The British Attempt to Construct a Socialist Commonwealth, 1945-1951

ladies and gentlemen this lecture is on the post-war settlement put forward by Attlee government and I began to talk about that in the last lecture and discussed in particular the welfare state which were instituted by the athlete's government completing reforms of earlier governments and liberals before the first world war and then the wartime coalition and now I'll discuss the other elements of the settlement the second element was a belief in planning and that was a great contrast with the end of the First World War when planning and nationalization had rapidly been succeeded by D control and laid the Labour Party in its 1945 manifesto called let us face the future so that Labour would plan from the ground up and Herbert Morrison who was leader of the House of Commons said in 1946 that planning as it is now taking shape in this country under our eyes is something new and constructively revolutionary which will be regarded in times to come as a contribution to civilization as vital and distinctively British as parliamentary democracy and the rule of law but what did planning mean during the war of course goods had been allocated by a policy of rationing and that was what some people in the labour party believed in by planning and one economic advisor wrote in his diary I fear that systemic crips who was President of the Board of Trade and then Chancellor in the Labor government I fear that crips wants a detailed economic plan in the sense of a statement of exactly how many shirts how many pairs of boots and shoes etc we should produce over each of the next five years this I believe if taken seriously would lead to the sacrifice of all the flexibility which a proper use of the pricing and cost system demands and all that obviously would mean an end to the idea of consumer sovereignty and might even involve directional labor which would be unacceptable to the trade unions so the Labour Party moved away from the idea of retaining rationing as a permanent system which really quite unrealistic I think and they said that they would keep controls primarily to deal with shortages particularly shortages of food and the controls would end when the shortages a need and that meant the Labour government began a process in the late forties of decontrol which was accelerated by the Conservatives when they came to office in 1951 and they came broadened the view that would better to return to the market and in 1949 Harold Wilson as President of the Board of Trade announced what he called a bonfire of controls getting rid of many licensing arrangements for the building trade and other controls rationing was not finally ended until the early 1950s that clearly by planning labor didn't mean Ortiz came not to mean simply the continuation of wartime controls and rationing so what did it mean it didn't mean an industrial strategy of the kind French would have in Japan had a control of industry by the state there was really no long term policy for industry no investment policy and no real idea perhaps what to do with the nationalize industries and you may say it was difficult to achieve that when the trade unions were so important a part of the Labor Party and in practice the Labour government came to be much more concerned with the stabilization of the economy rather than problems of planning the industrial structure and Harold Wilson said that the great gap in the labor part is policy at that time was it had no real policy for private industry was going to nationalize certain industries now camreta loom but it had no real policy for planning private private sector and you may criticize the government of that time for evading all sorts of difficult questions about Britain's industrial efficiency which would become important later on and indeed planning unlike the welfare state did not last for the whole of the post-war period it's indeed you can say that planning and the use of role of the state is the main victim of post-war politics that it came to a sudden juddering halt in the late 1970s in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was elected and attending any party now would use planning as a slogan but in the immediate post-war period it was important well as I said the trade unions played a fundamental part in the Labour Party and the great trade union leader of the interwar years Ernest Bevin was foreign secretary and in practice the second most important person in the government over the whole field in some ways even more important than the Prime Minister and Bevin before becoming foreign second in the wartime government he'd been Minister for labour and national service in from 1940 to 1945 and when he entered the ministry in 1940 he made this comment they say that Gladstone was at the Treasury from 1860 to 1930 I'm going to be Minister of Lai from 1940 to 1990 and what he meant by that was that the labor movement organized labor should be regarded as an equal partner with employers and other groups in discussions with government the decisions about the trade unions and about working people should not be taken as he believed they'd been taken the 20s and 30s without discussion and indeed the consent of the labor movement and Bevin believes decisions which had led to the general strike in which he played a prominent part had occurred because labor wasn't treated as an estate of the realm of particular importance and after the general strike Bevin came to the view that it was no good trying to resist the capitalist state but it was better to try and get an established and recognized position of partnership with it so the trade unions you can see this proce in the 20s and 30s were gradually accommodating themselves to the capitalist state rather than resisting it and the process was symbolized in the 1930s when the Secretary of the trade union movement Walter citrine accepted a knighthood from the national government they were partners in the state and recognized by the state and that sense was increased strengthened with the rise of the dictators in the 1930s when even the most left-wing trade union leaders came to accept that the capitalist States was worth defending against external enemies and a trade unions indeed were in the lead in pressing for greater rearm and to defend the country and one of the reasons that Neville Chamberlain failed in 1940 failed to continue in government was that he couldn't get the support of the Labor Party all the trade unions and so the trade unions became very fundamental obviously with a Labour government and during the period of the Labor government from 1948 to 1950 you got the first and perhaps only really successful voluntary incomes policy whereby the trade unions agreed not to use their bargaining power to the full but to accept wage restraint because they said the other policies of the Labour government were leading to social justice and it was a fair society in that fair society the unions ought to make their contribution now that broke down that wages policy with the Korean War which led to inflation it might have broken down anyway now um Bevin said I want to be Minister of Labour till 1990 well he was Minister of Labour til the winter of discontent of nineteen seventy eight nine because Bevins policies of the tea you see in the trade union should be consulted on all major issues of policy was accepted by not only by Labor Government's by conservative governments the governments of Churchill and Macmillan as much as the govern directly so the tea you see the trade unions did become an estate of the realm but you may say they took it too far and it broke down in the winter discontent and Margaret Thatcher was the first Prime Minister to adopt policies of trade unions didn't like without consulting with them and that ended as it were Bevins period in the Minister Ministry of Labour and the whole idea of collective solidarity gradually broke down after the war Patrick couldn't be preserved perhaps it was something special in wartime not easily to be reproduced in the peacetime era and when later government's came to try and impose incomes policies they didn't couldn't do so with the ease of the Atlee government's first incomes policy the need to impose an income as policy of course was a consequence of full employment because it increased a trade union bargaining power enormous lee if government so it was thought to Margaret Thatcher came to power governments couldn't run the economy so as to increase unemployment it was thought that would lead to defeat electoral defeat because of people's memories of the 1930s they thought with new keynesian techniques you could avoid unemployment but that meant that one of the constraints that you like on union power had disappeared so you had to find a substitute and until Margaret Thatcher that substitute was seen in some form of incomes policy and the argument was which which Bevan accepted I think that in return for the union's being given such an important role in government they ought to cooperate with the government and restrain the use of bargaining power in the general interest now that had one floor which was pointed out by one trade unionist as early as 1950 very prescient and a key to what happened I think in the winter of discontent he said we were not meant to be public servants to guard the interest of the nation we were appointed to protect our members and to further their interests within the framework of the law does anyone ask the employer to have the national interests in mind instead of the interest of his firm it's all right having the national interests in mind but we are not the right people to have it and it's a great problem for a party of the left and a labor part is often seen as a radical party party the left but insofar as the powerful trade union element in it can you not see it in an alternative way as a rather defensive and conservative movement with a vested interest in preserving the practices of traditional practices if you like of the trade unions which Margaret Thatcher was later to undermine radicalize whatever you call it because those practices were seen not to be compatible with industrial efficiency but until Margaret Thatcher and this is a continuation of policies I think from the before the first world war even the much criticized national governments of the 20s and 30s followed it the emphasis was always on conciliating labor trying to bring them into the system trying to weaken their the power of class conflict and class war if you like but you may say and I think the Margaret Thatcher would have said this that we paid - higher price for being so successful in containing social conflict she would say these were policies of appeasement and that we paid a high price in the loss of industrial efficiency in trying to do that but at any rate it's fair to say in the Acne government this conflict wasn't there and the athlete government was remarkably successful both in increasing economic growth industrial efficiency they'll say later and in establishing a very good relationship with trade union movement so those are two further elements of the post-war settlement in addition to the welfare state the planning element and the relationship with the trade unions as in the state of the realm and I now come to what you may think of as the main element of the settlement which no government has dared to touch in fundamentals since it was set up namely the National Health Service passed legislation in 1946 and came into effect in 1948 now that was prefigured it's fair to say by the coalition government which issued a white paper a calling for national health service in 1944 and it's fair to say that a National Health Service was common ground between the parties but the coalition government's proposal was for a much less comprehensive one than the one put forward by an IRA in Bevin because the Coalition was arguing for a National Health Service under local authorities there was already in existence rather half hasn't patchwork before the war of municipal hospitals run by some local authorities but not others and also voluntary hospitals which were fee paying and there was a bit of a dog's breakfast a little bit of a dull breakfast really and the when you went into one of the voluntary hospitals you were asked if you could contribute of course some people couldn't contribute reserve rather unfortunate anecdotes of one lady who came in expecting a baby and was asked if she could contribute and she said unfortunately couldn't because she needed all her resources to pay for the baby but the baby was stillborn and then she was said well you don't need that money now can you give it to the hospital and the labor party was proposing a much more comprehensive national system but the meant the main hostility to it came not from you may be surprised not so much from the Conservatives as from the British Medical Association from the doctors some of the doctors are now resisting reform of the health Sir they resisted every change in the Health Service since it was set up but they also resisted the Health Service itself and the BMA house in 1945 they cheered the defeat and beverage for his seat in barrack on tweed and the former Secretary of the BMA dr. Alfred Cox when he saw an iron Bevins bill said I have examined the bill and it looks to be uncommon ly like the first step and a big one towards national socialism as practiced in Germany the medical service there was early put under the dictatorship of a medical Fuhrer this bill will establish the Minister of Health in that capacity it's fair to say some people in America think Obama's health care system is communism so there's some analogy there and it's also feds at that time the BMA represented primarily the better off doctors who gained considerably from the system before the Health Service from contributions from patients now the key elements of the Bevin system which still remain are firstly that it was universal would apply to every person in the country you could opt out of it but you didn't need to opt in everyone would automatically be a member of it if they wished secondly it was free at source thirdly and this was the most important thing that an R in Bevin did it nationalized the hospitals the hospital weren't to be run anymore by local authorities or voluntary bodies but nationalized and run from the centre because Bevin argued that other than local authorities were too small and the rates were insufficient to sustain a service and there'd be too much inequality between rich and poor areas and what Bevin wanted was a national service available to people in poor areas as well as in rich without destroy our discrimination and Bevin said some degree of hyperbole perhaps this is the biggest social experiment in the social services that the world has ever seen undertaken and it was the first health system in the world to offer free care to the whole population and the first comprehensive system to be based not on the insurance principle and of course the old lloyd-george system was but on a national provision of services available to all and Bevin saw this as a first step towards building a socialist society because he said this is to be funded by the taxpayer and by no other source and he also incidentally favored not the beverage system but a non-contributory welfare system because he asked why should the poor contribute to welfare payments and that this showed the superiority of collective action over individual action now this led to a problem because when the Health Service was set up at Lee the Prime Minister made a conciliatory speech saying that the health service owed something to those in all political parties and I Bevin then made a speech which got him into trouble and probably cost the Labour Party votes in which he reminded people that he'd had to go down the mines at the age of 12 and this had been a result of the Tory mine owners and he said he had great contempt for them and that to him they would always be lower than vermin famous phrase and he said that tourism was organised spiv are' well this wasn't the consensual attitude in which at Lee helped the Health Service to begin now Bevin saw himself in the cabinet as the main representative of democratic socialism and indeed he was one of just two cabinet ministers in the government who had not been in the cat' wartime coalition so he'd not been part of the consensus of wartime consensus now Nigel Lawson later Tory Chancellor the exchange was the nearest Britain had to a religion that they lost belief in God or other principal but the National Health says religion believed in without any evidence fate but it created problems from the beginning because if it was free and sauce demand for it in theory would be unlimited because if any good is free we want perhaps as much of it as we can the health is an unlimited good if you like but of course the funding for it were limited and certainly other ministers who clamp all the Education Minister transport ministers and others they were competing with health for their budgets now they would ask themselves why should the health budget to be unlimited when our budgets are being limited and of course the Treasury that's decided midst very limited of funds and money how much the Health Service should get compared with other services now Bevin said in a Democratic Socialist you can't do that and that the health service should depend on the demand for health which is an unlimited good and who had to spend more for it that was just the price you needed to pay to cure people of their illnesses and you shouldn't have any petty Treasury interference with it and that was going to lead to the crisis which blew up the Labour government in 1951 and kept it divided for 13 years when Bevin had an argument with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gates kill over the seemingly trivial issue whether charges should be imposed for false teeth and spectacles and as a seemingly trivial issue but as I shall try and show in a few minutes it blew up the Labour government but that at any rate is the next element of the post-war settlement and broadly it has survived it's still a universal service the core is still free obviously pay for prescription charges and appliances and and so on but the core of it is free you do not pay the doctor you do not pay to stay in hospital and so on and it is universal and I think it's fair to say that no government of any colour has dared publicly to suggest that any of these features be and they think that they would lose votes by it whatever imagine Lawson said now the next element of the settlement which hasn't lasted was nationalization and that was the nationalization of various public utilities the Bank of England was the first in 1946 later D nationalized by another Labour government the Blair government in its first days in 1997 the mines nationalized in 1947 together with electricity gas and the railways and then briefly iron and steel in 1951 now we now see nationalization as a part of an ideological choice and certainly true that some people in the labour government did see it that way but most I think didn't and most in the country didn't because none of these industries or organisations were under undiluted private control all what either were subject to some measure of public control even the iron and steel industry was run in the 30s by a cartel and all of them were the subject of an inquiry or official report during the war most of them recognized that they should be nationalized often by chairmen who were conservatives and substantial parts of many of them were red already owned some of them by local authorities for example a lot of transport was run by local authorities many gas undertakings were run by local authorities so it didn't seem the huge ideological shift if you like that it may seem to us today and the gas industry over a third of them were were already controlled by local authorities electricity was 60% publicly owned a quarter of bath and coach services were under local authorities so there weren't really examples of an adulterated pure enterprise so the issue - most people didn't seem one with public versus private ownership but one of public ownership versus public control and when the Conservatives D nationalized iron and steel in the 50s they didn't privatizing as Margaret Thatcher privatized they established it under a public cartel so that there wasn't there what it wasn't fully and there was still control and planning over the industry so it was seen as a practical answer at that time which convinced many people who were not themselves socialists but in all this was a very important and crucial change occurring in the labour party because the original idea or program of the Labour Party had been nationalization was somehow an end in itself a part of achieving the socialist goal of a society based on fellowship but now of becoming a means to an end to be justified by whether it increased or decreased the efficiency of business or industry and you may say it's a practical pragmatic question if you find it doesn't there's no argument for nationalization very different sort of position from the original socialist position movement if you like from socialism to social democracy and labor was gradually moving away from a commitment to wholesale nationalization in 1949 it issued a policy statement called labor believes in Britain and instead nationalization was appropriate where private enterprise was and I quote failing the nation but this meant that where private enterprise was successful who didn't need nationalization and in 1950 and 51 there were very few new candidates for nationalization nationalization was no longer really a center of labour policy in a way which it was in 1945 so that is the final element of the settlement which I want to mention and it hasn't of course lasted and the mixed economy so-called lasted till Margaret Thatcher and then she privatized everything and when in 1997 Tony Blair came to power the question wasn't what labor would nationalize but what it would privatize and the Labour Party actually went further in privatization after 1997 than Margaret Thatcher so nationalization that part of the settlement is dead now I want to sum up the achievements of this government before coming on to its demise and his achievements were very considerably indeed between 1945 and 50 Britain increased her exports by 200% and brought the balance of payments into balance before the Korean War which had worsened it but no one thought in 1945 that could be achieved so rapidly second and by contrast at the end of the First World War full employment was preserved a great contrast with the interwar years unemployment was under 1% for the whole period of the Labour government you look at the depressed areas in the Northeast in 1938 unemployment had been 38% in 1951 it was 1% and by 1988 it was 13% again it was going up and his half course higher now output between 1945 and 51 increased by a third real GD gross domestic product rose by 3 percent per annum from 1947 to 1951 and that's the highest four-year rise in GDP in the 20th century wage rates rose on average 6 percent a year compared with prices 4 or 5 percent year so it was a small increase in standard of living each year but it was smaller than it needed been because so much of the increase in output was steered into investments and exports which the country needed and therefore it was not apparent to the ordinary consumer who took the view that there was too much rationing and austerity and you often read accounts of that period which says it was very gray you couldn't buy any consumer goods and so on well there are two things to be said about that the first is that the increase was shifted as I say into investments in exports but the second is that most of these accounts come from comfortable people of the middle classes who couldn't buy the consumer goods that they wanted and could afford but for poorer people it wasn't such a difficult time because price because of rationing prices were held down and so they were able to buy the essentials of life easily than they could have done before so you got to be careful from which side look at it it's fair to say it was the middle classes that were the key marginal voters under our electoral system and that was where labour lost seats in 1950 and 51 it had gained enormously in 1945 particularly the suburban areas of London and Birmingham and those were the areas which swung heavily against labour in 1950 and 51 but the working-class vote increased labour got a higher vote from the working classes in 1950 and 51 that it had in 1945 which is why it lost the election of 1951 despite getting more votes from the Conservatives because the labour party piled up huge majorities in working-class Aires where they weren't needed but lost in the key marginal seats so economically on the whole the Labour Party had government very successful and also you may argue the greatest social advances century with the National Insurance Act the National Assistance Act and the National Health Service that's now social welfare based not on charity but on individual rights and maintaining civilized living standards for millions of people the school-leaving age was raised to 15 and that too was an achievement fundamental the reduction in particular of insecurity and the achievement of one of Labour's fundamental aims as a party the universal minimum for everyone the social investigators seabone Roundtree had studied York at the beany of the 20th century and through the 20th century to look at poverty and in 1936 he found that 31 percent of the working-class lived in poverty by 1950 the figure was down to 3 percent and that was not due early to welfare but to high wages due to trade union bargaining power and above all to full employment and Roundtree found in 1936 unemployment was the cause of poverty in 29% of and low wages in 33% of cases in 1950 the figures were not percent because you had full employment and 1% due to low wages and Roundtree said remaining poverty seemed primarily caused by sickness and old age and he thought very optimistically the advance of the health service and increases in pensions could deal with that so it was a very optimistic period now abroad also the Labour Party had much success to its credit it instituted policies of collective security through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and played a part with America in resisting what it saw the gresham in Korea and it decolonized some said much too rapidly in India but at least Britain avoided the long drawn-out and hopeless battle the French thought in Algeria or Bell the Belgians in the Congo and the Labour Party's policies in India was summed up very well I think by the Chancellor Hugh Doulton in 1947 he said this in his diary if you are in a place where you are not wanted and weigh who have not got the forced squash those who don't want you the only thing to do is to come out this very simple truth will I think have to be applied to other places - eg Palestine I don't believe that one person a hundred thousand in the country cares happens about it so long as British people are not being mauled about and I think that was a fair estimate now it's not wholly as you'd expect a holy one siding record of success there were failures the first failure which damaged the Labour Party very considerably was a cold crisis in 1947 when 24 hours notice of coal all electricity rather had to be cut off in the South East of England for 24 hours and the motto was people said with food shortages the food Minister was straight she and the Minister for the mines were shin hwal and the motto who came to be starved with straight Chi and shiver with shin hwal that didn't work then the Labour Party didn't have a effective policy to meet the shortage of dollars which had not been seen clearly before 1945 and there were periodic economic crises with the dollars leaving the country then the Labour Party didn't manage to do much about the Palestine problem that you may say not particularly to discredit since no one else has been able to do anything about it either then some people argued that too much of national output went into exports and capital formation and that it was asking too much of the electorate and they should have increased consumption more but that Atlee would have replied using a phrase of Margaret Thatcher that he believed in Victorian values of saving and thrift and so on and not in consumption and he said a phrase often used then that there was a national effort would all ought to be involved with to get the economy back on its feet Atlee was a bad chooser of ministers he kept elderly dugouts in government much longer than they should have been and should have brought on the young and he should have promoted in my opinion are not in Bevin who he thought should be successor incidentally and he had poor judgment about that then one of the problems hit the Labour government and he broke it up was rearmament following the Korean War and that was where the heavy expenditure occurred in my opinion which did the most damage to the prospects of British industrial recovery in the 50s because it got in the way of the export drive just when Germany and Japan were returning to world markets they weren't involved in heavy rearmament obvious reasons but of course people in that government had memories of appeasement in the 30s and they thought to be very dangerous to appease Stalin in career as it had been dangerous to appease Hitler and so they had they thought they had to take part in rearmament nevertheless and before going on the demise of the government this was a new and very important settlement the word consensus is often used but I prefer the word settlement because so much of it has has remained and a one aspect of the settlement not often noticed is the effect it had on the Conservatives that they who could only get to power if they accepted the main elements of it but if they had supporting traditional free-market policies if they'd said they didn't believe in the health service on the welfare state they would never have been returned to government but as I say it was a breach with the labor view the traditional labor view that there were two forms of society a capitalist society and a socialist society and the aim of the labour party was to replace one with another because the utterly obvious conclusion from the athlete government was that capitalism could in fact be reformed now in 1946 one of the younger members of the Labour Party to become a minister in the Wilson and Callaghan governments Anthony Crosland wrote an important book called the future of socialism and Crossland argued that at Lee's reforms had so fundamentally transformed the capitalist system that socialism itself had to be revised and he said that many liberal minded people have now concluded that Keynes plus modified capitalism plus welfare state works perfectly well and I think in that statement you can see the route so took a long time to get it formed of new labor under Blair where clause was abolished and the Labour Party was no longer centrally concerned with state control so capitalism was saved in a sense by the labor governments relying on the influence if you like of beverage and Keynes neither whom were labor both were liberal some on the left and Bevin was one of them tended to attack labor governments for saving capitalism they said they shouldn't have saved if they should move onto socialism but oddly enough no one on the right thanked Keynes and beverage for saving capitalism and people on the right like Margaret Thatcher tend to attack they didn't thank him for saving it so the fundamental alternatives which seemed to be there were no longer there and there you had a much different political battle it was reflected in the 1950s by the phrase Pascal ISM because the Chancellor conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government that succeeded Atlas was RA Butler and the Labour Chancellor at the end of the late governor had been huge eight skill and they said they really there was a lot of agreement between them but skill ISM now one other feature of the settlement I think is worth noticing it was a highly centralizing settlement there was no what the Labour Party was sort of as nonsense about devolution or decentralization or the big society because the Labour Party then said only a strong central state could ensure equality and fair shares and the that benefits should be funded by central government the health service should be central Bevin although Welsh strongly resisted any separate Welsh or Scottish health said he would have hated devolution he said sheep don't change their character when they cross the Welsh border if you're ill is that if you're ill the treatment you need doesn't depend on whether you Welsh or Scottish or English but the sort of treatment you need how ill you are depends on need and not on geography and they would therefore been very much opposed to devolution now the settlement was attacked as I say very strongly from the left by Bevin later by Tony Benn and so on as a substitute for socialism but the more fundamental attack came later on from the right and particularly from Margaret Thatcher now the main criticism that Margaret Thatcher was to make of it was it was too concerned with fair distribution than with increasing production and the real problem in Britain was how to make Britain more efficient and there was too much guilt in what she saw the ruling class derived from the 30s and we ought to get rid weather radically at outdate industrial method trade union management and so on and that in a part of that Chris from the bit unfair because the Labor Party did as I've shown succeed in increasing industrial production and they took the view that the welfare state and the and the health service they were valuable in themselves but they'd also give you a more effective population more capable of of production and that you would lose less days in absenteeism and so on so and you lose a whole of the population effectively and but they're it's fair to say they didn't entirely attack the restricted practices and difficulties that plagued British industry it was summed up well I think that John Maynard Keynes in a memo to the Cabinet in March 1945 near the end of the war he said if by some sad geographical slip the American Air Force it is too late now to hope for much from the enemy he said if the American Air Force were to destroy every factory in the northeast coast and in Lancashire at an hour when the directors were sitting there and no one else we should have nothing to fear he said how else we are to regain the exuberant inexperience which is necessary it seems to success I cannot surmise now the problem was that if they couldn't increase industrial efficiency how were they going to pay for this wonderful welfare state and all the rest of it and in 1951 Herbert Morrison who was on the right of the party said there was a tendency in education and the other social services for expenditure to rise from year to year without full regard to the taxable capacity of the country to a greater extent that had happened in recent years what was desirable must be judged in the light of what was practicable from the point of view of long term finance and Stafford Cripps who's on the Left said they were reaching the limit on expenditure which could be raised by taxation and there was a serious danger that obligations might be entered into which the country could not meet in future years and in 1949 the first little breach came in neither Evans Health Service because a bill was introduced making it possible to impose prescription charges they weren't actually impose by labor they were imposed by the Conservative government afterwards and Bevin accepted watering it down or simply he had the authority to do it he didn't actually do it and the reason he conceded in part was a Chancellor at that time also Stafford Cripps who was as Bevin thought a socialist and basically on the right side and he thought that government was still moving towards socialism and he crypts argue the charges on prescriptions would simply be a response to abuse - what Bevin himself called the ceaseless cascade of medicine which is pouring down British throats so you could argue it was to protect the health service and not to raise revenue and thereby principle of free National Health Service preserve now then things changed because Crips became very seriously ill and had to resign in the autumn of 1950 and he was replaced - Bevin sharra by the young hew Gaitskell who just entered part in 1945 and Bevin wrote a letter Coe test - at Leiby cuz he said Gaitskell had no roots or experience in the labor movement and he was a middle class intellectual from Oxford and really didn't understand the trade unions grave mistake to appoint such a person and then in the spring of 1951 the foreign sector Ernest Bevin died and was replaced by Herbert Morrison and so the two major posts and the government had gone and an hour in Bevin who had great claims either of them from the Health Service got neither and actly did not treat him well Bevin would have been content with the position of colonial secretary wanted that but actually said he couldn't put him in that position because he was too racially prejudiced and what he meant by that he was too Pro black and against the settlers the white settlers in Rhodesia and South Africa so he didn't get that chance and he was moved in January 1951 to the post of Minister of Labour it's important to note he wasn't Minister of Health but the time the dispute arose in April 19 he was in the Ministry of Labour and that was a particularly sensitive position because were the problems of rearmament in the Korean War the you'd have to hold down wages in some way if you were going to be able to finance rearm and so the vast sensitive position and perhaps not the position that a leads should have been given to a leading figure in the labour party now the new Minister of Health was Hillary Markland who was outside the cabinet so health was being downgraded and the position of Bevin opposed to the charges was made difficult because Hillary Marquand agreed to the charges so gates kill and the government could say well the Ministry of Health actually agrees to the charge and who were you to oppose them now Hugh Gates kill was determined that the anomalous position he sword of health were back with only service without a ceiling of expenditure expended unlimited that that should stop and unlike crips he wasn't prepared to tolerate Bevin just saying he wanted as much on the health service as people demanded so he said there has to be a ceiling now on the other side Bevin was not prepared to accept and gates kill what he'd been prepared to accept from crypts because he didn't regard Gaitskell as a socialist he thought he was moving in away from socialism and gates kill proposed all sorts of things which fortunately perhaps for him did not become public it's now known from the records he proposed a charge for hospital stay for a stay in hospital in 1950 when it never it was rejected but he proposes something not even Margaret Thatcher proposed I think and a beverage incidentally was in favor of hospital charges on the grounds it shouldn't be more profitable for a patient to be in hospital when he could be at home rather hard justification that gates co-produced a ceiling on the health service budget and he said that ceiling could only be achieved if you had charges for false teeth and spectacles now Bevin said argued in cabinet that the rearmament program was a to large and couldn't possibly be met that the raw materials would not be forthcoming and on that he was proved correct and the Conservative government that succeeded labor led by Churchill scaled down the rearmament program gage skills position was we had to do what we could in rearmament because we had to keep the Americans onside there was great fear the Americans would withdraw from Europe if other countries didn't make their contribution but Bevin said that the program couldn't be achieved now furthermore there was something I think even more fundamental than these points that Bevin was beginning to take the view that the government was going in the wrong direction it had no longer any purpose for its food existing that previously whatever the difficulties and setbacks it was moving forward towards some form of socialism have you defined it and that was confirmed I say by the fact that crips was the extreme he he respected were moving towards that principle now he thought it was going in the wrong direction coming under the influence of middle-class economists that couldn't achieve anything more and Bevin resigned from the government with Harold Wilson another cabinet minister in May 1951 and really took the view that nothing gained by remaining in office on that basis but again had an even further point that Devin talking it was this the basis of his belief in a free health service was that people could be trusted to be responsible and from that point of view the charges wouldn't be needed because the increases in expenditure were merely temporary it was a backlog because of bad treatment before the Health Service existed and that was true that a lot of people would see complaints basically women who weren't covered by the lloyd-george Insurance Scheme hadn't gone to the doctor because they couldn't afford to do so so therefore Bevin said there's a large backlog which will naturally fall as it is cleared so spending will fall and on that too he was correct the conservatives established a committee in the 1950s to look at overspending in the health service the committee concluded wasn't overspending that the Health Service budget was actually being contained but this resignation in 1951 was absolutely crucial because it meant the end of the first of the post-war dreams that Britain could move towards a socialist society perhaps a society like that of Sweden or Norway that was Bevins view and he came to be bewildered in the 1950s when the tide seemed to be turning other way and socialism seemed to become a lost battle because the Solidarity of the working classes as he saw it was eroded by affluence and individualism and in the late 50s he attacked what he called the affluent society he said how our people have achieved material prosperity in excess of their moral stature and in 1959 he said to a colleague history gave them the chance the working class he meant they didn't take it now it is probably too late it was a path Britain could have taken towards a socialist society it's interesting in later years both neither Bevin nor gates Gill held office again both died prematurely Bevin in 1960 and Gaitskell in 1963 many years later gates kills widow told a journalist even a friend of Bevin that in fact Bevin should have been leader and she said he was a natural leader for a socialist party of course that raises the question of whether labor was or was still a Socialist Party but anyway it ended that particular dream now the Left saw 1945 and in particular National Health Service as the beginning of a period of socialist advance and a Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was very fond of writing about the forward march of labour but in fact I think in hindsight you can say the Ackley government was not the beginning it was the culmination it was as much an end rather than the beginning that we moved after a long hesitations perhaps in a very different direction and particular under Margaret Thatcher it was the first Prime Minister to grow up in the post-war period and who asked the question can we really afford these traditional institutions and habits we had and we've inherited from the Acne government perhaps the welfare state was alright in the past but do we still want it in an affluent society and the settlement broke down an attack from the right so that I think was very important now the left as I say was disappointed by 50s and what happened afterwards but I think in a sense the Conservatives also came to be disappointed by what happened in post-war Britain and I now want to explain why that happened because the central aim of conservatives had been to maintain British power in the world and when in October 1940 Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain a leader of the Conservative Party become Prime Minister in May but chained and remain leader of the Conservative Party he had to retire to a terminal illness in October Churchill asked himself am i by temperament and conviction able sincerely to identify myself with the main historical conceptions of tourism and the answers you won't be surprising your answer was yes but he said he could he thought since at all times I faithfully served two causes which I think stands supreme and these two parties were the maintenance of the enduring greatness of Britain and her Empire and the historical continuity of her Island life so for Churchill the essence of conservatism was that Britain should remain a great power but at the end of the war was called the big three and earnest bevy in the Foreign Secretary in the Labour government though not a CLE agreed with that view and it was Ernest Bevin who pressed hardest for Britain to become an atomic power not so much because of Russia but to stand up to America he said we could not afford to acquiesce in an American monopoly of this new development it was a symbol of Independence and the Chancellor and the presence Board of Trade worried about the cost that Bevin said we've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs we've got to have a bloody Union Jack flying on top of it and actly actually rather finagled a decision because the key committee which made the decision excluded the economics ministers who said we couldn't afford it and decide to have it the cabinet and Parliament weren't told talk about Prime Minister Graham they weren't told it came out in an answer to a parliamentary question on the defence estimates that one of the one of the items of expenditure was expansion British atomic weapons when actually later in life was asked why I didn't tell his cabinet colleagues he said some of them weren't fit to be trusted with matters of that sort so we would become a great power and act Lee said the most important thing Bevin did was standing up to the Americans now secondly the second thing that Lee did and Churchill followed and you may think good thing or a bad thing there be a lot of division of opinion was to resist American pressure to become part of a supranational Europe the Americans took the view they couldn't afford to pay endlessly for Europe to defend herself it was time Europe defended herself on her own and the couldn't do it with squabbling countries and the squabbling countries wouldn't allow an independent nationalist Germany to rearm so they all had to get together and join together in some Federation and that way rearm and form collective security so the American burden would be lightened and that was not something that Bevin wants to do or Churchill want to do and with the Churchill government in 1952 Anthony Eden made an important statement of the foreign sector an important statement America which some of you will agree with he warned the Americans against trying to push a country to act against its basic instincts and he said you will realize I am talking about repeated suggestions that Britain should join a Federation on the conscience of Europe and he then said this is something we all know in our bones we could never do and you may think that is a profound comment or you may think it's backward looking but it was a view of the Conservative government and Eden said to one of his advisors in the Foreign Office he said the letters I get from constituents he represented a constituency in Warwickshire he said they're all from people in Canada Australia New Zealand you know me so there are the people who Joseph says where their relatives are and he said the continent is where they're where their ancestors are buried that's what they think in the continent they don't want to be involved with Europe now we didn't succeed in becoming the big three I think one of the big three I think it's fair to say and did we do badly in the post-war period because we try to do too much one of the scientific advisors the Labour government say Henry Tizard said in 1949 we persist in regarding ourselves as a great power capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties he said we are not a great power and never will be again we are a great nation but if we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation let us take warning from the fate of great powers of the past and not burst ourselves with pride see Aesop's fable of the Frog so that I think was another area and now the Conservatives struggled hard to combat that decline of Britain as a great power but it's fair to say they didn't succeed and the conservative played as much of the role of the Labour Party in liquidating the Empire and the ending of Britain's role as a very great power and perhaps Churchill in a way instinctively understood that because when in 1946 he visit America he said the American president Harry Truman if I could be born again I'd like to have been an American America is the country of the future Britain's the country of the past it used to be said that the Sun never sets on the British Empire but country's rise and fall America is now the land of opportunity at the end of his life Churchill said he was depressed because he said I worked hard all my life I have achieved a lot but I've achieved nothing because Churchill hopes the strong and secure British Empire would be a guarantor peace in the world and Churchill said that Statesman he said he wouldn't be regarded very highly by history and his private area oh don't be ridiculous sing hymns after comment Churchill said no he said because Statesman a judge not by their victories but by what they did with their victories and then he said I could have defended the British Empire against anybody except the British people so he didn't achieve that either and that was a further failure further if you like a failure of a dream now Churchill came back to power he succeeded the Labour government in 1951 though during the war he said he would retire at the end of the war and he wouldn't make lloyd George's mistake of hanging on and he said to Anthony Eden his heir apparent at the end of the war is he they were in the Cabinet Room he said 30 years of my life have been passed in this room I shall never sit in again in it again you will but I shall not of course he did return in 1951 though it seemed that nothing he did could add to the reputation he'd gained in 1945 and his peacetime government was a very of course very different from the wartime a coalition the first problem that Churchill faced was frankly that he was on the whole unfit to remain as Prime Minister contrary to the public hadn't been told that he'd suffered beginning in the war very serious heart attacks and strokes and was a very ill man the French president aureole who visited Britain in December 1951 reported of Churchill theater had found a man whose hearing is poor and who often repeats himself in 1954 the French ambassador reported to his government he is still active only in appearance in May 1953 shortly before he had a very serious stroke which made people think he wouldn't survive the weekend but he did the an aide to dr. Adenauer the German Chancellor wrote this in his diary Churchill sometimes gives an uninformed absent-minded impression and when he wakes from his dreams and poses questions they are often off the point the old man sits heavily in his chair his left eye waters and if he tries to give a connected opinion such as on a British desire for peace he seems as often with old men on the edge of tears it is hardly credible that this man despite his physical condition should lead the British Empire the Chancellor is dr. Adenauer sometimes gets a poor impression from his interlocutors mistakes and makes notes of his concern on a piece of paper which he push it over to me but the permanent secretary the Foreign Office comforted Adenauer by saying the Foreign Office did keep a constant eye on the Prime Minister so Churchill was unfit for office it's fair to say but yet there's a paradox it's arguable the 1951 to 55 government was one most successful in the post-war period and you may say this shows the comparative and importance of the role of a prime minister in British government and I shall talk more I've read I've fallen further behind but I should talk further about the conservative achievements in 1951 five including some of you may think keeping us out of Europe some people say judge'll twice save Britain first buy action in 1940 and second by inaction in 1951 when he kept us out of the European Coal and Steel community I shall talk further about that in the next lecture thank you very much

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 84,235

Keywords: Political History, British History, Attlee, Clement Attlee, Post-war politics, History, Politics, Westminster, Bogdanor, Vernon Bogdanor, Political History Lecture, Political History Talk, History Lecture, History Talk, Social History, Gresham, Gresham College, Gresham Professor, Professor of Government, Professor of Political History, Free public lecture, Free education

Id: TEgvxQ_OhcU

Length: 61min 24sec (3684 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2011