Political situation in Britain 1945-1960

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.The Labour governof 1945 to 1951………………………….3-6
2. The creation of a multi-racial Commonwealth………………………7
3.Christian Democracy as principal political phe
of post-war Europe ……………………………………………… 8-10
4.The Conreturn to power………………………………10-14
5. References…………………………………………………………..15
The Labour governof 1945 to 1951
To exchange the splendours of oratory and the decades of experience of the greatest of war leaders for a very sincere but decidedly uncharismatic little man, seemed to the rest of the world an odd thing for the British electorate to do in the summer of 1945. It never made a wiser choice. Britain was straining forward to peace and a new social order, anxious that the disillusionment and lost opportunity which followed the First World War should not be repeated this time. For that, Attlee was the man. Churchill had no more desire to establish a social democratic Britain than he had to give India its overdue self-government. Attlee was committed to both. The Labour govern-ment of 1945 to 1951 was all in all the most competent, effective and honourable reforming administration in modern British history.
For the first time Labour had an absolute majority in the House of Commons; for the first time it had gained such a degree of middle-class support that it could truly be seen to represent the nation as a whole, and the success of its work can be measured by its genuinely national character. No Prime Minister of the twen-tieth century has been less partisan than Attlee or has had sounder judgment. He gauged his mandate with accuracy and carried it out with a cool modesty which deprived his opponents of any chance of convincing the nation that its affairs were now in the hands of dangerous revolutionaries. No hands were safer than those of this old boy of Haileybury, which, if lacking the panache of Churchill's Harrow, is one of the most respectable of public schools. If Attlee seemed so very reliable it was perhaps due in some measure to the fact that he had no pretensions to being either an aristocratic radical or a rebellious working man.
He came from the most sober of the middle middle-class - just a little above that which in twenty years time the country would come to prefer for its Prime Ministers. With lieutenants as outstanding as Bevin, Cripps and Aneurin Bevan, and with a leader of the opposition as distinguished as Churchill, it is not surprising that Attlee himself appeared so ordinary as to be mediocre, even to his lieutenants themselves.
The strength of Labour's achievement lay in being tied to no one man's genius. It was a collective and almost unideological response to the in inequality of British society and the unemployment of the thirties, seen in the light of the indigenous socialism of Tawney and of the experience of national community engendered by the war. After the election victory the Labour MPs might gather in the House of Commons to sing the 'Red Flag', but it represented no more than a nostalgic reevocation of tribal mythology. In the hard light of day the party's more doctrinaire socialists, led at the time by Professor Laski, chairman of the National Executive, were kept very much at arm's length by the Prime Minister and his closest colleagues.
Labour's agenda could be seen as the missed agenda of the 1920s and 1930s: the coal mines were nationalized at last, so too were the railways and the Bank of England, but little else (Iron and Steel, as a last and only half-believed-in fling, in 1951). Attlee, Morrison and Cripps had ceased to believe that massive nationalization would help the cause of social equality. The economy could be controlled more effectively and less dramation Keynesian principles through the working of the Treasury. Control rather than ownership was the point; control to bring to an end the massive social misery of the recent past. In this they were largely successful. Unemployment, unknown dur-ing the war, hardly reappeared for years; it remained lower than even Beveridge had thought possible. The really large-scale poverty of pre-war Britain was gone for good: where in 1936 Rowntree had found 31.1 per cent of York's workers living below the poverty line, by 1951 it was only 2.8 per cent. The main weak spot here remained the slum areas in the great industrial conurbations, and Labour was not very successful with its hous-ing, but food and health were enormously improved. Infant mortality rates had been 138 per thousand live births at the beginning of the century, they were down to 21 by the 1950s. On the basis of the Beveridge Report the welfare state was solidly erected with its principal glory, the National Health Service, inaugurated in 1948. For this Aneurin Bevan, the most radical of Labour's current leadership, was directly responsible. The health of the nation, which had improved so dramatically during the Second World War, with a fair distribution of basic food, was to be maintained at that level. If education needed to keep pace with health, the achievement here was less complete. The Education Act of 1944 provided a charter for secondary education for all with the raising of the school-leaving age to fifteen and the establishment of a break at the age of eleven. However, while there was certainly a very considerable expansion of good secon-dary education outside the privileged and fee-paying classes, the hard division which grew up between 'grammar' and 'secondary modern' based on the 'eleven-plus' examination was not a fully satisfactory answer to the nation's needs, and the proportion of really working-class children getting anywhere near a university remained decidedly low.
In evaluating the limitations of Labour's success, it is impor-tant to remember that Britain's economic situation after the war was grave in the extreme: assets down, debts up, responsibilities as great as ever. Of the three great allied powers, Russia had suffered by far the most through the war; she also gained enormously by the peace. Britain had suffered much and lost in every way. America had suffered very little and gained every-thing. The war over and with the cool Truman as Roosevelt's successor, she did not see herself on top so as to help needy old friends, but to make the world safe for the speedy realization of all her hitherto, unspelt out ambitions. The new order was to be centred irremediably upon the US. The United Nations were to be located in New York. The World Bank was not to leave American soil. Lend-Lease, on the other hand, was to be immediately terminated. The British Empire should be decently dismantled, to be replaced so far as convenient by a string of American bases spread across the globe. Neither politically nor economically could Britain say a very firm Nay to much of this. It could only procrastinate while waiting for America to wake up to the fact that Soviet power required that their allies be strengthened not weakened, and this of course soon began to happen. The in-auguration of Marshall Aid in 1948 was the result. For Britain the immediate struggle was simply to stay in business; perhaps it was fortunate that her people hardly saw it this way, remaining somewhat mesmerized by the consciousness that they had 'won' the war. For the time being the country was still shorter on food than during the conflict: bread rationing was a post-war pheThe Labour government battled through the econo-mic crisis quite effectively during the chancellorship of Stafford Cripps, but it came nowhere near to achieving any sort of economic miracle. In such circumstances the weight of its social achievement is the more remarkable.
For all its singing of the 'Red Flag' the socialism of Attlee wanted nothing in common with Soviet Communism. The prosecution of the cold war was safe in his hands. So was the development of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent: whatever has been thought of it subsequently, it seemed obviously necessary to Attlee at the time. Doubtless it was too late to save the countries of eastern Europe from a narrow party tyranny imposed by Stalin, but Labour probably did as much as the Conservatives would have done to protest and resist. Indeed Ernest Bevin may well be claimed as Britain's finest conservative Foreign Secretary since Castlereagh. No Tory Foreign Secretary of this century has so well personified the British bull dog - as Churchill himself recognized. His task was to harness the United States to the defence of Europe and the non-Communist world, while surrendering as little as possible to America's anti-imperial syndrome. British responsibility in Palestine was hurriedly aban-doned in 1948, largely under American pressure and fairly disastrously for the future of the Middle East; but on other matters the growing fear of Russia on both sides of the Atlantic was the necessary lever to bring the two into line. The working of the Marshall Plan for Europe's economic recovery owed much to Bevin, while the establishment of NATO in 1949 may well be seen as his supreme achievement and, for better or worse, the principal foundation of British foreign policy for the next half-century.
The welfare state emerged then into the full light of day, on a basis established well before by Lloyd George and even Neville Chamberlain, linked with a far more widespread and deeply pondered anti-Communism than characterized any earlier phase of British history. This undoubtedly helped both the churches and the middle classes overcome their surviving hostility to the degree of socialism to which the government was committed (though, when vested interests were at stake, that hostility was still fierce enough - as within the ranks of the BMA). Neverthe-less, all in all, the inheritance of Temple, Tawney, Beveridge; the Christian Socialist idealism of Cripps; the tough anti-Soviet line of Bevin; the sheer sanity and respectability of Attlee; the fact that at heart Conservatives like Butler and Macmillan could go along with quite a large part of Labour's programme: all this ensured that, despite a not too successful economic strategy, Labour's revolution was the most widely supported and the least seriously challenged of all the great legislative reforms of modern British history. It established a modern, benevolent, and rather bureaucratic shape taken for granted by all British governments until the late 1970s.
The creation of a multi-racial Commonwealth
Perhaps the most decisive and unquestionably right of all Labour's achievements was the granting of independence to India in 1947. If there was no reasonable alternative, it is also true that the speed and lack of tergiversation with which it was done owed a great deal to Attlee himself and to his choice of Lord Mountbatten as the last Viceroy. Rapid withdrawal from so vast and ancient a responsibility combined with a last minute agreeto divide the sub-continent into two separate States — India and Pakistan — was an operation too immense and, really, too unplannable not to bring with it some fearful disorder, yet it is probably true that if Attlee and Mountbatten had not committed themselves to a minimum of delay, the overall breakdown of order throughout the country could have been a great deal worse. Since the late eighteenth century Britain had owed much of her world position to the possession of India. Now it had gone and people at home seemed strangely little affected by the ending of this extraordinary relationship, so that the standard histories of Britain mostly understate the significance of what had happened. The development of British Africa may have appeared to offer sufficient imperial compensation for the loss of India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. At the time it did not occur to people how quickly the rest of the Empire would go too. In the earlier 1950s young colonial officials were still being offered a lifetime of work ahead of them administering some African territory. But in regard to India, Attlee had taken a decision which would consti-tute a decisive precedent for the Empire as a whole: each land could go when it would, provided a majority so desired and some sort of democratic structure, frail though it might be, had first been established. The Commonwealth Conference of 1949 was almost as pregnant as the founding of NATO for the future shape of Britain's relationship with the rest of the world: India and Pakistan could remain within it as republics and therefore, in due course, many another country too. The creation of a multi-racial Commonwealth rendered the dismantling of the Empire a much easier and more positive exercise than it would otherwise have been.
Christian Democracy as principal political
pheof post-war Europe
Attlee's Britain was the third of 'The Big Three'. It was also the first State of a battered western Europe. Germany, Italy and France had all been damaged by the war a great deal more than Britain, and Germany was now truncated of its eastern pro-vinces, filled with millions of refugees from the east, and divided into four zones of occupation. The relationship between Britain and her main European neighbours would be increasingly impor-tant yet never satisfactorily apprehended. On the Continent out of great disaster grew a greater renewal which, while it in some ways paralleled what was happening in Britain under Labour, was also distinctively different. The principal political pheof post-war Europe was Christian Democracy, an animal of which British people tended to be somewhat suspi It was, above all, a Catholic phenomenon though in Germany especially it also attracted considerable support among more conservative Protestants. In pre-war Europe the Catholic community had already demonstrated a strong and deeply rooted tendency towards democracy. But still more powerful, especially in Rome, had been the fear that democracy was Protestant in origin and Socialist, if not Communist, in destiny; that it was closely linked with anti-clericalism and the confisca-tion of Church schools; that Catholicism, being an authoritarian religion, could only really be at home with an authoritarian government. The concordat signed in 1940 between the Vatican and Portugal represents the last important expression of a Catho-lic political approach which had hitherto in practice steadily crushed Catholic aspirations towards democracy. The collapse of Fascism and Nazism, together with the strong par-ticipation of Catholic radicals in the resistance movements, redrew the politico-religious map of western Europe. Effectively the world was now divided between Communist States on the one hand and countries trying to model themselves on the principles of Anglo-Saxon democracy upon the other. The bulk of EuroCatholics (and Protestants too) were left with little alternaexcept for the lunatic fringe, Christians ceased to flirt with Fascism and plunged instead into 'Christian Democracy', with the blessing of Pope Pius XII and under the leadership of Catholic democrats surviving from a former era: in Italy Alcide de Gasperi, Don Sturzo's right hand man from the 1920s; in Germany Konrad Adenauer; in France, Resistance leaders like Georges Bidault.
In its early post-war fervour European Christian Democracy could then appear as a left of centre phenomenon — at least in its leadership and aspirations, though not so clearly in its grass roots voting power. This was less true in Germany, more in France. Here it was not only democratic but also saw itself as an essentially reforming force, a not unnatural ally of Socialist parties. It was committed to much the same sort of programme as Labour in Britain, though having a less coherent experience to draw upon; its policies were vaguer, the gap between immediate circumstance and underlying attitude greater. In France, morethe Mouvement Republicain Populaire (MRP) - just beof its more left-wing character — quickly lost half its electorate to more conservative parties, especially the Gaullists; moreover, the issue of Church schools fatally divided it from the Socialists; while it further failed for long to grasp that democracy at home was not compatible with the continued imposition of French rule abroad. No party suffered more in its integrity from the early 1950s war in Viet Nam. By the mid-1950s its surviving rump had clearly ceased to be a party of the left. In Germany and Italy, where there was no de Gaulle (that is to say, no right wing politician of distinction with an impeccable war record), ChrisDemocracy was not challenged effectively from the right and remained a far larger party, but over the years — and perhaps for that very reason — it moved no less decisively to the right. If in the 1940s it could look not too unlike a continental version of Labour, by the 1960s it had undoubtedly become the principal continental parallel to Conservatism. This was a natural enough development and did not undermine the basic significance of the phenomenon of Christian Democracy. The new community of western Europe, growing out of the devastation of the war and achieving in due course the economic miracle which always just eluded Britain, would be united by an extremely solid Catholic political presence in every single country south of Scandinavia, for finally even Gaullism was but a rather right-wing form of 'Christian Democracy', more adapted to traditional France than the MRP. It was not wholly an accident that, when the European Economic Community was brought into being, the beginning of a politiunited Europe, it was done by a 'Treaty of Rome'.
As Stalin's iron hand imposed Communist regimes all across eastern Europe, the sense of the need for a united front greatly grew. Any lingering hopes of appeasement disappeared in 1948, after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February and the Berlin blockade imposed in June; the following year saw both the Communist conquest of China and the foundation of NATO; 1950 the Korean war. In Malaya Britain now had a hundred thousand troops resisting Communist guerrilla infiltration. The United States, which had so easily concurred in the abandonment of eastern Europe to Stalin five years before, now plunged into an anti-Communist witch-hunt led by the Catholic senator Joe McCarthy. Nothing quite so hysterical happened in Britain but the antipathy for Communism is shown well enough by the fact that 97 out of 100 Communist candidates in the 1950 election lost their deposits and for the first time for many years no Communist candidate was elected.
The Conreturn to power
By 1950 Labour's appointed work was done. The senior members of its government were old and tired; there was little heart to go further or sense of common purpose between the radical left led by Aneurin Bevan and the old leadership. Its two most outstanding members, Cripps and Bevin, both had to retire in ill health. In April 1951 Bevan and his lieutenant, Harold Wilson, actually resigned from the government in protest against details of Hugh GaitskelPs rearmament budget. Yet the country was strangely reluctant to let Labour go or the Tories return to power. The government had not lost one by-election. They retained control by a tiny majority (of eight) in the 1950 General Election and though they lost that of October 1951 by a small number of seats they still possessed more votes than the ConIt was certainly time for Labour to go, but it was equally clear that the Conservatives had no mandate to undo the work of their predecessors and in fact little desire to undo it either. Their programme was to 'free' the nation from the mass of rather dreary controls which the war had brought and State socialism fostered, and to build houses. The economy was anybeginning to prosper and the nation to relax: there were 126,000" television licences in 1949, 763,000 in 1951. The Korean war set things back a little but food rationing was at long last phased out in 1953-1954. Road transport and the iron and steel industry were denationalized, income tax reduced, controls of all sorts lifted, but the core of Labour's achievement was in no way touched. The Conservative leadership recognized that this was what the nation wanted and had no desire to restart the class war.
Churchill, returning to 10 Downing Street in his late seventies, was less a Prime Minister, more a historic monument, asleep or reminiscing on the past. He was no longer interested in either confrontation or adventure. 'Invest in success', declared Butler, his Chancellor of the Exchequer and general handyman, uncon-troversially. The man who had hammered the unions in the twenties was now all for industrial appeasement: settle it, Chur-chill told his minister, 'on their terms'. As to the new European community, which he had himself encouraged to come into existence with a prophetic speech at Strasbourg, he was now not at all interested in Britain's entry - the Empire must come first. George VI died in February 1952 a few months after. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth the next year was not only an occasion of unparalleled splendour, it was also the symbolic rite of passage in which the traditional values of society were reasserted at the very moment when the war and its subsequent austerities could at last be put aside and the age of affluence begin to dawn. For such a ceremony Churchill was the ideal Prime Minister.
The government's principal positive contribution to the new affluence lay in the field of housing, one of Labour's weaker spots. The Conservative manifesto promised 300,000 new houses a year, which Labour decried as just empty words, but Harold Macmillan was appointed Minister of Housing and soon more than fulfilled the target. The three million houses and more built while the Conservatives were in office vastly enlarged middle England, the houseproud middle class. It is arguable that the concentration on private building was damaging for Britain's real economic expansion and was indeed one of the reasons why this country never achieved growth comparable to that of Geror France. These things are relative. The British economy in the 1950s did grow by 2 to 3 per cent a year, more than it has ever done before or since in this century, and domestic prosperity grew still more rapidly. Where there were two and a quarter million cars and one million television sets when the Conserva-tives came to power in 1951, there were eight million cars and 13 million television sets by the time they left office in 1964. Average earnings had risen by 110 per cent, a rise of over 30 per cent on average living standards, allowing for inflation.
It remains true that while Britain's economy appeared to flourish in the 1950s, the growth in affluence was not matched by a comparable growth in production. Elsewhere in Europe, as in Japan, it was different. Europe, especially hitherto industrially backward southern Europe, was hastily breaking through into a modern, urbanized, industrialized society: France, Italy, Spain. A world of peasants was fading almost overnight into a world of high rise flats, pollution, advanced technology. The interface between peasant and technocrat is far more intimate in southern than in northern Europe. Germany, Britain's traditional indus-trial rival, was modernizing on a different tack. Vastly more damaged by the war than Britain, the will to recover proved more emphatic. By the end of the 1950s Britain was in fact slipping badly back in Europe's economic race. Its industrialization and urbanization had taken place too long ago, its war scars were too relatively mild.
The Conservatives who had achieved power somewhat insecurely in 1951 were returned with resounding success in 1955 and again in 1959. The world relaxed. Stalin died and East—West relations grew easier. African empire, it was quietly recognized as the decade wore on, would soon have to go the way of India, and no one minded too much. The thing to do was to make the process as gracious as possible. Even the foolish fiasco of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956, undertaken during Eden's brief premiership, disastrously divisive as it was, proved to matter far less than seemed possible at the time. It certainly hastened the pragmatic recognition that Britain's impower was shrinking fast — faster than people had imeven in the gloomy early post-war days. But what would it matter? Macmillan was now Prime Minister and, under the genial mantle of SuperMac, as the Empire shrank, the Common-wealth expanded. Happy little independent States, each endowed with a parliament on the Westminster model, would succeed to the old colonies. Trade would grow. Everyone would be free and content. 'A wind of change' was blowing across Africa and indeed across the world, Macmillan warned the South African parliament in Cape Town in February i960, a non-racial and democratic wind, but so long as you go along with it, there should be nothing to fear.
There were, of course, some signs in the later 1950s that there might still be things to fear — the Notting Hill race riots in the summer of 1958 being one of the more obvious, and the explo-sion of Britain's very own hydrogen bomb another. Ever since Attlee, the government had been adept at spending ever greater sums on nuclear weaponry without discussion in parliament or -by and large - anywhere else. Only at the end of the 1950 did the horrifying reality of nuclear war hanging over the world since 1945 start to penetrate the imagination of the multitude. Never-theless it is impossible not to recognize the sense of controlled content the nation felt at the time. Unemployment never reached half a million. At the end of the decade industrial production was still rising, the balance of payments was fairly favourable, inflation reasonably low, income tax down (and twopence off the price of beer). National service was phased out after the White Paper on Defence of 1957 while, internationally, cold war con-frontation was being transmuted in the age of Khrushchev into rivalry over space exploration and a race for the moon. Even divorces, which had been high just after the war, were now well down.
The avuncular and unflappable character of Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, provided the ideal coping-stone for this Indian summer of content, a benign and comfortable age. In earlier days he had been more drawn to enthusiasm. As a very young man he was close to becoming a Roman Catholic under the influence of his tutor and friend Ronald Knox, almost but not quite. In the inter-war years he had been the Conservative protester, both over unemployment and over Munich, so much so that he was close to joining the Labour Party, almost but not quite. By the early fifties, as Minister of Housing, he had become the most sure-footed of all the Con-servative team, and in the post-Suez disarray he righted the boat with remarkable aplomb. A liberal Conservative if ever there was one, he yet now seemed rather less reformist than Rab Butler and more acceptable to the Tory right wing. All things to all men, he was the crofter's grandson who believed in one nation; the Duke of Devonshire's uncle who saw fit to bring the Duke into his government - and got away with it. 'You have never had it so good', he told the nation and though that rather simple message has subsequently produced many sneers, it was yet substantially the truth and people of later, more harassed, generations would look back to the age of Macmillan - so much more comfortable and relaxed than that of Churchill and Attlee before it, more confident and hopeful than the age of Wilson after it - with increasing nostalgia. If the affluence was genuine and widely spread, it was, of course, part of a global movement of prosperity and political relaxation. In its local expression it was firmly grounded upon the maintenance of Attlee's welfare state with which it combined a renewed stress on personal freedom and the celebration of England's past. Macmillan was Britain's last truly imperial premier. He epitomized the central social, political and religious judgment of the age: in everything a little bland, a little too reluctant to delve uncomfortably into the murky deep. Nevertheless beneath the blandness, humanity steadily prevailed. In July 1955 Ruth Ellis, the mother of two young children, was hanged in Oxford Gaol for shooting her lover. He had been both unfaithful and cruel. She had just had a miscarriage, brought on very probably by his punching her in the stomach. She wanted to die. Eden was Prime Minister at the time and Major Lloyd George, an elderly nonentity, Home Secretary. That such a thing could happen, despite protests, for a crime which in other western countries would certainly no longer have been punished in this way says a good deal about the underlying unimaginative moral conservatism still normative in the mid-1950s. But in fact she was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. The Commons lobby for the abolition of capital punishment had been growing steadily stronger, and the very next year on a free vote there would be a majority for abolition, though this would only become law ten years later. The hanging of Ruth Ellis appears strangely barbaric to the Englishman of the 1980s; to most Englishmen of the 1950s such a thing still seemed in theory justifiable enough, as running a world-wide empire seemed justi-fiable; both had seemed so for centuries. In practice, however, neither appeared any more quite the right thing to do. Macmillan's genius lay in the skill with which he epitomized a somewhat jaunty Conservatism while in fact keeping the ship of State moving rather rapidly forward. British society was in reality changing fast in the 1950s and woe to them who failed to see beneath the drapery of tradition the emergence of a new and unimperial age.
REFERENCES
Hastings A. (1991) A history of English Christianity 1920-1990, SCM PRESS,
London

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