restored a sense of direction and national pride. As Bullock says, it was an impressive record: by the beginning of the war, Germany had recovered from the depths of depression to become one of the best-equipped industrial nations in the world.8 Furthermore, there was some sympathy for Hitler’s efforts to unite German-speaking peoples and redress the grievances that had festered since the Treaty of Versailles. Even though his racist policies were formally deplored, they presented no evident threat to Britain and the Empire that justified full-scale war. From this point of view, a confrontation with Germany made rather less sense than a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union. Here was an undisputed opponent of capitalism, dedicated to world revolution, and an ideologically disturbing influence in home affairs. As it appeared from the Right, ‘appeasement’ avoided alienating Germany as a potential ally against the greater menace of communist influence in the West. It is uncertain whether Chamberlain and his advisors were ahead of their time in their efforts to reach a diplomatic solution to the tensions in Europe, or simply irresolute and naïve. Clearly, Chamberlain was mindful of the Bolshevik threat and thus the risks of open confrontation amongst western European states. After his popular reception in Munich, he might well have been persuaded that Hitler could be appeased. On more than one later occasion, Hitler expressed regret that Germany should be at war with Britain, particularly as he had long thought of Britain as a natural ally and friend.9 Until the summer of 1939, a war with Britain must have seemed unlikely; after all, Britain was linked to Germany by dynastic ties, and as the policy of ‘appeasement’ suggests, influential sections of British opinion were drawn towards a settlement that would leave Hitler free to consolidate German hegemony in the East. Even after war was declared, Hitler retained lingering hopes of an Anglo-German alliance.10 There was at least an element of truth in Nazi propaganda that, up to the moment war was declared, Britain’s position appeared weak and ideologically confused. Allied objections to Germany’s treatment of minorities and subject peoples provoked jibes of hypocrisy which could not be lightly dismissed. Britain had shown little concern for the fate of German Jewry while trying to reach an understanding before 1939. Moreover, Britain ruled a colonial empire with an unshakeable belief in the racial and cultural superiority of the British Raj. As for the United States, the black minority was discriminated against and largely unrepresented in the political process and public life; whilst in France, women were virtually without any legal and political rights until 1945. But above all, there were affinities between Britain and Germany in their opposition to communism and their suspicions of the USSR: in Hitler’s view, it was only Britain’s obduracy in failing to recognise these common interests that frustrated an alliance. With the onset of hostilities, both sides drew upon a potent sense of their nation’s history to give coherence and meaning to the war. In particular, each constructed an idealised image of their common people – ordinary, decent, productive citizens for whom and by whom the war was being fought. In both cases, the meaning given to these populist ideals was closely linked to the idea of freedom and the sovereignty of the State; however, what was made of these ideas was ideologically distinct. For Hitler, freedom for the German people was tied to the concept of Lebensraum – a policy of preserving and enlarging the ‘racial community’ by extending its political domination and living space.

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In accord with this policy, Austria and Czechoslovakia were annexed and Poland attacked, and the integrity of the Aryan race protected from the converging menace of Judaism, Liberalism and Bolshevism by methods that the civilised world cannot forget. As is commonly the case with totalitarian regimes, freedom and citizenship were defined in terms of abstract, supra-individual ideals. That particular rag-bag of archaic myths, technical rationality and agrarian romanticism created by National Socialism was in marked contrast, however, to the substantive and historically specific meaning given to the concepts of freedom and citizenship in Britain during the war. Here the battle for Britain was waged on two fronts: as a military defence of the Empire, its political traditions and privileged trade, and as an ideological struggle to extend the meaning of freedom, equality, and democracy in relation to the material conditions of public and private life. In the latter case, the efforts demanded of ordinary people by the war raised expectations of a more equal and just society at home. Orwell remarked in 1941, ‘The war and the revolution are inseparable’.11 For the labour movement, the defeat of fascism and the restructuring of British society were one and the same. What emerged in Britain between 1940 and 1945 was not revolution but a radical and popular movement for social reform. Its direction was informed by the deprivations suffered by working people through the inter-war years: its ideal was a society free from poverty, unemployment, squalor and despair in which the rights of citizenship extended to equality of opportunity and physical care. With the re-ordering of these freedoms, the political balance moved significantly to the Left. Yet ironically it was Churchill, whose record in social and domestic affairs scarcely endeared him to a liberal cause, who unexpectedly and perhaps unwittingly gave shape to the ideology of reform. As leader of the wartime Coalition, Churchill’s appeal to the chauvinistic traditions and sentiments of the nation aroused a unique combination of patriotic and radical sympathies. His invocation of a ‘common people’ united in a common cause, though deeply nationalistic, did not rest upon such mythical abstractions as the ‘Aryan race’, or de Gaulle’s transcendental vision of ‘la France’: Churchill’s rhetoric was grounded upon his belief in the inherent qualities of the British people – their sense of community and fair play, their instinct for decency, justice and the rule of law and, above all, their determination to win the war. His message was immediate and to the point, and attributed to every citizen a determination and stoicism that matched his own.12 No longer were British workers seen as the idle, intractable trouble-makers of pre-war years; they were now airmen, soldiers, servicemen, and civilians risking their life by ‘doing their bit’. It was a view which appealed to all strata of society: as Mrs Milburn, a suburban Tory, wrote in her diary after the fall of France, The men are evacuated from Flanders via Dunkirk day by day and great are the deeds of the Navy and the Air Force. Against fearful odds the men withdraw from their perilous positions. Many more are able to get away than was at first thought possible. Grim stories are told. Their bravery is unexcelled.13 From the early years of the war, through the blitz and military retreats from France, Crete and Tobruk, there was recognition of the heroism of everyone who faced the devastating conditions of modern war. This extended to the civilian urban population who were daily

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exposed to aerial attacks. Firemen, air wardens, ambulance drivers and ordinary civilians, just as much as those in military service, were praised for their courage and endurance. This was ‘the people’s war’ – not a foreign and glamorous campaign, but a war for domestic survival fought by a largely conscript army against forces of destruction that demolished homes, factories, railways and docks, and killed civilians and soldiers on leave. The idea of heroism was no longer limited to the singular courageous act; it became a generalised quality of all those who endured the deprivations and dangers of both combat and the home front. Once courage had become de-militarised and hence, to a certain extent, de-mythologised, it was found amongst people of all walks of life: men and women who laboured in factories and mines; hospital staff without proper facilities; the rescue services working round the clock, and many others who steadfastly served the community without questioning the dangers and risks. Their welfare and safety became a heartfelt concern: as Mrs Milburn said, ‘we must do everything we can for them’. The Second World War brought home the fact that sacrifices and endurance commonly needed to sustain a viable existence in adversity are morally as demanding as bravery under fire. Orwell was one of the few contemporary writers who understood this kind of courage. In his wartime essays and weekly column in Tribune he identified the strength of ordinary people facing public and private misfortunes and the deprivations of war. Their courage was not the stuff for which medals are struck, yet it revealed the tenacity and hardship of an ordinary working life that maintained production and essential services, cared for children, the sick and the old, and filled the ‘other’ ranks. Orwell’s ‘ordinary’ people were not just unknown, they were working class – the vast rump of the British population who had survived the Depression and desolation of the preceding years and who were largely excluded from the rising prosperity of ‘baby Austin Britain’ when the economy revived. The new world of private consumption that brought electricity, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, domestic comforts and motor cars to middle-class homes, made little impression on working-class communities in industrial cities further north. Economic recovery was uneven: poverty and chronic unemployment were still common experiences of working-class life. While average rates of unemployment had gradually declined, the proportion of long-term unemployed had not: for every hundred men who were unemployed for two years from the beginning of the Depression in 1929, only 39 had returned to work by 1936.14 Calder graphically describes the situation immediately preceeding the war: In 1937, one Scot in six, one Welshman in four was unemployed. A line drawn from the Severn to the Humber, through the midlands, would have marked with rough accuracy the division between a relatively prosperous ‘New’ Britain in the south and east and an afflicted and demoralised ‘Nineteenth century Britain’, where a generation had been tortured on the Procrustean bed of industrial decline.15 The differences between classes and regions remained as great in the late 1930s as they were after the First World War. Little had been done to alleviate these unreasonable contrasts of prosperity and decay. Government attempts to absorb the unemployed in sponsored programmes of public work were minimal and ineffectual compared with the success of dedicated programmes of renewal in Germany and the United States. In

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Britain, the industrial working class remained a nation apart, politically defeated by the General Strike, materially deprived and regionally distinct. These were the ‘ordinary’ people upon whose qualities the defence of liberty relied. After years of hardship and neglect they were called to the centre of the national stage, not as members of an exploited class, but as soldiers and workers in a patriotic struggle for liberty, justice, equality against oppression, intolerance and brute force. Their identification with the national interest was hastily and crudely drawn: at the beginning of the war, a government poster clumsily proclaimed: YOUR COURAGE, YOUR CHEERFULNESS, YOUR RESOLUTION WILL BRING US VICTORY! The divisions between ‘them’ and ‘us’ were no less a part of government thinking than the daily reality of working-class life. It was Churchill’s peculiar contribution as a wartime leader to bridge that gulf by rhetorically evoking a common heritage of freedom and democracy that transcended classes and regions in opposition to Hitler and his Nazi Reich. Churchill did not claim Britain was especially fortunate in its leaders, nor did he make grandiose claims for himself, but he did claim that the British people, whatever their rank and circumstance, had a natural inclination to defend liberty and the rule of law. In attributing these sterling qualities to the common people, his rhetoric was deeply populist: the struggle for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ incorporated not only those whose material and personal advantages were well established, but the majority who were socially and economically deprived. Collectively, the ‘common people’ became a moral as well as an economic category. Their essential contribution to the war effort was recognised in newsreels, broadcasts, official pamphlets and the speeches that created the language of the Second World War. It was their ‘determination’, ‘heroism’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘endeavour’ that embodied the spirit of what Britain was fighting for. Paradoxically, Britain had found in Churchill a Conservative leader with a reactionary past who, according to his wife, knew nothing of the life and aspirations of the ordinary people,16 whose chauvinism and imaginative sense of British history gave the war a meaning and a political significance that struck a chord with the working class. In appealing to those great abstractions of liberty, justice and democracy, Churchill offered no proposals for change; these ideas were for him already embedded in parliamentary government and the British constitution, if not in the national character itself. Least of all did he expect his rhetoric to radicalise a popular movement for social reform. His horizons were limited by the strategic objectives of war. These objectives, however, depended upon the consent and co-operation of the ordinary people on every front. With 40 per cent of the work-force in the defence services, and labour in short supply, the loyalty and morale of the working people became ideologically and physically inseparable from the aims of the war. Churchill’s wartime Coalition recognised this fact: unlike the ‘National’ governments of the inter-war years, it drew together prominent members of the three main parties – irrespective of the strength of their party’s representation in the House of Commons. The presence of Labour leaders in the War Cabinet and key government posts strengthened appeals for national solidarity. Although Conservatives held the majority of junior posts,

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Labour Ministers dominated social and economic strategy on the home front. Here, the struggle for democracy, justice and equality was wholly consistent with Labour’s ideals for a socialist peace. As Ernest Bevin remarked on his appointment as Minister of Labour, it was ‘a chance to lay down the conditions under which we shall start again’.17 Bevin was charged with the difficult task of balancing recruitment to the armed services with the pressing demands of the civilian manpower budget. More significantly, he was brought into the Cabinet at Churchill’s personal request to negotiate a ‘contract’ with the trade unions to ensure a dedicated supply of labour committed to the efforts of war. In this sensitive area, Bevin was an inspired choice. Until his appointment, he had been general secretary of the Transport and General Workers which he had amalgamated into Britain’s largest trade union. No one in the Cabinet was closer to the shop floor, and no single individual had greater influence over the social relations of production or the distribution of labour and its supply. He was not by any means a revolutionary socialist – indeed, to some of his colleagues on the Left, he was scarcely a socialist at all – but he spoke with the authentic voice of the working class, and his relations with trade union leaders carried conviction and power. Under his control, the Ministry of Labour rivalled the Exchequer in shaping economic strategy, as well as conditions of employment and work. To many Conservatives, Bevin personified by his demeanour, background and political stance the feared, even repellent symbol of a proletarian dictator, yet his unfailing loyalty to the Government and his friendship with Churchill strengthened his identification with the war effort. As a prominent member of the Cabinet, he was a potent reminder to the working people of the labour movement and its cause. Whenever possible, Bevin used his powers sparingly. His preference for voluntary recruitment and co-operative industrial relations met with Churchill’s approval and was endorsed by other members of the Cabinet, not least because it was widely feared that compulsory controls would radicalise labour relations, if not provoke opposition to the war effort itself. However, by 1941, manpower shortages were so acute that the Government was compelled to mobilise labour from whatever sources it could. Voluntary appeals to women had met with little success. Reluctantly, and for the first and only time in British history, a limited form of female conscription was introduced.18 By 1943, the number of women in the work-force had increased to nearly two million, compared with approximately half a million in 1939. Reactions to female conscription were indicative of the strength of patriotic sentiment at the time. The public outcry anticipated by the Government was more muted than feared. Although Mass Observation reported that privately women were ‘unusually disturbed and unsettled’ by conscription,19 the move was emphatically supported by Parliament and the Press. Wartime propaganda had left no one in doubt that their efforts were vital to defend democracy and a civilised way of life; the only question was why the Government had hestitated so long before recruiting women to the fight. Yet it would be fanciful to suppose this feeling of solidarity changed the fundamental relations of capitalist production, or dissolved tensions between management and labour on the shop floor. Although economic strategy was centrally planned, productive functions were co-ordinated through a network of trade and business associations representing the interests of private firms. Moreover, the conditions for capitalist production had rarely been so favourable since the First World War. Private enterprise thrived in an environment where competition was minimal, the free mobility of labour

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was severely curtailed and government contracts (offered on a ‘cost-plus’ basis) underwrote the financial risks. Rumours of gross profiteering were widespread, and sometimes confirmed.20 The Government repeatedly called for industrial harmony, and issued a flood of enlightened directives to improve efficiency and relations at work, yet few employers offered more than the minimum statutory provisions to promote the welfare and morale of their staff.21 It was feared that such concessions would prejudice relations with labour, and hence, adversely affect productivity and company profits after the war. The trade unions were no less defensive; they looked back to unemployment and the bitter struggles of the 1930s and before, and were generally resistant to changes in established divisions of labour and skill. With business and labour straining to protect their interests, pre-war patterns of industrial relations did not significantly change – except in one important respect: both sides of industry were now subordinated to centralised planning and controls. This did little to moderate conflicts between labour and capital, but it effectively triangulated the relations of production by superimposing the mediating intervention of the State. The persistence of fraught industrial relations exacerbated deep-rooted problems of economic management which continued to undermine the British economy after the war. Compared with other leading industrial powers, Britain’s industrial capacity had historically declined through lack of investment and training in modern production techniques. Industrial strategy was anchored in a mercantile tradition of small, labourintensive units competing for domestic and colonial markets with what one contemporary report described as ‘knife and fork’ techniques.22 Against the more advanced and better co-ordinated technologies of German industry, Britain struggled unsuccessfully to produce essential supplies, cheaply and on time. These deficiencies have been extensively documented by Corelli Barnett in his Audit of War.23 They add up to an unpromising combination of incompetent management, poorly trained operatives, and, perhaps most damaging of all, a legacy of unmodernised plant which left the country dependent upon American technology and military aid. Constant demands for greater productivity were the driving force behind attempts to rationalise the economy and a crucial factor in the movement for social and political change. Given the retarded condition of British industry, the massive increases in production needed to supply the war had to be urged from the efforts of ordinary working people on every front. In May 1940, when the whole country was aware of the threat of invasion, Ernest Bevin openly appealed to a mass meeting of the TUC.: I have to ask you virtually to place yourselves at the disposal of the state. We are socialists and this is the test of our socialism..... If our movement and our class rise with all their energy now and save the people of this country from disaster, the country will always turn with confidence to the people who saved them.24 The need to secure the goodwill and co-operation of the working class had been recognised by Chamberlain’s government even before the war began. Memories of rampant industrial strife during the First World War had haunted attempts to reach agreement with the trade unions on rearmament and the terms of employment in the event of another war. With an acute shortage of skilled labour, the Government was driven to

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compromise with concessions on wages, food subsidies, increased taxes on profits, and trade union representation on key advisory boards.25 Within months of the outbreak of war, all government departments were instructed to liaise closely with the TUC. It was an affirmation of the uneasy ‘contract’ between the Government and trade unions that survived successive administrations until the election of Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1979. The involvement of organised labour in the process of social and economic planning can scarcely be described as a ‘revolutionary’ change, yet in the context of British politics, it was a significant step towards a more open, inclusive society brought about by full employment and the scarcity of vital skills. Moreover, there was a promise of more radical change to come: with Labour in the Coalition, the ‘contract’ with the trade unions tacitly became a political pact. Within the labour movement, commitment to the war effort cut across sectarian loyalties with moderates and militants alike pledging total support for the production drive.26 Trade union leaders took the initiative in pressing for increased production, greater efficiency and industrial reforms. On the Government’s side, Labour ministers pushed through a battery of orders relating to the terms and conditions of employment and rates of pay, particularly those affecting the lowest paid.27 It was a long-awaited opportunity for the labour movement to strengthen its influence in government and consolidate power on the factory floor. To moderate trade unionists, such as Bevin, this was a milestone on the road to industrial democracy; to idealists inspired by images of Soviet society, it was a road leading to the collective ownership of industry with the means of production under workers’ control. In the upheaval of war, even the more radical of these alternatives did not seem farfetched. To some observers, the political economy of wartime Britain with its centralised planning and levies on capital and state controls, already looked like the practical application of socialist theory at a formative stage. Bringing essential industries under public control seemed a logical step towards rationalising an economy whose industrial infrastructure was already at breaking point. Reports of profiteering, incompetence and waste lent a patriotic weight to socialist critiques that the war was being fought to defend the liberty of those who believed ‘patriotism is another name for profits’ and for whom ‘democracy means dividends and little else.’28 However, it did not require left-wing propaganda to make the case for modernising Britain’s economy and industrial base: the performance of wartime industries was a constant concern. Mass Observation reported that 38 per cent of ‘the upper and middle class’ thought profits were ‘too high’, whereas only 4 per cent of the same social strata thought profits were too low.29 Moreover, the overwhelming majority of informants believed that efficiency would increase if essential industries were taken out of private hands, while six out of seven respondents favoured conscription of private assets and wealth. In general, there was little sympathy for those who complained that production was being retarded by a lack of financial incentives for directors and shareholders of private firms.30 After the catastrophic failures of capitalism between the wars, the credibility of laissez-faire economies and their apologists was in decline. The nature of the war effort depended upon the collective organisation of all available resources in the national interest. The very idea of profits being made from the hardships of war was an affront to the courage and sacrifice of people in all walks of life. The Left called for the nationalisation of essential industries and, more generally, an end to the desolation and

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waste that had scarred the inter-war years. There was a wave of admiration for the Soviet Union and the achievements of the Russian peoples on their industrial front. Stories of Russian workers dismantling and reassembling factories ahead of the German advance persuaded many observers that Stalin’s combination of ‘American efficiency with a revolutionary sweep’ should be the model of war production that Britain should emulate. Even the Ministry of Information had to allow that whatever else might be said about the Soviet system, it was not conspicuous for inefficiency and waste.31 However, the case for modernising Britain’s economy spelled a different message to business leaders and Conservatives inclined to the Right. Their response to state intervention reflected a vested interest in maintaining private enterprise in a society where capitalism could thrive. The problems of wartime production were laid squarely upon excessive government direction which allegedly handicapped output, and severely limited opportunities for exports and trade. Fearing lasting and radical changes in the organisation of the economy after the war, Conservatives with close business connections called for an end to the ‘iniquitous’ tax on wartime profits, excessive wage increases, restrictive practices, the expansion of social services, and all forms of red tape.32 These views were publicly promoted through such newly-founded movements as ‘The National League for Freedom’ and ‘Aims of Industry’, and gathered intellectual support from Hayek’s damaging and now fashionable critique of economic planning in The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944. If the war was being fought for liberty and democracy, why, it was asked, is the freedom of the market being eroded by bureaucratic constraints? The Conservative press seized upon such complaints, advocating the appointment of freemarketeers to key government posts. In general, right-wing opinion inclined to the now familiar Thatcherite view that the problems of the economy resulted from too many government restrictions on private enterprise and trade. Between these divided interests, the Coalition steered a middle course: it resisted attempts to repeal wartime taxes on profits, but stopped short of nationalising essential industries, and never seriously considered conscripting private assets on any scale. The immediate problem was to win the war: it was not part of the Government’s programme to transform the established order or to redistribute property and wealth. Managers continued to manage in the interests of shareholders and private firms, and senior civil servants still governed with all the assumptions of a privileged class. However, the acute shortage of human resources brought home to the British people that the strength and security of the nation depended upon the labour and welfare of the working class. Measures were introduced which physically improved the conditions of employment and safety at work, raised minimum earnings, and extended state benefits and social services to new categories of need.33 At the same time, efforts were made to boost civilian morale. Meeting the hopes and expectations of ordinary people was seen as crucial to a war that had to be won on the home front. In the last analysis, victory depended upon production, and thus ‘the will of the people to keep factories going at full blast’.34 In terms of health, physical environment, diet and livelihood there is little doubt from contemporary reports that ordinary wage earners were carrying the greater sacrifice and burden of war.35 For a time, speculations about the likelihood of social revolution were rife. Rationing, mass evacuation, conscription and the blitz radicalised patriotic sentiments and stoked resentment against the bosses and the sectarian interests of capital. An early report on civilian morale prudently warned that ‘it is not safe to assume that

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because (we) don’t have to keep down civil disturbances by force, such a situation must automatically continue indefinitely’.36 One far-sighted managing director cautioned his fellow employers in the following terms: There’s bound to be a radical change; nothing can stop it – it’s here with us now. Many (industrialists) are still burying their heads in the sand like ostriches, just like they did over the war itself. If industry doesn’t plan for revolution, there’ll be revolution. We can only avoid it by meeting the needs of the people and the times, by taking the great changes that are going to be forced on us anyway if we don’t do it ourselves.37 In fact, there was little evidence to suppose the working class was either inclined or capable of challenging the authority of the State. Tempered by the hardships of the past twenty years, the mood of the people leaned to reform, not militant, concerted revolt. However, the war effort raised questions about the direction and priorities of British society, and in whose interests the war was being fought. At the heart of these questions lay the future of employment and the conditions of working-class life. Britain was at war with an enemy that had overcome the problems of unemployment, modernised its industry, stabilised the currency and restored a sense of national purpose and pride in productive work. Moreover, the origins of the National Socialist Party that effected this recovery were radically anti-capitalist – just as they were opposed to all other interests that challenged the power of the State.38 It was these decidedly totalitarian tendencies of Hitler’s Reich that gave substance to the essentially libertarian notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that Churchill so skilfully evoked. However, under conditions of war, the meaning of these concepts appeared in a different light. The interests of freely contracting individuals gave way to more pressing needs for collective security and defence. Under the Emergency Powers Act (1939) the Government assumed total control over persons and property – not just the resources of a particular class, but control over ‘all persons, rich and poor, employer and workman, man or woman, and all property’.39 The great British tradition of liberty was suspended without protest in favour of measures which would have been unthinkable in peace. Whatever the notions of ‘equality’, ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ might have stood for in the past, they came to mean ‘equality of sacrifice’, government by fiat, and the obligation upon everyone to ‘do their bit’. The very nature of the war effort transformed the relationship of citizens to the state, extending government controls and scrutiny to almost every aspect of social life. Planners, scientists and experts of all kinds were drawn into government to coordinate strategic objectives with the efforts of industry and the home front. With them came investigative committees, intelligence units and advisory panels to monitor everything from aircraft production to public opinion and maternal care. Effective management of the war economy was an immediate priority, but beyond that popular support for controls over domestic consumption and the principle of ‘fair shares’ was symptomatic of the demand for more egalitarian and enlightened administration in social affairs. Promises of prosperity and future employment inspired visions of a better, more rationally ordered world. The idea of social planning, so strongly resisted by laissez-faire ideologues before the war, found its apotheosis in the defence of freedom and democracy in the Second World War. Planning became a political priority – a key to the aspirations of the people’s

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war – and a condition not just of technical efficiency, but of the free and equal society Britain was fighting for. As early as 1941, plans for the reconstruction of postwar Britain were being widely circulated and discussed. In January of that year, Picture Post published a special feature entitled ‘A Plan for Britain’. Prominent writers, scientists, economists and academics presented their image of a prosperous, healthy and productive new Britain, with fresh approaches to employment, education, social security, housing, town planning and medical care. In contrast with the aftermath of the First World War and the harsh years that followed, Picture Post’s vision of the new society offered the prospect of a progressive democracy that would banish want, ignorance, squalor, idleness and disease, which Beveridge identified the following year as the ‘five giants on the road of reconstruction’ that postwar Britain must overcome. Only the war against Hilter and the struggle for victory intervened. Picture Post left readers in no doubt that the two were directly connected: ‘Our plan for a new Britain is not something outside the war, or something after the war. It is an essential part of our war aims. It is, indeed, our most positive war aim. The new Britain is the country we are fighting for.’ The priorities of this visionary society owed more to the condition of the British working class than propaganda against fascism and the German Reich. Stark contrasts between the democratic freedoms of ‘peoples who control their own destiny’ and the tyranny of Nazi rule meant little to those for whom freedom had earlier been measured by whatever could be saved from the dole. What mattered most to ordinary people were not sweeping ideological abstractions, but the security of regular work. If freedom had a real significance for the working class, it was freedom from the destructive effects of market forces which had earlier brought mass unemployment and a literal hunger for work. To a greater or lesser extent, liberal opinion converged upon the belief that the welfare of the people is ultimately a collective responsibility of the State. It was by no means a new idea but it became the underlying premise of social policy and progressive thinking both during and immediately after the war. In particular, maintaining full employment was an acknowledged priority amongst planners and politicians of all persuasions who envisaged a better society after the war. This was the underlying assumption – the economic foundation – of the promised Welfare State. But whilst the need to sustain continuity of employment was not in doubt, the measures needed to achieve this condition were a matter of speculation and debate. Different proposals implied altogether different consequences for society and the economy after the war. The nature and extent of government regulation and controls was at the centre of these debates. The right wing of the Conservative Party, for instance, advocated a curious admixture of market forces and direct political intervention – a combination which pre-figures current Tory practices – and which assumed that the economy, and hence employment, would somehow naturally expand with the recovery of markets and foreign trade. The Centre and Centre Left, on the other hand, favoured programmes of public works within a Keynesian framework of deficit budgeting and fiscal devices to stimulate aggregate demand. More radically, the Left (including the Communist Party) proposed a major restructuring of the economy through the extension of public ownership and yet more public works. At issue here was not simply the conflicting interests of labour and capital and their political representations on the Left and Right; policies on employment brought to a head radically different conceptions of the social order and how Britain as a nation should live.

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Against the prevailing Tory belief that democracy should ensure the unfettered right of individuals to pursue their interests in the market place, there emerged the idea of Britain as a corporate, organic society in which the state provides a measure of collective security for every citizen in equal part. It was a view endorsed by the popular ideal of ‘fair shares for all’ which equated justice with fairness, and which likewise held that democracy should extend to common minimum standards of welfare, as well as to civil and political rights. These competing philosophies have not always been so closely identified with the Labour and Conservative parties as they are today. Before the war, figures as diverse in their politics as Oswald Mosley, Harold Macmillan, Hugh Dalton and Nye Bevan advocated comprehensive approaches to social and economic planning which assumed in varying degrees the coordinating and redistributive intervention of the State. However, these ideas had little influence on government policies before the war; together with Keynes’ unorthodox proposals on economic planning and fiscal controls, they were politically marginalised by increasingly outmoded commitments to the doctrine of laissez-faire.40 Yet with the outbreak of war, the Government had virually no choice but to suspend these assumptions and improvise a strategy for the nation’s survival in total war. It was a strategy that entailed physical controls over strategic resources, food rationing, mass evacuation, industrial conscription and the direction of labour power. But above all, it was a strategy that depended upon massive civilian support and hence upon the co-operation of the trade union movement and the working class. In their defence of democracy, the efforts of the common people assumed a defiant and patriotic stance. For the first time in recent history, ordinary wage earners were identified, not just with the labour process, but with the endeavours and values of society as a whole. Their support was neither grudgingly nor voluntarily given;41 nor was their place in society granted as of right; it had to be earned through loyalty and a determination to endure the hardships and sacrifices of war. It was an experience which radicalised political attitudes and supported a groundswell of popular sentiment in favour of improving the life chances of ordinary families after the war. One thing was certain; there could be no going back to the harsh conditions of the market place before the war. The new society would be a planned society which promised prosperity, equality of opportunity and a civilised standard of life. In particular, full employment – or more precisely, the expectation that full employment would in future be maintained by the State – was the most tangible concession that working people gained from the war. This was their reward for loyalty to the war effort that would be conferred upon Churchill’s ‘common people’ as Britain’s first citizens of a Welfare State.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 2 3 4

K. Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, Macmillan, 1946), p. 416. Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came (London, Heinemann, 1989). G. D. H. Cole, The People’s Front (London, Gollancz, 1937), p. 161. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1930–1964 (ed.) Stanley Olson (New York, Atheneum, 1980), p. 159. Although Nicolson attributes the interjection, ‘You speak for Britain’ to Boothby, it is usually attributed to Leo Amery. 5 Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, Panther, 1971), p. 66.

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6 W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 55ff. 7 Chamberlain kept his promise. An ‘Excess Profits Tax’ was introduced with the outbreak of war, levied at 60 per cent on increases in profits above the average pre-war level. The EPT was increased under Churchill’s Coalition to 100 per cent in June 1940. 8 Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1963), p. 356. The impact of Hitler’s Reich on German society is discussed in detail by Franz Neumann in his classic study, Behemoth.: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (New York, Harper Torch Books, 1966). See also David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany (New York, Norton, 1981); Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (trans) John Hidden (New York, Longman, 1981), and Detler J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (London, Penguin, 1987). 9 Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, p. 337. 10 ibid. 11 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Gollancz, 1963). 12 The following extract from Churchill’s famous speech in Manchester, 1940, illustrates the directness and urgency of his appeal: Come then to the task, to the battle to the toil – each to our part, each to our station. Fill the armies, rule the air, pour out munitions, strangle the Uboats, sweep the mines, plough the land, build the ships, guard the streets, succour the wounded, uplift the downcast, and honour the brave…. There is not a week, nor a day, nor an hour to lose. 13 Mrs Milburn’s Diaries (ed.) Peter Donnelly (London, Fontana, 1981), p. 48. 14 The Pilgrim Trust, Men Without Work, (1938). 15 Angus Calder, The People’s War, p. 30. 16 Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981) p. 107. 17 Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 177. 18 Conscription initially applied to unmarried women between the ages of 20 and 30 who had the option of choosing between the Auxiliary Services and industrial work. However, all women between the ages of 18 and 60 were expected to undertake national service of some kind. 19 Mass Observation, People in Production (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1942), p. 137. 20 Angus Calder, The People’s War, p. 293–295. 21 A typical response was, ‘We are too busy getting on with the war to think of such things.’ Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 258. 22 Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War (London, Macmillan, 1986), p. 154. 23 Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War (London, Macmillan, 1986). 24 Quoted by Kenneth Harris in Attlee (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 182. 25 See Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (London, Jonathan Cape, 1975), p. 57ff. 26 K. Coates and A. Topham, Industrial Democracy in Great Britain (London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), p.139 et seq. 27 Despite resistance from employers and Conservative MPs, the introduction of statutory controls and collective bargaining improved the wages of the worst paid, notably agricultural workers and hotel and catering staff. Agricultural wages almost doubled between 1940 and 1945. Average earnings increased by approximately 70 per cent over pre-war levels. Improvements in take-home pay were attributable mainly to an increase in the number of hours worked per week (from an average of 48 hours in 1938 to 53 hours by 1943). However, basic rates of pay amongst manual workers in war industries remained relatively stable. Comparing the incomes of salaried personnel and wage earners, the Institute of Statistics concluded that ‘if the

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28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

26

enormous difference in average income of the two classes compared is taken into consideration, the financial war burden on workers appears to be relatively high’. Cited in Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 164–5. Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 231. Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 232. Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 232. Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (London, Jonathan Cape, 1975), p.135. For instance, Leo Amery, a Conservative MP with extensive business interests in essential war industries, repeatedly proposed that the Government should ‘get rid of restrictions to the fullest extent that we can…. in order to let things get into a normal swing again’. Quoted by Mass Observation, War Begins at Home (London, Chatto & Windus, 1940), p. 407. Under Bevin’s direction, the factory inspectorate was strengthened, industrial welfare officers appointed and a whole raft of measures were introduced to improve health and safety and the physical conditions of wartime work. More generally, concern for the health of the general population, especially the welfare of working-class mothers, children and the elderly, led to numerous schemes and reforms, including mass immunisation, free or subsidised school meals, free milk, orange juice, cod liver oil, vitamins and state nursery facilities. Under the Pensions Act (1940), a nationally financed and administered scheme was introduced to support the incomes of the elderly and infirm. These provisions, together with the proposals outlined in the Beveridge Report, the Education Bill and the National Health Service White Paper, clearly recognised that the health and well-being of the nation should be a primary and collective responsibility of the State. Ministry of Information, Assurance of Victory (London, HMSO, 1940). Mass Observation, People in Production, pp. 201–23. Mass Observation, War Begins at Home, p. 422. Mass Observation, People in Production, p. 63. Detler J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany (London, Penguin, 1987). Quoted from Attlee’s introduction to the extension of the Emergency Powers Act (1940). Angus Calder, The People’s War, p. 124. S. Glynn and J. Oxborrow, Interwar Britain: A Social and Economic History, Ch. 4 (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1976). For instance, out of approximately five million men and women recruited to the armed services during the war, only a quarter of a million volunteered. See Walter Morrison, ‘Volunteer’ in Peter Grafton (ed.) You, You and You: The People Out of Step with World War II (London, Pluto Press, 1981).

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Chapter 2 Production for victory There was never any doubt that the war had to be won on the home front. The rapid mobilisation of British industry needed to produce armaments and military supplies brought a new sense of urgency to factories, laboratories, farms and mines. Inventive channels of communication emerged between scientists, military intelligence officers and engineers, alongside new forms of co-operation between government departments, union leaders and employers. Britain had declared war against one of the world’s most technologically advanced industrial powers. Confronting Germany’s military capacity tested the strength of British industry, and particularly the ingenuity of managers and planners to make optimum use of the nation’s resources. Above all, it was recognised that the war effort depended upon the skill and endurance of ordinary people. It was their labour and loyalty to the nation’s cause that the government confidently predicted would win the war.1 When war was declared in 1939, one-and-a-quarter million people in Britain were unemployed. By the end of the war, unemployment was virtually unknown. The war absorbed any able-bodied person seeking work, as well as many who were not so fit. Even more were conscripted who were reluctant to volunteer, including women who were pressed into industrial service between domestic shifts. With approximately 30 per cent of the male work-force in the armed services, labour remained at a premium throughout the war. People in non-essential occupations were directed to work in engineering, munitions, aircraft production, chemicals, oil and other essential industries. Factory workers worked long hours, often through double shifts. In 1940, the Ministry of Labour restricted women to a sixty-hour week; another order required that all workers should be allowed at least one day’s rest. So vital was labour to the objectives of war that government propaganda revealed an almost nervous concern with the state of industrial morale. During the First World War propaganda had been directed mainly at the troops; in the Second World War it showed an overwhelming preoccupation with commitment and cohesion on the home front. Efforts to maintain the morale and compliance of the working people were as indispensable to the war effort as military tactics and supplies: indeed, they were directly related. The economy depended upon a vast army of mobile labour that could be flexibly deployed from industry to industry as the needs of war changed. Initially, production concentrated upon munitions; later, priorities switched to aircraft production; after 1942, labour was mobilised on every front. Dramatic feats of production were certainly achieved, but it would be misleading to suppose that the British economy was equipped to cope with the strains of a protracted war. Apart from an initial spurt in aircraft production when Britain, virtually unarmed, faced the threat of invasion, essential industries were slow to adapt to the task in hand. Even in the later stages of the war, when the economy was cushioned by massive financial and technical support from the United

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States, Britain’s industrial performance was no match for Germany’s war machine. Barnett estimates that between 1939 and 1946, total manufacturing output in Britain rose by 4.6 per cent, compared with an increase of 32.6 per cent in Germany between 1939 and 1944. For German munitions industries as a whole, increases in productivity per head were approximately twice that achieved in the British case.2 Nor can it be said that the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ – so often invoked as an antidote to Britain’s postwar ills – triumphed over long-standing antagonisms and entrenched positions on the shop-floor. With the means of war production firmly in private hands, the divided interests of labour and capital, though ideologically subordinated to a common cause, continued to surface in grievances, counter-accusations, stoppages and strikes.3 These tensions in the uneasily triangulated relationship between the work-force, employers and the State have largely been obscured by the success of Allied victory in 1945. However, negotiations between these parties took place against a background of recent and bitter events, no less than the National Government’s policy of ’appeasement’ and consequent reluctance to prepare the economy for full-scale war. Even after war had been declared, it appears that Chamberlain and his associates believed Hitler posed no serious threat to the security of western Europe or British interests around the globe. At worst, the war would be a short affair; at best it might be won by propaganda alone.4 During this initial period of ‘phoney war’, the Government was slow to mobilise labour or equip the economy for a major war. Plans to control essential industries and services were held back, and despite an urgent need for munitions, armaments production continued with little change of pace. Although the Emergency Powers Act (1939) granted the Government extensive powers, direct intervention in the economy was resisted for fear of upsetting vested interests and privileges in the market place. As Calder says, They were frightened of interfering with private firms. They were terrified of provoking the trade unions. They were scared of the middle class reaction to ‘belt-tightening’ measures which would help divert workers, factories, raw materials and shipping space from peacetime amenities to war-like manufactures.5 Gambling on a limited war, Chamberlain’s government was reluctant to disrupt the economic order that underpinned their political position and continuing power: for the time being, the war effort was entrusted to private enterprise with minimum interference from the State. Chamberlain was no doubt influenced as much by the buoyancy of the economy as his belief that Hitler had been bluffing and had now ‘missed the bus’. The years following the Depression had brought a cycle of unprecedented economic growth; labour was plentiful and relatively cheap, domestic and foreign trade was expanding and, with captive colonial markets, the rate of profit remained consistently high. Moreover, after the damaging defeat of the General Strike in 1926, the labour movement had become increasingly acquiescent. The decline of trade union militancy allowed the interests of capital and industry relatively free rein. Strikes tended to be local, unofficial and comparatively rare: between 1927 and 1939 an annual average of three million working days were lost compared with an average of twenty-eight million days between 1919 and

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1925.6 Wages were generally depressed, and the persistence of long-term unemployment ensured an adequate reserve of labour to meet both industrial expansion and the contingencies of war. Indeed, so confident were the powers of capital that there was little need to consult with unions or seek a concordat with the labour force. With market forces in their favour, it is not surprising that the Government and their supporters were reluctant to disturb Britain’s profitable niche in industrial trade by re-ordering the economy for war. This complacent period of assertive capital politically collapsed with the German invasion of Norway in April 1940. The unseemly retreat of British forces from Trondheim showed how poorly prepared the country had been for war. Amidst cries from his own party to stand down, Chamberlain had little option but to resign. Churchill was appointed Prime Minister on the same day (10 May 1940) that German forces swept across Belgium and Holland. Henceforth, the nation was called to a titanic struggle against an enemy that threatened nothing less than ‘European civilisation’ and ‘the future of mankind’. By this time no one believed the war could be won with rhetoric alone: with the fall of France, there was a pressing need to produce military supplies to match the global reach of Churchill’s words. Politically, this meant securing the goodwill of the trade unions and the working class. Their distrust of Chamberlain’s government with its close connections in the City and industry had been a major factor in the mismanagement of the war – so disastrously revealed by Britain’s ill-equipped divisions in Norway and France. Churchill, though himself a free-marketeer, invited Labour leaders to join a coalition government. With the appointment of Ernest Bevin to the Ministry of Labour, the crucial task of securing a viable contract with the trade unions was now in competent hands. It was an inspired appointment that went some way towards defusing Churchill’s own reputation as an unsympathetic opponent of socialism and the working class. The other major problem was to find a means of paying for the war. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer was the first to point out, funds were simply not available to finance a full-scale war. It was expected that the toll on Britain’s already depleted gold and currency reserves would lead to bankruptcy within two years.7 Nor, after defaulting on debts still outstanding from the First World War, could Britain be sure of unlimited credit and supplies from the United States. The Treasury warned that Britain could afford only a short war: the Chiefs of Staff claimed they could only hope to win a long campaign. As Barnett observes, the hiatus brought into sharp relief ‘the contrast between Britain’s selfperpetuated role of first class world and imperial power and her backward industrial economy’.8 With far-reaching costs to the nation’s economy, ‘good housekeeping’, as Keynes remarked, ‘was thrown to the winds’: in a determined decision not to reduce the war effort to the level of Britain’s economic reserves, the Cabinet ordered an army of fiftyfive divisions and a huge expansion in aircraft production by the end of 1941. In the event, the financial burden of this decision was underwritten by the United States. Even before America entered the war, Britain’s war economy was already heavily dependent upon American industry and technical support. From 1941 onwards, under an agreement known as ‘Lend-Lease’, a stream of raw materials, machine tools, food and military supplies flowed into Britain, in total amounting to over $27 billion worth of aid. As a

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result, Britain no longer needed to pay for the war through trade and currency reserves. Instead, as Barnett writes, she was able to turn her economy over to war purposes to a degree impossible for any other belligerent..... Access to America’s colossal productive and technological resources enabled Britain to expand her war factories far beyond the limits of British industry’s own ability to equip them. Here was the essential basis for that grand scale of British war production which so misleadingly impressed public opinion and which prophets like Beveridge took as providing practical justification for their vision of a New Jerusalem. For the truth is that Britain’s war economy was in its fundamental nature artificial: as dependent upon American strength as a patient on a life-support machine.9 In return for becoming the ‘arsenal of democracy’, the United States negotiated certain ‘considerations’ in international trade. British exports were restricted, gold reserves and overseas assets were stripped, and British markets were infiltrated by American firms.10 The war effort was effectively mortgaged at the expense of Britain’s postwar standing in world trade. The management of the war effort under Churchill’s Coalition showed a realism and determination that Chamberlain’s administration conspicuously lacked. But though it carried conviction, the Coalition did not radically change the organisation of production or the processes of economic planning and supply. State intervention in the economy followed a pattern familiar from the First World War. The railways were brought under government control; the Ministry of Agriculture introduced subsidies and higher prices to increase the production of grain and other staples imported from abroad; a new Ministry of Shipping directed the merchant marine, and a Ministry of Aircraft Production was formed, initially under Lord Beaverbrook, to meet the urgent need for aircraft of all kinds. There was reluctance, however, to intervene directly in industrial production or interfere with the management of private firms. Instead, indirect control was exercised through a web of government contracts allocating raw materials, capital investment, plant and labour to essential industries on the basis of agreed programmes of supply. Through this bureaucratically elaborate system, the State became the biggest ‘customer’ and sponsor of private industrial concerns. The result was a less than efficient compromise between the nationalisation of essential industries (repeatedly called for by the Left), and a seller’s market with few competitive constraints upon costs, delivery or the quality of what was produced. In an effort to cut through this mass of cumbersome controls, Churchill formed an innovative non-ministerial committee, known as the Defence Committee (Supply), which brought together staff officers from the armed services with the heads of production departments to establish priorities in strategic planning. Time and time again, these meetings revealed the shortcomings of British industry and the nation’s reliance upon American technology and supplies. But they also provided Churchill with a vantage point to survey both the military and industrial front and impose his personal stamp and direction upon events.11

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It was this committee which decided in 1941 to strengthen the RAF’s bomber command with the production of 4,000 heavy bombers over the next two years. By 1943, the British aircraft industry had increased its work-force to 1,750,000 employees, compared with 35,000 in 1935.12 With an annual expenditure of £800 million, it had become a major customer of engineering, electrical and allied industries, consuming some 40 per cent of all engineering contracts. From small beginnings, it had become an integral part of the war economy and a crucial industry in Britain’s defence. The rapid transformation of the aircraft industry was hailed as an inspiration to the nation’s cause. Through the summer of 1940, aircraft industries worked flat out: production targets were overtaken and 650 fighter planes were delivered ahead of time. Beaverbrook’s flair for propaganda made sure that these targets remained in the public eye. With a scheme that would have commended itself to Mrs Thatcher’s government, he persuaded the public to pay for fighters through private subscriptions. A Spitfire was notionally priced at £5,000: millions of pounds flowed in from individuals, voluntary associations, factories and towns. Soon almost every city and major town in the country had contributed a Spitfire with its name on the plane.13 Undoubtedly, the development of the aircraft industry was a major industrial achievement. In terms of speed, organisation and scale it was without parallel during the war. Here was a shining example of what could be achieved through resourcefulness, common purpose and industrial goodwill. Newsreel pictures of Stakhanovite women assembling Spitfires and Lancaster bombers around the clock, using recycled saucepans and second-hand parts, became part of the rich mythology of the industrial front. Although grossly exaggerated, these legends had the useful ideological function of emphasising the commitment and stamina of the civilian labour force, while at the same time distracting attention from the long hours, hazardous conditions and unequal rewards of industrial work. However, the early successes in aircraft production have to be set against the uneven development across a wider industrial front. The strategic priority for fighter planes and bombers between 1940 and 1943 was disproportionately costly in terms of labour, materials and machine tools. Resources for aircraft production tended to take precedence over almost everything else, retarding the output of equally vital equipment, such as antiaircraft guns, small arms and tanks. Moreover, after an initial spurt of productivity, aircraft production declined as the industry confronted the multiple difficulties that beset its hasty and unwieldy growth. By the end of 1942, factories were struggling to meet targets and delivery dates. There were several reasons for this, not all of which were peculiar to the aircraft industry and allied trades. In general, industry suffered from a chronic shortage of designers, engineers and skilled craftsmen needed to support the rapid expansion of military supplies. Fragmentation between often widely-dispersed manufacturing units added to the difficulties of synchronising production, while the sheer pace and complexity, particularly of aircraft construction, resulted in fatigue and friction amongst workers struggling to meet unrealistic demands. Added to this, industry was plagued by demarcation and manning disputes, which were common to engineering sectors at large. Setbacks in aircraft production could not be blamed entirely upon shortages of labour; the root of the problem, as Bevin and others remarked at the time, lay in the management of those human and other resources which had been preferentially supplied since the start

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of the war.14 In a telling comparison, Barnett documents how the British aviation industry was outclassed in productivity, development and design by more sophisticated foreign management and manufacturing techniques. In Germany and the United States, the educational system had ensured a solid foundation of engineering and administrative skills; consequently, there was no shortage of highly trained managers and technical personnel. Similarly, there was no lack of material or financial resources or time to modify production systems and develop long-term projects and designs. These differences, together with better working conditions, more harmonious labour relations, and a more disciplined work-force, partly account for the performance of German and American aircraft industries which exceeded output from British factories by between 25 to 200 per cent.15 Again, it would be misleading to suppose that the aircraft industry was an isolated case; everywhere the same lack of coherent management, conflicting priorities and reliance on ad hoc solutions underlay the direction of British manufacturing industry from the highest level of planning to the shop-floor. And if aircraft production was the ‘best case’, the design and manufacture of tanks was certainly amongst the worst. Displaced by the need for aircraft, tanks did not become a priority until the summer of 1941 when the Government insisted production should be advanced at all costs. The problem with tanks was both tactical and mechanical: the War Office was slow to evolve a clear conception of how tanks would be deployed – and hence the kind of vehicle and armaments required; the producers (car manufacturers, railway workshops, armament factories) were unable to design engines and transmission units strong enough to carry heavy armour and long-range guns. Between the War Office and numerous, poorly co-ordinated commercial firms, division and confusions were rife. Diverse specifications were ordered, then changed; numerous prototypes and hybrids were designed – many of which went into production unmodified and untried – while difficulties persisted in integrating the various manufacturing industries involved. As a result, in comparison with German and American tanks, British models were slow, underpowered and poorly armed. Furthermore, they were notoriously unreliable. Yet so great was the pressure for tanks that many were delivered as combat-ready to armoured divsions in North Africa with known mechanical faults.16 By contrast, the Germans produced a range of reliable, well-armed and well-armoured tanks, culminating in the ‘Panther’ and ‘Tiger’ which were highly effective in combat and superbly engineered. By the time British manufacturers had overcome problems of armament and mechanical design, the War Office had invested in American tanks, notably ‘Shermans’, which had become the mainstay of British armoured divsions by the end of the war. It would be unfair to suggest that the shortcomings of British tank and aircraft production were the responsibility of wartime contractors or government departments alone: more generally, they were the emergent effect of a style of management that was typical of British industry long before the war. Britain could claim a genius in technological innovation that was envied by the rest of the world, but industry repeatedly failed to capitalise on this advantage with long-term commercial plans. Instead, management inclined towards piecemeal development, placing their faith in muddling through. It was a fault that extended throughout the system, from the strategic ordering of industrial priorities to project design and labour relations on the factory floor. Untrained in contemporary techniques of forecasting and operational research, management

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approached production with an amateurish pragmatism, aptly described by Barnett in relation to aircraft production during the war: The wartime British aircraft industry, again true of an older industrial tradition, had no clear operational doctrine as such, no coherent professional philosophy; its way of doing things was the cumulative outcome of countless ad hoc answers by ‘practical men’ to the incidental problems posed by rushed pre-war expansion and then by the urgent demands of war. Such pragmatism, however, had its functional costs, in that too high a proportion of the industry’s scarce resources in skill were deployed well forward in steering the production process itself – adjusting for modifications, fixing local hold-ups, arranging the transitions between one batch of aircraft and another; day-to-day crisis management because production had not been carefully organised with the very object of avoiding crises.17 In effect, this style of management encouraged a perpetual firefighting attitude to industrial production which allowed little time to monitor and improve efficiency, or plan projects with the operational continuity and precision of German and American industries either during or after the war. Much the same approach was apparent in the Government’s presentation of the war effort as a whole. There was little attempt to identify a coherent strategy relating industrial priorities to Britain’s economic situation and the aims of war. As Mass Observation noted, Production propaganda has been overwhelmingly ad hoc. The emphasis first on planes and then on tanks has added a special ad hocness. Production has to be based on steady rhythms, routines, methods, moods, It does not lend itself to catch-phrases and sudden spurts. Industrial work requires steady continuous effort. In the nature of things, it must be firmly based on understanding, background information, and appreciation of the process in which one is engaged. No serious attempt has been made to approach the industrial problems of war production in this way.18 As a result, the largest category of producers – those employed in industrial work – were reported as lacking an enduring sense of belonging to a wider effort beyond the factory floor. In general, a communal sense of purpose and solidarity was seldom apparent within the factory gates. Throughout most of industry, mistrust, irritation, inefficiency and strife belied the impression of resourcefulness and harmony promoted by government propaganda and the popular press. Commenting on the situation in 1942, Mass Observation reported that ‘everything suggests extensive industrial inefficiency’ underscored by ‘psychological friction and disunity of outlook’.19 Inefficiency was evident in pointless delays, confusion, interruptions and waste – not due to events beyond managerial control, but arising, more significantly, from a lack of creative thinking and planning which took the social character of production into account. The inability of

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management at all levels to come to terms with what Mass Observation called the ‘human factor’ in war production originated from the profoundly alienating belief that strictly economic incentives were the only effective means of motivating work. Underpinning a long tradition of British industrial relations, this narrow dogma ignored the potentially productive relationship between the sense of satisfaction and purpose derived from socially valued work, and a corresponding commitment to high levels of productivity and corporate goodwill. To put it simply, not everyone is motivated directly by financial rewards. During the Second World War, people were willing to put up with long hours, scarcity and meagre pay given a clear sense of endeavour for a national cause. This was manifestly so on the home front: Churchill’s message to the people left no one in doubt that their sacrifices were vital to defend a civilised way of life. ‘The ordinary people’ Mass Observation recorded, ’are ready and anxious to give their best.’20 Even the Communist Party pledged its support for increased productivity after the Nazis turned to the Russian front.21 Yet with few exceptions, industry failed to rally to this unprecendented spirit of commitment and goodwill. Industrialists were reluctant to suspend a lifelong distrust of trade unions and initiate more consultative styles of management better suited to the times. From a narrowly commercial point of view, labour was treated as units of output, costs and time with little concern for the quality and subjective meaning of the effort involved. These attitudes were expressed in a reluctance to listen to complaints or suggestions for increased efficiency, while failure to explain sudden changes in the pace or direction of work was one of the most common grievances on the shop-floor.22 Confronted by this singularly market approach to labour, it is not entirely surprising that wage-earners lacked a sense of belonging to a wider cause. On a day-to-day basis, the cash nexus dominated relations with the shop-floor. In one striking instance, the alienating effects of these attitudes were epitomised by a senior manager who is quoted as saying, ‘I’m damned if I can see why it’s considered appalling to have a person who has done no work all day. What’s he got to complain about if he’s getting paid?’23 Nor was there a compelling reason for industry to change, for despite urgent demands for military and other supplies, employers continued to operate in an environment in which efficiency was measured by profits, rather than productivity, and profits were one of the few things that were plentiful during the war. Government attempts to foster cohesion and efficiency on the industrial front were continually frustrated by the interests and attitudes of the market place. A contemporary survey found that ‘Cutting right across industrial morale today is the feeling of the worker that his or her work for the war effort is still for an employer who is making profits out of it.’24 It was a feeling that carried the burden of long-standing grievances, now compounded by the hazards and conditions of wartime work. In that fundamental respect, relations of production did not change; the antagonism between labour and management continued as before. Commenting on the situation among Northern industries, Mass Observation reported that The most striking feature of the industrial situation here is the survival of strictly peacetime procedure in conflict between employers and men…. One looked and listened in vain for any sign of unity binding all parties in the fight against Germany. From the men, one got the fight against management. From the management, one experienced hours of

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vituperation against the men. Both sides claimed to be concerned only with improving the situation to increase the strength of the struggle against Fascism, but nevertheless, the real war which is being fought here today is still pre-war, private and economic.25 However, as these observations suggest, the cleavage between workers and management now assumed a wider ideological significance in the context of war. The same sentiments invoked to justify the war against fascism were echoed in negotiations over pay and conditions on the shop-floor. Indeed, when it was virtually certain the Allies would win the war, the struggle against Hitler and labour’s old enemy, the employers, was liable to converge and become ideologically confused.26 Total commitment to efficiency was labour’s strongest card in confronting both the employers and government during the war. Calls for increased productivity were politically unassailable and carried the support of ordinary people for stronger trade union representation in management and Whitehall. Separately and collectively, the trade unions pledged their commitment to production on every front. Disturbing impressions of the incompetence and opportunism of private industry in response to the war challenged the employers’ prerogative to manage production and all matters relating to efficiency themselves. In 1942, the Engineering Employers Federation, under firm pressure from the Government, grudgingly conceded to demands from the AEU for joint production committees of elected nominees. Within a year, joint production committees with equal representation from management and the shop-floor were nationally established in most larger firms. Their brief was to advise upon production, efficiency and all related matters, excepting pay. Amongst both militant and moderate trade unionists, the formation of JPCs was hailed as a victory for organised labour over the traditional autonomy and exclusive authority of management boards. Subsequent demands from the TUC. that joint production committees should be made compulsory were refused; nevertheless the Government actively encouraged consultative processes in larger firms. The effect of these committees upon relations within industry was somewhat ambiguous. In some factories, joint production committees worked tolerably well and modest improvements in efficiency were gained. However, the consultative committees were seldom found in small or medium-sized firms where conditions of employment often failed to meet minimum standards of safety and pay. Similarly, workers in agriculture, catering, and part-time workers of all kinds (the vast majority of whom were women), were largely excluded from these developments. On the other hand, amongst the larger, unionised firms, consultative committees established a lasting role for shop stewards in negotiations between senior management and the rank and file. In general, the more beligerent their stance, the more controversial the issue, the more support union representatives could expect from the factory floor.27 And though management quickly learnt to domesticate proceedings by stressing the non-executive role of nominees, at the very least employers now had to be more circumspect in exercising the prerogatives of industrial power. Joint production committees were a symptom of industrial disharmony, not a cure for industrial strife. They certainly did not reduce the incidence of strikes which increased every year throughout the war. Although strikes and lock-outs were illegal under the Emergency Powers Act, and roundly condemned as unpatriotic on all sides, the official

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tally rose from below a pre-war level of 922 reported in 1940 to a record peak of 2,194 in 1944.28 Coal-mining was by far the most strike-prone industry, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the 3,700,000 days lost in 1944, followed by engineering and allied trades. Whilst strikes remained a frequent tactic in the ‘private war’ between labour and capital, few were organised for overtly political ends. Most were lightning stoppages over piece rates, working conditions and pay; moreover, few lasted more than three or four days. And although the growing incidence of strikes was vociferously deplored by employers and the Right as the subversive resurgence of trade union power, their effects on production were firmly checked by government intervention, in most instances with the tacit co-operation of the unions themselves. The deterrence of strikes, or more realistically, measures to prevent their escalation, was part and parcel of government policy, agreed in consultation with the TUC. The framework of legislation relied to a large extent upon voluntary negotiations and restraint. However, if voluntary procedures failed to produce a settlement, trade disputes were referred to an independent arbitration tribunal whose ruling was binding under the Conditions of the Employment and National Arbitration Order (1940), commonly known as Order 1305. A separate Order made it an indictable offence to ‘instigate or incite…any strike among persons engaged in the performance of essential services’.29 This provision, intended to be against ‘politically motivated’ strikes, was later extended to cover peaceful picketing in essential industries. The main problem with Order 1305 was the time it took for tribunals to reach a decision. Many disputes were provoked by sudden and unexpected circumstances. While the tribunal waited to deliberate over the case, the situation could deteriorate, with those affected taking matters into their own hands. Again, dissatisfaction with a tribunal’s ruling was itself a reason for strikes. As an independent arbiter, removed from the actual scene of disputes, the tribunal often failed to appreciate local conditions, or lacked specific knowledge of the industry involved. Both these difficulties adversely affected the prevalence of strikes in the coal-mining industry where frequent variations at the coalface called for prompt settlements based upon an intimate knowledge of the local seam. This was so in perhaps the most celebrated, and certainly the most farcical strike of the war. Its history offers a salutatory warning to any government still thinking of placing strikes in essential services outside the law. The dispute in question began early in December 1941 when sixty coal-face workers at Betteshanger Colliery failed to negotiate satisfactory rates for a difficult seam. The men initiated a go-slow; in retaliation, management ordered the protesting miners out of the pit. Others came out in sympathy. On 9 January 1942 the miners contested the Tribunal’s ruling in favour of management’s original offer and came out on strike. Production stopped and about 4,000 men were idle for three weeks. Under Order 1305, the strike was illegal and the practicability of prosecuting large numbers of workers was put to the test. It was decided to concentrate solely on underground workers as proceedings against all 4,000 strikers would grind the administrative and legislative process to a halt. The Ministry of Labour was reluctant to proceed at all for fear of damaging relations with the trade unions whilst undermining the moral authority of Order 1305. However, with Cabinet approval, summonses were served against 1,050 miners. Finding enough Justices of the Peace to sign over 1,000 forms in duplicate proved difficult; extra police had to be drafted to serve the summonses, and special sessions had

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to be arranged at Canterbury Magistrates’ Court. If the defendants pleaded ‘not guilty’, it was expected the hearings would last for several months. To save the Government potential embarrassment, an unusual form of plea-bargaining was devised: the union obligingly agreed to acccept a decision on a few ‘test cases’ who were instructed to plead guilty in the expectation of a fine. News of the prosecutions spread to other pits, and on the day of the hearings, in a long procession of striking miners, their families and as many supporters marched to Court to the sound of colliery bands and cheering crowds. The judgment of the Court was unexpectedly severe: the Branch Secretary, the local President and a member of the local executive were sent to prison with hard labour, and nearly one thousand miners were fined between £3 and £5. Sir Harold Emmerson, at the time Chief Industrial Commissioner at the Ministry of Labour, describes what happened next: Protests came against the severity of the sentences, particularly against the imprisonment of the three union officials. Many of the miners in the area were in the Home Guard, and Kent was in the front line. ‘Was this the way to treat good citizens?’ There was talk of sympathetic strikes. But the real trouble was that the only men who could call off the strike were now in gaol. The Secretary for Mines went down to Kent to see them accompanied by the National President of the Miners’ Union. Negotiations were re-opened and five days after the hearing an agreement was signed, in prison, between the colliery management and the Kent Miners’ Union. Apart from some face-saving words, it gave the men what they wanted. Then the Secretary took a deputation to the Home Secretary asking for the immediate release of the three local officials. The men would not start work until their leaders were free. After eleven days in prison they were released. The mine re-opened and in the first week the normal output of coal was nearly trebled.30 If nothing else, this case illustrates the limitations of imposing legal penalties against strikes. Even with the union’s co-operation, it proved impractical to prosecute large numbers of workers equitably and en masse. Only nine convicted miners opted to pay their fines. As the Court prepared warrants to commit the remaining thousand or so to gaol, the colliery company, foreseeing further trouble, hastily offered to pay all outstanding fines; however, at the last minute the Government decided it would not be in anyone’s interests to press the point. In the event, the use of emergency powers protracted and complicated the dispute and, as the Ministry of Labour had feared from the start, undermined the moral authority of the State. When thousands of miners came out on strike in 1944, there was no attempt to re-invoke Order 1305.31 Such events strained the tactical yet tenuous alliance between government, labour and the employers. Continued co-operation with labour was the corner-stone of government policies on the industrial front. It was accepted that trade union leaders should be consulted and their confidence sought both in relation to the management of the economy and plans for social reconstruction after the war. Taking account of the interests of labour can scarcely be described as a revolutionary change, but compared with the structure of decision-making before the war, it was a significant step towards a more open, inclusive

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society, largely brought about by the exigencies of war. It should be emphasised, however, that it was the demands of wartime production, and particularly the premium on industrial skills, that underpinned this change. There is a tendency amongst historians to write as if the wartime ‘consensus’ and emergent proposals for social reform arose like miasma from the common dangers of the early years of the war. But whilst desperate circumstances shaped the context and rhetoric of change, the basis of the consensus was a political contract between government, the trade unions and private employers on the production of essential supplies. It was a tenuous contract on all sides, and though closest between government and trade union leadership, it was by no means binding upon union rank and file. As we have seen, embittered cleavages between labour and management perpetuated antagonistic relations, despite a patriotic commitment on both sides to increase production of strategic supplies. Ironically, the so-called ‘consensus’ had its impetus in these long-standing conflicts which threatened industrial morale at the most crucial stage of the war. The urgency of the war effort and its dependence upon the skills and moral support of the working class, left no alternative but to accede to popular demands with immediate proposals for domestic reform. These demands carried a momentum that could not be shelved until after the war. As A.J.P. Taylor recalls, Men talked of reconstruction as they had done during the First World War. This time they were determined not to be cheated, and therefore demanded the formulation of practical schemes while the war was on. This demand was hard to resist. The governing classes were on their best behaviour, from conviction as well as calculation.32 Pressures for change shifted the balance of political opinion further to the Left and opened the way for a broad coalition of progressive ideas. However, the war did not fundamentally change the structure of industrial relations, nor the objective situation of the working class. Labour and capital confronted each other like armies of observation, divided, rather than united, by a common determination to win the war. As Barnett records, the consequences were evident in low productivity, shoddy workmanship, absenteeism, go-slows and strikes across the whole range of essential industries during the war.33 Locked into the past, neither side was willing to suspend hostilities without compensating inducements and guarantees. In effect, the Government held the ring, encouraging Herculean feats of production with subsidies, sanctions and promises of future employment and reforms; yet everywhere productivity was constrained by intransigent relations between a chronically disaffected work-force and Britain’s equally uncompromising capitalist class. By comparison, labour relations in Germany were of a different order during the Third Reich. Here, the lines of compliance were tightly drawn by a combination of political coercion and tacit consent. Despite massive allied bombing and a smaller work-force, Germany consistently maintained higher rates of industrial production until the closing years of the war. Moreover, unlike Britain whose war effort heavily depended upon the United States, Germany relied almost entirely upon national resources and those of occupied states. German superiority is commonly attributed to a combination of more advanced technologies, better-trained and motivated workers and more effective planning and operational techniques. Only in the overall command of the war effort were there

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conspicuous shortcomings on the German side; by comparison, the problems of war production in Britain were, in Barnett’s opinion, much closer to the ground: German strength lay in the ‘field’ itself, in industry where highly trained and motivated engineers, managers, and workforces performed no less admirably than their army comrades in striving to redeem the fatal blunderings of Nazi leadership. In the case of British war production, however, it was in the field, beyond direct reach of bureaucratic planning and intervention, in the very factories and plants, that British performance proved inferior. Thus German shortcomings in production derived essentially from the nature of the Nazi regime and ceased with its demise; British shortcomings belonged to Britain’s industrial system itself.34 However, less widely cited are those economic and ideological continuities between labour and the Nazi regime. As Grunberger observes, ‘the key to labour’s attitude to the regime lay in the single word work’.35 After years of unemployment and political disturbance, many German workers were ready to trade collective bargaining for a more ordered and stable society which promised, above all, the right to work. Hitler’s promise of ‘arbeit und broat’ was made good. Out of the confusion of the Weimar Republic, the National Socialists conjured an ‘economic miracle’ which, though inflationary and heavily dependent upon re-armament, appeared real enough to the man in the street. Between 1932 and 1937 the number of those in work increased from 12.9 million to 18.9 million, whilst total earnings rose by 51 per cent.36 Economic recovery brought rising standards of living and the availability of higher quality consumer goods. But more than that, it restored a sense of direction and self-esteem. The corporate identity of the Nazi Reich fused the interests of the individual and the state, creating a sense of liberation through nationally productive work. Nor was this sense of liberation illusory; economic recovery was closely allied to the political and ethnic ideals of a ‘greater Germany’. Hitler’s aggressive stance in foreign affairs touched national sentiment to the core: with the re-militarisation of the Rhineland and ‘bringing home’ the Saar, the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Versailles were repudiated, and the crippling reparations to Germany’s enemies of the First World War abruptly ceased. Hitler alone assumed the credit for this rapid resurgence of Germany’s economic and political power. His self-styled posture as Führer of the Fatherland transcended the petit bourgeois roots of National Socialism and personified the strength of a united Germany and the political integrity of the Reich. To the traditional middle class, marginalised by the changing complexity of a modern industrial state, National Socialism articulated a yearning for an ordered and more prosperous world. But equally for many industrial workers, the value placed by Nazi propaganda upon crafts and skilled work, enhanced their income and sense of social worth. In particular, the achievements of German workers in construction and armamentled industries were celebrated by the regime: in contrast, persistent inefficiency or unwillingness to work was liable to be seen as dissident opposition to the state. It was a discipline that rewarded hard and productive work and punished those who would not conform. Politically, the activities of the SA and the Gestapo inhibited collective opposition within labour’s ranks. However, it would be misleading to suppose that

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compliance rested solely upon force and threats. Popular enthusiasm for the regime was often spontaneous and sincere, as in the case of the mass celebrations following the annexation of the Sudetenland and Hitler’s march into Austria and the occupation of Paris. Military success stirred a mixture of nationalist sentiments which for a time obscured the disparity between the Nazis’ self-portrait of a people united in ‘strength through joy’ and the need for repressive tactics against militant sections of the working class. However, the suppression of trade union organisations was combined with a skilful manipulation of the ideological significance of productive work. The traditional maxim Arbeit macht frei (’Labour liberates’) assumed a specifically nationalist meaning which coordinated the ideals of Hitler’s revolutionary ‘new order’ with the rising social and material aspirations of the German working class. The cultural and individual significance of work cut across class divisions as a dominant motif of national revival and solidarity in the Third Reich, drawing workers, managers, bureaucrats and scientists into the new order of National Socialist ideals. Although Hitler’s vision of Volksgemeinschaft (National community) failed to suppress the indigenous culture of the urban working class, the success of his social and economic policies went a long way towards legitimating his claim to govern by popular assent.37 In Britain, the ideological apparatus of the war failed to penetrate working class consciousness to the same extent. The reasons for this lay deep in the history of the working class. Unlike European societies where the transition to industrial capitalism engendered a spirit of democracy and revolutionary change, there had been little attempt in Britain – except piecemeal and then grudgingly – to integrate labour into the political culture of civil society.38 From Disraeli’s ‘two nations’ to the Second World War, labour remained a category apart, ideologically alienated from the centres of power by generations of exploitation at the hands of an historically unreconstituted and no less insular ruling class. The common heritage that Churchill imagined to be the birthright of every citizen was belied by the attitudes and deprivations inherited by the contemporary working class. Their loyalties were formed, as Hoggart says, by a strong sense of belonging to a community with a culture and consciousness of its own; similarly, their relation to authority was founded upon a solidaristic sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’.39 These latent antagonisms, though muted by a common cause, retarded the labour process and adversely affected industrial production and morale. As we have suggested above, the war against Germany co-existed with the continuing struggle against labour’s old enemy – capital and its agents on the factory floor. But almost immediately, the vast increases in production needed to sustain the war brought public acceptance of the fact that the condition of labour was of no less importance to the defence of democracy than to the narrower interests of capital and the employers. Politically, labour acquired a new self-confidence which owed as much to its representation on committees related to planning and social reform as the grass-roots commitment of ordinary households did to the aims of the war. Both in industry and on the home front, the war effort tested the loyalty of the labour movement and the stamina of the working class. Hardened by years of deprivation, the endurance of working-class communities through the Blitz provided the imagery, humour and social cohesion that sustained the country through the worst years of the war. When in the spring of 1944 intelligence reports alerted the country to a new and potentially devastating wave of

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aerial attacks (Hitler’s ‘V’ rockets), Churchill was confidently able to predict ‘Britain can take it’, assured of the strength and solidarity of the working class. This lasting image of a resolute people, united against the strains of war, has come to symbolise the collective achievement of Britain’s ‘finest hour’. What is remembered is the sense of community, the common endeavour, not the strikes, industrial acrimony or the nation’s dependence upon American supplies. In retrospect, the achievements of wartime production are associated less with strategic management and centralised planning than with the determined efforts of British workers to the nation’s cause. This singular emphasis upon the willing co-operation of labour became for latter-day Conservatives a panacea for restoring Britain’s competitive position in the industrial world. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and the short-lived ‘Backing Britain’ campaign of the early 1970s, appeals were made for a return to the ‘spirit of co-operation’ associated with the war. In the prevailing view of governments, employers and the Tory press, the roots of Britain’s postwar decline lay in labour’s subsequent defensive strength.40 This ideological simplification obscured the fact that the structural tensions of postwar industry were no less in evidence during the war. Nevertheless, efforts were made to moderate trade union resistance, particularly to rationalisation and technological change, by incorporating labour into analogous forms of ‘social contract’ in an attempt to recapture the unity commonly believed to have marked labour relations between 1940 and 1945. This broadly conciliatory approach, like the confrontational stance of the Thatcher governments that followed, was flawed both in its diagnosis of the ills of postwar society and the nature of industrial solidarity during the Second World War. The persistent tendency to hold organised labour responsible for the problems of the British economy distracted attention from the multiple problems of under-investment, obsolete equipment, inadequate technical training and the chronic deficiencies of British management.41 Amongst these ill-assorted problems, trade union militancy was no less a symptom than a cause. The naïve belief that decades of competitive decline can be reversed by transforming the attitude of labour, or curbing trade union powers, fails to recognise that the priorities of the work-force are related to the organisation of production as a whole. As comparisons with industrial performance in Sweden, France, Germany and Japan suggest, the competent management of human resources which encourages positive attitudes towards employees is no less critical in accounting for productivity than technical training or investment in development and research. In short, the behaviour of the work-force is largely determined by the managerial environment in which they work. Sadly, this environment and its pattern of industrial relations has not fundamentally changed in Britain since before the war. Not surprisingly, as the development of industry has required increasingly sophisticated labour processes and innovative techniques, the historically backward nature of these relations has emerged as a critically important factor in Britain’s economic decline.42 In these respects, the war was historically anomalous, not because pay and working conditions were any less an issue, or that there was less resistance to innovation and technical change, but because relations of war production took on a significance that subordinated the struggle between labour and management to the interests of the community as a whole. Yet ironically, the war effort drew upon the same values of

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working-class solidarity, masculinity and victory that were no less evident, for example, in the coal-miners’ strike of 1973–74, or again in the more dramatic confrontation between the miners and the Thatcher government in 1984–5. On this latter occasion, the miners found themselves fighting not just for pay but – threatened by the closure of numerous pits – for their livelihood, their communities and way of life. That parallel was not lost on sympathetic elements of the popular Press where the struggle between the miners and the Thatcher government was portrayed in the spirit of a ‘miners’ Dunkirk’. Indeed, if there was one expectation that underwrote the corpor-ate participation of the labour movement through the Second World War, it was the expectation that the collective significance of work in postwar society would assume a value beyond its material reward.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Ministry of Information, Assurance of Victory (London, HMSO, 1940). Corelli Barnett, Audit of War (London, Macmillan, 1987), p. 60. M. M. Postan, British War Production (London, HMSO, 1952). Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (London, Jonathan Cape, 1975), p. 63. Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, Panther Books, 1971), p. 79. Sean Glynn and John Oxborrow, Inter-War Britain: A Social and Economic History (London, Allen & Unwin, 1976), p. 179. K. Hancock and M. Gowing, British War Economy (London, HMSO and Longman, 1953), pp. 366–70. Corelli Barnett, Audit of War, p. 144. Ibid., pp. 144–145. Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: Anglo-American Collaboration in the Reconstruction of Multi-lateral Trade (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 54–6. J. M. Lee, The Churchill Coalition 1940–1945 (Hamden, Connecticut 1980), p. 89. Corelli Barnett, Audit of War, p. 60. Angus Calder, The People’s War, p. 173. Ernest Bevin is reported as saying that ‘The aircraft industry was the one industry which failed to improve its output in proportion to the amount of labour supplied.’ Minute of the Defence Supply Committee of 7 January 1943, quoted in Barnett, p. 157. Corelli Barnett, Audit of War, pp. 151–61. Angus Calder, The People’s War, p. 299. Corelli Barnett, Audit of War, pp. 152–3. Mass Observation, People in Production (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1942), p. 59. People in Production, p. 72. Ibid., p. 73. Ken Coates and Antony Topham, Industrial Democracy in Great Britain (London, Macgibbon & Kee, 1968), p. 141. People in Production, pp. 60–68. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., pp. 24–25. Ibid., p. 246.

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

42

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Angus Calder, The People’s War, p. 461. Ken Coates and Antony Topham, Industrial Democracy in Great Britain, p. 142. V. L. Allen, Trade Unions and the Government (London, Longman, 1960), p. 136. Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, Appendix II, Cmnd. 3623 (London, HMSO, 1968). For a detailed account of disputes within the coal-mining industry during the war see Diana Parkin, ‘Contested sources of identity: nation, class and gender in Second World War Britain’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1988. A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 567. Corelli Barnett, Audit of War, p. 191. Ibid., p. 62. Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich, (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974) p. 239. D.J.K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1989), p. 69. Ibid., p. 45. Edward Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Gollancz, 1963). See also Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, Chatto & Windus, 1957) and Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 1961). Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy. The common impression that Britain is especially prone to industrial disputes and strikes is grossly exaggerated. The number of days lost to strikes, even during conspicuous periods of industrial unrest, has been far less than many of Britain’s closest competitors. For instance, between 1967–76 (which included a national miners’ strike and the notorious ‘three day week’), the annual average of days lost per 1,000 employees in the UK was 788, compared with 1,349 in the USA. Canada, Australia, Italy, Finland and Ireland all recorded higher averages for the period than the UK (see L. Harris, ‘Working class strength: A counter-view’ in A Socialist Anatomy of Britain (ed.) D. Coates et al., London Polity, 1985). Furthermore, strikes in Britain tend to be concentrated in relatively few industries: for the period 1971 to 1975, the Department of Employment reported that 98 per cent of manufacturing firms, employing in all about four-fifths of the industrial workforce, experienced no official strikes, belying the impression that strikes are endemic to British industry as a whole. See Charles Handy, The Making of Managers (Report for the British Institute of Management and The Confederation British Industry, Corby 1987) for a comparison of managers in selected advanced industrial economies; also J. Constable and R. McCormick, The Making of British Managers (Report for the British Institute of Managers and the Confederation British Industry, Corby 1987) on the relatively undeveloped state of British management and management training. R.E. Caves, ‘Productivity differences among industries’, in R.E. Caves and L. B. Krause (eds) Britain’s Economic Performance (Washington DC, The Brookings Institution, 1980).

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Chapter 3 Keeping the home fires burning It is commonly assumed that during the Second World War women were liberated from traditional domestic roles and encouraged to participate in the wider world of paid work and auxiliary service on much the same terms as men. Marx’s discussion of the ‘reserve army of labour’ is frequently cited in this context to interpret these changes in the relationship of women to industrial work. The argument suggests that the capitalist state, deprived of adequate supplies of male labour, had to recruit and make certain provisions for women in the labour force.1 The consequences of these concessions, it is argued, allowed women to experience to a much greater extent than before an independent and socially emancipated way of life. The argument is strengthened by the fact that at the end of the war, when women once again became marginal to the labour force, the provision of state-funded child care and other concessions to women’s domestic responsibilities were withdrawn and traditional sexual divisions of labour, both within and outside the home, reappeared.2 The reality of women’s experience in the war was different and much more diverse than the above interpretation suggests. Amongst twentieth-century wars that have had an emancipatory effect on women, the Second World War trails some way behind the Spanish Civil War (where women fought, in truly revolutionary fashion, as Republican combat troops) and the Russian Revolution which ended centuries of institutionalised patriarchy. By comparison, British women were never part of the combat forces during the Second World War, and in this case there was no wartime legislation that had any specific or lasting significance for female emancipation. Indeed, the Beveridge Report, published as a White Paper during the war, was almost entirely reactionary in its statutory implications as far as women were concerned. It is certainly true that some women, who might otherwise not have been in paid employment, were either conscripted or voluntarily drawn into wage labour during the war, and there was a considerable redirection and reorganisation of those women already in paid employment, but the mythical armies of wartime women workers do not exist outside fantasy.3 The more mundane reality is that for many women the war meant that life continued much as before – except that ordinary household and domestic tasks were accomplished with more difficulty and at greater length. What needs to be questioned is the common idea that the war increased the overall participation of women in employment and public life and this enhanced their personal and social standing in British society. How, then, was women’s experience changed by the war? It has to be said that as in peace, so in war, women experienced multiple and diverse realities. Many working-class women lived under the constant threat of poverty and insecurity. Middle-class women knew a limited security, which offered some opportunities for education and personal emancipation. A tiny percentage of wealthy, bourgeois women experienced that way of life forever enshrined in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford – a way of life

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located in London and country estates, centrally concerned with the arrangements of property and the proper articulation of status and social codes. This way of life is disproportionately represented in literature and the arts, and has frequently been presented as an indication of social behaviour and the direction of change. Yet while there is no denying a certain fascination with the lives of the Mitford sisters, or Diana Cooper or the coterie of other quasi-legendary figures of the 1920s and the 1930s, the experiences of these individuals and their fiction obscures the poverty and the socially confined nature of the majority of women at the time. If there was one characteristic typical of the lives of the great majority of women in the period before the Second World War it was their social seclusion. For most workingclass women, life was lived in the domestic world of the household and the local community. Few people, and women least of all, travelled unless either forced to look for work or conscripted. (One of the more ironic comments by private soldiers in the First World War is that they thought that volunteering for active service would give then an opportunity to travel.) The physical boundaries of life and the frontiers of the social world were essentially narrow ones. If we put this limitation together with the material circumstances of most women, especially married women with children, we have a way of life that is socially and physically restricted, bound by the dual constraints of poverty and the daily needs of others. This way of life offered few opportunities for education, leisure and freely chosen employment, or any of the other advantages that commonly made up the catalogue of ordinary, middle-class freedoms. Material hardship thus dominated the lives of the majority of working-class women before the Second World War. Their pattern of employment seldom extended beyond marriage and the birth of children and was usually followed by virtual exclusion from employment for the rest of adult life. Significant and widely recognised exceptions to this pattern existed: many married women with children took in home work (for example, washing, letting of rooms and the manufacture of clothes or other articles); others relied upon relatives or paid minders to care for children whilst they worked outside the home.4 As there was no statutory limit on the age of baby-sitters and/or child-minders, it can be assumed that much infant and child care was performed by older children in the household as well as by adult kin. But access to employment for women was limited: either opportunities for employment did not exist (or only existed on a temporary basis such as seasonal agricultural work) or domestic responsibilities were simply too great to allow a long-term commitment. There were also considerable domestic or community pressures against the employment of married women outside the home. These constraints have been documented over and over again; indeed, one of the lesser cited reasons for the propaganda to encourage women workers in the Second World War was that the Government found itself forced to counteract the resistance of men as employers, husbands and fellow workers to the extension of female employment.5 The arguments used by the Government suggested firstly that women’s contribution to the war effort would not be needed for very long (normal domestic service would therefore be resumed as soon as possible), and secondly that the Government and industry would guarantee that jobs occupied by women during the war would be returned to men as soon as hostilities ceased. Of the many arguments and theories about the employment of women in the Second World War, few adequately reflect either the variety in the experiences of women or the

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continuity of their pre-war and wartime roles. Certainly, a minority of women undertook tasks exceptional for their sex, but the majority continued to occupy a traditional subordinate status. It is equally important to recognise that it is misleading to see employment per se (in either wartime or peacetime) as intrinsically liberating and emancipating. The heritage of Engels’ views about the entry of women into paid employment as a prerequisite for their emancipation is as evident in theories and discussions of women and employment in the Second World War as it is in other contexts: the assumption, following Engels, is that wage labour is in some primary sense emancipatory.6 Certainly, wage labour for women can decrease their economic dependence on men, but if the wage labour takes place within the context of patriarchal industrial capitalism (and such was certainly the case in the Second World War) then the emancipatory effects have to be considered with some circumspection. Almost all working-class families – men, women and children – were better off materially as a result of full employment created by the needs of the war economy. In this sense women were partially liberated from former poverty (and its concomitant side effects in terms of illhealth and malnourishment) and the insecurity of the pre-war years, but the degree of emancipation Engels envisaged – an emancipation of personal and sexual life that would involve education, the choice of work and the option of maternity – was still light years away. Furthermore, there is no evidence that sexual mores changed substantially during the war: the increase in illegitimacy which is frequently cited as an indication of greater sexual freedom is a crude index of sexual morality and is, in this case, a much better indication simply of those relationships which, but for the war, would have been legitimated by marriage. The sexual double standard, attitudes to illegitimate children, unmarried mothers, sexually ‘liberated’ women and sexual minorities, all these much more reliable, and important, indices of sexual morality, remained largely unaltered either in measured social opinion, in literature and the media, or in statute. The real benefit to working-class women brought by the war was virtually guaranteed employment for men. But this conclusion obscures many of the varied and subtle differences that the war made to women. The extent of change in the employment of women can be stated in one bald statistic: in 1939 there were six-and-a-half million women in the work-force in Great Britain; by 1943 this figure had increased to just seven-and-a-half million. Thus the belief that most women were integrated into the labour force is hardly borne out by official figures. More striking is the number of women in employment before the war, rather than those drawn into employment. Again, the evidence challenges those easy assumptions about the employment of women being a post-Second World War phenomenon. Substantial numbers of women – particularly unmarried working-class women – had always been in employment, predominantly as servants, service and unskilled factory workers. When the conscription of women did begin (through the National Service No. 2 Act which became law on 18 December 1941) initial public reaction was not unfavourable; indeed, the general view was that this latest development in the direction of labour should have come into effect earlier. Particularly in the early years of war when the war economy was under acute strain, the British, unlike the Germans, were prepared to abandon rigid views about gender roles in order to meet labour shortages. As Claudia Koonz has commented about Germany:

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Even faced with dire labour shortages and acute production problems, Hitler, Goebbels and Goring did not fashion a policy that tapped women as a reserve. Until 1943, Hitler repeatedly rejected desperate pleas from the men responsible for the work force…. In the final analysis, then, the carefully constructed system, which offered material and psychological benefits for motherhood, proved dysfunctional in Nazi leaders’ plans for conquest.7 The greater flexibility of the British towards the conscription of women suggests that the British had a more ‘modern’ attitude to the employment of women, namely that it could be tolerated. The limitations of this attitude (its complete disregard for women’s relationship to the labour market and the unequal rewards that women received in paid work) are well known. Moreover, the inadequacy of a ‘modern’ attitude to women’s paid work was well-known to British women themselves. Despite appeals to their patriotism women were unwilling to enter voluntarily into war work. Calder writes: Voluntary appeals to women had clearly failed, most grievously in the case of the women’s services, which had a bad reputation for impropriety. But they had failed because women themselves were reluctant, hesitant, or in their own opinions, busy enough already. One typist wrote ‘I can lay my hand on my heart and say truthfully that I have not yet met a women in the twenties who is not in an awful state about conscription….8 Only unmarried women between the ages of 20 and 30 years old were to be called up (the lower age limit was extended to 19 years in 1942, and the upper age limit to 40 in 1943). Married women with children and/or other domestic responsibilities were not conscripted; the belief that mothers were forced to work and leave young children in state nurseries is a myth. But the quotation above also suggests women’s attitude to war work: many women were already bearing significant domestic responsibilities and clearly felt that any further call on their time or energy was unacceptable. The majority of nonemployed women worked at least a twelve-hour day for seven days every week at household tasks made more onerous by wartime conditions, leaving little time and energy for the war effort. Appeals to a potential ‘volunteer’ work-force assumed a virtually unoccupied female population who, in apparent contradiction to their supposed life of leisure, possessed an eager sense of Protestant endeavour that could be called into productive activity by the right kind of appeal. Certainly some middle-class, middle-aged women did work hard and long during the war – and the organisation of the Women’s Voluntary Service remains as a testament to that activity – but the response of these women was insufficient to meet the growing demand for labour. As a 1944 Ministry of Information pamphlet remarked: ‘The registrations of women have shown the number available for war work to be largely restricted by domestic responsibilities. The numbers available with no employment and no household duties have been small.’ Equally, the report of the Royal Commission on Equal Pay (published in 1946) found that at the height of the war, in spite of the unprecedented central direction and control of female labour power, nearly ten million women remained ‘unavailable’ even for part-time employment. Indeed, women represented, at the highest peak of female employment in

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June 1944, only 39.3 per cent of the total industrial population compared with 27 per cent immediately before the war. Far more significant than the increase of women in paid work was the wartime shift in the sectors of the economy in which women were employed. It is in the redirection of women’s employment that we find the more radical effects of the war. The Ministry of Labour and National Service employment statistics reveal that in 1939 most single women were either already in paid employment or actively seeking full-time work, while a tendency for young married women to go on working until the birth of their first child was already apparent. A period of wage labour was already part of the normal expectation of adult female life. Conscription entailed not an induction into work but a shift within the labour market, typically from the shrinking service sector to the rapidly expanding engineering industry. It was partly because women were directed into unaccustomed work linked with the war effort that there was a similar shift at the end of the war. By the middle of 1944, for example, out of the sixteen million women aged between 14 and 49 years, over seven million were employed in the Auxiliary Services, full-time Civil Defence or industry. By 1946 there were vacancies in light engineering, the new manufacturing industries and in a wide variety of jobs within the service sector. At the same time there was a marked decline in the number of jobs available in areas such as munitions in which women had been most heavily concentrated during the war. Whilst many working-class women experienced an unprecedented demand for their labour in the war economy, there was little enthusiasm on the part of industry to reward their labour on the same terms as men. If women were slow to heed the call to work for victory, a significant reason must have been the low levels of pay that such worthy service would attract. In general, in spite of the large scale redistribution of women towards industry, working-class women were generally still confined to the low paid, low status work that had long been defined as ‘women’s work’. By 1943 the proportion of women in the three main industrial groups had changed as follows:

Munitions Basic industries Other industries and services

Mid 1939 (%) 16 15 37

Sept 1943 (%) 37 28 51

But whilst women constituted a larger proportion of the industrial work-force than previously, neither unions nor employers considered the new situation as anything other than a temporary and, in many ways, regrettable, necessity. Those few women who were allowed to do ‘men’s work’ for the duration of the war were usually only allowed to do so because of carefully negotiated agreements between trade unions, employers and the government. What was not taken into account in these agreements was the major industrial campaign of working women during the 1930s: the campaign for equal pay. Thus, although wage levels rose during the war, the discrepancy between men’s and women’s wage rates hardly changed. In the comparatively well paid engineering industry, for example, the average woman’s wage in 1944 was exactly half the average wage for men. Overall, few women in any trade or profession succeeded in achieving positions of real responsibility. Although a minority of women, usually middle-class and highly educated, were able to establish themselves in niches from which it was difficult

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to dislodge them at the end of the war, opportunities for women to make significant progress up the professional or managerial ladder were hardly more numerous than in peacetime. The experience of women’s employment indicates, therefore, that with few exceptions, the war acted as an accelerator rather than an innovator. While in some areas, existing trends were confirmed (such as the trend, already noticeable before the war, for young childless married women to take some form of employment) in other areas (such as the right to equal pay, to promotion and to access to industrial training and apprenticeship schemes) the war does not appear to have made a significant difference to women’s position within the labour force. Perhaps the most lasting change was the marked increase in the availability of parttime industrial work. Although the possibility of part-time work was welcomed by many married women (it was estimated by Geoffrey Thomas in a 1948 survey on women’s attitudes to industrial work that about three times as many married women were willing to work part-time rather than full-time) the widespread introduction of part-time work had a damaging effect on the employment status of women in the years after the war. Initially, employers had generally been unwilling to accept part-time workers, so much so that the Ministry of Labour and National Service had to issue several explanatory pamphlets designed to stimulate the extension of this practice. The pamphlets emphasised the possibilities of a wartime equivalent of ‘flexi-time’, and suggested that employers should make allowances for other demands on workers – such as women ‘having to’ cook meals for their husbands or meet their children from school. With initial reluctance, more and more employers took up the idea as the advantages for employers gradually took shape: part-time staff could be denied basic employment rights such as job security, vocational training, wage rises and access to those fringe benefits (such as pension funds) that were then available. Far from being progressive, contemporary conditions of employment suggest that in some ways the war was actually regressive as far as women were concerned. It brought the introduction and institutionalisation of part-time work and the lasting acceptance on the part of the Government, employers and trade unions of divisions between men’s and women’s work. That is not to say that ideas about gender-related occupational skills did not exist before the war; they did, and have existed as long as there has been a social division of labour. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span’ may have been a vision of a classless society, but it was certainly not a vision of a society in which there was no sexual division of labour. These primary divisions were commonly ratified by the government in wage differentials during the Second World War; furthermore, women were only ‘allowed’ to do men’s work on the understanding that as soon as the war ended, traditional occupational divisions would reassert themselves. The potentially progressive Royal Commission on Equal Pay (established in 1944) endorsed in its final report the maintenance of sexual segregation in the labour market. Despite dissent from the female commissioners (who published a Minority Report) the Commission took the view that equal pay might attract too many women into well paid work and actually increase female employment. As Jane Lewis has commented: The failure of both unions and government to recognise the structural factors affecting women’s relationship to the labour market (particularly

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their reproductive role and the domestic division of labour), other than to conceptualise them as handicaps rendering women in need of protection, has meant that there has been little change in the overall position of women workers.9 Just as the war re-enforced traditional notions of gender-related work, this hardening of the industrial arteries was linked to traditional expectations about the roles of the sexes in civilian life. Again, the war is sometimes portrayed as having had a general emancipatory effect upon the status of women. The state provision of nurseries, the partial (and extensively qualified) acceptance by the state of responsibility for the care of infants and pre-school children, the numbers of women experiencing a degree of geographical mobility through service in the armed forces, and the dissolution of certain cultural forms of gender-appropriate behaviour (such as rigid dress codes), are all taken as evidence of a general libertarianism and a degree of ‘modernisation’ as far as sexuality and the expectations of women were concerned.10 But just as in the case of employment, the available evidence suggests a continuation of accepted conventions, with only the most minimal and superficial changes. It is true, for example, that many women stopped wearing make-up during the war, but it would be quite false to suppose that this was because women suddenly abandoned a conventional form of personal narcissism. What disappeared were cosmetics, not their popularity or the conventions of glamour. The title of this chapter is ‘Keeping the home fires burning’. Given the availability of fuel for domestic use in wartime Britain, the title must be interpreted metaphorically. It was intended to emphasise that whatever else happened in Britain during the Second World War, women went on fulfilling their traditional tasks of caring for others within the context of the home. Indeed, the efficient operation of the war economy depended upon the maintenance of a harmonious relationship between the State and the community and in this, as always, the State was dependent upon the willing co-operation of households and family. To secure this co-operation it became necessary for the state to demonstrate a close interest in the ordinary domestic lives of its citizens, both male and female. Thus women became the target of an extraordinary barrage of government advice, which took the form of information about diet, child care, the care of the home and those endless other issues that can be related to domestic life. Intervention took various forms, from propaganda and the evacuation of mothers and children in the early years of the war, to the development of school health care in later years. In all cases, the material specifically aimed at women suggested that in the view of the State, women were as much citizens as men, even though this apparent ideological equality could not be interpreted as a challenge to the traditional sexual division of labour. Very early in the war, in the case of the evacuation of women and children from those urban areas deemed most at risk from enemy bombing, we see an outstanding example of the State’s mixed reactions when confronted by the reality of the lives of many of its citizens. Evacuation was thoroughly successful, in the sense that large numbers of women and children were removed from their homes and billeted, more or less voluntarily, with private citizens in country areas. At the same time, the exercise conspicuously failed, since the State’s meticulous planning had been premised on a male, middle-class understanding of normality. Separation from home and community may have been normal for men used to boarding school and the armed services, but for children and their

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mothers enforced separation was simply unacceptable. Large numbers of women and children voted with their feet and went home. Calder sums up the evidence thus: Cambridge had expected 24,000 evacuees, it received 6,700. By November 11th, (1939) only 3,650 remained. By July 14th, 1940, this had fallen to 1,624. These figures were not exceptional. Evacuation failed. By the beginning of 1940, nearly seven hundred thousand evacuees in England and Wales (four out of every ten children and approaching ninetenths of the mothers and children under five) had gone home.11 In Problems of Social Policy, Titmuss claims that the events of evacuation ‘aroused the conscience of the nation’ and led to the creation of more extensive, and more effective welfare services. Titmuss’ thesis rests on the argument that the ‘nation’ (or at least the nation as represented by astounded householders in country areas) was so appalled by the poverty stricken, undernourished and poorly dressed children who arrived on their doorsteps that they united in a wave of concern about the social conditions that had produced these waifs and strays. Thus was enshrined – in social analysis – those fictional evacuees who first appeared in literature in Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags: the children of Fagin from the city slums who could terrorise adult men accustomed to military life and discipline. Waugh can be allowed literary licence; the point of his novel is to demonstrate the vacuity of the terrorised as much as the delinquency of the children. However, Titmuss’ arguments and subsequent interpretations of evacuation are more significant as part and parcel of the ideological justification for the Welfare State. Titmuss argued that the children arriving in country areas provided demonstrable evidence of the poverty of urban life. The children were, he claimed, generally poorly dressed and nourished and inadequately socialised. Yet when we set Titmuss’ arguments in the context of later and contemporary evidence, this claim appears overstated. Widespread poverty certainly existed in Britain in 1940, but it existed in the country as much as in the towns, albeit in ways that many middle-class people found easier to accept. Margaret Cole remarked of evacuation that it had been organised by minds that were ‘military, male and middle class’ and in this she vividly summed up the lack of comprehension, and indeed sensitivity, to assumptions outside a narrow vision of orderly rural and suburban society. In a recent study of evacuation, John Macnicol has demonstrated just how narrow this comprehension of the world had been. No concessions were made in explaining deviant behaviour for the terror of children abruptly separated from their mothers and their homes. The assumption was always that in some sense the country is inevitably healthier than the town; no allowances were made for a life which was not organised around formal middle-class timetables of set meals and office hours, but around shift work and neighbourhood ties. Macnicol cites one perplexed official who was given the task of reporting on the health of children evacuated to camp schools: Most puzzling were the regular anthropometric surveys of children evacuated to camp schools. To the utter despair of officials, such children actually experienced retarded growth rates; Sir Edward Howarth, director of the National Camps Corporation, concluded from this that ‘it is better for a child to stay in East London sleeping irregular hours in ill ventilated

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shelters and eating fish and chips than to have fresh air conditions in one of our camps with regular hours of sleep and plenty of well prepared wholesome food’.12 What Sir Edward and his colleagues failed to see was the inadequacy of fresh air as a substitute for home, and the presence of parents and local ties. But it is unlikely that Sir Edward – or those other male, military, middle-class minds – would have recognised this loss: the British male, military, middle-class had always, in a sense, been evacuated from home. Even if this took the form of expensive boarding schools rather than a billet on an unwilling country householder, it may nevertheless have made it difficult for senior civil servants and organisers of social policy to see what was wrong with the concept, if not the practice, of evacuation. Partly in response to the experiences of evacuation and the wartime disruption of family life, psychoanalysts began to develop an understanding of the trauma experienced by children separated from their mothers. The work of D.W. Winnicott and, most notably, Anna Freud, opened the way for early investigations of what later became known as maternal deprivation.13 The social and ideological implications of their work – which suggested the need for a close and continuous relationship between young children and their mothers – had yet to be thought out.14 Yet even at that time, the ideas of Anna Freud were seen as innovative and potentially radical in challenging the functional, wartime view of mothers as primarily caretakers rather than central emotional figures. The idea that all young children – even young middle-and upper-class boys – depend upon close maternal bonds for the development of stable personalities, was clearly too much for current policy makers and most of the medical profession.15 The law and related thinking on children and families up to this time had emphasised the socially damaging consequences for a child of being fatherless, whether through death or illegitimacy. Anna Freud pointed to the potentially even greater damage of not having a mother, or equivalent mother figure. Although her concerns were primarily with emotional health rather than questions of social provision, her work none the less gave to the mother a crucial and central role in the development of that stable and productive citizen so near to the hearts of wartime social reformers.16 But what is also apparent in subsequent studies of the effect of evacuation is the way in which male social scientists – and Titmuss is no exception – were eager to seize on evacuation as an illustration of the need not just for better welfare provisions but welfare provisions that left untouched basic assumptions about the sexual division of labour and social class. In the folklore about evacuation, working-class mothers were frequently seen as the ‘cause’ of their children’s delinquency and dirtiness. In the work of Titmuss this is less openly the case, but the assumption remains that responsibility for the behaviour of children lies primarily with the mother, and that mothers must be helped to fulfil their obligations towards their children. Inevitably, this was an invitation to various pundits to moralise about the causes of delinquency amongst evacuees. Macnicol quotes Cosmo Lang as saying: Many of the children came from homes where the houses were decent, and where the wages were good, and where, apparently, the state of the children was not due to any real defect in the conditions under which they

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were living but simply to the heedlessness, the shiftlessness, the carelessness and the ignorance of the mothers.17 Speaking in the same debate in the House of Lords in 1943 others expressed the view that what was needed in the postwar world was a great deal more training for motherhood and domestic life. This debate – and indeed the whole concern surrounding the condition of evacuated children – brought into focus those conflicting ideas about class, motherhood and the responsibilities of women which already existed in British society. Anna Davin has demonstrated how eugenic concerns for the future of the ‘race’ had persuaded the British ruling class as early as the late nineteenth century that more had to be done to ensure the minimal health of women and children.18 However, the State’s attitude to women and children in the Second World War illustrates the deeply contradictory nature of this position: on the one had there was a recognised need for healthy, well socialised children, yet at the same time there was a deep suspicion of intervening directly in the family or, more specifically, intervening in the family so as to undermine what were deemed to be the assumed responsibilities of the male breadwinner. In the Second World War, just as in those earlier periods, consistently contradictory attitudes about women and the family were expressed. One of the most important contributions to this debate was made by feminists who had already provided much of the documentary evidence about the ill-health and malnourishment of working-class children and women in the 1920s and 1930s. Women such as Eleanor Rathbone and Margery Spring-Rice had campaigned long and hard for specific and focused help for women and children – help that eventually took the form, in the case of the campaigns organised by Eleanor Rathbone, of ‘Family’ Allowances paid to the mother.19 This actuarial concession was prised very unwillingly from the government and the issues it raised are still able to provoke deep feelings and real divisions of opinion. But at least on this issue – the question of who should be paid state support for children – there was agreement amongst the majority of feminists. Other questions raised more complex policy issues. On questions of family support, some sections of elite opinion wished to improve the standard of living of the working-class family in such a way as to ensure the traditional division of labour (that is, dependent wife and children supported by a male breadwinner), whilst others, albeit a minority, saw in this narrow vision a conventional trap as far as women were concerned – anticipating the postwar normalisation of married women’s domain solely and absolutely in the household. For wartime, and postwar feminists, the issues of the day were largely those posed by the agendas set by male politicians and social scientists. An autonomous and independent women’s movement (such as developed in the 1970s and 1980s) did not exist in the wartime years; there were varied organisations of and for women but their campaigns largely revolved around attempting to secure the representation of women in national debates. Of those national debates, the war time concern over the low birth-rate was one area where differences in feminist thinking became markedly apparent. The falling birthrate attracted national attention early in the war when the publication in 1942 of Titmuss’ Parents Revolt had called the nation’s attention to the declining birth-rate. Conservative voices in the population condemned ‘good-time girls who won’t have babies’.20 The attitude of women was rather different. Women interviewed in the early 1940s by Mass Observation expressed a general reluctance to bear children in the social and

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personal conditions of war. This view, in the eyes of men such as Lord Horder (who anyway believed that the war was ‘taking the flower and leaving the weed’) was simply selfish. The situation could only be remedied by encouraging middle-class married couples to have more children. If necessary, Lord Horder thought, birth could be arranged by Caesarian section which ‘means a full anaesthetic and freedom from the troubles of childbirth’.21 This view – quoted because it epitomised a typical strain of thinking about childbirth which today would astound the educated middle class – was nevertheless part of a wartime tradition that attempted to make family life, and particularly maternity, attractive to the middle class. The views of Horder were stated less explicitly by others, but were none the less evident in liberal, reformist thinking about the family. What is striking about British attitudes to the family, however, is the persistence of eugenic assumptions about class. As in Germany at the time, there was explicit concern (voiced by Horder, Titmuss and others) about the future of the ‘race’, but in Britain this concern was always qualified by the importance of maintaining the ‘proper’ distribution of middle- and working-class families. In contrast, propaganda about the family in Germany was much more directed at the idea of maintaining ‘the Germans’ – a homogeneous racial and social group that was not differentiated by class and cultural differences. In a striking cartoon about ‘healthy’ families, Germany’s propaganda machine identified a family of one or two children as a group of spoilt and decadent people, whilst the family with four or five children were fit, muscular Germans vibrating with health and vitality. To ensure large families, and traditional households, Germany under Hitler banned contraception, abortion and the employment of women in virtually all professional and managerial roles.22 As it turned out, these decrees made little difference to the German birth-rate, but what is now more significant is the way in which many of Hitler’s family decrees (and decrees relating to women) were welcomed, as subsequent critics have noted, by feminist organisations because they appeared to confer prestige and high status on the work that women traditionally performed. The enthusiasm of sections of German feminism for Hitler’s family policy represents the vulnerability of certain strands of feminism to repressive and reactionary legislation. As feminists revalue the contributions of women, particularly motherhood, and defend these responsibilities against the detractions of patriarchy, there is a real danger that the traditional sexual divisions of labour will be enshrined in social policy and statute. This is exactly what happened in the case of Hitler’s Germany – the laudable attempts of feminists to ensure public consideration for the family and women led to an institutionalisation of an entirely domestic domain. In Britain, class divisions – in terms not just of income but equally of culture and social aspirations – led to very different views about the proper place of women. The greatest unity in the use of the term ‘women’ can be found in the work of Titmuss and Beveridge, whose model is close to the German idea of levelling class differences between women. Amongst liberal middle-class feminists, on the other hand, there were diverse interpretations of the category of women: for instance Edith Summerskill and Anne Scott-James clearly envisaged working-class women in much improved working-class homes, but middle-class women making a career out of domestic life and motherhood. What Summerskill (and by 1945 other women such as Eva Hubback and Margaret Bondfield) were effectively doing was laying the ideological foundation for the educated middle-class women of the 1950s who became a full-time wife and mother – the very women, in fact, whom Betty Friedan and

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others found becoming unhappy and depressed in the affluent suburbs of the postwar world. Thinking about women during the Second World War seems to have been remarkably resistant to radical change. However, evidence would suggest that despite the considerable concern of social reformers to improve the lives of women and children, this concern never became the basis for ideological generalisation about women or the institutionalisation of practices supposedly based on what all women should want or need. Resistance to generalisation has probably been in the long-term interests of all women, since it prevented, or at least mitigated, attempts by subsequent governments to impose conformity on women. The highly articulate, well educated tradition of middleclass feminism in Britain ensured the maintenance of social, political and personal options for all women – including, of course, the political right of working-class women to organise around both class and gender against the sectional interests of the bourgeoisie. Women who identified themselves as feminists (for example Edith Summerskill) had a very clear sense that they were not going to be labelled and marginalised by male social scientists such as Titmuss. Their strongly voiced commitment to professional life and the economic independence of women maintained a tradition of opposition to the relegation (and virtual civil disappearance) of women into that inclusive, and frequently regressive, unit, the ‘family’ and domestic life. But professionalising the household and household tasks carries implications for women, and family policy generally, that have in the long term been arguably reactionary. The barrage of advice directed at women during the Second World War – on diet, cooking, the care of children, making clothes and making do – was eminently sensible, if not immediately attractive. Here Orwell’s remarks in The Road to Wigan Pier on middle-class advice to the poor on what to eat are a constant and vivid reminder of the way in which advice to the poor is flawed by its condescension and its tacit assumption that the middle class will not themselves have to follow suit. Nevertheless, by including women as recipients of state advice in the War, women did go some way towards acquiring, like men, the status of citizen. Even if women did remain in the home, they were seen as an integral part of the social fabric, and as such qualified to receive an equality of social status. Amongst the many roles of women during the war was that of guardians of the nation’s domestic resources, and here the latent Puritanism of sections of the British middle class was brought out by the war. In the public figures of Sir Stafford Cripps (who informed the House of Commons at the beginning of the war that ‘personal extravagance must be eliminated altogether’), and Lord Woolton, the public was provided with two leading exponents of the view that the demonstration of wealth (although not its possession) was both unpatriotic and an indication of personal moral failing. This point of view fitted some aspects of existing British culture remarkably well: the British had never (at least by 1940) been known for the excellence of their cuisine or the elegance of their clothes, and ‘good, simple’ food and hard-wearing sensible clothes were already the accepted standards of large sections of the middle and upper class. Orwell himself, for example, although critical of attempts by the middle class to persuade the poor to eat lentils and oranges, expressed sympathy for ‘foreign’ food or sophistication in dress. Elegance was deemed thoroughly out of place for the duration of the war, and the standards for women and the home that received official approval would not have been

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out of place in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. Inevitably, since the class divisions of England persisted alongside their supposed disappearance, access to other worlds also persisted. The memoirs of Evelyn Waugh provide endless detail about the continuing availability throughout the war of rich food, domestic luxury and personal indulgence. Expensive London restaurants and hotels remained open during the war, and Waugh and his contemporaries continued to dine, and dine reasonably well, at the Ritz, the Connaught and other chosen haunts. Even those with political sympathies to the left of Waugh were able to enjoy relative privilege throughout the war; Naomi Mitchison, for example, writes of trips to London by first-class sleeper and ‘wonderful’ service in hotels.23 Yet such jaunts were, even for Waugh, limited and infrequent, and if the world inside these hotels and restaurants remained unchanged then the world outside did not. What changed most, at least in a superficial sense, was the appearance of the people. Even more remarkable than some of the changes in diet that occurred during the war were changes in dress. Conventional expectations about how women should dress disappeared, and trousers, headscarves and various forms of uniform became widely accepted. Inevitably, when Dior introduced the ‘New Look’ in 1947, government ministers – intent on persuading the country to accept consumer austerity – decried fashion as wasteful and unnecessary. After all, women had done without extravagant clothes throughout the war and shortages of cloth were bad enough without a Frenchman persuading women that skirts should be made out often yards of material. In these government strictures we can find the legacy of those lingering attitudes which labelled clothes and dress as morally frivolous and identified women’s concern with them as superficial and unpatriotic. Expressed in these attitudes is an essentially anti-feminine stance – a point of view which suggests a close relationship between women, dress and triviality. Women, the wartime Board of Trade assumed, should not be concerned with dress except in a purely functional sense; more than that suggested childish and irresponsible pursuits. Ironically, feminists may have contributed to the masculinisation of the culture which was so marked a feature of the war years. In the history of British feminism there has always been a tradition which has sought emancipation for women through the replication of male behaviour and standards, however absurd and rooted in the hierarchies of class. This tradition was conspicuous during the war in the armed forces and other administrative institutions of the State: women in uniform, and particularly in the uniform of officers, gave the appearance of female emancipation and a veneer of sexual equality to the armed forces. What female officers did not encourage was any sense of solidarity amongst women. Here the evidence, from fiction, documentary accounts and autobiography, attests to the vitality and predominance of the British class system over ties or loyalties of gender. For example, Mary Lee Settle’s autobiographical account of her time as a private in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, reveals the virtual absence of any gender solidarity between ranks. The dedication of the book sums up the author’s views: To the wartime other ranks of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, Royal Air Force, below the rank of sergeant.24

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That the ‘other ranks’ were subject to vicious and contemptuous treatment by officers of their own sex is not left in any doubt to readers of Settle’s book. An officer was an officer, regardless of sex. There is little indication from the evidence of conscripted women that the war brought women ‘closer together’ or contributed to their emancipation. On the contrary, it produced amongst the ‘other ranks’ a much enhanced dislike of the middle class. In general, the war effort attempted to homogenise the values and behaviour of all women, an attempt shared by the State and by some feminists. Although the experience of war was as diverse for women as was the experience of peacetime, the ideological impulse was to make all women into sensible, responsible citizens who professionally cared for their husbands and children and did not indulge in selfish personal extravagance. Resistance to this norm was expressed by lack of interest in the home, and an interest in sexuality and dress. The ‘good time girl’ who emerged as one of the stereotypes of the war was, in fact, a stigmatised figure of resistance to the dominant culture. In promoting that worthy mother of two who made do and mended, wartime propagandists did much to re-enforce (although not create) that disjunction in bourgeois culture between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women. Some middle-class women, to judge by autobiographical evidence, embraced with delight the enforced dowdiness of the wartime years and were all too happy to abandon the conventional standards previously expected of women in the middle class. The role of the ‘good women’ obviously has its sartorial appeal, but again we find that the limits of dowdiness and shabbiness were themselves circumscribed. Women were persuaded to make clothes out of whatever cloth was available, but when Unity Mitford draped herself in an old curtain for a dinner party her sisters rapidly removed her from the scene. Making do was one thing, sending up, or at any rate demonstrating, the absurdity of conventions in dress was quite another. Thus the lines of conventional behaviour and appearance for women changed during the war, but did not disappear. Circumstances encouraged amongst the middle class the frugality in dress and household ornament that had always been the unenviable lot, for material reasons, of the working class. But the encouragement of frugality did not mean that a new culture emerged in which class codes and status expectations disappeared. A.J.P. Taylor has written that during the Second World War the country as a whole came to know the standard of living of the skilled artisan.25 In financial terms, this was largely the case and all sections of the population were subject to power cuts, shortages and restrictions on travel and entertainment. But besides that common and shared experience, class-related aspirations and expectations persisted, as did very real material differences, of which by far the most important was the availability and quality of housing. Women did not live in an undifferentiated social world: middle-class women spent the war in relatively safe and adequate accommodation whilst working-class women mostly lived in crowded and inadequate housing. (Bombing had been much more severe in working-class areas of cities than those of the middle-class suburbs.) Keeping up appearances in those conditions was clearly difficult. Equally, middle-class standards of appearance could not survive without material support: the middle class looked as drab as everybody else. Into this cultural void came the seductive images and dress of North America and the Hollywood dream factory. Many historians have commented on the return of glamour in dress after the Second World War. What arrived with that glamour (which was after all no new thing in itself) was a new set of social identifications, sources and locations. It

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was no longer Royalty or the aristocracy or the socially privileged who were the models and arbiters of fashion, but a world of mixed origins, wealth and standards that gave no comfort to the middle class. These standards were not those of conscientious application, persistent professional dedication and blind duty to Church, State and the Conservative Party, but were those of individual achievement and newly created fame, originality and notoriety. After the war, the incomes of some members of the professional middle class remained close to those of the skilled working class. What continued to differentiate those two groups was the ability of the professional middle class to elaborate upon the relevance and vitality of their cultural and social standards. For middle-class women, this meant translating household work and the care of children into a new profession, a Gestalt trick that probably fooled no one, least of all the chief practitioners. Equally, it meant developing an ideology, particularly about women, which included the value of ‘wholeness’. Role models in the 1950s encouraged women with multiple interests outside the home, even with part-time jobs. These preoccupations made women more ‘interesting’ and balanced. Of course, it also made them absolutely no threat to the status quo, either personal or social. ‘Interests’ and part-time jobs could be picked up and put down as domestic situations dictated; they did not in any sense challenge either the domestic sexual division of labour or the values and rewards of the occupational structure. In general, the Second World War made the world a safer place for conventional attitudes towards the home and family and women’s roles. Separation from husbands and kin may have brought a degree of personal freedom to a minority of women, but for the majority it brought emotional and material deprivations and exposure to the disciplines of a masculine world. Most women who volunteered or were conscripted into war-rated work held monotonous and poorly-paid jobs which were subordinated to the discipline of production systems designed and supervised by men.26 Wartime propaganda further extended the language of the work place to the management of the home itself. Women were constantly exhorted to meet the need for economy, efficiency and labour-saving practices in organising domestic life. Moreover, they were expected to show the same war-winning spirit in coping with these now more difficult and occasionally hazardous tasks as might be traditionally expected of men. In a country at war, those masculine attributes of strength, endeavour and physical courage were morally just as appropriate to survival at home as they were on the military front. What this suggests is a pervasive ‘masculinisation’ of women’s experiences in employment, voluntary service and domestic life.27 Yet, though women were constrained to conform to these austere demands, even in their appearance and dress, they were seldom accorded an equivalent moral and symbolic status for ‘doing their bit’. For the most part, the war effort meant ‘putting up with things’ without complaint. Women’s traditional, passive compliance was thus reinterpreted as their patriotic duty to the home front. Against the upheaval and traumas of the Second World War those idealised postwar images of a secure and well-provided home were understandably attractive to a generation of women who had known the personal dislocation and disruptions of war. It took some decades before the sanctity of this safe retreat and its constructions of male and female identity could be socially dismantled and critically assessed.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 The concept of the ‘reserve army of labour’ is discussed in relationship to women by Irene Bruegel in ‘The Reserve Army of Labour 1974–1979’, in (ed.) Feminist Review, Waged Work (London, Virago, 1986), pp.40–53. 2 Postwar ideologies about women are outlined in Elizabeth Wilson’s Only Halfway to Paradise (London, Tavistock, 1980). 3 The majority of women in paid work during the Second World War were (as they had been before the war) young and single. 4 See V. de Vessilitsky, The Homeworker and her Outlook (London, G. Bell, 1916); Duncan Bythell, The Sweated Trades (London, Batsford, 1978) and Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Separation of Home and Work. Landladies and Lodgers in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in (ed.) Sandra Burman, Fit Work for Women (London, Croom Helm, 1979), pp.64–97. 5 The suspicions of the trade unions towards women workers, most particularly about the issue of wage rates, are outlined in Harold Smith, ‘The Problem of Equal Pay for Equal Work in Great Britain during World War II’, Journal of Modern History, Vol.53, December 1981, pp.652–73. 6 See the discussion by Delia Davin of China in Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays (eds.) Janet Sayers, Mary Evans and Nanneke Redclift (London, Tavistock, 1987). 7 Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland (London, Methuen, 1988), p.397. 8 Angus Calder, The Peoples War, p.309. 9 Jane Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950 (Brighton, Wheatsheaf Books, 1984), p.205. 10 The contradictory attitudes of the State towards the provision of state nurseries are discussed by Denise Riley in ‘War in the Nursery’, Feminist Review, No.2, 1979, pp.82–108. 11 Angus Calder, The People’s War, pp.51–2. 12 John Macnicol, ‘Going to the Country’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 18 April, 1986, p.15. 13 This work is best represented in Anna Freud’s Infants Without Families, The Writings of Anna Freud, Vol.3 (London, The Hogarth Press, 1973). 14 A summary of British work on childhood is given in J. Packman, The Child’s Generation: Child Care Policy in Britain (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981). 15 See the individual accounts of evacuation given in B. Wicks, No Time to Wave Goodbye (London, Bloomsbury, 1988) and R. Inglis, The Children’s War (London, Collins, 1989). 16 Anna Freud, ‘The Need of the Small Child to be Mothered,’ in Infants Without Families. 17 John Macnicol, ‘Going to the Country’. 18 Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, No.5, 1978, pp.9–65. 19 The history of Family Allowances is documented in John Macnicol, The Movement for Family Allowances 1918–45 (London, Heinemann, 1980). 20 A remark quoted in ‘Why Women Don’t Have Babies’, by Anne Scott-James. Picture Post, 13 November 1943. 21 Ibid. 22 See Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland. 23 Naomi Mitchison, Among You Taking Notes (ed.) Dorothy Sheridan (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986). 24 Mary Lee Settle, All the Brave Promises: The Memories of Aircraftwomen Second Class (London, Heinemann, 1966). 25 Charles Madge, War-time Patterns of Saving and Spending (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1943). 26 See the discussion in Penny Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War:

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Production and Patriarchy in Conflict (London, Croom Helm, 1984). 27 For example, women in childbirth were often encouraged with Grantley Dick Read’s analogy between the courage of women in labour and the courage of men in battle. See Tess Cosslett, ‘Grantley Dick Read and Sheila Kitzinger, Towards a Woman-centred Story of Childbirth?’, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol.1, No.1, May 1991, pp.29–43.

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Chapter 4 The spirit of the times Societies at war need to establish and articulate a sense of traditional and shared values. As was suggested in the previous chapter, one aspect of tradition which was given prominence was that of the well-managed home and the female ‘home-maker’. The politics of gender were given a new prominence by the war, and women were defined as citizens in the British sense of the appropriate world order. But however homogeneous some values about Britain were, it became apparent during 1939–45 that Britons had highly diverse cultural tastes and expectations. Indeed, the battle for control of the national culture was, at times, hotly contested. If consumer tastes in both high and low culture are to be seen as significant, then the period 1939–45 suggests increasing polarisation and diversity in British culture. On the one hand, the demand for serious literature and classical music considerably increased; during the Second World War the nation, it would appear, was suddenly converted from Titbits to Tolstoy and from Muzak to Mozart. Certainly, books of all kinds were in great demand, whilst concerts of classical music were endlessly popular. But at the same time a national media emerged (in the form of radio programmes and high circulation periodicals) which cut across the traditional distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and attempted to articulate a common set of definably British cultural attitudes and interests. The classless citizen became the audience for a variety of radio programmes and government publications. The implications of this development were quickly noticed and remarked upon by those with a professional interest in ‘culture’. Comment upon the decline in cultural standards in Britain became commonplace. Many shades of political opinion decried the new mass culture of cinema, radio and television, and viewed with deep suspicion the development of cultural forms that were not rooted in an established tradition. This reaction widened the divide between élite and ‘mass’ culture and left mass culture largely ignored by serious critical or creative attention. The national, inclusive culture that might have developed in Britain during and after the war – and which could have embraced both Vaughan Williams and ITMA – foundered on the suspicions and contempt of the British bourgeoisie for popular tastes. The long-term effect of the war on British culture was that it became more rather than less class-specific than before. Furthermore, mass culture, regarded as the preserve of the working class, was rendered in the absence of powerful and articulate defenders deeply permeable by commercial interests. The idea of a national mass culture emerged largely in response to those wartime circumstances which demanded a sense of national identity and cultural homogeneity in the face of an enemy and its alien traditions. Initially, the collective identity of the British was rapidly defined by the threat of invasion. Once this danger receded, there was time to give substance to the relatively novel notion of indigenous British cultural forms.

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According to some critics, what was to emerge was Philistine, anti-theoretical and deeply xenophobic, whilst to others the war gave – to broadcasting in particular – a far more egalitarian and democratic stance.1 The part played by the war in this – and the wider issue of whether British culture actually accords with this view – is the central theme of this chapter. When war broke out the British people had access to mass entertainment mainly through the wireless set. Indeed, the wireless played a crucial part in the lives of the British during the Second World War. In a memorable image, an ordinary British family is pictured huddling around its wireless set on Sunday 3 September to listen to Chamberlain’s declaration of war. At later stages of the war, the same family hears about Dunkirk, el Alamein and Tobruk, and when the news is bad it revives its spirits by listening to Tommy Handley. Reading formed a less important part of national life. The adult population was largely literate, but as the school-leaving age remained at 14 years for much of the war (and state education was much interrupted by war), literature, and literary life, were preoccupations of a relatively small section of the population. Nevertheless, popular mythology portrays a nation suddenly given to ‘serious’ reading. The evidence suggests that reading remained as limited as ever. If soldiers were now perceived as enthusiastic readers, it was because men from more educated backgrounds were conscripted into the armed forces than was normally the case. In addition to the wireless and newspapers, the population also had access to the theatre and cinemas. Very few families had television sets, and the mass availability of recorded music was still to come. However, the British intelligentsia believed that a mass culture already existed by 1939, even if its technology was still crude. What is more, articulate voices amongst the British cultural élite had already decided that mass culture was a thoroughly bad thing. It would be mistaken, therefore, to suggest that the war was solely responsible for the powerfully argued attack on popular culture. The criteria of ‘good’ high culture and ‘bad’ low or mass culture were already well defined: from the beginning of the nineteenth century there had been a chorus of voices expressing a contempt for, and a moral and political concern about, popular literature and entertainment. Politically reactionary fears about the dissemination of radical ideas through literature were accompanied by socially reactionary suspicions about the nature of the literature read by the working class and women. When George Eliot in the mid-nineteenth century attacked ‘silly novels by lady novelists’ she was stating the values of the traditional élite: literature should be serious, morally uplifting and unlikely to encourage the already frivolous in even more frivolous ideas.2 The warning naturally went entirely unheeded: by the 1930s literature and entertainment included both conventionally serious respectable literature as well as the more disreputable genres such as romantic and light fiction. These latter forms of literature were regarded with disdain, and symptomatic of the general moral decline of the twentieth century. For example, Q.D. Leavis wrote in 1932 that: The modern magazine, then, while being very much more ‘readable’ for the exhausted city dweller than it ever was, has achieved this end by sacrificing any pretension to be literature; nor does it merely set itself to amuse and soothe. It is quite explicitly defiant of other standards and

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ambitions. And by accustoming the reading public to certain limited appeals and a certain restricted outlook, it has spoilt the public for fiction in book form of a more serious nature.3 Unfortunately for Mrs Leavis, and others who shared her views, the war hastened the range and the extent of ‘readable’ culture. It did so in two ways. Firstly, the quite deliberate propaganda exercises of the wartime government (ranging from sponsored concerts to booklets about food) promoted a national culture that attempted to generalise the cultural values and standards of the educated upper and middle class. Secondly, the cultural forms and practices of the intellectual élite (which though not ideologically consistent was certainly socially homogeneous) lost much of their privileged status. All forms of literature and entertainment were subject to controls, if largely those of material scarcity. Thus the privileged circumstances which had previously sustained such exclusive forms of cultural life as poetry and the opera were no longer protected from the scrutiny and constraints of the public world. In both these particular instances standards certainly continued unchanged, but they did so in ways which diminished their social impact. By the end of the war authors as politically divergent as Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were writing novels full of nostalgia for a declining world of high culture and fear of the values of the emerging postwar world. Different as they are in terms of the fictional worlds which they create, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four shared a common suspicion of the ‘modern’. Modernity, the loss of tradition, changes in manners and codes of conduct, the language of mass communications – all these real and imagined events re-enforced the boundaries of an existing tradition which equated popular culture with low or bad taste. Britain’s cultural élite of the 1930s had been far from uncritical of government policy. Indeed, the 1930s are notable for the politically informed criticism, poetry and prose of the Auden group. Yet despite their attacks on British domestic and foreign policy, high culture in general remained rooted in two fixed habits of mind which made it virtually impossible to confront the politics of the Second World War and postwar society in terms other than those of pained nostalgia for a threatened world. The first of these was the assumption that discussion of the subtleties and complexities of human action is only possible in traditional cultural forms. Mrs Leavis argued that: The generalisations on life, love, marriage, sex, women, etc., which fill the popular novel, the magazine, and the magazine pages of the popular press, provide film captions and headlines, and so form the popular mind, have set up a further barrier between a serious novelist and the reading public. To be understood by the majority he would have to employ…the clichés in which they are accustomed to think and feel, or rather, to having their thinking and feeling done for them.4 Informed and influenced by this point of view, the British were slower than other nations to explore the possibilities of the cinema and popular music. Cinema directors in Japan, Italy, France and the United States recognised (either before or after the war) that film

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could vividly interpret the complexities of human action. The British remained largely rooted in the perception of film as a vehicle for narrative. The second assumption, voiced by Mrs Leavis in the 1930s and by many later critics, was that mass culture was in some fundamental sense morally flawed. Mass culture, in the eyes of critics as diverse in their politics as Ortega Gasset, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, F.K. and Q.D. Leavis and – after the war – T.S. Eliot, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, became synonymous with all that was valueless, without any claim to serious moral or intellectual purpose. Other critics, both during and after the war, attempted to find different answers, interpretations and solutions to the superficiality presented by the mass media. Amongst the Left, the trivia and the tedium of the mass media were explained in the workings of the profit motive; if rubbish could be sold, either as a book or a film, then it would be produced. As distinct from these commercial values, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart documented an indigenous workingclass culture in Britain which they saw as containing sentiments and ideas of genuine importance and of real moral and political integrity. The Frankfurt School on the whole defiantly ignored mass culture (Adorno’s writing on jazz being an exception to this) seeing it as part of a modern and essentially capitalist process which negated all social processes and relationships not directly related to profit. Underlying these different interpretations is the idea that culture should convey a transcendent moral significance. In the case of the First World War, literature, poetry and criticism articulated a relatively clear critique of the pointless slaughter, for no obvious moral or political gains, of a largely volunteer army. The problem in the Second World War was that because the war was perceived as both more ‘just’ and unavoidable the literary and cultural establishment was left in a curious limbo. Churchill had delivered coherent and morally passionate statements about the war that might otherwise have been made by novelists and poets. There was apparently no serious case (other than that of pacifism) which could be made for opposition to the war. Thus the political functions of a literary and intellectual élite were largely displaced: the Second World War needed little ideological justification. Equally, its aims were not morally ambiguous or a cause for social dissent. Moreover, the importance given both ideologically and in reality to the mundane yet essential activities of ‘ordinary’ people in maintaining production and the web of social life made it virtually unthinkable to suggest that these same people should not participate in the culture they were conscripted to defend. These ordinary men and women were not portrayed in Britain during the Second World War as ‘worker heroes’ or ‘folk heroes’, characteristic of the Soviet Union and Germany respectively. What they became were citizens, the apparently classless (if consistently white and gendered) people who had recently acquired a full social maturity. The development, with the full participation of the Government’s propaganda machine, was significant in that it created new central characters for documentaries about everyday civilian and military life. The 1920s and 1930s had seen the growth of an explicitly working-class cinema (in, for example, the establishment in 1929 of a Federation of Workers’ Film Societies), and the war years saw the further extension of this activity in both film and literature.5 In many of the films and much of this literature (particularly that published in periodicals), the citizen hero (and to a much lesser extent the citizen heroine) looked forward to a society in which a sophisticated technology would increasingly

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tender obsolete class distinctions, particularly in consumption and occupation. The expectations about the social possibilities of a modern industrial society were to be found in films such as Basil Dearden’s They Came to a City. But as a group of British film producers wrote in 1947: For the most part films such as Millions Like Us, San Demetrio London, Nine Men, The Way Ahead, Waterloo Road and The Way to the Stars…showed us people in whom we could believe and whose experience was as genuine as our own. The war film discovered the common denominator of the British people.6 Such a judgement is probably an exaggeration of the reality of wartime cinema. Nevertheless, what it does suggest is that producers themselves believed that audiences wanted films with central characters with whom they could identify. The belief is borne out by the evidence collected by Mass Observation throughout the war about cinema; of all the many films mentioned it is Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve, a film notable for the heroes who are not officers, that is most frequently, and warmly, mentioned.7 Nevertheless, the cinema was very far from dominated by documentary realism. Massively popular throughout the war, and seldom mentioned in reviews of British wartime culture, were the Gainsborough melodramas. As Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan have remarked, ‘It was to those films rather than Ealing’s realistic dramas that the public turned for solace in the last years of the war.’8 By 1944 it was apparent that the films appropriate to Britain’s beleaguered situation in 1940–2 were no longer of interest to a population which was anticipating the opening of the Second Front and the end of the war. Equally, the population (at least that part of it which regularly went to the cinema) had become, by 1943, critical of the short films made as explicit government propaganda by the Crown Film Unit.9 As the contemporary report on Ministry of Information Shorts remarked, ‘People are increasingly tired of exhortations and requests and general propaganda, especially along familiar lines.’10 The limited, although significant, diversification within the content of wartime British films could not, of course, alter the fact that the distribution of films (unlike the written word) was much more centrally controlled. Film directors, in common with radio producers, had to work within large scale bureaucracies preoccupied, in the case of film companies, with profit. Nevertheless, what occurred in both cases has been described by G.P. Scannell as a ‘shift in communicative behaviour’; that is, a reorganisation in the power relation between film-maker (or radio producer) and the audience.11 Literature, although far from independent of commercial considerations, was more varied in terms of its outlets, but what was discernible was a deliberate attempt by some editors and publishers to seek authors from outside traditional literary circles. Numerous independent publishers did exist, and limited circulation periodicals were commonplace. Throughout the war, journals such as John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing, Bugle Blast, Picture Post and the more overtly political weeklies such as Tribune and the New Statesman increased in popularity. With the exception of Bugle Blast (which was established in 1943) all these periodicals were founded before the war, but the war increased their sales, and particularly in the case of Penguin New Writing, gave the journals greater public prominence. The case of Penguin New Writing is a striking instance of the way in which

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what had, in effect, been a literary ‘little magazine’ before the war, became a widely known and popular institution by 1945. When Lehmann established the magazine, its original purpose was to publish little-known authors. This policy rapidly shifted towards the publications not only of new fiction, but also documentary accounts of real life. Moreover, these accounts were explicitly encouraged by the magazine. By 1942, its pages were filled with descriptions of the lives of people working in factories, or men conscripted into the armed forces. Volume 2, for example, includes a discussion with a civil servant about conditions in London during the Blitz, while a later volume includes an account of work in the Auxiliary Fire Service. Throughout the war years the mixture of descriptions of civilian and military life continued, side by side with essays by literary critics and occasional contributions by established literary figures and well-known, or relatively well-known, poets. The interest aroused by Penguin New Writing was considerable. One of its contributors, himself a soldier during the war, has described this interest, and the general attitude to literature during the war, as follows: As a soldier, I was reading everything I could get. After the bombing of London books were in terribly short supply, and publishers trotted out their remainders, which found ready buyers everywhere. Penguin New Writing was awaited avidly every month. And when my wife managed to find a few underthe-counter paperbacks and send them to me I was in a splendid new heaven of ghastly paper and war-time narrow margins. Most of us in the army bought, and I contributed to quite a lot of, the odd little periodicals that were published as paper permitted – Modern Reading, English Story, Bugle Blast, Poetry London, Horizon, New Writing and so on. I recall reading anything one found anywhere – in billets, in abandoned tents, in dead comrade’s packs. In that way I came upon The Rosary, If Winter Comes, some of the Forsyte saga. I remember re-reading Crime and Punishment because it was a small thin-paper edition that I owned, and the four best Jane Austen novels in a similar compact volume. One was circumscribed in the army by what one could carry and what one could get. At home on leave it was Boots’ Library.12 What is interesting about the quotation, apart from the voracity of the reader, is the suggestion that all the ‘little’ magazines filled a literary gap. The readers and contributors to Penguin New Writing appeared to have a limitless appetite for the details of everyday life. The editors of Horizon – included in the list above – had no such interest: the journal was launched in 1940 with the clearly stated intention of maintaining aesthetic and cultural standards during the war. It stood as a reminder that while there was a movement towards innovative forms, an élite culture continued, and quite unashamedly so. Cyril Connolly, the first editor of Horizon, was committed to a policy of encouraging what he saw as ‘original’ and ‘great’ art and roundly condemned what he described as ‘culture diffusion’. As he wrote in 1942: We are becoming a nation of culture-diffusionists. Culture diffusion is not art. We are not making a true art. The appreciation of art is spreading

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everywhere, education has taken wings, we are at last getting a wellinformed inquisitive public. But war artists are not art, the Brains Trust is not art, the B.B.C. is not art, all the Penguins, all the discussion groups and M.O.I, films and pamphlets will avail nothing if we deny independence, leisure and privacy to the artist himself.13 In part, what Connolly is referring to in this outburst is the government sponsored activities of the Council for Education in Music and the Arts (CEMA). Established in January 1940 with a budget of £25,000, it rapidly became responsible for encouraging theatrical and musical performances outside London and the traditional locations for high culture. In this sense, CEMA did, as Connolly put it, ‘diffuse’. But at the same time it did not challenge many entirely orthodox judgements about ‘standards’ in literature and the arts, and its subsequent transformation into the Arts Council suggests that it was very far from being dominated by those who wished to transform the values of artistic life.14 Thus the assumption that the war swept away, at a stroke, élitist attitudes to art and literature cannot be sustained. Distinctions still continued to be made between high and low art, even if many of these distinctions were being made from an increasingly defensive position. Throughout the war, established novelists (such as L.P. Hartley, Graham Greene, Rosamund Lehmann, C.P. Snow and Joyce Cary) continued to publish. The Listener, Times Literary Supplement, Sunday Times and Observer all listed novels by these authors as being the most important published in the war years. Almost no perceptible change is evident, therefore, in the authors regarded as significant at this time by the literary establishment. The new names in English fiction (Amis, Murdoch, Wain et al.) did not emerge until after the war, when they developed the representation in literature of ordinary experience that had been furthered during the war. The English realist novel had long described the detailed physical realities of individual lives, but the postwar novelists were able to integrate material and emotional reality, to place material experience as central to the definition of character and the vocabulary of motives. When Murdoch, Wain and Amis write of young men’s problems in obtaining and staying in paid work, they are, in an important sense, continuing that tradition which had been developed during the war. The plots of Lucky Jim, Hurry on Down and Under the Net are essentially concerned with the common-place experience of having a job. It is a reflection of the extremely traditional nature of English literary criticism and the critical milieu in general that when these novels appeared they were hailed as ‘angry’ and ‘antiestablishment’, whereas today they read as essays in – often humorous – discontent. The tradition represented by Connolly et al. continued to exercise a considerable influence on English wartime culture, even if that influence was increasingly seen by emergent novelists and critics as irrelevant or outmoded. Connolly and the staff of Horizon, for their part, felt constrained to justify their position. In his relationship with his friend George Orwell, Cyril Connolly consistently maintained that although he disagreed with Orwell’s interest in social questions, he did accept the validity of this preoccupation. Indeed, their long friendship illustrates the coexistence amongst the English literary establishment of diverse points of view, bound together by a very similar underlying attitude to questions of class and proper political allegiance. Towards the end of his life Connolly described himself as a stage rebel, and Orwell as a true one, and yet both were united in an essentially liberal attitude to social and political questions and a

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compliant, if critical, view of industrial capitalism. The bone of contention between them, as far as literature was concerned, was Orwell’s interest in the documentation of ordinary life and in the establishment of a place in literature for the habits and experiences of those people whom Orwell regarded, with a complex mixture of almost Churchillian affection and disdain, as the ‘ordinary’ people . Central to Orwell’s thinking was the belief that the ordinary, decent British person had to be protected against the moral chaos of a mass culture. Orwell’s attitude to the British people, and how he chose to describe them, illustrates a recurrent feature of cultural life in industrial capitalism: the silent voice of those people who have neither the resources nor the education with which to document their own experiences. A unique feature of the Second World War is that the working class (albeit predominantly the male working class) was encouraged to set down the details of its daily life. But two important qualifications have to be made: the first concerns how these experiences were interpreted, and the second raises the question of how the representation of the experience was to a greater or lesser extent structured by the existing forms and values of literature. The pages of Bugle Blast and Penguin New Writing were filled, month after month, with accounts of life in the factories and the armed services of wartime Britain, but much of this writing is introduced and explained by the editors. What is effectively being sanctioned is the right to literary self-expression: to assume that this constitutes a genuine working-class voice would be simple-minded. It is a long way from wartime Britain to the early nineteenth-century gentry in Bath, but when a character in Jane Austen’s Persuasion remarks – in the context of a discussion about the relative capacities for emotional commitment of men and women – that ‘men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story’, she might well have been referring to the advantages of the educated middle class. The voice of English fiction, as contemporary feminism has been at such pains to demonstrate, has been largely male, white and middle class. Of course, that is not to say that neither women nor the working class have written novels, but it is to argue that the construction of the assumptive world of fiction, its legitimate concerns, its standards and proper boundaries of the novel have been set and elaborated by a relatively small group of educated middleclass men. Working-class fiction in the war years is therefore literally a fiction – it does not exist as such, it did not exist in the pre-war years, and it has not appeared since. If we look for the expression of working-class views and aspirations in the wartime years it would be necessary, as it still is, to turn to those forms of self-expression which do not figure in the pages of literary magazines: the oral culture of the community, the working-class interests and politics – trade and craft unions, religious groups and voluntary organisations related to sport. All these social groups constitute forms of culture, but they do not constitute a form of culture that is either accessible to the dominant culture or able to make much impact on it. A great deal was made in the 1960s and 1970s of the supposed rise of working-class culture (the culture of popular music, football and street fashion) but all these aspects of working-class life had, in effect, always existed, albeit in different forms. What changed in the postwar years was the extent to which these activities were taken over, organised and institutionalised by commercial entrepreneurs. During the war, this possibility was minimal. Yet what existed was the culture itself: a culture that could express itself in the wild, anarchic humour of Tommy Handley and the wit and anti-authoritarian sentiments of the shows produced and

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presented by the ITMA team. But what did not occur – and hence left a void in both leftwing politics and the ideological construction of the British citizen – was a coalition between this culture, with its own distinctions of style and regional origin, and a more coherent political culture capable of generalising working-class interests and enthusiasms. This lack of fusion between the working class and middle-class Left is a dominant theme in the work of Orwell: for him the reason for the disjunction between these two groups who apparently shared the same ideals was the insensitivity and limitations of the bourgeois Left. In a famous passage he attacked the Left of his own class: The trouble is the socialist bourgeoisie, most of whom give me the creeps…. And then so many of them are the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell who go about spreading sweetness and light and have at the back of their minds a vision of the working class all T.T., well washed behind the ears, readers of Edward Carpenter or some other pious sodomite and talking with B.B.C. accents.15 This attack is developed elsewhere on the habits and assumptions of a group which may – or may not – have been largely a figment of Orwell’s homophobic and irritated imagination. The rational basis of his dissatisfaction with the bourgeois, theoretical Left is that ‘The basic trouble with all orthodox Marxists is that, possessing a system which appears to explain everything, they never bother to discover what is going on inside other people’s heads.’16 Nevertheless, class identity can be transcended: The young Communist who died heroically in the International Bridgade was public school to the core. He had changed his allegiance but not his emotions. What does that prove? Merely the possibility of building a Socialist on the bones of a Blimp, the power of one kind of loyalty to transmute itself into another, the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found.17 The last passage expresses Orwell’s own emotional preoccupation with ‘strength’ and ‘manliness’ (hence the remark about the ‘rabbits of the Left’) but nevertheless he allows the possibility of a united front between socialists of different class origins. It was a hope that Orwell sustained, and worked for, until his death, but his efforts and thinking were often deeply confused and symptomatic of the difficulties in countries with deep class divisions in cultural habits and expectations, of forging links between socialists of different classes – and indeed of different cultures and sexes. That problem remains endemic to British politics. Even though the war years saw the emergence of a popular ideology of classlessness, of unity and common purpose that significantly contributed to the Labour victory in 1945, it did not survive the postwar revival of status and class differences and the gradual disappearance of those wartime symbols – such as ration books – that had imposed at least a surface communality on the day-to-day experiences of social life.

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The problem for intellectuals of the Left during the war (and one recognised and discussed by Orwell) was establishing a programme for the future that could both maintain that communality and embody the social expectations and aspirations of the working class and the values of middle-class culture. Much of the literature that emerges from the war indicates the resistance of the British class system to the common experience of war. In Keith Douglas’s Alamein to Zem Zem, the author describes his stay in an army hospital, and his own movement between two worlds – that of men, and officers: Presently an R.A.M.C. Warrant Officer came and said to me peremptorily: ‘Where’s your card?’ After some fumbling, I found it under my blankets. He read it to himself, and then said, aloud, in a puzzled voice, ‘L.T. What’s that? Lieutenant?’ He looked at me hard. ‘Are you an officer?’ he said in a tone of ‘Don’t try that stuff with me.’ ‘Yes,’ I said in apology. ‘Well, I don’t know. I thought you was another rank. You’ve got other rank’s pyjamas on’, he added, accusingly….‘I suppose you want to go to the officers’ ward…’. I was wheeled away again…. I got into the other bed, amazed at the feel of clean sheets and springs, and admiring books on a shelf, blue and white check curtains and a strip of carpet.18 Left behind to dine on sausage rolls and Oxo are the ‘other’ ranks, whilst Douglas is soon enjoying comparatively nourishing trays of food and full room service. More than any other feature of wartime service life, it is this feature of the British armed services – the distinction in treatment of the different ranks – that emerges so powerfully from wartime documentary and autobiography. It is this capacity of the British class structure to maintain a deeply divided society that so perplexed Orwell, and indeed other contemporary and later socialists. As long as a traditional working class remained largely supportive of the Labour Party, a clear political alliance existed which could constitute the basis of political action, but for political power to become a reality other social groups had to be brought into the context of Labour Party politics. The war years effectively did this – ironically in part through Churchill’s rhetoric of a ‘common people’ – but the problem still remained for postwar Labour governments, which has never been solved in terms either of the specific policies of the party or its ideology. The Labour Party has always been an uneasy alliance of socialists and social democrats. In 1945 it was given, rather than creating for itself, a popular and coherent identity out of the aims an ideals of the war. As we have noted above, the documentary developed as a form both of literature and cinema during the Second World War. Documentary per se was not established during the war (Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier and the film Night Train are all powerful examples of the genre produced in the 1930s), but it was encouraged by government grants for war artists (which supported, for instance, the drawings of Henry Moore and Edward Ardizzone of wartime life), and by critical acclaim for those engaged in the task. This development laid the foundation for a critical endorsement of the concept of realism in literature, art and the cinema. Films such as Launder and Gilliat’s Millions Like Us and Carol Reed’s The Way Ahead brought to a mass public, in a comprehensible and accessible form, the nature of social production and

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the reality of war. Just as the work of Keith Douglas graphically illustrated the language and power of the dominant class, so these films gave a reality to the otherwise mythical, wartime figures of the ordinary soldier and assembly line worker. In this way, the concerns, constraints and conditions of life of the mass of the population became part of the wartime agenda. It was therefore a short step, in ideological terms, from the identification of the ordinary people to political recognition of their needs and desires. The pre-war years had provided plentiful information about poverty, malnutrition and under-privilege in Britain, but however thorough the evidence of the Fabian Society or the Pilgrim Trust, it did not catch the popular imagination with anything like the impact of film and radio drama. Generally known and carefully documented facts have far less impact than a vividly portrayed study of an individual case. In creating a climate of opinion in which the assumptions of the traditional ruling class were questioned and revalued, films, radio shows and literature played a dramatic part. In this way, through the media, literature and art of the Second World War, the quality, and indeed the texture, of ordinary life in Britain became widely recognised. It was this quality of life that Churchill claimed the war was all about, and for which Orwell became a leading spokesman. In his weekly essays in Tribune, Orwell helped to establish what was to become in the 1960s the new subject area of cultural studies. Orwell would no doubt have loathed such a suggestion, but in effect his As You Please columns broke new ground in discussing, as matters of serious consideration, such aspects of English life as the detective story, the popular Sunday newspaper and the quality of beer. A national culture, Orwell realised, is a diverse collection of different interests, habits and artifacts. For all his friendships and professional and social connections with many of the leading writers and intellectuals of his day (including those who, like Connolly, were able to recognise what Orwell was doing and were emphatically opposed to it), Orwell had little sympathy for the exclusiveness of the literary and intellectual élite, or its work. In a sense, what Churchill represented to wartime politics, Orwell represented to literature. Both men were, by virtue of birth and education, members of élite groups, but both were, for different reasons, marginal to the central habits and assumptions of those groups. Just as Churchill was the maverick politician, so Orwell was a maverick critic – a man with little respect for established convention or the rules of bourgeois normality, but with a lifetime commitment to and identification with the cause of Britain, and the British people. Thus in both the leading writer and the leading politician of the war, we find similar elements of non-conformity, patriotism, and an identity with the British, which embraced a wider social mix than was typical of the traditional élite. What Orwell contributed to the formation of wartime ideology was the articulation of a Cromwellian tradition of social equality, emphasizing the corruption of privilege and hierarchy. Orwell’s distaste for hierarchy had a long history. He had resigned from his post with the colonial police force in Burma because he could not tolerate the autocratic authority which he was required to exercise. His experiences while fighting for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War re-enforced his dislike for formal authority: Homage to Catalonia is, amongst other things, a vivid statement about the real power of committed, disciplined order as opposed to the coerced, enforced order of conscript or command armies. The power of the State and entrenched interests to enforce their will against those of democracy and liberty is a theme of both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although both books were not

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published until after the war, both drew on themes which Orwell had identified during the war: the authority of the State, the disappearance of traditional communities and values, and the curtailment of political discussion in a world which is guided and organised by autocrats and experts. The technological future, so attractive to some writers during the war, was seen by Orwell as a threat to individual autonomy and raised the spectre of standardisation, mass conformity and control. Suspicion arose, in part, out of a general English antipathy to science and technology, but it was also an understandable suspicion for a member of a generation which was living through aerial bombing raids and the threat, after the explosion of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of destruction on a global scale. The control of technology and its social organisation became major issues in Orwell’s fiction, just as they were to become central to the political and social agenda of Britain in the years after 1942. Following the entry of the United States into the war, and the failure of the Germans to establish supremacy over the Soviet Union, it became obvious to most contemporary observers that the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. The question was, How long would it take the Allies to defeat the Axis powers? So attention turned to the nature of the postwar world, in which it was already clear that three factors would emerge which had hitherto been unknown in Western Europe. Those factors were the consumer revolution or, to put it another way, the management of overproduction; the commitment of the state to the redress of the grosser inequalities of industrial capitalism; and the demonstrable ability of the scientific community to produce technologies of undreamed-of sophistication and power. Amazement at the potential capacity of capitalist production was evident in contemporary magazines and autobiographies. Contact with the United States armed services and their personnel left most individuals stunned by such displays of material plenty. The United States could not merely produce sophisticated manufactured items (the German economy, and to a certain extent the British, could do that as well) but it could produce them in such quantities, and make them available on such a wide scale, the European imagination was literally dazed. Figures as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre and Evelyn Waugh returned from their first visits to the United States amazed by what they saw. (Their reactions were not, of course, solely those of bemused travellers: Sartre wondered at the childlike naïvety of Americans and Waugh was equally amazed at the limited horizons of the citizens of the world’s most powerful nation.) Subsequent visits were to reveal the dilemmas of the United States social fabric: poverty and racism were rapidly recognised as realities of American life, and the experiences of British war brides were not, perhaps, atypical of the gradual disappointment and disillusionment with the United States that many European travellers and immigrants experienced. Orwell never visited the United States, and expressed only distant interest in the country and its people. Yet what emerges in Nineteen Eighty-Four as one of the features of the future is the shoddiness of the goods produced for mass consumption, precisely the criticism of American consumer society that many other travellers and visitors made. This superficial impression of life in a society geared to consumer demand, and apparently capable of satisfying every possible real and imagined need, was an indication of the changes that were to occur throughout Western Europe in the postwar years. European economies became dominated by international capital, the consumer demands created by capitalism, and the development of an ideological climate that equated the

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accumulation of capital with the satisfaction of real human need were already evident in the United States. But although some of these processes were evident by the early and mid 1940s, the interpretation of these changes remained, for the most part, locked into a semi-romantic liberal reaction to these evident processes of social change and transformation. Witness, for example, Orwell’s account of the future: For this is the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and probably cannot allow the individual any freedom whatever. When one mentions totalitarianism one thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy, but I think one must face the risk that this phenomenon is going to be world wide. It is obvious that the period of free capitalism is coming to an end and that one country after another is adopting a centralised economy according as one prefers. With that, the economic liberty to do what he likes, to choose his own work, to move to and fro across the surface of the earth, comes to an end. Now, until recently the full implications of this were not foreseen. It was never fully realised that the disappearance of economic liberty would have any effect on intellectual liberty.19 In crucial ways, this passage (written in 1941) is pure Thatcherism: the equation of economic and personal liberty is a pivotal one for all defenders of capitalism as both an economic and a moral system. And defending capitalism as a moral system is precisely what Orwell is doing here, i.e. arguing that ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ (albeit of the most vague and ill-defined kind) are in some senses real possibilities only within capitalism. It is easy to point out the obvious lack of freedom of the majority under capitalism: all those people Orwell met in Wigan, in the kitchens of Paris and in the hostels for the penniless in London were quite ‘unfree’ in the sense that they were subject, through their poverty, to brutal constraints and harsh disciplines. Even those people in paid work were, as Orwell himself noted on more than one occasion, little better than wage-slaves, tied to a life of constant and unremitting toil through the operation of market forces over which they had no control. In theory, of course, every Wigan factory worker and Parisian plongeur was free to ‘move to and fro across the surface of the earth’ but this hypothetical freedom was not accompanied by any of the structural supports that might have made it possible. Orwell’s fears about the consequences of a centralised economy must now strike the reader as either prophetic or reactionary. Prophetic to those who, in the late 1970s and 1980s, spearheaded ideological attacks against the ‘nanny state’ and advocated the primacy of market forces. To others, the remarks suggest the limitations of Orwell’s political analysis and his unwitting contribution to the case against socialism and the redistributive potential of the State. The sincerity of Orwell’s writing, and his passionate opposition to totalitarianism, stemmed from events in Germany and the Soviet Union as much as from his fears for the West. By 1941 it was well known that Stalin had been responsible for massive, and often random, attacks on the freedoms and lives of individuals. What was damaging, in terms of the future of European socialism, was that many on the Left, including Orwell, equated the purges in the Soviet Union with socialism and centralised planning. The reasons for the show trials, and the widespread persecutions and violations of civil liberties in the Soviet Union, were many and various. Amongst the causes of the terror was the limited

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development in Russia of bourgeois values which enshrined personal freedom and liberty – values that existed within the context of capitalism but were not derived from it, and indeed had often developed in opposition to the interests of capital. The notion of the rule of law, the correct procedure for fair trial, habeas corpus, the right to free association and to publish – all these central pillars of a democratic society had only been established in Britain and the United States after long and often painful struggles; they had certainly not emerged, as Orwell apparently believed, as a natural corollary of the market economy. Yet both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were to contribute, in their different ways, to the idea that only the market economy, left virtually free from state control, can guarantee personal freedom. Orwell himself, at the end of his life, expressed concern with the way in which these novels were being used. Writing to Vernon Richards in 1949 he remarked: ‘I am afraid some of the U.S. Republican papers have tried to use 1984 as propaganda against the Labour Party, but I have issued a sort of dementi which I hope will be printed.’20 But from the point of view of those US Republicans, it is difficult to see exactly why Nineteen Eighty-Four should not be used in a campaign against centralised planning by a socialist state. The novel is, after all, a fantasy, albeit a particularly vivid and unattractive one, about the possibilities of centralised state power and state control. The awful food, the appalling living conditions, the witless media – all the elements that go to make up the nightmare world of Nineteen Eighty-Four were precisely features of social life in wartime England about which Orwell himself complained. His attacks, for example, on sensationalist journalism and mass-produced consumer goods is never an attack on the motives of profit and gain but a moral attack on individuals for either writing or consuming such rubbish. Indeed, Orwell’s moral sense is such that throughout his work the words ‘decent’ and ‘decency’ occur over and again as approving and validating comments on particular people or situations. The problem, of course, is that ‘decent’ people, in Orwell’s sense, are quite likely to hold diverse political views.21 In all, Orwell’s case against the centralised state is essentially conservative, and one that – despite the stated intentions of the author – makes a contribution towards the identification of socialism, or even state intervention in welfare and economic planning, with the loss of personal freedom. Orwell cannot, of course, be blamed for the idea current in British society that the cause of capitalism and freedom are the same. But he does group together, quite indiscriminately, all capitalist societies without concern for either their political culture or economic success. Earlier in this chapter it was suggested that one of the features of wartime culture and ideology in Britain was an emphasis on documenting the lives of ordinary citizens. This ran counter to many of the values of the traditional literary and artistic élite which had been largely uninterested in the social content of art and literature but centrally concerned with the ability of a writer or an artist to achieve that elusive quality of ‘originality’. Documentary, and documentation, did not pretend to be original. Indeed, its central value was that it precisely was not: it was about the representation and reiteration of the ordinary and commonplace experience, albeit in ways that might make it more realistic or relevant. This development, encouraged for good strategic and propaganda reasons, made way for the growth of public interest in the conditions of everyday life – an interest epitomised by the large sales of government reports, political tracts and works of investigative journalism. All these developments, noted by historians of the war, can in

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one sense be interpreted as a growing public sophistication about political life and a growing interest and concern with the realities of social and economic organisation. It is not to deny this possibility to suggest that, also emerging in these works themselves, rather than in the public response to them, was an ideology that was in many ways conservative. The works of the angry young men all provide the best example of this. The early novels of Wain, Osborne and Amis are deeply suspicious of the male officer class (even if access to upper-class women is a central ambition of the heroes) and yet as critical, if not more so, of the working class and its communal values. The novels are, in many ways, the epitomy of the fictional fulfilment of the hopes of meritocracy, and the transcendence of established class hierarchies, that wartime ideals had created. But the other side to this classlessness, the reactionary aspect of what might otherwise be a progressive idea, is a hostility to organised left-wing politics and an attachment to the values of capitalism as a superior political and economic system. Numerous people in Britain throughout the war documented and analysed with detailed thoroughness the appalling inequalities and injustices of British society. The sudden need to organise sections of the civilian population brought home, as had the First World War, the manifest discrepancies in the hopes and experiences of people living in the same society. All this was widely recorded and widely accessible to the population as a whole. (Indeed, through such agencies as the Army Education Corps and the Brains Trust it became almost a citizen’s obligation to know these facts of British life.) Yet little of this documentation was analysed as fully as it was distributed. Amongst leading members of the Labour Party there were, as ever, splits between a semi-Marxist Left and a social democratic Right, whilst a significant group in the Conservative Party attempted to draw the party towards social democracy. But no political group, and few individuals, confronted the ideological paradox of the war, which entailed a genuine commitment to social equality and improvements in welfare provision together with a close identification of freedom and liberty with the social relations of capitalism. The planners and the social reformers of the war and the postwar years were therefore faced with the daunting task of reconciling two irreconcilable positions: the expectation of social equality within a capitalist state. The welfare provisions that were suggested during the war to cement this doomed alliance are the subject of the next chapter. What we have suggested here is that the decline in the hegemony of bourgeois culture that the war did much to encourage and accelerate did not at the same time produce an ideology or critical culture capable of challenging the material basis of bourgeois rationality and tastes. Indeed, the classless wartime citizen became a symbol that was to eventually prove more easily manipulated by the Right than by the Left.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Perry Anderson, ‘The Origins of the Present Crisis’ in Towards Socialism (London, Fontana, 1965), pp. 11–52. 2 George Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, Westminster Review, 66, 1856, pp.442–61. 3 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London, Chatto & Windus, 1968), p.32. 4 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p.256. 5 For an account of the British working class and the cinema see Bert Hegenkamp, Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain, 1929–1939 (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1986).

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6 Michael Balcon, Ernest Lindgren, Forsyth Hardy and Roger Manvell, Twenty Years of British Film, 1925–1945 (London, The Falcon Press, 1947), p.85. 7 See (eds) Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan, Mass Observation at the Movies (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp.220–291. 8 (eds) Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan, Mass Observation at the Movies, p. 15. 9 The Crown Film Unit was set up in April 1940 under the direction of Jack Beddington. The Unit was located within the Ministry of Information and was essentially the re-named GPO Film Unit. For research on cinema audiences see Paul Corrigan in (eds) J. Curran and V. Porter, British Cinema History (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), Chapter two. 10 (eds) Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan, Mass Observation at the Movies, p.455. 11 For accounts of broadcasting (essentially radio broadcasting) immediately before and during the war see Asa Briggs, History of Broadcasting in the U.K. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961) and Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol.1, 1922–1939 (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1991). 12 Personal communication from Mr Alan Wykes (a serving soldier during the War) to Mary Evans, 7 April 1969. 13 Cyril Connolly, Comment, Vol.VI, December 1942, p.371. 14 See N. Pearson, The State and the Visual Arts (Milton Keynes, The Open University Press, 1982). 15 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol.1, (eds) Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970), p.245. 16 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol.1, p.290. 17 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol.I, p.592. 18 Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem (ed. with an introduction by Desmond Graham) (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 144. 19 George Orwell, ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, The Listener, 19 June 1941. 20 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol.4 (eds) Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970), p.566. Other writers, sympathetic to Orwell, have also tried to rescue Orwell (particularly the Orwell of 1984) from the charge of right-wing libertarianism. See, for example, Ben Pimlott’s Introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1989), pp.V–XVI. 21 For examples of Orwell’s use of the term ‘decent’ and ‘decency’ see George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966), pp.52–3 and 104.

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Chapter 5 When the war is over The war brought massive upheavals to ordinary life. Men and women were pressed into the armed services, redeployed in factories, on the land and in mines; mothers and children were evacuated and families split up; communications were interrupted and basic commodities were in short supply. But there were deeper transformations at work. The demands of the war economy brought vitality and full employment to the declining industrial areas of Scotland, Wales and the North; production and distribution were centrally co-ordinated and the use of resources strategically planned; profiteers were roundly condemned, and with a rough and ready justice people willingly accepted ‘fair shares for all’. Politically, the mood of the electorate veered to the left. There was little sympathy for those who defended class distinctions, inherited privileges or the vested interests of the Tory ‘old gang’. The ideas of freedom, equality and democracy which mobilised the fight against fascism, inspired visions of a future society that better fitted these ideals. In broadcasts, editorials, sermons and magazines, past standards were revoked in favour of sweeping changes and reforms. The movement towards social reconstruction became part of the war effort, inseparable from the objectives Britain was fighting for. The chief mentors of this movement were Beveridge and Keynes: its hopes were pinned on ‘democracy and science’, while its aims, Churchill boldly declared, were to advance ‘the forward march of the common people towards their just and true inheritance, and towards a broader and fuller age’. Debates about the nature of postwar society became increasingly relevant as the immediate threat of invasion passed and – much to the relief of Churchill and the War Cabinet – the United States entered the war. Allied victory was now more or less assured; it was a question of when the war would end, rather than who would win. From that moment onwards, a broad spectrum of political, professional, academic and officially sponsored reconstruction groups moved into gear. In 1941 a Cabinet Committee on Reconstruction was appointed, followed by a Ministry of Reconstruction the following year. Each of the major political parties formed reconstruction committees to frame social and economic policy in anticipation of electoral victory after the war. At the same time, a stream of discussion papers, proposals and plans were circulated in pamphlets, newspapers and magazines. In January 1941, Picture Post carried an article by the young economist Thomas Balogh, called ‘The First Necessity in the New Britain: Work for All’. Balogh listed five essential requirements of future economic policy: a job for every ablebodied man; state control of investment and the banks; a state managed company to direct community investments; tax reforms with a tax on property and reduced income tax, and the co-ordination of national and international economic plans. In the same issue A.D.K. Owen, writing on social security, demanded a minimum wage for all adults, allowances for children, and an all-in contributory social insurance scheme, with special forms of

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public assistance for those most in need. Many of these demands were recognised in the Beveridge Report which appeared as a best-selling White Paper the following year. Such sweeping proposals whetted appetites for change. But though clearly inspired by utopian zeal, the reconstruction movement often betrayed an idealised sense of political tradition and an inhibiting attachment to the past. In matters of economic and social policy, the emphasis was squarely upon repairing faults in the existing fabric rather than making a radical break and a fresh start. Reform and rationalisation, not revolution, were the order of the day. After all, it was in defence of all that was lasting and valuable that the nation was now at war. This sense of continuity pointed to the reconstruction of a middle ground. Even so, the patriotic front against Nazi Germany obscured significant differences in ideology and attitudes towards plans for change and social reform. These differences were compounded by no less divergent views about the nature of fascism itself. Jose Harris observes that some people believed ‘they were fighting against a perverted form of socialism, others against a deviant form of advanced monopoly capitalism’.1 Such opinions are not surprising in a highly stratified and divided society but as Harris remarks, they produced some unexpected alliances which cut across the more familiar categories of capital versus labour, individualism versus collectivism, Right versus Left. In so far as there was a national consensus, it was expressed as a patriotic determination to win the war, and an uncommon tolerance of the measures needed to achieve that end. Churchill aptly expressed the prevailing mood when he defined the terms of the Coalition as ‘Everything for the war, whether controversial or not, and nothing controversial that is not bona fide needed for the war’.2 It was a principle that opened the way for radical innovation, but equally justified resistance to politically sensitive change. Churchill, for instance, personally vetoed a proposal to nationalise the coal mines in 1943, and on the same basis, unsuccessfully attempted to stop Butler’s ‘controversial’ plans for educational reform which were none the less enacted in 1944. For the most part, measures sponsored by the Government as essential for war contributed in various ways to the climate of rationalisation and reform. The need to modernise and co-ordinate systems of production, distribution and supply introduced a degree of state intervention that would have been unthinkable before the war. Similarly, with the introduction of industrial conscription, the centralised direction of labour and the rationed distribution of basic supplies, the war justified an otherwise intolerable degree of government regulation and interference in private lives. These emergency measures were accepted on pragmatic and patriotic grounds, but they also influenced the climate and attitudes to future change. The idea that ‘things are going to be different after the war’ was by no means welcomed by everyone. Those whose life had been cushioned by privilege and wealth had every reason to hope that reconstruction would mean a return to a world of rising prosperity and established lines of status and economic power. For this section of the population, the war had imposed previously unknown restrictions on their style of life and undermined – though not entirely eliminated – their advantage both as providers and consumers in the market place. With a vested interest in keeping things the same, the new enthusiasm for egalitarianism was a disturbing indication of the direction of change. Nor were these fears entirely misplaced: in 1942 the Home Intelligence Unit reported strong support for ‘equality of sacrifice’, a heightened awareness of social deprivations, and a majority in favour of levelling class distinctions after the war.3

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Yet in spite of the radical mood of the country and the rationed scarcity of consumer goods, privilege was not wholly eradicated by war. Private education, private medical care, private housing and family wealth all remained relatively secure. Boys still went to public schools, old acquaintances met in the officers’ mess, and London society enjoyed – on a somewhat diminished scale – many of the diversions and pleasures of life before the war. In country houses, fashionable restaurants and London clubs, élite opinion created an ideological epoch that fitted a bourgeois sense of continuity in the midst of change.4 Nostalgia for a rapidly passing age was sharpened by the unwelcome prospect of a society that in all likelihood would undermine the advantages and cultural distinctions that had supported a life of comfort and authority before the war. The very expression ‘before the war’ became a catch-phrase amongst cartoonists and columnists, who satirised reactionary postures to the direction of change: ‘before the war’ shopkeepers were obliging, service was excellent, and the working classes were deferential or happily out of sight. These myopic images of pre-war society were scorned by the Left and a large groundswell of progressive opinion which favoured social reform. From the Communist Party to the Butlerite wing of the Conservative Party it was widely accepted that there could be no going back to the hardships and divisions of the inter-war years. Within the Conservative Party, progressive voices divided the party – along the same ideological axis as it divided again after 1975 – by joining with leading churchmen, trade unionists and liberal elements of the Press in calling for improvements in the life chances of ordinary people when the war was won. Health, education, housing and welfare headed the list of Tory reforms. On wider questions of citizenship and the reciprocal obligations of the State, the Conservative Reconstruction Committee, chaired by R.A. Butler, departed from the party’s libertarian traditions to propose the moral reconstruction of English society as a Christian community founded upon principles of social justice. The Committee’s philosophy which, amongst other unpalatable ideas recommended the communal ownership of land and the democratisation of public schools, proved far too radical for the party as a whole and was received with blustering alarm by the Right. Later, the business of modernising Conservative policy passed to the less theoretical Tory Social Reform Group which attempted to bring the party closer to the Government’s plans for reconstruction. Acting as a pressure group for change, the group hoped to redress some of the damage done to the party’s image between the wars, mainly they believed by ‘businessmen, financiers and speculators ranging freely in a laissez-faire economy and creeping unnoticed into the fold of Conservatism’.5 The efforts of this young but influential group to rid the party of opportunists who ‘cast a slur over responsible government’ and the Party’s good name, deepened existing splits amongst the Tories. Whatever Conservatism may have stood for in the past, it had rarely been concerned with such high-minded ideals. It had been above all a pragmatic party, a selfconsciously non-ideological party of mutually supporting social interests that eschewed doctrinal disputes in favour of internal solidarity and expediency in power. The quest for the true nature of Toryism revived a contest between two different visions of the party: progressive opinion rediscovered the essence of Conservatism in Disraeli’s novel idea of ‘One Nation’, whilst the dissenting and predominantly right-wing majority resisted social democratic tendencies both within the party and everywhere else.

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These ideological splits amongst Conservatives brought to a head two opposing traditions of political thought. Progressive wings of the major parties tended to conceive society as an ‘organic’ entity which endowed the State with public responsibilities that in some sense transcended the rights and interests of individuals. The more conservative view held that such rights and interests – including those relating to welfare – were a private matter and the proper function of the State was merely to uphold individual liberties. Of the two, the latter tradition had been dominant in the history of welfare provisions and thinking about the State.6 This position was largely undermined by the exigencies of war which gave reality and legitimate purpose to the collective interests of society and the corporate role of the state. These conditions did not create consensus on specific issues of welfare or citizenship, but on wider questions of social and political order there was a convergence of opinion that societal problems should be viewed comprehensively rather than ad hoc, and that their solution presupposed more extensive planning and state intervention than would have been tolerated before the war. The management of the economy was a case in point. The idea of a planned economy had of course been around for some time: politically, it was the centre ground to which all enlightened members of the major parties now laid some claim. Ideologically, the differences between moderate opinion and those further to the Left turned upon whether state intervention was a positive step towards a more efficient and humane society, or a temporary expedient to shore up an ailing capitalist system in terminal decline. Keynes had favoured the former view when a decade earlier he wrote: For my part, I think that Capitalism wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to work out a social organisation which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life.7 The economic instabilities of the inter-war years had already established limited forms of government intervention as an accomplished fact. Although ideologically inclined towards laissez-faire, pre-war Tory governments had nonetheless encouraged rationalisation in ship-building, mining, textiles and the railways, and had established nationally owned corporations in broadcasting, civil aviation and electrical power supplies. But these interventions had been largely ad hoc responses to immediate needs. As Harold Macmillan had earlier remarked, ‘Planning is forced upon us… not for idealistic reasons but because the old mechanism which served us when markets were expanding naturally and spontaneously is no longer adequate when the tendency is in the opposite direction’.8 There was little enthusiasm, however, and no precedent for the comprehensive programmes of social planning that caught political imagination during the Second World War. In the event, debates about the management of the British economy were overtaken by more immediate events. With the onset of war, the need to co-ordinate strategic resources, including labour, imposed centralised direction upon almost every sector of the economy. Complex regulations affected transport and communications, employment, consumption, diet and the detail of domestic life. Food rationing was just one facet of

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state regulation to control production, distribution and supply. By 1942 approximately half of the national product was specifically directed towards the war. By British standards, output was uncommonly high, especially in munitions, aircraft production and other industries strategically related to defence. Between 1939 and 1943 some three million new jobs were created, instantly absorbing over a million unemployed. Unproductive land was cultivated, increasing by 50 per cent Britain’s available arable land. These targets, and the measures needed to achieve them, were dictated and justified by war. However, the implications for economic reconstruction were clear: if this is what could be achieved under conditions of war, there was no limit to the problems which could be overcome with the return to peace. The assumption that peacetime production would equal the efforts of war underlay hopes of future prosperity. This buoyant assumption was echoed by ordinary people and the popular press. Anticipating victory, an editorial in the Daily Mirror (February 1945) urged its readers to apply the same wartime spirit to rebuilding a better peace: Housing will have to be tackled like a problem of war. We can make as if by a miracle tanks, aircraft, battleships, pipelines, harbours! Are we, then, incapable of building houses? No. But to get those precious products of peace we must show the same energy, the same brain power, the same spirit by means of which we made the same fearful engines of war. But equally, wartime conditions pointed to the chronic inadequacies of British society and the multiple problems which had to be faced: incompetent management, poor industrial relations, a dearth of trained scientists, technologists and engineers, inadequate and ill-organised social and medical services, squalid housing, poverty and the astonishing social deprivation revealed by the evacuation and the Blitz. At the very minimum, the consensus which emerged during the early years of the war amounted to a broad convergence of moderate opinion that it was in the public interest to put these inadequacies right. By the end of the war, the principle of state intervention in the economy was no longer a political issue. Despite evident shortcomings, the war effort had belied the British reputation for simply muddling through and demonstrated that a planned and centrally managed economy could be justified, not just ideologically, but by highly effective results. The idea of an expansive economy with mixed public and private investment was reflected in the reconstruction plans of all the main political parties who freely adapted Keynesian assumptions to suit their own ends. Keynes’ confident prediction that unemployment could be averted by stimulating demand, readily satisfied the need within progressive circles for a rational and politically defensible alternative to the chaotic instability that divided society when market forces were unrestrained. Even within the Treasury, deeply resistant orthodoxies were gradually reviewed to take account of the principles of economic management advised by Keynes.9 The publication of a White Paper on Employment Policy in 1944 was a minor landmark in recognising demand management as the most effective means of achieving ‘a high and stable level of employment’ after the war. The assumptions behind the White Paper were shaped as much by memories of the Depression and mass unemployment as developments in economic thinking since the

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First World War. Unemployment was held to be the major cause of poverty and social discontent: ensuring full employment was therefore regarded as fundamental to social and political stability. In 1942, William Beveridge advised the Minister for Reconstruction that maintaining full employment was the cornerstone of plans for a Welfare State. ‘Without such maintenance’ he wrote, ‘all else is futile, with such maintenance all other problems become soluble’.10 Beveridge’s assault upon Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, Idleness and Want – the ‘five giants’ he personified on the road to reconstruction – went well beyond the terms of reference of his Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services. The Committee was expected to deal with relatively narrow questions concerning compensation for industrial injury and sickness, and to rationalise the haphazard and often inconsistent patchwork of social security that had accumulated over the previous fifty years. From the start, Beveridge used this opportunity to propose an extensive portfolio of interrelated provisions, including a national health service, family allowances and a system of comprehensive social insurance from the ‘cradle to the grave’. The Report set down the guiding principles and much of the institutional framework of future social policy. Its proposals were designed not simply to eliminate squalor and want but to promote Beveridge’s vision of a new democratic social order which he believed was pre-figured by the aims of the war. The resulting White Paper was a singularly personalised document signed by William Beveridge alone. Its publication in 1942, a few days after the battle of Alamein, was received with overwhelming popular enthusiasm, and quickly established Beveridge as the leading spokesman on postwar reconstruction – a pioneering architect of a more enlightened age. The Home Intelligence Unit records that the Report was ‘welcomed with almost universal approval as the first real attempt to put into practice talk about the new world’. Moreover, the zeal with which Beveridge publicised the Report appealed to the increasingly optimistic and radical expectations of ordinary people who pressed for the immediate implementation of his plan. Encouraged by this rising tide of enthusiasm, the Labour Party uncritically adopted Beveridge’s recommendations as their own, whilst the Tory Reform Group called for a Ministry of Social Security without delay. Only in Whitehall was the Report more cautiously received, particularly at the Treasury, where serious doubts were raised about the somewhat speculative actuarial assumptions which were said to finance the scheme.11 Beveridge clearly thought of his reforms as revolutionary. Moreover, his ideas on social security were merely a prelude to even more sweeping plans for economic reorganisation and reform, some of which were presented in his subsequent report, Full Employment in a Free Society in 1944. Yet if Beveridge had presented his social insurance scheme in 1909 at the time of the ‘People’s Budget’, it might have been truly revolutionary; but as a blueprint for the future it leaned all too readily upon problems and assumptions from the past.12 Beveridge, after all, was not a revolutionary socialist, but a Liberal with Fabian sympathies. His concern for the poor and disadvantaged was qualified by a belief in the eugenic superiority of the upper classes and by his own intellectual conceit. Social policy, he firmly believed, should be dictated by careful analysis of social facts – interpreted by experts such as himself. Inevitably, the facts upon which his Report is based relate mainly to the conditions of civilian life in the 1930s. This would have mattered less if Beveridge had not assumed that past patterns of employment and family life were an established norm to which Britain would return at

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the end of the war. Unfortunately, and particularly for those who remain as much in need of assistance in the 1990s as they did in the 1930s, Beveridge was affected by the same nostalgia for a receding past as others who were more evidently conservative. Despite his grandiose talk of freedom and democracy and the collectivist rhetoric of his reports, his substantive proposals in no way challenged the institutional order of British society or the traditional character of the State. The Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services is premised upon the fundamental principle that social policy should conform to existing patterns of social and economic life.13 Accordingly, and in line with past assumptions, social insurance was construed as an essentially private contract between contributors and the State. The euphoria which greeted the scheme arose spontaneously from the mistaken belief that welfare benefits would be freely available to anyone in need. Beveridge did much to create this munificent impression himself. However, it was a ‘national’ scheme only in so far as it was to be administered by the State; in practice, social security was limited to paying contributors and not coextensive with citizenship as a universal right. If for no other reason than this, Beveridge emphasised that the financial viability of his scheme depended upon maintaining high levels of productive employment after the war. If that could be guaranteed, the keystone of a stable and prosperous society would be in place, and the scheme would pay for itself. However, this fundamental assumption did not take account of two considerations that were as relevant to household budgets and the British economy in the 1930s as they are in the 1990s: firstly, that market capitalism is inherently unstable and given to recurrent fluctuations in the demand for labour, and secondly, that the majority of families rely upon the paid labour of more than one member of the household. The expectation of successive governments, trade unionists, social reformers and moralists has, almost without exception, been that the male head of the household is primarily responsible for the material well-being of family dependents, including children, elderly relatives and the infirm. However, ‘primary’ should not be read as ‘only’; in reality, most households have depended upon a variable patchwork of paid labour to make ends meet. The ad hoc arrangements commonly needed – particularly within working-class households – to maintain an adequate family income have recently been documented by feminist historians.14 These studies have found that participation in the economy by women of all categories – married and unmarried, young and old, childless and mothers – has consistently been more substantial than social planners or earlier historians have supposed. Whilst policy experts have readily assumed that women should take responsibility for maintaining a home by cooking, washing, caring for children, supporting the elderly and nursing the sick, there appears to be deep-seated resistance to recognising the fact that large numbers of married women also undertake these and other services outside the home as paid work. Beveridge and his generation of social reformers were no exception. Brought up in a materially secure bourgeois world where few women, let alone married women sought employment, he generalised from this experience to the population as whole. The nuclear, two-generational family supported solely upon the earnings of a fully employed male became the established norm. Yet even in 1931, the Census recorded that 10 per cent of all married women were economically active – a figure which took no account of those in casual or informal paid work.

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In identifying two major causes of poverty – unemployment and the natural propensity of families to breed – Beveridge and his colleagues gave little indication that these causes were interrelated. Children, of course, cost money to clothe, feed and educate and thus can have a dire effect on slender means. Yet the corollary of this – which now seems obvious – was not seriously considered in 1942: the birth of children virtually excludes women from employment. The absence of alternative child care provisions beyond the immediate family tied women – as it does today – to economic dependency upon their husband’s wage, reducing if not wholly removing their capacity to supplement the household income from paid work. Nor should it be supposed that this oversight was accidental: the Beveridge Report defines the proper attitude of housewives to employment and their obligations in the home in no uncertain terms: ‘The attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home is not and should not be the same as that of the single woman. She has other duties.’ These ‘other duties’ are identified as follows: ‘In the next thirty years housewives as mothers have vital work to do ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race and of British ideals in the world.’15 As these paragraphs were published, women were being recruited into industry, the auxiliary armed forces, the Women’s Land Army and Civil Defence, while countless others were participating in the war effort as volunteer fire watchers, ambulance drivers, cooks and social workers or through voluntary organisations such as the W. V. S. At the same time, state funded nursery schools and child care facilities were opened to release women with young children for vital war work. It was an opportunity as never before to recognise the role of women outside the home, yet instead of supporting their contribution to the economy and household incomes after the war, the Beveridge Report prescribed a model of the British family which confined women to an economically dependent domestic life. The sexism and unthinking chauvinism that colour the Beveridge Report were not untypical of ‘enlightened’ attitudes of the time. Richard Titmuss in his Parents Revolt reflects a common middle-class anxiety that Britain’s ‘human stock’ is declining and will qualitatively deteriorate if the middle classes do not reproduce themselves in greater numbers.16 Women of child-bearing age thus had a duty to society: their place was in marriage as housewives and mothers, reproducing the nation while supporting the efforts of wage-earning men. Married women in gainful employment, Beveridge decided, should be paid lower benefits than insured men (on the assumption that husbands provide bed and board). But it was thought that such women were likely to be in a minority and that as far as unemployment was concerned, associated benefits would affect mostly men. It was also assumed that periods of unemployment would be infrequent and short. This last expectation rested upon the optimistic belief that a planned and wellmanaged capitalist economy would ensure prosperity in a stable world. It was an assumption that permeated a broad spectrum of thinking on social reconstruction from agnostics on the Left to the Tory Reform Group, and informed the somewhat speculative budgets supporting proposals for a ‘Welfare State’. Anticipating that postwar expansion would bring full employment, Beveridge estimated the cost of his scheme could be met with contributions from employers and employees without having to increase taxes on those in work. It was a sketchy projection which revealed financial weaknesses in his plan: expert advisers to his Committee estimated a likely charge on the Exchequer of

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between three to five million pounds in the first year of operation alone, causing considerable concern within government circles and Whitehall.17 No less optimistic were Beveridge’s forecasts of economic expansion and the demand for labour after the war. Yet full employment had never actually existed in Britain prior to 1939. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, at least 10 per cent of the insured work-force were unemployed in any one year, with peaks of over 20 per cent between 1931 and 1933. For the period as a whole, unemployment averaged 14 per cent a year, or approximately one in seven of the insured labour force. Beveridge was inclined to dismiss evidence of this sort as weak-kneed defeatism: in future, he insisted, the maintenance of full employment would be the responsibility of the State. However, the burden of such responsibility carried far-reaching implications. Beveridge anticipated that in practice a policy of full employment would probably require measures akin to the centralised direction of labour imposed during the war, with compulsory training schemes and severe restrictions upon personal choice of employment. Full Employment in a Free Society went even further, arguing that economic security for all would necessitate the planned relocation of industry with public and private investment directed by a National Investment Board bringing three-quarters of the nation’s enterprise under public control.18 As he remarked elsewhere, ‘Ownership of the means of production is not one of the essential British liberties’ and in spite of lobbies of vested interest, should not stand in the way of social reconstruction after the war.19 The radical implications of Beveridge’s plans for social security were not to everyone’s taste. Although with hindsight the Beveridge Report has been described as ‘the greatest non-event of the war’,20 the keen interest it aroused immediately made it the focus of ideologically opposed factions competing to influence the post-war world. Fears about the radical implications of Beveridge’s plans were hastily expressed by the Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, who was so embarrassed by the ‘socialism’ of the Beveridge Report that he attempted to stifle discussion of it within the armed services – a ploy which proved so unsuccessful he subsequently had to present the Report as evidence of the enlightened and progressive views of the establishment itself. Others found the Report just as difficult to deal with. Beatrice Webb saw it, for all its collectivist views, as shoring up, and thus extending the life of capitalism. For different reasons, Churchill was no less vexed by the apparent popularity of such a radical plan. Although he was not opposed to some of Beveridge’s specific ideas, he in turn was disturbed by the collectivist tone of the Report. As Kenneth Harris remarks: It would be unfair to say that [Churchill] was opposed to all its contents, but he was suspicious of what it might lead to. Just as he had not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, he had not taken his seals of office to make Britain into a socialist state.21 Churchill’s misgivings were not all that surprising from a Conservative politician with a reactionary record in social affairs. He found comfort in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s repeated warnings that the country could ill-afford Beveridge’s Plan. The rift that the Report produced between Labour’s leadership and the party’s rank and file was more revealing. Although the principles of the Report were readily endorsed by the

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party as a blueprint for social reconstruction, attitudes towards putting the Plan into effect crystallised many of the issues that divide the Labour Party to this day. Responding to the mood of their constituents, Labour backbenchers called for the full implementation of Beveridge’s proposals without delay. Their enthusiam was broadly shared by trade unionists, committees of churchmen, the Liberal Party and most of the popular press. Yet Attlee and his senior collegues were not to be drawn. While publicly welcoming the Report, they sided with the Government’s more equivocal view that the Plan should be approved in principle without any firm commitment to proceed at this stage. Bevin’s carping criticisms of the details of Beveridge’s scheme added to the impression that Labour leaders were not in tune with the feelings of the party or the spirit of these reforms. In the crudest ideological terms, it could not help but seem to Labour MPs on the left that the leadership had aligned itself for all practical purposes with that body of reactionary Conservatives who publicly opposed the Plan. The cry for ‘Beveridge now’ did not prevail. The Government temporised with strong reassurances of future reforms but made no specific commitment to introduce any part of the Plan. There was disappointment in the country and a widespread feeling that ‘vested interests’ had triumphed again. Within the House, divisions over the Report briefly ruptured the wartime ‘truce’22 and exposed Attlee, as Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party, to criticism from more than one side. The sincerity of Attlee’s opposition to Beveridge’s ‘giant evils’ was never in doubt, but in the eyes of many Labour MPs, he seemed reluctant to challenge the system which perpetuated these ills. From the left of the party, Attlee’s leadership as a senior member of the War Cabinet came under continual attack. The Tribune published several editorial rebukes in the style of the following extract, which appeared shortly before the publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942: If Mr Attlee has gained some of the toughness which comes with high position in politics, it has been reserved for the members and policies of his own Party…. Were merely Mr Attlee’s reputation at stake we would find it worthy of comment as the passing of yet another Socialist into the limbo of collaboration. But of more profound concern is that Mr Attlee is involving the entire Labour Party in the disrepute which his actions – and even more, lack of actions – have earned.23 Disappointment and criticisms of Attlee’s leadership were commonplace. Harold Laski, who before the war had been a loyal and amicable friend, was moved to write to Ernest Bevin in 1942 saying, ‘It is time for a fighting leader and you are the right person for that place’. Attlee himself took very little notice of these attacks. He placed his trust in the party’s National Executive Committee which, in spite of splits and misgivings, invariably rallied to his support. The issue behind these personal criticisms was the nature and role of the Labour Party, and particularly its vision and future commitment to socialism. Of the many ideological battles being fought at the time, those within the Labour Party and on the Left were as fundamental as any, and as inconclusive as they are today. Attlee represented what he himself described as the ‘Robert Owen tradition’ of socialism. He was committed to an organic, Christian view of society; to full employment, freedom from sickness,

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deprivation and want, to free education and medical care and, pragmatically, to a planned but mixed economy. On the left-wing of the Parliamentary Party, Aneurin Bevan and Stafford Cripps most vocally represented the views of those committed to more radical programmes of change, including the nationalisation of productive resources, the abolition of inherited privilege and the redistribution of social rewards. Their tolerance for varieties of modified capitalism was much lower than Attlee’s or his immediate colleagues such as Dalton, Morrison and Bevin. While it was self-evident to the Left that private ownership of the means of production was itself the cause of exploitation, unemployment and want, Attlee believed the instability and excesses of capitalism could be corrected by expert planning and the moral education of the capitalist class. Attlee’s biographer has summed up his position as follows: He hoped that society would become less the product of the profit motive and more the projection of the zeal to work for the good of the community. But he was not in a hurry to see it happen, or was ever certain that it would. ‘My own view is that where the leadership is good, whether in the private or public sector, the response is satisfactory.’ Leadership there had to be: all men were not equal and had not been born equal. But all men had an equal right to try and make themselves equal – or even superior. A society predicated on fellowship did not preclude competition. It was the spirit in which that competition took place that counted. And those gifted enough, or fortunate enough, to achieve superior status or resources must – in the spirit of fellowship – carry out in a moral society the responsibilities which those achievements entailed. A moral society was the end – socialism was only the means.24 This vision of society as a moral community founded upon ideas of mutual obligation and fair play, was possibly also shared by Bevan and Cripps, but their analysis of the social world – like that of later represenatives of the socialist Left – included a far more searching critique of capitalist relations and thus a more sceptical assessment of the possiblility of managing an inherently competitive and complex system by a morality that condemns social inequalities yet condones unequal advantage in the market place. Under Attlee’s leadership, the numerous domestic achievements of the postwar Labour government – the introduction of the Welfare State, a national health service, a planned economy with the nationalisation of essential industries (but not financial institutions) and marginal redistributions of income and wealth – were significant steps towards social democracy. Yet none represented a radical break from the past. Although they caught the popular appetite for change, they drew upon ideas which were common within progressive circles of all political parties well before the start of the war. Even Labour’s programme of nationalisation (with the ‘controversial’ exception of iron and steel) followed the recommendations of predominantly Conservative committees, and borrowed a model of the ‘public corporation’ introduced by Liberal and Conservative governments before 1939. There was already a broad political consensus in favour of egalitarian reforms to which all parties were publicly committed in varying degrees by 1945. Similarly, there was common agreement on the need to modernise the economy through effective state planning and controls. The rationalisation of industry and the

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central management of resources, including human resources through training and productive employment, was common ground between reconstruction committees during the war.25 Attlee’s ambition to render capitalism more efficient and humane by pragmatic consensus rather than radical change was close to the heart of this moderate consensus, and thus succeeded in consolidating the Labour Party within the governing establishment of Britain, while widening lasting ideological divisions within the party itself. The dissatisfaction of the British Left with Attlee’s performance was shared, though for quite different reasons, by the main body of the Conservative Party. It would certainly be mistaken to assume that the progressive views of the party’s Reconstruction Committee or the Tory Reform group were representative of ideas within the party as a whole. Indeed, their liberal views on social reconstruction threw general opinion within the party into sharp relief. For the majority of backbench Conservatives, reconstruction was the road to socialism by another name. Their opposition to Labour policies, and their more muted suspicions of colleagues who agitated for change, turned upon the still prevalent view that the intervention of government in the economy and public life dampens the spirit of private enterprise and diminishes individual freedom of choice. Such fears nakedly surfaced in Churchill’s infamous election broadcast, scripted by Brendan Bracken in 1945: ‘I declare to you from the bottom of my heart’, he said, ‘that no socialist system can be established without a political police.’ Should the Labour Party attempt to implement their programme of socialist reform, he went on, ‘they would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo – no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.’26 It is difficult to square these sentiments with his earlier expansive gestures towards social reconstruction and ‘the broadening field for State ownership and enterprise’ he had offered to the nation in his broadcast only two years before. But whilst there is some doubt whether the views expressed in the ‘Gestapo’ speech were Churchill’s own, they were certainly not uncommon amongst members of the Conservative Party as a whole.27 Deep-seated suspicions of ‘collectivism’, even in its mildest forms, coloured the attitudes of Tory backbenchers to the Party’s policies on reconstruction and reform, including its lukewarm commitment to Beveridge’s plan. A lobby of Conservative businessmen formed to oppose the Plan as an attempt to undermine the principle of individual liberty and responsibility.28 Others found an opportunity to voice stereotyped views about the fecklessness of the working class. Speaking apparently for the Plan, Sir Arnold Grindley expressed a common Tory concern: How is want to be defined? Can it necessarily be met by any specific monetary sum? The family of a hard-working man can live without want, perhaps on £3 a week, whereas the family of a man who misuses his money or spends it on drink or gambling may be very hard put to it if his wages are £5 or £6 a week.29 As a contemporary journalist remarked, ‘the fear that small children or old age pensioners may take to drink or gambling is a very real one to a large section of the Conservative Party’. Indeed, when introducing the Report for the Government, the Conservative, Sir John Anderson, was so obviously confused about the details of the scheme, and so

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unenthusiastic about the measures it implied, that he left no doubt that he hoped the Report would be indefinitely shelved. Other Conservatives – perhaps some fifty or so sympathetic to the aims of the Tory Reform Group – supported Liberal and Labour backbenchers who pressed for prompt legislation on Beveridge’s Plan. Indeed, for some progressive Conservatives, such as R.A. Butler and members of his Reconstruction Committee, Beveridge’s ideas did not go far enough. Under the unlikely influence of the exiled German sociologist, Karl Mannheim, whose organic conception of the industrial order assumed a moral as well as an executive role for the State, the Committee proposed a comprehensive system of social welfare that would guarantee minimum standards of living in return for public acceptance of standards of Christian discipline at work and in the conduct of social life.30 This highminded conception of a morally integrated state found little support amongst members of the Conservative Party as a whole, some of whom suspected the Committee’s ideas were uncomfortably close to the political order against which Britain was currently at war. The failure of the Conservative Party to agree upon Beveridge’s Plan, or to put forward a credible alternative of their own, left the party vulnerable to the widespread popularity of Beveridge’s social insurance scheme. The party had little option but to make the most of a mixed opportunity by emphasising those aspects of the Report that best suited its position. Thus they stressed the limited and essentially contractual basis of the scheme (though fearing this might turn into ‘a contract of unlimited liability for the State’), and endorsed its traditional conception of government as the guardian of individual rights. The Labour Party, on the other hand, enthused by popular reactions to the scheme, found in Beveridge a legitimate opportunity to harness the sense of wartime solidarity to policies that advanced their public image and the socialist cause. Debates over social policy and the nature of postwar reconstruction were closely bound up with the aims of the war. Wartime propaganda stressed liberty, equality and democracy as cherished institutions of British life. Accordingly, support for social justice, equality and citizenship became identified with patriotic sentiments and the justification for war. However, as reactions to Beveridge’s Plan suggest, the united front against fascism obscured a kaleidoscope of different interpretations of what these concepts in practice might mean. If there was a common ground amongst the many factions lobbying for change, it was the belief that the problems of postwar society should be met by comprehensive planning rather than short-term measures and piecemeal reforms. This was no less accepted by progressive Conservatives as Fabians and the socialist Left: it applied as much to the management of the economy and problems of unemployment as it did to the provision of welfare and the politics of personal life. After a tradition of government deeply resistant to rationalisation, it represented a significant shift in political thinking that owed as much to the mistakes of the past as the model of strategic management collectively assumed by the Government in response to war. But whilst the need for social planning formed a common intellectual framework within which progressive elements could find mutual support across party lines, an attachment to planning was compatible with either capitalism or socialism and thus provided neither the direction nor a legitimation for political change. In fact, the emergent social democratic ‘consensus’ was never explicitly consolidated in ideological terms. It was at the time a pragmatic coalition against vested and resistant interests, legitimated by the groundswell of popular expectations that had been raised by

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the aims and experiences of the war. Evacuation, rationing and the Blitz, and sweeping emergency powers, had radicalised the political landscape and whetted appetites for lasting change. Reconstruction was an immediate issue, not a planner’s vision that could be suspended until after the war. Influencing the direction and process of reconstruction was a critical priority amongst political factions from Right to Left. In the event, the moderate consensus that emerged to underpin the framework of postwar society was a compromise between cross-cutting ideological pressures and pragmatic constraints. In the Government’s case, plans for reconstruction were circumscribed by the political composition of the Coalition and its short-term objectives in fighting the war. Although senior Ministers, with the notable exception of Churchill, regularly attended meetings of the Cabinet Reconstruction Committee, expectations of change were strategically balanced against the immediate priority of defeating Hitler and the Axis powers. To a certain extent, in representing the national interest, the Cabinet held the ring between the radical demands of the socialist Left and the reactionary inertia of the Right, creating an opportunity for progressive and moderate thinkers of all parties to co-operate in shaping the reconstruction of British society both during and after the war. The Education Reform Bill presented by R.A. Butler in 1944 is a monument to moderate social reconstruction in the midst of war. It satisfied the inclinations of neither Left nor Right, nor for that matter the wishes of the teaching profession, but it was supported as a major reform by liberal politicians on all sides. Butler records that within the House of Commons, ‘Its provisions were broadly acceptable to moderate and progressive Conservative opinion and consistently supported by Labour men’. To less moderate and progressive Conservatives, however, the proposed changes were contentious if not outrageous. Anticipating right-wing reactions, Churchill had earlier vetoed the Bill as far too controversial. None the less, Butler pressed ahead with a modified draft in which earlier clauses bringing the public schools within the ambit of state education were entirely dropped. Even so, the proposed rationalisation of secondary education greatly increased the State’s executive powers and thus invited strong objections – as it does today – from the rump of the Conservative Party and the radical Right. A new Ministry of Education would be empowered to impose national policy over local education authorities which would be obliged to provide free secondary education for every child up to the age of 15. Both in spirit and design, it was an impressive piece of social reform that brought to an end the gross inequalities in access to secondary education which disadvantaged children from the working class. Yet here was further evidence of the tendency towards collectivism and officialdom so abhorred by the Right, which even now the present government is belatedly trying to reverse by encouraging schools to ‘opt out’. With the passing of the 1944 Education Act, the principle of ‘free secondary education for all’ replaced a system which had provided education according to means. It was a principle to which the Labour Party had long been committed. During the two-day debate of the White Paper ‘not a single voice’ The Times reported, ‘was raised in favour of holding up or whittling down any of the proposals’ from the Labour side. Indeed, Labour MPs strongly endorsed the egalitarian spirit of Butler’s reforms, including such provisions as school meals ‘at national nutritional standards’, free transportation to and from school for children in outlying areas, and financial assistance with clothes and equipment for children from low income families. But at the heart of Butler’s future

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policy was the tripartite division of secondary education into secondary modern, technical and grammar schools, each of which was said to have ‘parity of esteem’, but which were to provide different kinds of education for children of different ‘aptitude and ablility’. Selection to one or other of these schools depended exclusively upon a child’s performance in a competitive written examination at the age of 11 years. Whether unintentionally or not, the criteria of selection perpetuated and legitimised class distinctions in secondary and, subsequently, higher education. This was very different from Labour’s official policy on secondary education which since the 1930s had upheld the principle of free access to unselective comprehensive schools. Yet despite its bold gestures and democratic appeal, the 1944 Act maintained previous distinctions between secondary schools with Labour’s unreserved support. Butler successfully glossed over the principles of selection by appealing to spurious scientific findings about the intellectual development of children and their future capabilities. His source was the Norwood Committee on curriculum and examinations which had reported in 1943. Notwithstanding the unscholarly assumptions of their Report, the recommendations of the Norwood Committee influenced the entire shape of British education after the war. Angus Calder summarises their findings in appropriately scathing terms: The authors proclaimed their discovery that the existing system provided for three broad categories of children, and concluded that these correspond, with extraordinary exactitude, to three broadly but neatly separate types of human beings. There were the ‘natural scholars’, who would enjoy a grammar school curriculum on their way to the top jobs; there was the ‘technical’ type, who often had an ‘uncanny insight into the intricacies of the mechanism’, whereas the subtleties of language construction were ‘too delicate for him’; and there was the ‘modern’ type (sic) who could deal with ‘concrete things’ more easily than with ‘ideas’ and who was interested ‘only in the moment’. This later simple materialist would clearly be happiest if he were absolved from undue speculation, and for him, after the war, the elementary schools were re-named ‘secondary moderns’.31 The division of the school population into three academically and numerically unequal categories established, as Calder says, ‘the triparite (or as the cruel joke had it, tripartheid) system which ensured that privilege was perpetuated behind a facade of democratic advance’. The idea that a child’s potential contribution to society could be discovered by a single test on one day of an entire school career was opposed by the Left and informed opinion within the teaching profession from the start. But their objections had little influence upon Labour ministers, most of whom – with the notable exception of Ernest Bevin – had been educated at major public schools. Yet, like his cabinet colleagues, Bevin was committed to the preservation of grammar schools. With shrewd political opportunism, and a failure of collective imagination, the whole Labour leadership uncritically supported Butler’s reforms. As a result, the campaign against the socially divisive, discriminatory ‘eleven-plus’ examination and the case for

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comprehensive education, was to remain the major issue in state education for the next twenty five-years. In the broader context of the movement towards social reconstruction, the 1944 Education Act was an important step towards recognising that the institutional arrangements of public life could not be improved in isolation from the material environment affecting the lives and opportunities of individual citizens. In this respect, Butler’s proposals were, as Kenneth Morgan says, ‘a kind of educational Beveridge’.32 But in common with the Beveridge Report, the provisions of the 1944 Act were located in the problems of the past rather than the needs of the future. In spite of increasing awareness that technical and managerial skills would play a vital role in determining Britain’s postwar prosperity, the Act did little to lay the basis for technological training and industrial change.33 Technical education was assigned to an intermediate category of schools for the somewhat less able, and was naively equated with relatively unsophisticated skills of a mechanistic kind. By comparison, rather more consideration was given to the essential role of religious instruction in promoting Christian discipline as the foundation of education and social life. This anachronistic emphasis upon religion appeased the Church of England, and many Tory backbenchers as well: after all, in rural constituencies, the Conservative Party depended upon the long-standing connection between the Church and village schools. All children would benefit from a Christian education, even the least able, who would otherwise be ‘absolved from undue speculation’ in secondary ‘modern’ schools. In allocating the vast majority of children to these undemanding institutions (from which they would leave without formal qualifications at the age of 15 years), it was implicitly assumed that the future demands of the economy, like those of the past, would be for unskilled labour rather than a technically specialised work-force. This assumption, together with the unquestioned belief that a classical grammar school education (closely modelled upon the curriculum of public schools) was the most appropriate preparation for society’s managers, scientists and planners, perpetuated a whole set of prejudices which from the time of Prince Albert had been recognised as a critical factor in Britain’s industrial decline. The 1944 Education Act and the Beveridge Report are commonly thought of as exemplifying the spirit of modernisation and social reform kindled by the experiences of war. Both were carried by a popular, but by no means unqualified demand, for a more egalitarian and efficient society. Yet while both mitigated grosser inequalities and rationalised the fragmented provisions of the past, each was symptomatic of a deeprooted resistance to radical innovation and structural change. The same conservativism has marked the politics of reform and social reconstruction since Disraeli’s time. Indeed, it is so common that the British have made a national virtue of moderation and policies of the middle road. However, it would be a mistake to consider this simply as a comfortable habit of mind; it reveals the ideological contradictions surrounding attempts to reform politically unacceptable and potentially disruptive consequences of capitalism within a society which depends upon the productive but inherently divisive interests of capital itself. This dilemma circumscribes all policies intended to effect qualitative change, and especially those mediated by liberal sections of the bourgeoisie to which Beveridge, Butler, Attlee and contemporary Labour ministers belonged. Occupying the centre ground between the opposing demands of an authoritarian – but until recently – ideologically inarticulate

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right and the potentially destructive radicalism of the socialist left, coalitionists of all persuasions have a self-justifying and self-limiting interest in order, continuity, stability and moderate reform. Although they might be moved by genuinely progressive concerns, their moderate appeal tends to mask the underlying causes of inequality and the daily struggle of socially disadvantaged groups by creating a moral consensus around the need to expand the responsibilities and redistributive functions of the State. Implicit in this thinking is the idea that the public interest will be stabilised and strengthened by formal extensions of citizenship, thereby passively incorporating the dissident claims of the underprivileged and deflecting their focus from the market-place towards the bureaucratic expansion of a Welfare State. Undeniable benefits were gained from this process during the war, which in the case of such provisions as family allowances, free education and medical care, benefited the middle class at least as much as low income families and the poor. These measures were responsive to radical pressures towards social democracy and the extension of social rights, and as Calder says, were a fitting tribute to the ‘people’s war’. However, despite the more enlightened management of social policy, welfare capitalism was no less inefficient, nor was the market-place rendered more humane by an ostensibly egalitarian, liberal gloss. What it established was a system of distributive justice which, as Beveridge intended, closely followed the social and economic contours of British society, yet left the structures of inequality and their hierarchies of privilege largely untouched.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Jose Harris, ‘The Debate on State Welfare’ in H.L. Smith (ed.) War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 238. 2 Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London, Jonathan Cape, 1975), p. 253. 3 Ibid., p. 161. 4 See for instance Harold Nicolson, Diaries and letters 1930–64 (New York, Atheneum, 1980). 5 Viscount Hinchingbrooke, leader of the Tory Reform Group, quoted by Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War, p. 232. 6 Jose Harris, ‘The Debate on State Welfare’, p. 235. 7 J.M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (London, Macmillan, 1931), p. 321. 8 Harold Macmillan, Reconstruction (London, Macmillan, 1933) quoted by J. Stevenson in H. L. Smith (ed.) War and Social Change, p. 63. 9 Keynes was appointed advisor to the Treasury in 1940 but the principles of demand management were slow to influence Treasury thinking and were barely understood in most of Whitehall. See A. Cairncross, Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy, 1945–51 (London, Methuen, 1985), ch. 3. 10 Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 431–2. 11 Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, p. 437. 12 A.J.P. Taylor in English History 1914–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 567, observes that the Beveridge Plan ‘came some forty years too late and provided, as might be expected, against past evils: abject poverty and mass unemployment, one the great evil before 1914 and the other between the wars. Neither was to present a problem after 1945.’ 13 William Beveridge, Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services Cmnd. 6404 (London, HMSO, 1942), p. 49.

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14 See for example Sally Alexander, ‘Women’s Work in the Nineteenth Century’ in Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell (eds.) The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, pp. 59–111); and Waged Work: A Reader, edited by Feminist Reveiw (London, Virago, 1986), particularly the contributions by Bruegel, Phillips and Taylor. 15 William Beveridge, Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, paras. 114 and 117. 16 Richard Titmuss and K. Titmuss, Parents Revolt: A Study of the Declining Birthrate in Acquisitive Societies (London, Secker & Warburg, 1942). 17 Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, pp. 407–12. 18 William Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society (London, Allen & Unwin, 1944) pp. 177–8. 19 Quoted by Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, p. 433. 20 Trevor Burridge, Clement Attlee: A Political Biography (London, Jonathan Cape, 1985), p. 148. 21 Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982) p. 219. 22 In the course of the Pariamentary debate, the Labour MP, James Griffiths, put down an amendment calling for prompt legislation to implement Beveridge’s Plan. In all, 121 votes were cast against the Government, including 97 from Labour MPs. 23 Cited by Kenneth Harris, Attlee, p. 205. 24 Kenneth Harris, Attlee, pp. 565–6. 25 See J.M. Lee, The Churchill Coalition 1940–1945 (Hamden, Connecticut, 1980). 26 Quoted by Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, Panther, 1971), p. 666. 27 Amongst those who tried to dissuade Churchill from using this speech to appeal to the prejudices of Tory supporters was his wife, Clementine. See Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981) p. 545. 28 See Jose Harris, William Beveridge, p. 424. 29 Quoted in Picture Post Vol.18, No.10, 6 March 1943. 30 Jose Harris, ‘The Debate on State Welfare’, pp. 239–42. 31 Cited by Angus Calder, The People’s War, pp. 627–8. 32 Kenneth Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 174. 33 See Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War (London, Macmillan, 1986), chapter 11 for an extended discussion of the inadequacy of provisions for technical education under the 1944 Act.

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Chapter 6 Reconstructions from the past In a recent study of reconstructions of Britain’s industrial past, Robert Harison has argued that modern ‘heritage’ centres and museums obscure the lived experiences of the working class.1 These representations leave little sense of the unremitting toil, ill-health and the limited horizons of the workers of Britain’s industrial towns. The overwhelming impression is that the conditions that produced those experiences are a thing of the past, that the world has moved on, and the structures of inequality, dependence and strife have little relevance to the society which we inhabit today. The same sense of discontinuity is carried by popular images of the Second World War. Rationing, mass evacuation, Anderson shelters and the Blitz belong to a world so remote from the problems of our society that the formative experiences of war have faded almost into pre-history and lie half buried beneath folk-tales and myths. An enduring and dominant myth is that the war created unprecedented national cohesion that cut across political differences, conflicts and strife. Like all myths, it distorts and embellishes events to suit shifting interpretations of the past. There was certainly a popular patriotic front against Hitler, and during the Coalition a ‘truce’ was observed between parties in the House, but these expressions of national unity tend to obscure a continuing struggle to control the political economy of the postwar world. The war effort had fired a radical idealism which, for the first time in living memory, eclipsed the political initiative of the Right. Traditional Tory ideas of patriotism were contested by an alternative vision of a nation fighting against injustice and for the extension of citizenship and social rights. In spirit at least, it was no less an assault against vested interests of power and privilege as Hitler’s Third Reich. Yet as the war ended, shifting alliances and cross-cutting interests at home and abroad began to fragment these utopian visions of a postwar world. This concluding chapter suggests how Britain’s ideological commitment to the ensuing Cold War politically diverted pressures for radical reform towards an economically damaging and unsuccessful bid to maintain Britain’s former status as a major world power. The nature of the war effort swayed a significant minority of the upper and middle classes in favour of radical change. However, the idea that the war levelled class distinctions was largely a middle class myth underwritten by a patriotic belief in ‘equality of sacrifice’ and the potentially less comfortable prospect of ‘fair shares for all’. Certainly, the war effort brought people from different class backgrounds together as conscripts in the armed services, as members of voluntary services, in air-raid shelters and the Home Guard. Rationing and the economics of scarcity narrowed conspicuous differences in consumption, while taxation and the acute scarcity of labour marginally compressed the distribution of incomes and wealth.2 But these unusual circumstances did little to change the underlying structures of privilege and class. Capital was concentrated in financial institutions, industry and land, which were, for the most part, still privately

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owned. And though the economy was geared to the needs of the war, the social relations of production remained largely unchanged: wealth and property remained untouched, and managers still managed with the authority inherent in the taken-for-granted assumptions of capital, even if production targets were centrally planned. What changed were reactions to this authority. From the start of the war, both in industry and the armed services, the State relied upon the co-operation of an increasingly self-confident working class. Manual workers and their families represented about 70 per cent of the population and their efforts and aspirations came to be recognised as a priority which no political party could mistake. Here was an opportunity for the labour movement to reverse the defeats suffered by the working class in the General Strike. Trade union leaders were directly consulted on matters of economic and social policy, Joint Production Committees were established and collective bargaining returned to the shopfloor. A new confidence revitalised the trade union movement; old patterns of dependence and deference began to decline, while in the interests of efficiency, employers were encouraged to take greater responsibility for the welfare of employees. However, the provision of works canteens, washing facilities, welfare officers and industrial medical care did little to moderate industrial strife. Bevin’s vision of ‘industrial democracy’ with a confident and fully unionised working class sharing responsibility for boardroom decisions, was contradicted by the inherently opposing interests of labour and capital on the shop floor. The antagonisms between labour and the employers, so deeply entrenched in the 1920s and 30s, continued with the incidence of strikes increasing in each successive year of the war. Each side feared that concessions to wartime efficiency would prejudice their position in peace. Through arbitration councils, consultation and improvements in the conditions of work, the Government urged a more conciliatory role upon the TUC. However, the tenuous alliance between Mr Churchill’s government and the labour movement owed less to common ideological affinities than the shortage of labour power and hence the political bargaining position of the working class. On the industrial front, stability and co-operation were essential to the nation’s efforts in war. From the Government’s point of view, a pragmatic balance had to be found between efficiency in production and political pressures for social reform. The Government’s response to the potentially explosive issue of ‘equal pay for equal work’ is just one instance of how this balance was struck. By 1943, women comprised 35 per cent of the engineering work-force, yet they received only approximately 55 per cent of men’s pay.3 With the introduction of female conscription, the movement for equal pay became more militant: at the Rolls Royce aircraft plant at Hillingdon, near Glasgow, refusal to pay equal rates resulted in a ten-day strike. The Government responded with a court of inquiry which returned an equivocal judgement in favour of increasing women’s wages without upholding their claims for equal rates. The Cabinet feared that to concede to women’s demands against the vested interests of both the employers and the trade unions would provoke serious industrial unrest; moreover, an end to customary differentials had longer-term consequences for inflation and production costs after the war. Yet the issue clearly had awkward implications for national solidarity and civilian morale: whilst the Government exhorted everyone to make equal efforts and sacrifices for the war, women were being denied equal rewards for ‘doing their bit’. To divert mounting pressures for reform, the Cabinet temporised by appointing a royal commission in 1944 to ‘investigate

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the facts’. The commission was not asked to make policy recommendations and delayed its report until 1946, when its observations were largely ignored.4 Response to the campaign for equal pay was one instance of the resistance of vested interests to radical change; it also illustrates the Government’s immediate priorities during the war. Their primary objective was the strategic co-ordination of industrial and military forces to win the war: the politics of justice were altogether a different concern. However, in the interests of morale they could not be ignored. Churchill’s appeal to the heroic spirit of the common people, the inclusion of Labour leaders in the Coalition, conscription and rationing, contributed in different ways to a sense of national cohesion, but raised expectations of change and reform. Some changes were directly connected to the war effort, such as the re-deployment of labour and the expansion of social services, but the major reforms introduced or planned during the war – in employment policy and working conditions, health and educational services, housing and social insurance – were pushed by a groundswell of support from below. None of these plans advanced the objective of winning the war; nor had Churchill’s Coalition been formed to introduce liberal reforms. Indeed, in the case of Beveridge’s proposals and Butler’s educational plan, Churchill resisted their introduction, while in a more dramatic gesture the whole Government threatened to resign if an amendment on equal pay for women teachers was added to the Education Bill.5 The balance between the strategic objectives of war and the pressures for social reform carried longer-term implications for the politics of the postwar world. After the unemployment and hardships of the 1930s, there was a popular conviction that ‘things must not be the same after the war’. Yet against this tide of rising expectations, it was widely believed that the Second World War, like the previous war, would end in a slump. There were fears that the militancy and social unrest which followed the First World War would be repeated on an even more dangerous scale. Anxieties over a socialist revolt were not confined to the Right; they also unsettled members of the liberal middle class. Naomi Mitchison, a lifelong Labour supporter, wrote towards the end of the war: I know we are going to have hell trying to work the peace, trying to give people a worth-while-ness in their peacetime lives comparable with the worth-while-ness of working together during the war. We shall probably fail. I think we are in for a civilisation based on communism with its new system of classes. It may be unpleasant, and its immediate values are not those I care for.6 This kind of socialism had little appeal to Attlee and his cabinet colleagues. In 1944 their opposition to socialist militancy became internationally known when Labour ministers supported the use of British troops against the communist-led resistance movement in Greece which had borne the brunt of the fighting against the German occupation. It was a move that deeply disturbed the Left and confirmed their suspicions that it was not just the Tories who were concerned to defend traditions of hierarchy and order at home and abroad. From the Government’s point of view, the civil war in Greece registered the threat of postwar socialist revolutions across Europe, no less in Britain than elsewhere. Against this disturbing possibility, moderate proposals for reconstruction and reform became an ally of far-sighted factions on the political Right. Paradoxically, if things were

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going to stay the same, something had to change. The logic of the situation demanded popular support for a programme of social reform that satisfied democratic expectations, but at the same time left the structure of vested interests and privilege intact. Informed by this thinking, a series of wartime White Papers promising substantial improvements in working-class life, including full employment, free secondary education, comprehensive medical services, better housing and a Welfare State, gained a wide spectrum of political support. Certainly these plans went some way towards redressing the hardships and grievances of the inter-war years, but in every case they followed the existing social and economic contours of British society, leaving the structures of inequality largely unchanged. In the General Election of 1945, the major political parties pledged their support to a programme of reconstruction endorsed by the Government during the war: indeed, given the composition of the Coalition, it might be argued they had little choice. After a conspicuous role in wartime government, the Labour Party could claim as plausibly as the Conservatives to represent the national interest. The election manifestos of both parties were much the same. Both stated their commitment to full employment and emphasised their long-standing concern with improvements in working-class life. As past evidence of this concern was somewhat thin, the Tories appealed to Churchill’s warwinning qualities, and to the much earlier tradition of Disraeli’s ‘one nation’ to justify their claim. Labour had equally little evidence to offer of reforming administrations before the war: Ramsay MacDonald’s leadership had been notable, less for its concern with the conditions of the working class than its deference to the interests of capital and imperial power. But from early in the war, it was Labour rather than any other party that had become identified with progressive reform. Churchill’s appeal to the inherent ‘fairness’, ‘decency’ and ‘responsibility’ of ordinary British people expressed Attlee’s personal view that socialism – as represented by the British Labour Party – was the political expression of these national virtues and implicitly Christian beliefs. After six years of sacrifice and war, his stand carried tremendous moral authority. It was a short step to establishing Labour as the party of national responsibility and social concern. The most controversial issues of the 1945 election hinged upon the continuation of wartime economic controls. The Labour Party was determined to retain these until the basic objectives of economic reconstruction were met; to this they added the nationalisation of coal, gas, electricity, the railways, iron and steel. Their programme confirmed right-wing fears that Labour was planning a socialist state. But if this was socialism, it proved remarkably popular with the electorate who returned a Labour govenment with an overall majority of some 150 seats. Under a Labour government, the transition from war to peace proved less traumatic than many had feared. Four-and-a-half million men and women were released from the armed services between 1945 and 1946. Although housing shortages were acute, their return to civilian life was eased by the Civil Employment Act (1944) which ensured conscripts a right to their former jobs on the same terms and conditions as before the war. Rationing and constraints on domestic consumption continued, yet the radical climate of wartime opinion held for the next two to three years and, if anything, moved further to the Left. With a strong mandate from the people, the Labour government embarked upon the massive programme of reforms. Labour’s election manifesto stated that the aim of the

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new government was to establish a ‘Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain – free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public spirited, its material resources organised in the service of the British people’. It was a utopian vision shaped by the waste and deprivations of the inter-war years; its legislative framework was worked out in blueprints for social reconstruction during the war. By 1948, the foundations of the Welfare State had been laid; difficult negotiations over the National Health Service were resolved, and only the National Assistance Act remained to pass into law. On the economic front, planning controls inherited from the war were retained to regulate domestic consumption, prices, and the distribution of labour and industrial supplies. The Bank of England was nationalised along with essential forms of transportation and power, including the railways, civil aviation, long-distance road services, ports and canals, as well as electricity, gas and coal. Though the public ownership of the means of production had an ideological significance that went back to the Labour conference of 1918, the Attlee government was no less concerned to modernise Britain’s industrial base. Britain had lost about a quarter of its national wealth (c. £7000m) and now faced an enormous balance of payments deficit and a desperate situation in international trade. With much the same spirit that was shown in the war, austerity was imposed at home with an extension of consumer rationing and tight controls on investment, imports and foreign exchange. The national priority was to improve Britain’s international competitiveness by more efficient production geared to rising overseas demand. Between 1945 and 1950, industrial output increased by 35 per cent, while visible exports rose dramatically by 75 per cent without significant increases in imports over pre-war years. All this was achieved while maintaining full employment and creating the Welfare State. In spite of Tory rhetoric and fears, Labour’s programme of social and economic reconstruction met with little effective opposition. Attlee’s administration showed none of the totalitarian tendencies commonly attributed to socialist regimes; indeed, in economic matters, it was far less dirigiste than, for example, de Gaulle’s attempt to reconstruct France’s broken economy immediately after the war. The Government was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire, committed to collectively planned prosperity, a substantially expanded notion of citizenship which included social and material rights, and a mixed economy that left the major part of industry under private ownership and control. By 1948 it could claim that its election pledges had been faithfully honoured even though prosperity had yet to come. Moreover, its objectives had been achieved with remarkably little obstruction and dissent: Attlee was popular, the party was relatively united, and most of the time the Government carried the support of the trade unions, the electorate and Whitehall. As Kenneth Morgan remarks in his comprehensive survey of Attlee’s administration: To a degree unique in the history of British Labour governments, and indeed unusual in the record of any administration this century, there was a background of consensus for the British variant of ‘socialism in one country’.7 Whatever was meant by a ‘socialist commonwealth’ in 1945, the outcome was a form of social democratic ‘welfare capitalism’ that crystallised the political economy of British society for the next thirty years. Keynesian principles of demand management were

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accepted by subsequent Labour and Conservative governments as guiding assumptions of economic and social life. With them came a measure of industrial and regional rationalisation, a continuing commitment to full employment, an expansion of welfare benefits and a redistribution of income, all of which substantially improved the life chances of the working class. These developments were seen as a signficant break with the past. But if the war acted as a catalyst for change, it failed to transform either the class structure, with its systems of patronage and privilege, or the legitimating assumptions of British society in significant and lasting ways. Indeed, the peculiar achievement of the Attlee government was its success in assimilating the spirit of wartime radicalism into programmes of reconstruction that ensured structural continuity and inhibited radical change. In that respect, it drew upon a deeply conservative tradition of order and stability in British society, and perpetuated a political culture which, amongst other things, took for granted Britain’s continuing role as a major financial and military power. These traditions coloured Attlee’s variant of socialism, and particularly his foreign policy which, as we shall suggest, both limited his government’s achievements and contributed to the ideological divisions of the emerging Cold War. Attlee and his cabinet colleagues were careful to disassociate their variant of socialism from socialist movements in other parts of the world. British socialism had its origins in the image of Robert Owen and William Morris, not Lenin and Karl Marx. Change would be introduced ‘not by violent revolution, but by a series of legislative and administrative means’. Addressing a joint session of the United States Congress after his election in 1945, Attlee emphasised the democratic traditions of the British Labour Party in an attempt to disabuse Congress of ‘some misapprehensions’ about the kind of socialism his government stood for: I think that some people over here imagine that the Socialists are out to destroy freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom of the press. They are wrong; the Labour Party is in the tradition of freedom-loving movements which have always existed in our country. We in the Labour Party declare that we are in line with those who fought for Magna Carta and habeas corpus, with the Pilgrim Fathers, and with the signatories of the Declaration of Independence…. There is, and always will be, scope for enterprise; but when big business gets too powerful, so that it becomes monopolistic, we hold it is not safe to leave it in private hands…. We believe, as do most people in Britain, that one must plan the economic activities of the country if we are to assure the common man a fair deal. Man’s material discoveries have outpaced his moral progress. The greatest task that faces us today is to bring home to all people before it is too late that our civilisation can only survive by the acceptance and practice in international relations and in our national life of the Christian principle that we are members of one another.8 From a socialist Prime Minister, Attlee’s list of historical heroes is as curious for its omissions as are the feudal barons, religious dissenters and bourgeois nationalists whom

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he cites. However, his speech is revealing in another respect: throughout his dealings with the Americans, Attlee was at pains to identify the Labour Party with the values that cemented the wartime alliance, thus implying a continuity of interests between Labour, no less than Conservative governments, and the United States. This had decisive implications for Labour’s foreign policy and debilitating consequences for Britain’s economic recovery and future political options at home. Attlee’s visit to Washington coincided with negotiations for an extended American loan to stave off what Keynes described as Britain’s impending ‘financial Dunkirk’. The crisis was precipitated by President Truman’s abrupt decision to end financial assistance through Lend-Lease only six days after the end of the war. Negotiations had reached a difficult point: the American Treasury, wary of a socialist government, and suspecting Britain had hidden colonial reserves, was reluctant to accede to Britain’s initial request for a $5 billion interest-free loan.9 But there was more at stake than the loan itself. Attlee’s main mission was to dissuade the United States from returning to their former policy of isolationism in foreign affairs. Britain’s influence as a world power clearly depended upon maintaining a special military as well as economic relationship with the United States. And this in turn was linked to a related issue: Attlee was anxious to secure Britain’s rights under the 1943 Quebec Agreement with Canada and the United States to share information and materials on the development of atomic power. America now had the monopoly of advanced nuclear technology which President Truman and his staff were reluctant to share with Britain, or anyone else. Despite Attlee’s insistence that exclusive collaboration under the Quebec Agreement was essential for world security and peace, Truman held firm and, in effect, dissolved the nuclear partnership between the three powers. This was seen by Attlee and his colleagues as an ominous breach of trust which had to be redressed. The three issues on Attlee’s Washington agenda – the American Loan, the defensive alliance with the United States and nuclear co-operation – indicated the Labour Government’s determination to continue the foreign policies of former British governments by assuming a leading role in world affairs. With Allied victory over Germany and Japan, the scene was set for Anglo-American collaboration in securing western hegemony throughout Europe and the Far East. It was assumed, with some foresight, that apart from the Soviet Union and the United States, the potential centres of power in the postwar world would arise in Europe and Japan. Whoever dominated these powers would thus effectively control the globe. Labour’s support for military intervention against communist sympathisers in Greece was an early sign of the leadership’s loyalties in relation to the widening ideological split. As the Red Army advanced on Berlin, the need to consolidate Anglo-American power had already become a pressing reality. With this in mind, Truman and Churchill had agreed in July 1945 to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Attlee supported the decision on the grounds that if the war with Japan continued, American troops would have to be moved from Europe, thus weakening the European balance of power in favour of the USSR; he was there-fore in favour of ending the war with Japan without further delay. In Mandel’s view, There is little doubt today that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was motivated more by political than military considerations. It played no role, as was trumpeted at the time, in reducing

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US casualties: Japan was on the point of surrender anyway…. General MacArthur emphatically states, at the end of April 1945: ‘…my staff was unanimous in believing Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender.’ …Japan had already been gutted, the best of its army and navy had already been defeated, and the Japanese homelands were now at the mercy of air-raids and invasion. The gruesome killing of a quarter of a million human beings was carried out for no other purpose than a show of strength directed more at US allies, particularly the Soviet Union, than at Japan.10 Attlee was appalled at the effects of the bomb, but he was quick to realise the strategic significance of nuclear arms. Even before the second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, he sent a telegram to President Truman proposing that Britain and the United States should be the sole custodians of atomic energy in the interests of world peace. Truman’s reluctance to share America’s nuclear superiority was a bitter disappointment and a formative influence upon Attlee’s subsequent decision to build a British atomic bomb. The Labour Party had little influence on foreign and military policy during the war; there was, in effect, no ‘socialist’ foreign policy to guide the Labour government in 1945. Its actions were shaped by past loyalties, and by the taken-for-granted belief that Britain should remain a major power. This assumption was not entirely unrealistic: at the hub of an empire, and with one of the strongest postwar economies in Europe, Britain was well placed to develop an independent role in world affairs. However, pressing financial difficulties at home and fears of an encroaching Soviet presence in Western Europe, drew the Labour Government into what they saw as a special relationship with the United States. It was the beginning of Britain’s increasing postwar dependence upon America’s military and economic strength. Almost as soon as the war was over, it was evident that the terms of this relationship were less favourable to Britain than the United States: the withdrawal of American financial support with the sudden ending of Lend-Lease, the stringent conditions imposed on Britain’s request for a postwar loan, and Truman’s refusal to share nuclear technology, were early indications of Britain’s client status and America’s inclination to pursue an independent line in foreign affairs. One aspect of that policy included maintaining military bases with nuclear capability overseas. Saville notes that during the difficult and protracted discussions for an American loan, Washington hinted that negotiations might be eased if Britain agreed to provide facilities for American B-29 bombers in the UK. Five RAF bases were assigned for American use, although their strategic significance as nuclear bases was not disclosed to Parliament or the British public at the time.11 Indeed, everything to do with atomic energy was cloaked in secrecy and kept from all but an inner circle of the Cabinet and a few senior civil servants. This included the decision in 1947 to build a British atomic bomb. This hazardous departure, with its enormous financial and military implications, was not referred to the Defence Committee, nor debated by Parliament; moreover the Treasury was instructed to conceal the £100 million needed for initial developments in the Government’s financial estimates. The only politician outside the Cabinet fully informed of developments was Sir John Anderson who Attlee had earlier appointed as chairman of an Advisory Committee on the

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uses of atomic energy. Anderson, who was then Shadow Chancellor and a fierce critic of Labour’s domestic policies, had been associated with Britain’s atomic energy programme since the early days of the war. But more to the point, he was trusted by the Americans and in their eyes provided a credible and reassuring element of continuity between Conservative and Labour policy on nuclear developments and defence. In the opinion of Attlee and his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, an alliance with the United States was now essential for western security and world peace. It was a view which eventually prevailed over American tendencies towards isolationism and prepared the ground for the Marshall Plan, the NATO Alliance and the proliferation of American military bases in western Europe and the UK. By 1948, foreign rather than domestic policy had come to dominate the Government’s agenda. Relations with Washington improved as Britain and the United States were drawn closer together by the Soviet Union’s apparently aggressive stance over Berlin. However, Britain’s role as a potential third force between what Attlee described as ‘downright capitalism and tyrannical communism’ was compromised as much by the Government’s hostility to the Soviet Union as their pro-American sympathies. This tendency to divide the world into two opposing blocs was strongly criticised by a dissenting group within the Labour Party. In 1947 their pamphlet Keep Left urged the Government to disassociate itself from Truman’s plans for ‘collective security against communism’. It also called for the withdrawal of British troops from Greece, Palestine and Egypt, the reintegration of Germany into the European economy, and the renunciation of atomic weapons. But by the following year, effective opposition to the Government’s East-West policy petered out as attitudes to the Soviet Union hardened following the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, Stalin’s break with Yugoslavia and the Russian blockade of Berlin. These ‘facts’ of Soviet aggression vindicated the Anglo-American stance: Attlee announced that a ‘great fight’ had begun to protect democracy and the freedom of the West. Evoking the nation’s heroic struggle against Hitler, Attlee bracketed together communists and fascists and, to the fury of the Left, declared that British communists would no longer be eligible for employment related to national security. When the Communist Party objected, Attlee replied, ‘the workers of the country are well aware now, from events abroad and events here, what the Communist Party stands for’. The point was hammered home in Attlee’s address to the Labour Party in Scotland that year: Some people still believe the Communists are on the Left Wing of the Socialist movement. They are not…. From the point of view of freedom the Communists are on the extreme Right, more reactionary than some of the old tyrants we fought against in the past.12 The speech followed the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1948 which committed the United States to indefinite military involvement in Europe. In his biography of Attlee, Kenneth Harris claims the NATO pact was the crowning achievement of the Labour Government’s foreign policy and owed much to Attlee and Bevin’s determined stand against communism and the Soviet threat. Here at least, the Labour leaders and Churchill were at one: their attitudes to communism revived a tradition of suspicion and hostility towards the Soviet Union that had been harboured by successive British governments

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since the Russian Revolution in 1917. But more than that, it lent credibility to the assumption that Britain, no less than the United States, had a responsibility to defend a free world by maintaining its position as a major military power. This grandiose illusion was shared by all the main political parties, by the Chiefs of Staff and all but the most far-sighted civil servants in Whitehall. As Saville says, The illusion was powerful and persuasive, and while it was misguided and untrue, it is understandable in terms of the contribution that Britain made to the war against fascism. What is interesting is that not one person of political standing within the United Kingdom was prepared to state publicly that the war had changed fundamentally the balance of forces within world politics, and that henceforth Britain could only expect to play the part of a major second-class power. The Americans were never in doubt, and by 1945 they were quite clear that…Britain could only be subordinate to themselves.13 These imperial assumptions set a definitive seal on Britain’s alliances and foreign policy for years to come. Even today, as the political landscape of Europe is being transformed, the legacy of these beliefs is still evident in Britain’s uncompromising military stance amongst the member states of NATO and the EC. At the time, they lent a grim reality to Churchill’s image of an ‘iron curtain’ dividing Europe from Stettin to Trieste. The Soviet threat displaced the nation’s hatred of fascism towards communists and fellow travellers throughout Europe and the Third World. By 1948, Soviet communism was again seen as a form of ‘inverted Czarism’ (as Attlee described it) and perceived as an even greater risk to European peace and stability than fascism itself. As the world divided into opposing blocs, the Anglo-Soviet alliance of 1942 was hastily re-interpreted as a tactical deviation thrown up by the expediencies of war. Yet at the time the popularity of the Soviet Union as a wartime ally had been immense. Sympathy for the Russian people – who for much of the war carried the brunt of the German offensive – placed both the achievements and problems of Soviet society in an unprecedented light. Considerable efforts had been made to support Soviet military needs and to publicise the sacrifices and heroism of the civilian population. Exhibitions and lectures on Russian art, architecture, culture and history, and admiring reports of the tactics rapidly improvised by the Red Army, did much to change attitudes to the Soviet Union and influence wartime opinion amongst liberals and the working class. Orwell’s observation that all thinking members of the proletariat were ‘mildly and vaguely proRussian’ is reflected in a substantial increase in membership of the Communist Party during the Anglo-Soviet alliance.14 Indeed, support for the Soviet peoples was so popular that during the war Churchill requested the Ministry of Information ‘to consider what action was required to counter the present tendency of the British Public to forget the dangers of Communism in their enthusiasm over the resistance of Russia’.15 The following reply suggested that his fears at the time were not wide of the mark: The Russians are operating against the Germans beyond expectation, so that we cannot call Communism itself inefficient. The control by Government in this country of industry, the levies made upon earnings

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and upon capital are all integral parts of the Bolshevik theory, and the combination of these factors…is bound to educate the Public into assuming that Communism…is either a reasonable alternative to the prewar system of democratic theory or is a logical consequence of the wartime system of control.16 The combination of Britain’s military alliance with the Soviet Union and popular feeling inhibited outright condemnation of communism in the same vulgar terms that were common before the war. The present situation demanded that the Soviet Union should be officially rehabilitated as an heroic ally, but with an emphasis upon the achievements of the Red Army rather than the virtues of the Soviet way of life. Thus, throughout the war an effort was made to ‘contain’ popular enthusiam for the Soviet Union through officially sponsored events and celebrations which publicly affirmed Britain’s friendship without implying approval of communism itself. In much the same vein, Britain and the United States formally greeted Stalin as an equal and trusted partner at the Yalta Conference in 1945. The war was not yet over and the Western Allies assumed much hard fighting was still to be done before the German army finally capitulated. Britain and the United States readily endorsed the terms of the Yalta agreement which promised a degree of Soviet autonomy after the war in exchange for relatively favourable concessions to the West. At first the Yalta Conference suggested the prospect of a united Allied peace; later it acquired an infamous reputation. The Western Powers claimed they had been duped, but as A.J.P. Taylor suggests, it would be truer to say they had assumed too much. As the Germans retreated, the Russians consolidated their borders to the east. In the event, Russian victory in Eastern Europe proved unexpectedly easy; the British and Americans had miscalculated the strength of German resistance and subsequently regretted that they had treated Stalin with such friendly respect. Almost immediately, Bevin, as Labour Foreign Secretary, was openly at odds with the Russians on the terms of the agreement; while Churchill and Attlee impressed upon the Americans their fears of Soviet influence spreading to the West. In Taylor’s opinion, ‘allied co-operation did not break down because of the Yalta agreements; it broke down because the British and Americans repudiated them’.17 Yet what the Russians did in Eastern Europe was no more than what the Western Allies had done in France, Italy, Greece and elsewhere to secure their interests against communists and the Left. There was no evidence that the Soviet Union, depleted and exhausted after years of war, was preparing to launch a military offensive against the West. The real fear arose from the threat of indigenous socialist movements changing the balance of power within European nations after the war. As popular support for the Soviet Union reached new heights, the possibility that a more radical socialist movement might emerge within the British Labour Party or beyond its ranks could not be ignored. These anxieties hardened the Labour leadership’s evident hostility to communism and all forms of socialism but their own, and if anything, pushed the postwar ‘consensus’ further to the Right. In effect, the Labour Government’s pro-American, anti-Soviet sympathies gradually de-radicalised political opinion by shifting the axis of global alliances towards a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West. Allied victory in the Second World War became morally synonomous with the triumph of capitalist democracies over

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the tyranny of totalitarian regimes. Within less than two years, enthusiasm for Britain’s victorious Soviet ally reverted to the deeply ingrained suspicions of the inter-war years. With the blockade of Berlin, the cleavage between Soviet and Western powers became so deep that criticism of the Anglo– American alliance, or support for European socialist parties, or even unofficial strikes, were liable to be tainted as the work of Marxist sympathisers, or worse. In the United States, anti-communist fervour promoted Senator McCarthy’s investigations into ‘un-American activities’, while in Britain, similiar anxieties marginalised left wing opinion and stifled public expression of socialist policies and ideals. The persistence of these moral and political sympathies through the postwar years meant that when, some thirty years later, the liberal postwar ‘consensus’ began to collapse, credible proposals for political change could only emerge from the Right. The consequences of this postwar change in global alliances tied the Labour leadership, and every successive government, to American defence and foreign policies. It was a relationship which carried strong and continuing expectations of Britain’s commitment to western defence. Eisenhower’s phrase, ‘the military-industrial complex’ recognised the close relationship between the needs of industrial capital for expanding markets, and the expectation that governments would defend those markets, if necessary by force. In that sense, the ‘militarisation’ of the American economy was one lasting consequence of the Second World War. Prior to the war, the United States had no army or military establishment of any size: by 1960 it had a massive military machine and an economy geared to and dependent upon military needs. Nor was the United States the only country that felt the need to express its superiority through conspicuous consumption on military projects and national defence: Britain’s defence expenditure since 1945 has exceeded that of any OECD nation, except the USA. Efforts to assert Britain’s position as a leading power were inseparable from assumptions about the nation’s military status and needs. These assumptions went largely unquestioned: the decision to build a British atomic bomb is a case in point. As Margaret Gowing records, it was not a response to an immediate military threat, but rather something fundamentalist and almost instinctive… a feeling that Britain as a great power must acquire all major new weapons, a feeling that atomic weapons were a manifestation of the scientific and technological superiority on which Britain’s strength must depend.18 The escalating cost of these assumptions financially constrained the development of the domestic economy after the war and, in the long run, added to the burden of Britain’s relative decline. Accounts of Britain’s economic performance since 1945 seldom consider the external influence of foreign policies and defence. Most emphasise structural constraints upon development and economic growth. This now familiar story suggests a downward spiral of too little investment, low productivity, high interest rates, declining profits and uncompetititive costs. In addition, it is argued that poor industrial relations, lack of innovative management and the politicisation of economic policies, gradually depressed confidence in British industry and made the process all the more difficult to reverse.19 In general, there is now broad agreement upon the complex patterns causally implicated in Britain’s decline. Hobsbawm has suggested that their origins date from the second half of

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the nineteenth century when British industry turned its back on foreign competition in favour of more lucrative financial markets overseas.20 But though the roots of this process may be deeper than is often supposed, it is not implausible to suggest that since 1945 the cumulative effects of industrial decline have been exacerbated by a political commitment to foreign and defensive strategies that Britain could ill-afford. Although the British economy may have been in decline over a long period of time, the process has been uneven. Britain’s immediate postwar recovery was remarkable by any standards. Despite the enormous losses sustained during the war, the economic vitality of the late 1930s continued throughout the war and was maintained with impressive growth in manufacturing output, productivity and exports immediately after 1945. Foreign competition was limited: the economies of Germany, Italy, France and Japan had been virtually destroyed and the demand for British goods abroad was more than industry could satisfy. Compared with the demoralising instability that followed the First World War, Britain ended the Second World War at the start of a long expansive boom. Certainly, the early period of expansion was overshadowed by a shortage of dollar reserves. Tight controls were imposed upon imports and domestic supply to conserve foreign exchange, yet the anticipated balance of payments crisis never came. The net trade gap, which had run at around 40–45 per cent between 1930–9, was reduced to between 5 and 10 per cent, and a surplus balance was consistently returned on the private account.21 Whilst it might have seemed prudent in 1945 for the Government to seek an unlimited American loan, it is unlikely that financial support for the Government’s domestic programme was ever seriously at risk. Foreign reserves were not needed to maintain food subsidies nally funded through direct and indirect taxation. Social or the Welfare State: these provisions were adequately and interexpenditure was only stretched in relation to the rising cost of the Government’s foreign policies and commitments to defence. As Lord Keynes remarked in a personal memorandum following his negotiations for an American loan, ‘it comes out in the wash that the American Loan is primarily required to meet the political and military expenditure overseas’.22 It could be argued that economic stability and social security at home depended upon protecting international markets and democratic freedoms abroad. This was Attlee’s argument to the American Congress when he claimed ‘we cannot make a heaven in our own country and leave a hell outside’. The vision of hell uppermost in his mind was the totalitarian order of a communist state. From this moment, two overriding policy objectives of postwar governments became inextricably linked – in the interests of maintaining domestic security, employment and economic growth, the threat of communism and Soviet expansion had to be contained by military superiority in defence. Although politically these objectives went hand-in-hand, they were less easy to balance in the nation’s accounts. By the 1950s, the defence budget had risen to 11 per cent of GDP, compared with approximately 4.5 per cent for health and education combined.23 Outside the Commonwealth, British forces were deployed in Europe, the Mediterranean, Cyprus and the Middle East, as well as Korea and the Far East. Obligations to NATO were undertaken with little thought for Britain’s balance of payments, or their longerterm implications and domestic costs. To some extent, the weight of these commitments was cushioned by Britain’s privileged position as bankers to the sterling area. Sterling was treated as a ‘protected currency’, and a strong pound was regarded as a potent

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symbol of Britain’s superiority in world finance. However, fiscal policy continued to be swayed by outmoded assumptions about Britain’s peculiar influence upon world events, and the Treasury all too readily rationalised the economic consequences of these beliefs. As Stephen Blank remarks, ‘what this seems to indicate is an extraordinary primacy of political over economic considerations within the Treasury itself.24 In particular, there was a tendency to assess the strength of the domestic economy in relation to international confidence in the pound. Fixed exchange rates maintained a strong pound at levels which disguised Britain’s relative perfor-mance against the developing economies of Europe and Japan. It was not until the 1960s that the reality of Britain’s declining position began to bite. But by then it was too late. The opportunities open to the economy after the war had been largely dissipated in a bid to maintain the traditions and symbols of Britain’s former status as a major imperial and military power. The long-term cost of international priorities was domestic decline. Overseas commitments diverted investment away from civilian industry into foreign markets and defence. In particular, the provisions for massive rearmament in the budget of 1950 directed spending on research and development towards military projects rather than commercial ends. Elsewhere, there was little incentive for industry to restructure and invest in modern plant: the insatiable world market for British goods after the war encouraged the use of exhausted machinery and outmoded manufacturing and management techniques. Although the economy expanded, Britain’s temporary competitive edge was soon lost, notably to the technologically more advanced and reconstituted economies of West Germany and Japan. The lasting consequences of this are periodically evident in reactions to the external balance of trade. As the economy expands, imports tend to rise more steeply than exports, precipitating a balance of payments crisis and a sudden brake on expansion, resulting in the familiar ‘stop-go’ pattern that has recurred, despite contributions from oil revenues, to the present day. Each turn of the cycle weakens the economy to the advantage of Britain’s competitors overseas. The extent of this weakness was widely noted following the reflationary boom of 1973, when domestic production was unable to meet the rising demand for essential manufactured goods. Since then, imports have taken a growing share of the domestic market in such vital areas as engineering, electronics, textiles, communications, chemicals, vehicle production, as well as a widening range of finished goods. Strict monetarist policies over the last decade appear to have had little effect on this underlying pattern of boom and recession which has continued unabated with damaging consequences for the domestic economy and Britain’s competitive position in world trade.25 The history of Britain’s political economy since the war suggests that the roots of the postwar reconstruction with its popular social reforms were far from secure. The commitment of successive governments to welfare capitalism was premised upon the expectation of full employment and sustained economic growth. Equally, the unquestioned commitment to protect this liberal order and the security of the free world, assumed that Britain would remain a major power in world affairs. The burden of these domestic and foreign commitments became increasingly difficult to maintain as the economy’s competitive performance declined. Under the strains of a world recession that followed the ‘oil crisis’ of 1973, the Keynesian social democratic consensus began to break up. High levels of government spending, falling exchange rates, inflation and rising

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unemployment, exacerbated structural problems of the economy and led to cuts in public expenditure, reductions in real incomes and social unrest. In 1979, the ‘social contract’ between the Labour government and the trade unions was seriously undermined when more than one million local authority workers held the biggest one-day stoppage since the General Strike. The Conservative press asked, ‘Can Britain be governed?’ and ironically blamed trade union militants for a ‘winter of discontent’. With the election of a right-wing Conservative government later that year, Mrs Thatcher set out to prove that under new management, the economic trends of the postwar years could be reversed and that once again Britain could be a leading protagonist in world affairs. All politicians tell stories. Their art is to win the hearts and minds of the people to their vision of the future and the past. Mrs Thatcher’s story of the past was simple: since the Second World War, the greatness of Britain has been wasted by years of socialism and compromise which sapped the vitality of the nation and hastened its decline. The mission of her government in 1979 was to ‘rekindle the spirit which the socialist years have all but exhausted’. Her historical heroes were not the ‘common people’ whose collective efforts carried Britain through the Second World War, but businessmen, financiers and entrepreneurs - ‘the people who built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world’. In their image, Britain was offered a new reconstruction inspired by a moral commitment to individualism and the extension of market principles to every corner of public and private life. In their efforts to re-vitalise the spirit of capitalism, Mrs Thatcher’s ministers castigated in principle and all but dismantled in practice the social and political framework of government since the Second World War. In their view, the legacy of 1945 was ‘too much government of the wrong sort’. Past attempts to moderate market forces through nationalisation, prices and incomes policies, currency controls, welfare benefits and other supports had bureaucratised the economy and both financially and politically over-extended the state. Since the early 1980s, an extensive portfolio of nationalised industries has been transferred from public to private ownership, whilst in the name of efficiency, labour – and to a lesser extent, capital – have been exposed to the full reality of the market, unmediated by government intervention or moral restraint. But the greatest burden of Thatcherite policies has fallen upon the public domain, especially upon health, education, and welfare services and those for whom these benefits were designed. Wherever possible, services have been transferred to private contractors; others have been cut or displaced by stringent financial constraints. In many cases, competitive charges have been imposed, effectively replacing the principle of provision ‘according to need’ with the ability to pay. The object is not to improve access or the quality of services, but to encourage greater individual responsibility, and hence independence from what Mrs Thatcher once decried as ‘the Nanny State’. This attack upon the principles of public welfare has gradually altered the nature of citizenship and the relationship of individuals to the state. The direction of change was rhetorically caught by Mrs Thatcher’s notorious remark that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.’ It is a view that repudiates the very idea of civil society at the heart of wartime and postwar reforms. These reforms established fundamental social rights – rights to education and medical care, to a basic standard of living and security in old age. At the time, they were deemed essential to the infrastructure of a modern democracy, for without these elementary

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entitlements, people were not considered at liberty to exercise existing civil and political rights. Moreover, these freedoms were considered to be absolute rights; like the right to vote, they were not dependent upon reciprocal obligations to the economy or the state. That principle has now been breached. Regressive cuts in public services have shifted the burden of public interest from governments to the market place, increasing the demand for private insurance and other market solutions to the common contingencies of life. Those who can afford to pay have been transformed into private ‘customers’; those who can’t have grown into a conspicuous yet politically unrepresented lumpen class of alienated, permanently poor ‘demi-citizens’ for whom market society has little use. The dramatic expansion during the 1980s of this underclass bears witness to the erosion of the basic principle underlying postwar social reforms, namely, that citizenship should be a universal right. This principle has been continually undermined by policies geared to the secular interests of capital and trade. Amongst present-day Conservatives, the greatest threats to liberty are not Beveridge’s ‘giant evils’ of poverty, ignorance, sickness, squalor or want, but restrictions upon free enterprise, competition and consumer choice. The effects of these priorities are everywhere to be seen – in chronic unemployment, a decaying National Health Service, neglected old people, widespread poverty and over-crowded schools. Judged on these terms, the ‘enterprise culture’ has belied its promise to create opportunity and prosperity for all: indeed, by promoting the belief that wealth and consumer power have moral priority over welfare and human need, the Right has created the illusion that it is in the interests of the majority to accept the harsh inequalities that divided the nation before the war. Experiments that fail sometimes reveal as much as those which succeed. Few still believe inflation and unemployment can be controlled by the ‘free play of market forces’, or that policies which offer incentives to the rich whilst leaving untold numbers poorly educated, unskilled and unemployed, are likely to mobilise the productive resources needed for sustained economic growth. By the early 1990s, it had become obvious to all but a dwindling band of right-wing zealots that Thatcherism is a political aberration rather than an antidote to Britain’s decline: indeed, on most indices at the time, the economy appeared less competitive than when the Right’s neo-liberal experiment began. However, the problem is deeper than the failure of quasi-monetarist strategies to reverse economic trends: Britain’s hopes of recovery have been retarded by a political culture which has eroded sentiments of community and mutual obligation upon which national cohesion and the chances of economic revival ultimately rest. This more general malaise is evident, for instance, in Britain’s singular opposition to a European Charter of social rights. Reluctance to become a signatory to the Social Charter is symptomatic of a government lacking the moral resources to manage the transition to more advanced forms of global economy whilst safeguarding what Britain’s European partners regard as fundamental social rights. Within the Community, this appears as an anachronism which grates against the structural tendencies of modern capitalism and its more progressive social forms. Yet under Thatcherism the corporate framework of citizenship has long been in tension, if not in outright opposition, to the economic basis of social life. The prevailing ethic of individualism allows little place for communal values or mediating institutions between citizens and the state. Indeed, the idea of a democratic society tolerant of diversity and responsive to grass-roots initiatives and concerns, was repudiated by Mrs Thatcher’s dogmatic denial of ‘society’ itself. What has

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taken its place is a free market economy which justifies virtually unregulated competition between private interests, but, at best, belligerent co-existence with collective representations of social need. In retrospect, the 1940s and 1980s represent decades of strongly contrasting ideals. Both evoked under very different circumstances an unquestioned belief in the peculiar superiority of Britain’s role in world affairs, but their visions of civil society and the benefits of citizenship were far removed. In contrast with the Thatcher years, the postwar reconstruction built upon a spirit of common endeavour and a strong sense of reciprocity between citizens and the state. Planning was a recognised condition of freedom. Where the market had failed it was believed the state would succeed. Nor was this an untried dogma: successful intervention had brought victory and badly needed economic rationalisation and popular, egalitarian reforms. More profoundly, as we have suggested, the state assumed a moral authority legitimised by shared feelings of community and mutual obligation. The state was not merely a technical abstraction but represented real and widespread aspirations for a fairer, more compassionate and prosperous way of life. A comparison between these two decades suggests that economic success is not simply a matter of hitting upon the right fiscal strategies; it also depends upon supporting sentiments of reciprocity and political trust. Elsewhere, these values have evolved to underpin the most successful European economies with which Britain now competes. In a similar spirit, Britain needs a new social reconstruction, no less radical than Thatcherism but informed by priorities of a different kind. Above all, there is a case for combining the freedoms and economic dynamic of modern capitalism with socialised forms of regulation and planning which ensure the effective satisfaction of human need. As in 1945, it is a task that raises fundamental issues about the nature of citizenship and the relationship of individuals to the state – questions which have been largely removed from the public agenda since 1979, but which ultimately can be resolved only by a society’s collective image of itself.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Robert Harison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London, Methuen, 1987). 2 J. Westergaard and H. Resler, Class in a Capitalist Society: A Study of Contemporary Britain (London, Heinemann, 1975), p. 38ff, p. 58ff. 3 H. Smith, ‘The Problem of “Equal Pay for Equal Work” in Great Britain during World War II’, Journal of ‘Modern History, 53 (December 1981), pp. 652–72. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Naomi Mitchison, Among You Taking Notes (ed) Dorothy Sheridan (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 338. 7 Kenneth Morgan, Labour in Power: 1945–1951 (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 93. 8 Quoted by Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 281. 9 Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: Anglo-American Collaboration in the Reconstruction of Multi-lateral Trade. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956), Ch. 10. 10 Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London, Verso, 1986), p. 148. 11 John Saville, The Labour Movement in Britain (London, Faber & Faber 1988), pp. 94–5. 12 Kenneth Harris, Attlee, p. 316.

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John Saville, The Labour Movement in Britain, p. 98. Ken Newton, The Sociology of the British Communist Party (London, Penguin, 1969). Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (London, Jonathan Cape, 1975), p. 135. Paul Addison, The Road to 1945. A.J.P. Taylor, The Second World War (New York, Paragon Books, 1979), p. 219. Margaret Gowing and Lorna Arnold, Independence and Deterrence (London, Macmillan, 1974), p. 68. David Coates and John Hillard (eds), The Economic Decline of Modern Britain (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1986). Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969). S. Blank, ‘Britain: the politics of foreign commercial policy, the domestic economy and the problem of pluralistic stagnation’, International Organisation, 31 (4) 1977. John Saville, The Labour Movement in Britain (London, Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 95. G. C. Peden, British Economic and Social Policy (Oxford, Philip Allan, 1985), p. 188. S. Blank, International Organisation, 31 (4), 1977. In 1989, for instance, Britain’s current trade deficit exceeded a record £20 billion; bank interest rates were raised to two to three times the level of rival nations, and inflation increased to between 9 and 10 per cent. A new Chancellor (John Major) was appointed to slow the economy and stem the rising tide of imported goods. Industrialists complained of the prohibitive costs of new investment; unemployment and bankruptcies increased. The following year, as Mr Major replaced Mrs Thatcher as Britain’s Prime Minister, the economy slid into the second recession within a decade, bringing record levels of bankruptcies and unprecedented foreclosures of home loans.

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Chapter 7 Postscript On the political economy of citizenship Amongst advanced industrial nations the tensions between the State and civil society have deepened as the functions of government have expanded with economic growth. In Britain, these tensions have surfaced in a resurgence of possessive individualism, somewhat extravagantly polemicised by a decade of government committed to ‘rolling back the frontiers of the State’. However, aside from the manifestos and slogans, the issue on which most politicians divide is not whether economic growth or increasing affluence is a social good, but the extent to which resources should be distributed by the market or mediated in the public interest through the intervention of the State. It is an issue which has come to distinguish the postwar social democratic alliance from the neoliberalism of the New Right, and one which raises wider questions of individual freedom, social justice and the boundaries between the private and public domain. These issues have now returned to the public agenda under the unlikely guise of ‘citizenship’. Not since the Second World War has citizenship been so vigorously promoted by any government, or been subject to so much theoretical speculation and debate.1 In this concluding chapter, we shall briefly consider the context of this current revival against the aspirations and ideals of citizenship that emerged from the Second World War. Citizenship is now a contested concept. The collective rights and entitlements which defined the relationship of individuals to the postwar state have been morally challenged and, in some cases, substantially undercut by a gradual shift in the burden of public interest from government to the market place. The ‘active citizen’ of the recent Speaker’s Commission on Citizenship2 is moved by very different values and sentiments from those attributed to the first citizens of the Welfare State. If we go back for a moment to T.H. Marshall’s classic essay, ‘Citizenship and Social Class’,3 we find that, along with many of his contemporaries, Marshall believed that the postwar expansion of social rights – what he refers to as ‘social citizenship’ – expressed a new form of social solidarity. Citizenship would bind together different regions, parties and – most of all – different social classes, into a single community whose boundaries were co-terminus with the nation state. Clearly, Marshall attributes to citizenship a sociological significance which goes well beyond the formal recognition of civil, political and social rights. In the immediate postwar period, British society was seen rather like a ‘mutual’ or ‘friendly society’ which confers upon all its members fundamental equality both in relation to each other and in the eyes of the State. Indeed, Marshall ventures to suggest that citizenship would go some way towards legitimating class inequalities by establishing universal parity in relation to individual entitlements and social rights.4 This idea of citizenship as a kind of ‘social glue’ might easily be dismissed today as a romantic conjecture, but Marshall’s essay has to be read in historical perspective. The

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shared experiences of war had subtly transformed the image of British society and its legitimating beliefs. Rationing, mass evacuation, conscription and the collective use of resources had demanded massive civilian co-operation and an ‘equality of sacrifice’ which fostered a lasting sense of community and mutual trust. Unemployment, ignorance, squalor and want were recognised as marks of an unfair society and, with the publication of the Beveridge Report, demands that private suffering should be treated as a public issue became hard to resist.5. From early on, popular aspirations for a more egalitarian society were reflected in plans for a ‘New Britain’ which extended the principle of distributive justice to health, literacy and employment as a citizen’s fundamental right. In many respects, thinking about citizenship was utopian. It was influenced by the evident deprivation of large sections of the population lacking opportunities to improve their fate, and by wartime propaganda which raised expectations of future prosperity and decent standards of material life. The introduction of comprehensive entitlements to health, educational and welfare services was the basis of Marshall’s claim that the war had enhanced the advancement of citizenship through the expansion of social rights. Citizenship was conceived as a social status, which conferred unconditionally the right to participate fully in the life of the community, irrespective of differences in market situation or accidents of birth. There was no suggestion that citizenship had to be earned, or that there was an obligation to participate. These rights had already been ‘earned’ through collective sacrifices during the war. In the same spirit, it was assumed, they would be actively upheld. Indeed, this ‘modern drive towards social equality’, as Marshall called it, encouraged the belief that there were potentially few limits to the democratisation of civil society and the progressive enrichment of the working class.6 These optimistic observations were made at the start of a long boom in world trade which, for a decade or so, particularly favoured the British economy. It was an advantage which confidently endorsed the aims of the new society and its political agenda after the war. Arguably, the shape of this agenda had been set long before the war began; however, the feeling of solidarity created by the war effort gave political and moral legitimacy to the direction of change. This, rather than the reforms and technocratic adjustments that followed, was the underlying basis of the postwar consensus that legitimated the framework of social democratic government over the next thirty years. Although the major political parties continued to represent different interests and appeal to different constituencies, there was common support for a mixed but centrally managed economy; a broadly Keynesian approach to economic planning – with full employment as the highest priority, and a commitment to the principle and provisions of the Welfare State. While the economy remained buoyant there was no reason for successive Labour or Conservative governments to consider radical departures from this electorally successful mix. From the end of the war to the 1960s, it came close to delivering the promises of victory: as Marquand says, ‘living standards rose more rapidly than in most previous periods; personal freedoms and opportunities expanded; Britain became a kinder and, on most definitions, a fairer place’.7 In the halting and largely passive evolution of the British citizen, the extension of common rights to health, education and welfare was a watershed. The war effort had accelerated the process in an uncharacteristically radical moment of change and reform. Yet when the war ended, British society was still ideologically innocent compared with most modern bourgeois states. Unlike France or the USA, there was virtually no tradition

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of revolutionary dissent. By European standards, the consequences of England’s only civil war had been relatively benign. It had challenged the feudal remnants of juridical privilege, asserting the authority of parliament over the Crown, yet despite enhanced rights and powers, citizens remained subjects of the King. The constitutional settlement of 1688 bequeathed a lasting but ambiguous legacy on English society; its beneficiaries were commercially-minded landowners, merchants and aspirant artisans. However, Europe’s first ‘bourgeois revolution’ left Britain’s deeply paternalistic social system largely untouched. Social and political integration continued to depend upon traditional hierarchies of deference and local ties that later assimilated changing class formations with a resilience more akin to a caste system than the rebellious class conflicts experienced by most European states. Three centuries later, the postwar social reconstruction, though reformist and tinged with radical ideals, was mediated by the legacy of that same assumptive world with its culture of aristocratic amateurism, robust pragmatism and profound distrust of ‘ideologies’ and abstract ideas. The model citizen of 1945 reflected many of these assumptions: he was a pragmatic, decent-living individual – the long-suffering British Tommy who had loyally served his country and the King in the expectation of a fairer and better world. Though women had featured prominently in wartime propaganda, the image of the postwar British citizen was unquestionably male, and unmistakably white – Beveridge’s head of the household, a man with family responsibilities in need of secure, reasonably well paid work. The idea that women, and particularly unmarried women with children, could form a household without a male head was alien to legal expectations and common sense. In employment and the law relating to domestic property, paternalistic assumptions created an anomalous status for the ‘citizen housewife’ whose relations to the rest of society, it was taken for granted, would be mediated by men. It was symptomatic of the naïvety of the times that perceptions of social inequality seldom extended beyond inequalities of income and wealth. Sexual inequalities, racial discrimination and the position of ethnic and other minorities tended to be unthinkingly accepted as part of the hierarchical order of British society, even though there had been wartime condemnation of the racial and ethnic intolerance of the Nazi regime. Furthermore, Marshall’s optimism about the ‘drive towards social equality’ took no account of the caste-like resilience of traditional patterns of status and the enduring insularity of their legitimating beliefs. At the extremes, ‘gas and water socialism’ and the Welfare State co-existed with feudal titles and inherited privileges, including hereditary peers in the House of Lords. Whilst postwar Budgets effected marginal redistributions of income and wealth, there was no attempt to challenge entrenched systems of deference and preferment or the privileged institutions they maintained. Over the next generation, the social backgrounds from which senior civil servants, Anglican bishops, high court judges and senior army personnel were recruited remained largely unchanged.8 As in the case of Cromwell’s Glorious Revolution, Britain’s postwar democratic reconstruction did not displace the class in power; it only altered their public roles. Yet something had changed with the war. The idea of ‘citizenship’ promoted within the armed forces and on the home front expressed a qualitative change in relations between individuals and the State. Official pamphlets, broadcasts and the activities of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs emphasised reciprocity and fairness, co-operation and trust, which caught and endorsed the current mood. The wartime state was a moral as

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well as a legal entity; its legitimacy was based upon a consensus of patriotic sentiments and common aims. The same sense of community carried the social policies of the Labour government in 1945. Although its perceptions of inequality were relatively narrow, it was understood, albeit in confused and sometimes inconsistent ways, that civic morality had to be based upon distributive justice and a more caring relationship between people and the State. In contrast with pre-war governments which had grudgingly conceded the vote to women and working men as a ‘privilege’ and ‘gift’, the expansion of citizenship after the war was clearly acknowledged as a social right. Wartime feelings of solidarity didn’t last indefinitely. By the early 1960s, Harold Wilson’s attempt to evoke the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ produced at best a tepid response. What remained of the postwar consensus was a tacit agreement to tolerate the sectional interests of an increasing number of contestant parties within the corporate state. The familiar triad of government, trade unions and employers was now joined by an influential gallery of new players – chairmen of nationalised industries, property magnates, oil sheikhs and advisors from the National Economic Development Board and the IMF. The effects of the increasing ‘globalisation’ of the world economy was already being felt upon economic policies at home. At the same time, the limits of the consensus were being challenged from below. A radical new populism was beginning to cut across class-based politics to form single issue campaigns and protest groups. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was an early and influential model for many subsequent groups – from regional nationalists to anti-vivisectionists – who shaped and mirrored the changing cultural and moral sensibilities of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, the rediscovery of poverty drew attention to a wide spectrum of social deprivations within the Welfare State. Poverty-related action groups together with the leaders of black and ethnic minorities and, most critical of all, the women’s movement, formed a broad front to assert the right of all citizens to be treated as equals whatever their gender, class or race. This upsurge of democratic protest brought to an end Britain’s long period of ideological innocence. Increasing prosperity fostered altogether more critical attitudes towards relations between citizens and the State. Rising individual aspirations together with pressures from a plurality of socially disadvantaged groups, overloaded the political system with demands which an ailing economy struggled to meet. Feelings of grievance rarely coincide with the actual extent of social injustice: as in this case, they tend to be more acutely felt when rising expectations are disappointed. With hindsight, it could be argued that the grievances expressed in the 1960s and early 1970s were an indication of the success of the postwar drive towards social equality rather than a failure of the social democratic system as such. However, unlike the more successful political economies of Sweden and West Germany, frustration with the consequences of Britain’s accelerating economic decline tended to disequilibrate the democratic– welfare–capitalist mix and spill over into a generalised disaffection with postwar society and its legitimating beliefs. Marshall had earlier pointed to the underlying tensions between rising demands for social investment and the conditions of profitability under capitalism. During periods of sustained economic growth, such tensions can be temporised through adjustments that balance social expenditure against the needs of the market-place. However, when an economy turns down, political compromise is harder to achieve. In general, governments cannot simultaneously satisfy popular expectations for increased levels of public expenditure whilst meeting the demands of the private sector for lower taxation, renewed

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investment and higher rates of return. Particularly in periods of recession, these tensions intensify sectarian divisions between classes and interest groups, threatening social cohesion and the legitimacy of the political order. From the early 1970s these so-called ‘crises of legitimacy’9 became more difficult to resolve as the range of viable options open to governments progressively declined. One major constraining factor here was the expansion of global capital markets which favoured multi-national corporations and more volatile shifts in capital and international trade. It is now much more difficult for any one nation to manage its economy independently of economic institutions and developments elsewhere. Increases in social expenditure in response to electoral expectations for more generous social benefits are liable to have far-reaching consequences thereby adversely affecting levels of inflation, international confidence in the currency, exchange rates and the balance of trade. These strains between domestic and global pressures are not peculiar to weaker economies, but they are far more likely to destabilise the social order of societies such as Britain which are experiencing prolonged periods of economic decline. The inability of governments to contain these pressures by purely internal means contributed to the swing away from Keynesian strategies which, with diminishing success, relied upon extensive government intervention to inflate domestic demand.10 By contrast, monetarist policies seemed better fitted to the changing global situation, though they were largely untried. Exposing the economy to the full impact of international competition, it was thought, would accelerate growth and create an environment in which business would flourish. This meant removing barriers inhibiting market enterprise and the pursuit of wealth. In a counter-revolution against what was seen as the latent ‘socialism’ of a Keynesian approach, successive Thatcher governments privatised public corporations, decreased state subsidies and controls, limited trade union activities and cut both higher rates of taxation and welfare benefits to sharpen the incentive to work. Stringent conditions were imposed upon public spending to slow down the rate of inflation and encourage private initiative and growth. Social expenditure was a foremost casualty of this new monetarist approach. Cuts in public funding gradually eroded both the availability and quality of services – from legal aid to higher education – which had long been regarded as an estab-lished right. The tensions which Marshall and others had argued were inherent in a welfare–capitalist mix were of little concern to monetarists and the New Right, as welfare was regressively reduced to a grudging residual legacy of a political order that they were intent upon phasing out. The impact of these changes over the last ten years has altered the nature of citizenship. Whereas the objective of the postwar social reconstruction was to guarantee universal entitlements to education, housing and medical care and a decent minimum income for everyone, the aim of social policy through the 1980s was to get citizens to stand on their own feet. A new conception of ‘the active citizen’ has emerged tied to individual incentives and market choice rather than the collective spirit of a Welfare State.11 It is assumed that the benefits of economic recovery will eventually ‘trickle down’ to all strata of society, stimulating voluntary and private solutions to the common problems and necessities of life. In practice, however, the short-term economic boom of the mid 1980s tended to favour the rich and prosperous but conspicuously failed to reach those who need it most. Whilst the majority in relatively well-paid jobs enjoyed a modest rise in prosperity, it is evident that the elderly, unemployed and others marginal to the formal economy were being left further behind. Relative to the general standard of living,

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the numbers living in poverty doubled during the decade from 1981. Tax concessions to the rich, combined with reductions in social support for the poor and poorly paid, tended to polarise inequalities, not just in income but across a range of indices of well-being, including health.12 Instead of a common enterprise culture bringing generalised prosperity and wider consumer choice, the long-run tendency of capitalism to reduce differences in income and styles of life went into reverse. At a macro-level, these changing dimensions of inequality are linked to the processes of economic restructuring that have drastically reduced Britain’s manufacturing base. In less than a generation, British industry shed about one-third of its work-force without corresponding increases in other sectors to absorb the loss. Falling investment and more competitive markets at home and abroad have driven unemployment to record levels since before the war. Managers, executives and office staff whose companies have reorganised or collapsed have joined redundant miners, steelworkers and, most disheartening of all, school-leavers and graduates unable to find work. The pace of change has been forced by the Government’s efforts to encourage more competitive market behaviour: in place of subsidies to rehabilitate ailing industries, generous incentives have been offered to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs. However, such measures also carry latent social and individual costs: yesterday’s reductions in over-manning are today’s unemployed, claimants against the Department of Social Security, and as likely as not, the Department of Health.13 In this respect, the Government’s industrial and social policies appear inconsistent, the one undermining the other, frustrating investment and human capital, and increasing the number of dependents on the State. In spite of swingeing cuts in entitlements and benefits, social expenditure – though woefully inadequate in relation to need – remains a massive burden upon the Exchequer, contributing in its turn to the familiar pattern of inflation, high interest rates and uncompetitive growth. As Britain enters the European single market, these conflicts between economic pressures and social policy are likely to escalate, threatening the unwelcome prospect of rising levels of unemployment and wider spread deprivations in their wake. Amongst the electorate, the destabilising effects of these macro changes are experienced as a widening disparity between expectations of secure, relatively prosperous employment and the commonplace fact of redundancies, part-time work and chronic household debt. Recurrent periods of recession have sharpened feelings of relative deprivation and, for many, a sense of estrangement from market society itself. Whilst this is felt most acutely by those with low educational and vocational skills, it is by no means confined to those whose market position is objectively weak. The ‘Enterprise Culture’ was aimed at all strata of society. The promotion of home ownership, business start-ups, shares purchases, privatised education, health care and pension plans, appealed especially to the aspirations of the upwardly mobile who heavily invested in the promise of Mrs Thatcher’s mid-term consumer boom. Yet the reality of possessive individualism is harder to sustain when the economy turns down. Spiralling inflation, high interest rates and unemployment undermined visions of lasting prosperity and frustrated market initiatives and private dreams. Bankruptcies, particularly amongst small businesses, reached an all-time high in 1990 and continued to rise the following year. Home buyers were particularly badly hit: repossession orders doubled in the first six months of 1991 following a record number of repossessions in the previous year.14 As official estimates

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of unemployment topped 2.4 million, a Gallop poll reported that 75 per cent of the working population were in fear of losing their jobs.15 Such widespread feelings of economic insecurity, threatening loss of livelihood and a family home, go to the root of domestic order and tend to destroy those fragile sentiments of tolerance and mutual responsibility upon which citizenship and social cohesion are based. Maintaining social cohesion along a trajectory of economic decline has become the political reality of the late twentieth century. It is the context in which issues of citizenship have returned to the public agenda as tensions between market forces and social order weaken political legitimacy and social compliance. At every level of the society, there are signs that social cohesion is beginning to fragment, not in violent protest (though the rebellion over the perceived injustices of the Poll Tax came close to that), but in anomic confusion, frustration and discontent. For instance, in spite of the Government’s repeated emphasis upon law and order, Home Office statistics show a dramatic increase in crimes against persons and property throughout the decade from 1979.16 Football hooliganism, race riots, violent industrial disputes and assaults upon the police, hospital staff and local government employees have become commonplace in a society which has one of the highest and most overcrowded prison populations within Europe. However, disorder and anomy are not confined to decaying inner urban areas or the socially dispossessed. In the City, once a byword for probity, confidence has been undermined by revelations of insider dealing, fraudulent take-overs, corruption and predatory trading since the market was opened to international competition in 1986. Nor have government circles escaped unscathed. Despite Draconian increases in secrecy, a succession of political scandals has brought into disrepute both the ethics of the marketplace and the morality of government itself.17 Indications of growing social disorder suggest that as the economy faces fiercer global competition the assumptions and values of British society have tended to shift. The collapse of the postwar social democratic consensus and electoral support for the radical Right are starkly indicative of this change. Indeed, from the start the Thatcher decade explicitly promised a radical reversal in social attitudes and values, beginning with traditional sources of Tory loyalty and support. The Right’s strident commitment to ‘the free play of market forces’ was entirely new to postwar politics, as was their continuing assault upon the public sector and the Welfare State. In part, it was an attack upon vested interests inhibiting market efficiency and consumer choice – price-fixing cartels, trade union powers, the privileged autonomy of the professions, ‘unaccountable’ state monopolies and the like. But equally, faith in the efficiency of the market went hand in hand with a broader-based crusade to assert the ethics of individualism over the distributional values at the core of Keynesian social democracy. In the privatisation of nationalised industries, these two aspects of Thatcherism readily came together. Elsewhere, the promotion of ‘consumer choice’ masked the creeping privatisation of public services which have been brought under increasingly stringent and disabling political and financial controls. In the case of education and personal services, for instance, the demand for cost effectiveness has allowed crass managerialism to override the professional judgements of doctors, teachers and social workers in repeated efforts to reorganise public services along quasi-commercial lines. In some areas, such as universities and hospital services, conflicts between market values and professional standards have impaired the delivery of services and seriously undermined morale.

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Everywhere, the cry has been for ‘value for money’ with little regard for individuals or the quality of care. Yet as in the case of chronically high unemployment, it is thought to be a price worth paying for the political ascendancy of market values over the unquantifiable and managerially unaccountable ‘common good’.18 However, even amongst influential elements within the Tory party, the price of change has begun to appear unacceptably high. After ten years of Thatcherism, Britain still has an uncompetitive, low-value economy that is highly vulnerable to international markets. At best, neo-liberal policies slowed the rate of decline but at the cost of socially divisive increases in unemployment, homelessness, poverty, sickness and crime. The brunt of these ills has been carried by the electorate and, conspicuously, by a growing lumpenproletariat who would not seem out of place on a Dickensian street. Residual welfare policies have widened the poverty trap, yet despite extended means testing, the numbers on social security have not reduced. Nor, despite chronic underfunding, has social expenditure been cut. The National Health Service, state education and social services still exist, though on much sparser budgets. Like other public services, they are now accountable to management practices more appropriate to retail trading than standards of professional care. Furthermore, cuts in government subsidies, from public transport to the arts, have tended to impoverish the quality of social and cultural life, accentuating inequalities between regions, communities and socio-economic groups. But most of all, these changes have encouraged a form of ‘amoral individualism’ which has virtually removed from the vocabulary of public motives altruism, compassion and fairness to create a society divided by self-interest and which is manifestly low in reciprocity and trust. Into this moral vacuum, a second generation of Thatcherites, led by John Major, have launched a Citizen’s Charter drafted primarily to ensure that the consumers of public services receive acceptable service at a ‘fair’ price. There is nothing radical or controversial in the charter itself – except perhaps the view that citizens should be treated as ‘customers’ of the State. On the other hand, its very publication revives the germ of an idea first noted over two centuries ago by the classical political economist, Adam Smith. Smith observed that markets operate upon the basis of calculated self-interest, but to function effectively they cannot exist without a framework of mutual trust. Rational calculation of risk presupposes the generalised assumption that goods will be delivered, bills will be paid, contracts honoured and promises kept. In other words, an efficient market society has to be underpinned by such civic virtues as honesty, fairness, mutual obligation and, equally important, a recognition that these values are in one’s own selfinterest and hence should be promoted in the common good. It is not difficult to see why citizenship has been revived as part of the neo-liberal agenda, for the absence of such values works against a free market economy, encouraging greed, opportunism and dishonest contracts which, amongst other things, call for costly interventions and elaborate regulations and government controls. There is only a glimmer of these insights behind the Citizen’s Charter, but it is slowly being recognised that concomitant with Britain’s economic decline there is a weakening of social cohesion which undermines the effectiveness of the economy and alienates significant numbers of younger people from market society itself. The idea that economic success and mutual obligation are interrelated emerges more strongly from the Government’s companion report, Encouraging Citizenship. This

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speculative report opens with a warning that citizenship is ‘a cultural achievement, a gift of history’ that can easily be lost (and presumably withheld). The ‘active citizen’ of the Report is enjoined to safeguard the gifts bestowed upon him or her through voluntary service and charitable works. Citizenship is about civic duties and responsibilities, but not apparently about social rights. There is little here about reciprocal obligations and responsibilities of a government for the well-being of its people, and even less about rights to protect the freedom and privacy of individuals from the State. These things have to be taken on trust. Indeed, trusting the judgement and good faith of the Government is what encouraging citizenship is all about. According to this innocently idealised view of the State and society, citizens are not expected to act collectively or rock the boat. Their role is to observe an obligation to society by renouncing private hedonism in favour of voluntary service to maintain the social order and the status quo. All this is a far cry from the notion of citizenship that underwrote Britain’s social reconstruction after the war. Then, it was believed that to participate as active citizens people had to be literate, healthy, and employed. But more than that, in a predominantly capitalist society, it was recognised that citizenship is an aspiration that is continually in tension with market forces. In contrast with the free-market ideal of citizenship which aspires to little more than the (contractual) equality of individuals as private consumers, it was widely held that the State has a responsibility to provide opportunities and services to compensate for market inequalities and the inherited disadvantage of class. Albeit imperfectly, the Welfare State gave reality to this idea and marked the beginning of a new, restituitive form of social democracy which drew upon a strong conscience collective and the cohesive sense of national identity inspired by the efforts of war. The legacy of these ideals and values has been all but destroyed by the prolonged effects of industrial and regional decline which has embittered class antagonisms and made restituitive politics that much harder for any party to revive. Indeed, the task of reversing the nation’s fortunes is currently seen as antithetical to the former strain towards social equality and consensual politics which, together with excessive taxation and state intervention, the New Right holds to be historically implicated in Britain’s decline. Over the last ten years, ideological polarisation has tended to define the problem of Britain’s future as a contest between competing economic doctrines. But whilst few would doubt that since the early 1970s the British economy has been one of the most vulnerable in the industrial world, from a wider perspective, economic decline can be interpreted as symptomatic of a more profound political and moral failure which, in particular, has inhibited the development of productive relationships between capital, organised labour and the State. Only under the extreme and unusual conditions of total war has the State intervened to ensure co-operation between classes on national objectives and common aims. Such an agenda in peacetime cannot avoid confronting the underlying and essentially political question of how resources and rewards should be socially distributed. This question, which in different ways, Sweden, Japan and Britain’s European competitors have faced with relatively more success, is fundamental to the web of reciprocity upon which economic performance and the integration of civil society rests. The failure of postwar governments to come to terms with these issues is at the root of a disabling condition which is frequently called ‘the British disease’. Problems of low productivity, wage inflation, chronic unemployment and antagonistic labour relations cannot be resolved solely in terms of economic doctrines, whether Keynesian, neo-liberal

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or socialist, for they are not merely mechanical faults which can be repaired by technical adjustments; rather, they are manifestations of an economy which has undermined the sources of social cohesion upon which economic success depends. What has been lost in the British case is not just the competitive advantage in world trade but that degree of social integration and trust which give Britain’s competitors their leading edge. Clearly, Britain cannot go back to 1945. The political economy of the immediate postwar period has little in common with the circumstances and policy decisions of the 1990s. But equally, the current dogma that in some unseen and mysterious way the market will regulate itself once it is freed from state intervention, or the distorting effects of foreign markets, or disruptive trade union powers, is now no more convincing that the stultifying collectivism that images of state socialism once evoked. But these are crude alternatives, and far removed from the more complex models of economic integration to which the successful economies of the industrial world approximate. A key feature of their success lies in counterbalancing the spontaneous momentum of the market with forms of ‘regulative intelligence’ that recognise a functional interdependence between economic agents and the State and their reciprocal responsibility to co-operate.19 The cultural basis of this partnership rests upon the idea that human capital is a nation’s greatest competitive asset and, from state nursery education to scientific research, far greater investment is made in its creativity and development than is common in the British case.20 Here, citizenship is not a passive status dependent upon the continued beneficence of the State. It carries the active potential to educate and motivate individuals to tolerate diversity and co-operate with others to make the most of themselves. Ideologically, Britain is further from this model of reciprocity than most neighbouring members of the European Community. However, moves towards a federation of European states with a common currency and a common Social Charter of citizens’ rights, offer an opportunity to benefit from closer social as well as economic integration. Britain’s reluctance to participate fully in these developments is symptomatic of a deeper resistence to pluralistic conceptions of democracy and, for much the same reasons, a developmental role for the State. Elsewhere, in Sweden, Germany, France and Japan, the State has taken a leading role in fostering economic objectives by co-ordinating capital, industry and labour to achieve an exceptional economic performance. By contrast, British governments, especially since 1979, have been adept at coercion and mystification, but their record of innovation and economic direction is comparatively weak. These tendencies work against political and social cohesion both within domestic society and within the broader context of the EC. In particular, Britain’s isolated opposition to the European Social Charter, which proposed wide-ranging improvements in living and working conditions,21 is indicative of the present government’s beligerent attitude to the expansion of social rights and to the social democratic aspirations of other member states. The shape of European developments is still uncertain, but the idea behind a ‘social market’ is clear enough; it assumes that economic growth is more likely to be sustained by fostering good industrial relations and social cohesion than under conditions of anomie and social unrest. As the preceeding chapters have attempted to show, this lesson became historically transparent with the radical realignment of the economy and civil society during and immediately after the Second World War. However, by the 1980s it was evident that the achievements of the postwar social reconstruction were far from secure. Marshall’s confident assumption that the progress of citizenship is irreversible is

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now in doubt. It underestimates the competing pressures against which citizens’ rights are won, and the continual struggle needed to protect the erosion of existing rights. The boundaries between the private and the public domain are continually changing in response to economic demands. With the advent of the European single market they are likely to shift still further in favour of increasingly global competitive interests. In this wider context, the Rights’s belated attempt to make up for the democratic deficit of the Thatcher years by promoting an emasculated form of citizenship is unlikely to encourage the revival of an ailing economy, or satisfy growing pressures both in Britain and across Europe for recognition of counterbalancing social rights.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Contemporary government promotions include Encouraging Citizenship: Report of the Commission on Citizenship, HMSO, 1990 and The Citizen’s Charter, HMSO 1991. A companion Parent’s Charter and a Patient’s Charter were promised for the same year. Recent contributions to debates on citizenship include D. Marquand, The Unprincipled Society (London, Cape, 1988); Adrian Oldfield, Citizenship and Community; Civic Republicanism and the Modern World (London, Routledge, 1990); Jonathan Boswell, Community and the Economy: The Theory of Public co-operation (London, Routledge, 1990); B.S. Turner, ‘Outline of a theory of citizenship’, Sociology, Vol.24, No.2, 1990; R Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe (London, Chatto, 1990). 2 Encouraging Citizenship (ibid.). 3 T.H. Marshall, ‘Social Class and Citizenship’ in Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays (London, Heinemann, 1963). 4 Ibid. pp. 120–127. 5 But it wasn’t just idealism – there were more strategic issues at stake, not least the immediate task of mobilising a disbelieving and largely disaffected working class. Promises of ‘a land fit for hereos’ had been made before. This time, appeals for co-operation were met with a determination not to go back to the anxieties and strife that followed the First World War. These demands were hard to resist: against the risks of an immanent class war, they were met by immediate and detailed proposals for reform. Harold Nicolson was one of many who at the time expected the war effort to collapse in an internal class war. On the eve of the declaration of war he wrote, ‘The Labour Party will be hard put to prevent this war degenerating into class warfare’, echoing a common belief that the Tory ‘old gang’ were now powerless to win the confidence and compliance of the working class. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and letters 1930– 1964 (New York, Atheneum, 1980). 6 Marshall, ibid p.73. 7 D. Marquand, The Unprincipled Society, p.40. 8 Kelsall, R.K. Higher Civil Servants in Britain (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955); C.B. Otley, ‘The educational background of British army officers’, Sociology, May 1973; P. Stanworth and A. Giddens (eds), Elites and Power in British Society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974); J. Urry and J. Wakefield (eds), Power in Britain (London, Heinemann, 1975). 9 The phrase has been used to refer to the widening gap between the electorate’s expectations and what the governments of western democracies can deliver. See J. Habermas, The Legitimation Crisis (London, Heinemann, 1976). 10 In particular, the persistence of rising inflation and rising unemployment in the 1970s confounded successive British governments who found that, contrary to Keynesian predictions, attempts to balance one against the other succeeded in worsening both.

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11 See Encouraging Citizenship: op. cit. 12 M. Whitehead, The Health Divide: Inequalities in Health in the 1980s (London Health Education Authority, 1987). 13 The association between unemployment and illness is well-established. See, for example, H. Brenner, ‘Health costs and benefits of economic policy’, International Journal of Health Services, 7, 1977; H. Brenner, ‘Mortality and national economy’ Lancet, 2, 1979, and more recently N. Beale and S. Nethercott, ‘Job-loss and family morbidity: a study of a factory closure’, Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 35, pp.510–14. 14 Report of the Council of Mortgage Lenders, August 1991. 15 Reported in the Observer, 11 August 1991. 16 For major categories of offence, robbery increased by 166 per cent, criminal damage by 97 per cent, rape by 182 per cent, and assaults against persons by 86 per cent. Source: Home Office Statistical Bulletin, 1989. 17 The more prominent scandals that made headline news and cast serious doubt on the probity of both the financial community and inner government circles during the Thatcher years included the Westland affair, the Harrods take-over, the Guinness fraud, the DTI’s illegal inducements to British Aerospace in the sale of Rover, and more recently, covert attempts to cover up wholesale corruption in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. These and other less well-publicised scandals have created the popular impression that the City and Government itself have been more than ‘economical with the truth’. 18 The phrase was used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in commending to the House a percentage point drop in inflation at the price of an increase in unemployment of approximately 250,000 in 1991. 19 See Perry Anderson, ‘The figures of descent’, New Left Review, 161, January-February 1967. Anderson cites four specific examples of ‘regulative intelligence’ moderating successful postwar economies: the West German banking system; the linking of state planning agencies and commercial banks in Japan: the politically dominant labour movement in Sweden, and state-led technocracy in France. 20 Of the 24 OECD countries, only Britain is currently spending no more as a percentage of GDP on public services that it did in the late 1960s. In particular, gross public spending was cut by 40 per cent between 1980 and 1983. See C. Johnson, The Economy under Mrs Thatcher (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1991). 21 ‘The Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers’ contains thirty declarations divided into twelve sections: freedom of movement; employment and remuneration; improvement of living and working conditions; social protection; freedom of association and collective bargaining; vocational training; equal treatment for men and women; information, consultation and participation; health protection and safety at work; protection of children and adolescents; elderly persons and disabled persons. See Social Europe No.1, 1990 (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publication of the European Communities).

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Name index Adorno, Theodor 90 Amery, Leo 37 Amis, Kingsley 95, 106 Anderson, Sir John 126, 146 Ardizzone, Edward 100 Attlee, Clement 122–5, 132, 139, 140, 141–5, 146–7, 148, 150, 153 Austen, Jane 96 Balfour, Arthur James, 1st Earl of 14 Balogh, Thomas 110 Barnett, Corelli 4, 27, 39, 42, 45, 46–7, 54, 55 Beaverbrook, Lord 43, 44 Bevan, Aneurin 34, 123, 124 Beveridge, William 11, 12, 32, 42, 77, 109, 116–22, 126–7, 132, 138, 157, 164 Bevin, Ernest 7, 25, 27, 28, 41, 45, 60, 122, 123, 130, 137, 146, 147, 150 Blank, Stephen 153 Bondfield, Margaret 78 Boothby, Robert 17 Bracken, Brendan 121, 125 Bullock, Alan 19 Butler, R.A. 111, 112, 126, 128–9, 130, 132, 138 Calder, Angus 4, 17–18, 23, 40, 66–7, 72, 130, 132 Cary, Joyce 95 Chamberlain, Neville 5, 15, 16–17, 18, 19, 27, 40–1, 41, 42, 87 Churchill, Winston 5, 6, 10, 21, 24–5, 31, 41, 42, 43, 48, 57, 58, 91, 99, 100, 101, 109, 111, 121–2, 125, 128, 137, 138, 139, 140, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150 Cole, G.D.H. 16 Cole, Margaret 73 Connolly, Cyril 94–6, 101 Cooper, Diana 63 Coward, Noel 92 Cripps, Sir Stafford 79, 123, 124 Dalton, Hugh 34, 123 Davin, Anna 75 De Gaulle, Charles 21, 141 Dearden, Basil 91 Dior, Christian 80 Disraeli, Benjamin 57, 113, 140 Douglas, Keith 99, 100 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 151

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Eliot, George 88 Eliot, T.S. 90 Emmerson, Sir Harold 52 Engels, Friedrich 65 Franco, General Francisco 16 Freud, Anna 74 Friedan, Betty 78 Gasset, Ortega 90 Gilliat, Sidney 100 Gowing, Margaret 151 Greene, Graham 95 Greenwood, Arthur 17 Grindley, Sir Arnold 126 Grunberger, Richard 55 Handley, Tommy 87, 97 Harison, Robert 135 Harris, Jose 110–11 Harris, Kenneth 121–2, 147 Hartley, L.P. 95 Hayek, Friedrich von 9, 30 Heath, Edward 10 Hitler, Adolph 5, 6, 15, 16–17, 18, 19–20, 24, 31, 40, 55–7, 77 Hobsbawm, Eric 152 Hoggart, Richard 57, 90 Horder, Lord 76, 77 Howarth, Sir Edward 73 Hubback, Eva 78 Joseph, Sir Keith 12 Keynes, John Maynard 11, 34, 42, 109, 114, 116, 143, 153 Koonz, Claudia 66 Lang, Cosmo 75 Laski, Harold 123 Launder, Frank 100 Lawson, Nigel 13 Leavis, F.K. 90 Leavis, Q.D. 88, 89–90 Lehmann, Rosamund 95 Lehmannn, John 93 Lewis, Cecil Day 19 Lewis, Jane 70 MacArthur, General Douglas 145 McCarthy, Joseph 150–1

Name index MacDonald, Ramsay 140 Macmillan, Harold 10, 34, 114 Macnicol, John 73, 75 Major, John 160, 172 Mandel, Ernest 145 Mannheim, Karl 126 Marcuse, Herbert 90 Marquand, D. 163 Marshall, T.H. 162–3, 164–5, 166, 168, 175–6 Marwick, A. 4 Marx, Karl 62 Milburn, Clara 21–2 Mitchison, Naomi 79, 138 Mitford, Nancy 63 Mitford, Unity 81 Moore, Henry 100 Morgan, Kenneth 130–1, 142 Morrison, Herbert 123 Mosley, Oswald 34 Murdoch, Iris 95 Nicholson, Harold 17, 176 Orwell, George 9, 21, 22, 78–9, 89, 95–6, 97–105, 149 Osborne, John 106 Owen, A.D.K. 110 Pelling, H. 4 Rathbone, Eleanor 75 Reagan, Ronald 13 Reed, Carol 100 Richards, Jeffrey 92 Richards, Vernon 105 Salisbury, Robert, 3rd Marquess of 14 Sartre, Jean-Paul 102 Saville, John 146, 148 Scannell, G.P. 92 Scott-James, Anne 78 Settle, Mary Lee 80–1 Sheridan, Dorothy 92 Smith, Adam 172 Snow, C.P. 95 Spring-Rice, Margery 75 Stalin, Joseph 104, 147, 149, 150 Summerskill, Edith 77–8 Taylor, A.J.P. 5, 54, 82, 149–50 Thatcher, Margaret 10, 11, 155–6, 158, 169

132

Name index Thomas, Geoffrey 69 Titmuss, Richard 72–3, 74, 76, 77, 78, 120 Truman, Harry S. 143–7 Wain, John 95, 106 Waugh, Evelyn 63, 72, 79, 89, 102 Webb, Beatrice 121 Weber, Max v Williams, Raymond 90 Wilson, Harold 165 Winnicott, D.W. 74 Woolton, Lord 79

133

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Subject index Aims of Industry 30 aircraft industry 39, 42, 43–5, 46–7, 115; equal pay 137; Germany 45; United States 45 Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) 50 American Loan 144, 152–3 Anglo-Soviet alliance 1942 148 Animal Farm 101, 105 anomy 170 appeasement 17, 19, 20, 40; Labour Party and 17 armed services, demobilisation 140; women in 71, 80–1, 119 Army Education Corps 106 atomic bomb see nuclear weapons atomic energy see nuclear power Audit of War 27 Bank of England, nationalisation of 141 bankruptcies 169 Battle of Britain 6 Berlin, Soviet Union blockade 146, 147, 150 Betteshanger Colliery 52–3 Beveridge Report 110, 116–23, 131, 162; Attlee’s reaction to 122–3; Churchill’s reaction to 121–2; Conservative Party and 126–7; financing 117, 120; Labour Party and 122, 127; women 62–3, 118–20, 164 birth-rate 119, 120; fall in 76; Germany 77 Blitz 6, 7, 22, 58 Bolshevism see communism Brains Trust 106 Brideshead Revisited 89 British Expeditionary Force 6 Bugle Blast 93, 96 Cabinet Reconstruction Committee 128 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 10, 166

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Canada, nuclear co-operation 144 CEMA (Council for Education in Music and the Arts) 94–5 centralised planning 8–9, 26, 28, 32, 104, 105, 109, 114, 158 children, child care facilities 119–20; delinquency 74–5; evacuation 71, 73–4; health 75; mothers and 74–8 cinema 88, 90, 91–2, 100; Crown Film Unit 92; Ealing Studios 92; Gainsborough 92 citizenship 7, 132; the ‘active citizen’ 161–2, 173; Citizen’s Charter 172; nature of 168; social right 156, 162, 165; as a social status 162–3; as universal right 157; wartime 21; women and 164 Citizenship and Social Class 162 City, corruption in 170 Civil Employment Act 1944 140 coal-mining 59–60; strikes 51–3, 59 Coalition Government 11, 28, 30, 42–3, 111, 128, 135, 138, 139; Labour in 28–9, 41, 138 Cold War 9, 136, 142 collectivism 3, 125–6 ‘common people’, Churchill’s idea of 21, 24, 35 communism 7; attitude to 19, 147–50; threat of 153 Communist Party 33, 48, 112, 147, 149 Conditions of the Employment and National Arbitration Order (1940) 51–3 conscription 6; Bevin and 25; industrial 25, 34, 38, 111; military 5; private assets 29, 30; women 26, 63, 136 consensus 1–2, 4, 7; emergence of 127–8; postwar 9, 10, 165–6; wartime 165 Conservative government 1979 2, see also Thatcherism Conservative Party 11, 33, 112, 113, 125; 1945 election 10, 125, 139; Beveridge Report and 126–7; education 131;

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factions 106; pre-war admiration for Hitler 19; Right wing 9; Thatcher government 155–9, see also Thatcherism Conservative Reconstruction Committee 112, 125 crime, rise in 11 Crown Film Unit 92 culture 86; cinema 90, 91–2; documentary 100, 105–6; élite 86, 88, 89, 94; literacy 87; mass 87, 88, 90, 96; oral 97; working class 57, 87, 90, 96, 97; see also literature currency 153; exchange rates 153–4 Czechoslovakia, partition of 16, 19 Daily Mirror 115 Defence Committee (Supply) 43 defence strategies, effect on economic performance 151–4 demobilisation 140 democracy, principle of 8, 21, 24, 25, 31, 33–4 documentary 91, 96, 100, 105–6 Dunkirk 6, 21–2; ‘Dunkirk spirit’ 6, 39, 165 Ealing Studios 92 economics, free market 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 30, 33, 104, 118, 170–1, 173, 174; Keynesian 8, 10, 33, 116, 142, 163, 167; laissez-faire 11, 13, 29, 32, 34, 113, 114 education 171 Education Act 1944 9, 111, 128–31; equal pay 138 ‘eleven-plus’ examination 130 Emergency Powers Act 1939 31, 40, 50 employment, policies on 33–4 Employment Policy, White Paper 116 Engineering Employers Federation 50 engineering industry, strikes 51; women in 68, 69 English Story 93 enterprise culture 157, 169 equal pay 69, 70, 137–8; Royal Commission on 67, 68, 137–8; teachers 138 equality 1–2, 7, 10, 21, 25, 31 eugenics 74, 77 European Charter of Social Rights 157–8, 175

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European Community 157–8, 175–6 evacuation 7, 34, 71, 72, 128; effects of 73–4 exchange rates 153–4 ‘fair shares for all’, principle of 6–7, 32, 34, 136 family, allowances 75–67; fall in birth-rate 76; Germany 77; state intervention 75, see also children; women fascism 2, 7; Spain 16; united front against 16, 17–18, 24, 127; views on 110–11, see also National Socialism Federation of Workers’ Film Societies 91 feminist movement 75–80; Germany 77; middle-class women 78; working-class women 78 foreign policy, effect on economic performance 151–4 France, invasion of 5; women 20 free market economics 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 30, 33, 104, 104–5, 118, 170–1, 173, 174 freedom, concept of, appeals to 21, 24, 31 Full Employment in a Free Society 117, 121 Gainsborough, films 92 General Election 1945 139; Conservative Party 10, 125, 139 Germany 91; aircraft industry 45; birth-rate 77; education system 45; industrial relations 55; industry 27, 38, 39, 55; Lebensraum 20; pre-war opinions of 19; tank production 46; trade unions 57; treatment of minorities 15–16, 18, 20; under Nazism 15–16, 31, 55–7; unemployment 23; women, employment of 66 Greece, civil war 139, 144 ‘heritage’ centres 135 Hiroshima 144, 145 Homage to Catalonia 100, 101

Subject index Home Intelligence Unit 111–12, 117 Horizon 93, 94, 95 housing 82, 115; repossessions 169–170 illegitimacy, increase in 65 In Which We Serve 92 industrial relations 25, 26, 27, 45, 48, 54, 59, 115; Germany 55 industry 26, 27, 39, 115; conflict 27, 49, 59, 137; dependence on US technology 43; efficiency 49; Germany 27, 38, 39, 55; inefficiency in 47–8; joint production committees 50, 136; modernisation 141; morale 39, 49; munitions 39, 40, 115; ‘phoney war’ 40; public control of 28, 29; training 27, 59; wartime revival 6; women 62, 68, 69, see also management; strikes invasion of Britain, threat of 6, 27, 87, 109 ITMA 97 Japan, dropping of atomic bombs 144, 145 Jews 15–16, 18, 20 joint production committees 50, 136 Keynesian economics 8, 10, 33, 116, 142, 163, 167 labour, central direction of 111; demand for 118; shortages 25–6, 27–8, 30, 38, see also workers Labour Government 1945 2, 4, 9, 165; foreign policy 145; legislative programme 10 Labour Government 1974 2 Labour Party 4, 99, 139; appeasement and 17; Attlee and 122–5; Beveridge Report 117, 127; economic controls, retention of 140; education 129; factions 106;

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Subject index

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leadership 9, 10; left wing of 9, 10, 147; working-class support for 99 laissez-faire 11, 13, 29, 32, 34, 113, 114 Lebensraum 20 Left wing politics 97–9; Orwell on 97–8; social class and 97, 98–9 Lend-Lease 12, 42, 143, 145 Liberal Party, 1945 election 10 literacy 87 literature 86, 87–9 88, 92–7; magazines 88–9, see also culture lock-outs 50 magazines 88–9, 93–4 management 27, 30, 45–8, 59, 115; labour and 54, 59 market economics 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 30, 33, 104–5, 118, 170–1, 173, 174 Marshall Plan 146 mass media 88, 90 Mass Observation, child bearing 76; cinema 92; female conscription 25; industrial conflict 49; inefficiency 47; production 47, 48; war profits 29 merchant marine 43 middle class 23, 136; women 63, 78, 81 Millions Like Us 100 Ministry of Agriculture 43 Ministry of Aircraft Production 43 Ministry of Information 29, 67; Home Intelligence Unit 111–12, 117; propaganda films 92 Ministry of Labour 52, 53, 68; Bevin at 25 Ministry of Reconstruction 110 Ministry of Shipping 43 Modern Reading 93 monetarism 154, 167 morale 138; civilian 24, 30–1; ‘Dunkirk spirit’ 6, 39; industrial 39, 49; workers 26 Munich Agreement 16 munitions 39, 40, 115;

Subject index tanks 45–6; women in 68 music 86, see also culture Nagasaki 144, 145 National Assistance Act 141 National Governments 24; Labour opposition to 18–19 National Health Service 9, 124, 141, 157, 171 National League for Freedom, The 30 National Service No. 2 Act 1941 66 National Socialism 15–16, 19, 20, 31, 55–7, see also fascism nationalisation 11, 29, 43, 124, 141 NATO Alliance 146, 147, 148 ‘New Look’ 80 New Right 2–3, 10, 12, 161, 168, 173 New Statesman 93 New Writing 93 Night Train 100 Nineteen Eighty-Four 89, 101, 103–5 North Atlantic Treaty 1948 147 Norway, invasion of 41 Norwood Committee 129–30 nuclear co-operation 144, 146 nuclear power programme 146 nuclear weapons 10; British 145, 146, 151 Order 1305 51–3 Parents Revolt 76, 120 Penguin New Writing 93, 94, 96 Pensions Act 1940 37 People’s War, The 4 Persuasion 96 ‘phoney war’ 40 Picture Post 32, 93, 110 planning 8–9, 26, 28, 32, 104, 114, 125, 158 Poetry London 93 Poland, invasion of 5, 16–17, 19 privatisation 3, 156, 167, 171 Problems of Social Policy 72 profiteering 26, 109; tax on excess profits 18, 28, 29–30 propaganda 23; aimed at women 64, 71, 83, 164; Crown Film Unit 92; documentaries 91 public spending 3, 167–8, 171

140

Subject index Put Out More Flags 72 Quebec Agreement 1943 144 racism, Britain 20, 164; Germany 15–16, 18, 20; United States 20 railways, government control of 43 rationing/shortages 6, 34, 111, 112, 114, 128, 136, 140; postwar 9, 141 rearmament 154 reconstruction 3, 4, 125, 127, 128; Cabinet Committee on 110; Conservative Reconstruction Committee 112, 125; Ministry of 110 Road to Serfdom, The 30 Road to Wigan Pier, The 78–9, 100 Rolls Royce, Hillingdon 137 Royal Commission on Equal Pay 67, 68, 137–8 schools 128–31; selection to 129, 130; technical 131 single market 169 Social Charter 157–8, 174 social contract 155 Social Insurance and Allied Services 118 social insurance scheme 127 social security 121 socialism 10–11, 27, 138–9, 140, 142–4 Soviet Union 19, 20, 91, 144, 149; Anglo-Soviet alliance 1942 148; Berlin blockade 146, 147, 150; expansion 153; popular support for 29, 148–9, 150 Spanish Civil War, Orwell on 101; women in 62 state intervention 8, 29, 114, 115, 125 sterling 153 strikes 40, 50–1; arbitration tribunal 51; coal-mining 51–3, 59; equal pay 137; incitement to 51; legal penalties 53; Order 1305 51–3 tank production 45–6; Germany 46; United States 46

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teachers 128 Thatcherism 3, 11, 12, 58–9, 103, 155–9, 167, 170, 171, 172, 176; confrontationalism 58, 59; ‘wets’ 2 They Came to a City 91 Times, The 129 Tory Reform Group 113, 117, 120, 125, 126 Trade Union Congress (TUC) 18, 27, 28, 50, 51, 137 trade unions 2, 19, 26, 27, 28, 34, 40–1, 49–50, 50–1, 53, 58, 136–7; Bevin and 25; consultation with 53–4; ‘contract’ with 25, 28; Germany 57; management and 48, 53–4; militancy 10, 40, 59, 155; social contract 155; women 69 training, industry 27 Tribune 22, 93, 100, 122–3 unemployment 23, 26, 38, 41, 115, 116, 119, 120–1, 127, 157, 168–9, 170; Germany 23; United States 23 United States, aid to Britain 27, 39, 42, 144, 152–3; aircraft industry 45; Britain’s postwar dependence on 145; education system 45; entry into war 109–10; European view of 102–3; militarisation of economy 151; nuclear bases in UK 146; nuclear co-operation 144; special relationship 145; tank production 46; unemployment 23 Vietnam War 10 wage controls 10 wages 6, 51; women 68–9 War Cabinet, Labour leaders in 24–5 Way Ahead, The 100 Welfare State 1, 8, 9, 33, 35, 120, 124, 132, 141, 165, 166, 171, 173, see also Beveridge Report ‘winter of discontent’ 10 wireless 15, 86, 87, 92, 97 women, advice directed at 78; armed services 71, 80–1, 119; Beveridge Report 62–3, 118–20, 164; birth-rate 76;

Subject index child care provision 71, 119–20; children 74–8; citizenship and 164; conscription of 26, 63, 66–7, 137; domestic responsibilities 67, 71, 79, 118–20; dress, standards of 71, 79–80, 81, 82, 83; economic dependency 119; emancipation 62, 65; employment 38, 64–6; engineering industry 69; equal pay 69, 70, 137–8; feminist movement 75–80; France 20; Germany 66; health 75; home work 64; industry 62, 68, 69; middle class 63, 81, 82; motherhood 74–8; officers 80–1; part-time work 69–70; participation in economy 118; pay 68–9, 70, 137–8; propaganda aimed at 64, 71, 83, 164; redirection of 67–8; separation from husbands 83; sexual freedom 65; social seclusion of 63; Spanish Civil War 62; State’s attitude to 75; status at work 68, 70–1; teachers 138; trade unions 69; values and behaviour 81; working class 63, 64, 81, 82 Women’s Voluntary Service 67, 119 workers, attitudes to 21–2; co-operation of 27, 58; direction of labour 111; morale 39, 49; rights and expectations 7, see also labour working class 9, 31, 34, 54, 57–8, 136, 142; armed forces 5; children 75; Churchill and 24, 41; courage of 22–3; culture 57, 87, 90; documentaries 96; income 118; literature 97; market forces and 33;

143

Subject index radicalisation of 4; support for Labour Party 99; women 63, 75, 78 Yalta Conference 149–50

144