The Character Of The Postwar Period - Professor Vernon Bogdanor

ladies and gentlemen these lectures are a continuation of those that I gave last year on British political history in the 20th century and last year I reached to a second world war and the set of lectures is on the post-war period and I thought it might be helpful to begin with a few general reflections on the post-war period as a home now the most obvious contrast with the first part of the series is that in the second half there are fortunately no great Wars and on the whole stability and continuity in British life and in particular a continuity of the main political parties now the years before 1945 the first half of the century as part of the century was marked by a replacement of the Liberals as the main party for left by the Labour Party and in 1945 the Labour Party won its first overall majority in its history landslide majority and today the same two parties the same two major parties the Conservatives and labor over the major parts in 1945 they're still the same major parties and liberals in 1945 them at a third party and their successors Liberal Democrats are also a third party so perhaps has been much less changed and some people imagine people always talk about a changing and volatile world but perhaps less change and imagined and perhaps less change then in the first half of the century marked by two world wars but obviously there have been great changes and to illustrate those I will give two quotations from the 1940s which I think both both of which will strike you as an Akron estict 'day the first is from Winston Churchill in a speech the mansion house in in 1942 in middle of the war when he said we mean to hold our own I have not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British M well of course the British Empire was liquidated fairly soon after he made that speech my second quotation is from the Labour Party's election manifesto of 1945 it said the Labour Party is a Socialist Party and proud of it it's ultimate purpose is the establishment of a socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain now some people say the present leader of the Labour Party ed Miliband has moved a bit to the left but I will put a bet with you you won't find language of that kind in the next Labour Party election manifesto but at that time socialism was thought to be the wave of the future and in particular was given people thought a great push by the war and actly the leader of the Labour Party of 1935 and Prime Minister from 1945 to 51 he said this during the war he said those who count progress only in terms of seats 1 and of the growth of the numbers of professed adherents of the party miss the real significance of what has happened the outstanding thing is not so much the growth in the strength of the forces which attacks a citadel of capitalism as in the loss of the outworks the crumbling of the foundations and the loss of morale of the garrison in other words that people weren't willing to defend what he called capitalism in this confident way they had been in the 1920s and 1930s and perhaps were to be again later on but at that time he said the ideological defense of capitals and a weak and socialism is seemingly a wave of the future now what he meant by socialism was a new form of society based on the principle of nationalization which he called common ownership a common ownership of the means of production distribution and exchange which was in Clause 4 of the Labour Party Constitution till 1995 when Tony Blair removed but more than that it wasn't just a mechanical and institutional change that they were thinking of it was this change as a means to a change in the nature of society to create the goods society a society not based on acquisition and greed but on the principle of fellowship social supposed socialist principle of fellowship now it's clear that both of these quotations are really very much of a past and I think it would have been clearer much earlier than the day I think if you'd put those quotations of people in the mid 1960s they'd have thought they were rather old-fashioned and it was going to be very clear after the war that Britain was no longer an imperial power George Orwell said at the end of the war but the next ten years would show whether Britain remained a great power but just out of that ten years came the Suez Crisis of 1956 which showed that Britain could not act independently when opposed by the United States Britain had therefore become a second ranking power now the Labour Party has also clearly abandoned its commitment to socialism at least in the form in which Atlee put it forward and it faced a great problem really oddly enough a problem deriving I think from its success and success of the Atty government because I mean some of you may have been here when I gave lectures on the 1920s and 1930s and if you'd said at that point that Britain would become a society in which everyone had a job that was full employment which I was in the 1950s it had a National Health Service which was free and open to everyone in universal that it had the welfare state gathering guaranteeing to everyone a Social Security minimum so that hardly anyone would be in poverty if you'd said in the nineteen twenties or thirty that these things would happen they soon in Britain first I think people wouldn't have believed you but they would have said if these things do come about then that's utopia that's absolutely marvelous but the point is that when it came about in the 1950s and 60s people didn't think it was utopia and they wanted different sorts of things and so the socialist ideal gradually came under criticism now as I said the socialist idea wasn't just mechanical wasn't just nationalization but the aim was to create a new form of society and I'll give you another quotation from a speech that at Lee made in the 1950 general election campaign in Falkirk in Scotland he said this I feel rather tired when I hear that you must only appeal to the incentives of profit what got us through the war was unselfishness and an appeal to the highest instincts of mankind what is getting us through in these difficult days is a far greater sense of responsibility due to the fact that men and women feel they have a far greater stake in the country than they ever had before and again in Deming that's a language you'd hear from any leading politician today that they should forget about profit and incentives and rely on the principles of fellowship now it's understandable perhaps in terms of the illness Britain no longer great power the socialist dream not come about that some people should see the post-war period as a period of decline certainly from the high hopes of the 1940s and I think one central theme perhaps the central theme of a post-war period is decline of national self-confidence confidence in British institutions and in the British constitution parliamentary system which seemed in 1945 to have triumphed and immediately after the war most people thought that whatever the hardships Britain with better govern than any other country in the world and the way things were done in Britain was much better than the way they were down anywhere else but that gradually began to disappear that view and with the decline of Empire Britain seemed to have lost its role in the world and in 1962 former American Secretary of State Dean Acheson said Britain has lost an empire and is looking for a role now one role seemed obvious to many people at the time but it's proved a highly contentious matter indeed still highly contentious is the role in Europe and it's highly uncertain difficult and Europe was an issue would split both of the major parties the Labour Party in the 1980s they'd would break away in the social democrat party which then joined the Liberals and the Conservatives will split from top to bottom on the issue in the 1990s and I think it's fair to say the Conservatives are still split between those who think our role is in Europe and those a large larger number who think it isn't and it's interesting as as you know there's a current demand for referendum on whether we should stay in Europe or not and one recent opinion poll said that 51 percent of British people thought we should leave the European Union so it's a highly contentious matter but in the 1960s a lot of people who saw themselves forward-looking said the replacement for empire should be in Europe and we no longer have an empire but we can leave the Europeans perhaps play an important role there but it's fair to say that Britain hasn't made up its mind over a period of 50 years it's just 50 years since Harold Macmillan made the first application to join the European community then was in August 1961 and the 50 is the country still hadn't made up its mind basically whether it sees itself as being European or not but of course the main reason why people think we've declined I think is economic and that in a way is odd because our post-war rate of growth was much higher than it was before the war who look at the years 1921 239 growth was pretty miserable on average it was 1.1 percent from 1948 262 1.9 percent hi not only by the interwar stands but by most historic British standards and of course the post-war years have seen the growing spread of consumer affluence but when people speak of decline they don't mean decline as comparing what Britain was like once but decline in terms of comparisons with countries on the continent particularly perhaps Germany and pretzels of Japan and though these countries are growing faster now you may argue perhaps that was inevitable once they'd recovered from the war but perhaps they're certain features about those societies that allow them to grow faster and we can't it's as if you might say you're a pretty good 100-yard runner and last year you could run 100 yards in 5 minutes and a half this year you can run 100 yards in 5 minutes you might be pretty pleased but then you might say oh yes but many years ago Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile here I what am I talking about that of a mile my family are they big of fun that's an illustration of premature senility that um start again start again you can you can write you can run the mile you can run the mile in in in five and a half minutes and last year this year you can run it in five minutes you're doing pretty well but then someone says to you well 60 years ago Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile and that will make you miserable but you might not be able to run the mile that might be just beyond your capacity and the point I'm trying to make I hope it's clear to this muddled example but I mean that the point I'm trying to make is it there might be certain features about British society that mean just mean we can never grow as much as the German and Japanese and which make ourselves miserable if we compare ourselves with them rather than what we used to do in the past and those features of British society might be the very same features that make Britain a stable and reasonably happy country and that Britain I think I mentioned when I talked about Lloyd George last year Britain put a lot of effort into securing conciliatory relations between the two sides of Industry and in society in general it may be those factors prevent us having the dynamism which mean that we are rapidly growing economy now I think the post-war period divides reasonably into two main phases and the first is up to 1979 when Margaret Thatcher came to power when you have really an alternation between the Labour and conservative parties in government by contrast with the pre 1939 period when the Conservatives were very dominant and then in 1979 you've got 18 years of single-party government first with Margaret Thatcher and then with John Major the longest period of single-party government since the Napoleonic Wars and then succeeded by the longest period of single-party government by a left-wing majority since before the First World War the Blair and brown government's 13 years but I think more important simply those can mechanical changes is the great change which I think dated actually from slightly before Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 which was a growing skepticism towards the role of the state now you can argue that one main theme of British politics from 1900 until the mid 1970s was an increasing confidence in the roles of state who look at 1900 the average British person provided he or she kept out of the hands of the police didn't commit a crime would have nothing whatever to do with the state the state wouldn't impinge err was no health insurance non employment insurance nothing to connect you with the public authorities but gradually all that changed and the First World War before the First World War liberal reforms and so on and this confidence in the role the state I think was strengthened by the Second World War the wartime spirit the nation all pulling together which led to a strong sense of community and Trust and support for the wartime leaders like Churchill and athle who successfully led us through these rather dangerous times and of course during the war the state increased its powers enormous Lee and in the economy the market was the market system was completely suspended and the state decided the allocation of resources and people came to think it had been effective and that planning was more effective than market and that the states would do better we do better if the state controlled industry as well then it was said the state should have responsibility to secure full employment we didn't want to go back to the interwar years of mass unemployment the economist John Maynard Keynes had a lot of influence on all that of course and then people also said the market system was very unfair and it couldn't provide for Social Welfare so the state should take over responsibility of social services which should normally be free and financed out of taxation and again I'll give you a quote that sums up the postal immediate post-war pizzas had some notoriety from a politician called Douglas Jay who was an economic adviser to Atlee then became a Labour MP and minister he wrote a book in 1947 called a socialist case in which he said this in the case of nutrition and health just as in the case of education the gentlemen in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves and that came to be translated in so the man in Whitehall knows best it was used against the laymen or the man in Whitehall knows best now when people began to worry about the decline of the British economy in the late 1950s as a not it was doing badly historically but doing badly compared with other countries they said the natural answer to the problems we faced was to increase the power of the state and this began with a Conservative government Harold Macmillan's government introduced policies of planning in the 1960s an income policy and Harold Macmillan they strongly influenced by his experience in the 1930s he'd been MP for Stockton a very depressed era during that time and he wanted the state to play a larger role to ensure that the economy improved and that was all continued by the Labour government which succeeded handled Wilson's government then Heath and then Labour again in under Wilson and Cal until 1979 when it collapsed in the winter discontent and since then has been some sketches and concerning the role of the state and it's not been pushed back to where it was before the state increased its powers the welfare State still survives and some of the assumptions that are there of 1945 still survive but by no means all of them but I think the main casualty of post-war ideological progress has been the idea of planning which was so strongly support in 1945 that is now seen planning even I think by people in labor party perhaps on the left as part of the problem not part of the solution and the state is seen as part of a problem and not part of the solution by many people as I say all was very different in 1945 when the Labour Party won its first overall majority and the government was headed by Clement Attlee and great enigma and paradox about Atlee because in 2004 group academics were asked to rate the Prime Minister's academic and history and political fans so rate the Prime Minister's of the twentieth century and the vast majority said that he was the greatest prime minister of the century and his government is often acclaimed as a success story of post-war Britain but the discrepancy between the massive changes which the athlete government introduced and seemingly a miniscule stature the man who preside over it who's elected leader of the Labour Party in 1935 as a stopgap but remained leader for twenty years the longest leader of any major political party in the twentieth century next is Margaret Thatcher 15 years now at Lee I was born in 1883 in the Victorian age he went to public school and Oxford way and on the whole undistinguished career his only achievement was to gain a half blew at billiards he young he was a strong conservative and as he said imperialist but then after taking his degree qualified as a solicitor but he did what many a students in those days he went to work in boys clubs in the East End and he said the sight of conditions in the East End turned him into a socialist because he said he didn't think the people he Network any sense inferior the poor people to the people he grown up with but yet they had a much harder life and he was socialists of the left and worked really in a very anonymous way in these boys clubs but unlike many on the left in 1914 he volunteered for the army most people on the left at that time were opposed to the first war he wasn't his portlet and indeed he fought at Gallipoli he was rather proud of his military career and doing into warriors he was generally known as major Atlee that's his title after the war he was encouraged to go into politics and he became mayor of Stepney in 1919 and 1920 and then in 1922 he was elected MP for Limehouse and he said that the aim of the Labour Party was to ensure that Sampson poverty would be abolished and he said I took part in the Great War in the hope of securing lasting peace and a better life for all we were promised that Wars would end that the men who fought in a war be cared for and unemployment slums and poverty would be abolished he had junior office in the first two Labour government's which were minority governments in the second one he was briefly Postmaster General when that government collapsed and Ramsay MacDonald formed the national government and as some of you may remember that election led to a landslide victory for the national government and the landslide defeat for labour which had just 52 seats in the general election of 1931 and almost all the major figures of the Labour Party at all but one of the cabinets were defeated and the only cabinet minister left was George Lansbury and elderly pacifist who became leader and Atlas empirical it survived became number two and he was then appointed in 1935 when Lansbury retired he was appointed leader seemingly as a Scot stopgap but as they lasted 20 years and as a Margaret Thatcher lasted 15 but Margaret Thatcher was thrown out after his actually retired voluntarily with his reputation hi now when Ackley became lead of the Labour Party Hugh Doulton another leading figure said rather sadly a little mouse shall lead them and Beatrice Webber who heard him speak in 1940 said he looked and spoke like an insignificant elderly Clarke without distinction in the voice manner or substance of his discourse to realize that this little nonentity is the parliamentary leader of the Labour Party and presumably the future Prime Minister is pitiable the same year a newspaper magnate Cecil King described him as a very limited intelligence and no personality if you heard he was getting six pounds a week in the service of the East Ham Corporation one will be surprised he was earning so much now a part of his appeal to the Labour Party was precisely that he wasn't charismatic the Labour Party with Ramsay MacDonald and supposed betrayal of 1931 had had enough of charismatic leaders who thought they knew better than the Labour Party they wanted someone who represented it and in that sense at lead it'd he saw himself not as a leader but as a mouthpiece of the party and he said to the party conference in 1953 I am only here to carry out your will and he said the great quality of the prime minister is being a good chairman able to get others to work which was his great skill he had a lot of very difficult people to work with many of whom disliked each other intensely and he held them together but more than that Atlee was seen as someone who understood the nature of working-class life and the Labour Party's will remember was formed to give representation to the organized working-class it modelled he was from the working-class that didn't matter but he had an experience and sympathy with working-class conditions which he'd gained in the East End of London indeed he had the strongest experience of grassroots labour and socialist politics of any Labour leader and understood the Labour Party very well and he's said that the Labour Party had to be led from left-of-center it was typically unclear whether he meant left of centre of the political spectrum or left of centre of the Labour Party he typically left that unclear but he always wanted an R in Bevin who thought was on the left to succeed him well of course that did not happen any energy held together the Labour Party his great weakness was that like so many of that generation in the Labour Party he was rather ignorant of economics and when there were economic crises which did beset that Labour government quite frequently he lost his authority and he was unable to give a lead and during the first economic crisis of the Labour government in 1947 which was a crisis caused by trying to make the pound convertible which led to an outflow of cash from the country and a rapid end to convertibility there an attempt to remove him and the temp replacement was going to be Ernest Bevin the trade union leader who was foreign secretary and Bevin I think could have become leader the lane part I think it might have been better possibly if he had but anyway he said he didn't want to on the rather patronizing grounds that the little man has never done me any harm so Bevin remained where he was and so did at Lee now at Lee wasn't just a cypher it's fair to say on a few crucial issues he did make a lot of difference the rapid withdrawal from India was largely his decision the decision that Britain should become an atomic power was largely his decision with Bevin and those who think that prime ministerial powers a recent invention should consider what Atlee not normally thought of the strong burns out how he conducted the issue because he first set up a committee to consider whether we should have become an atomic power and the economics ministers said we couldn't afford to do so so it ends I'd have another committee from which they were excluded which said that we should become an F power most of the cabinet were not aware of this decision and or MPs until it was given in an answer to a parliamentary question about the defense estimates as a kind of casual aside that we were spending so much on developing atomic bomb and when actually was later asked to opted retired why he didn't tell his ministers of commitments about this decision he said some of them weren't fit to be trusted with secrets of that kind so prime ministerial matter leadership is not something new now his greatest weakness was that he could not inspire and his a pitcher in The Times when he died in 1967 said much of what he did was memorable very little of what he said now perhaps I didn't matter too much because the oddly enough the election that Labour lost in 1951 it actually got a higher vote than the Conservatives it's a partly a quirk of the electoral system and he got the highest vote in its history in 1951 when it lost election and the second highest vote ever won by any British political party the highest was won by John Major another unheroic leader in 1992 they got many more votes than Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair now the second-in-command of the government as I've implied was Ernest Bevin who had been a great trade union leader at a time the general strike it was widely thought he'd be Chancellor but he was made foreign secretary but nevertheless he had a huge influence on the whole of the government and he made a very interesting comment when he was appointed Minister of Labour in Churchill's coalition government in 1940 he said Gladstone was at the Treasury for 50 years I want to be at the Ministry of Labour for 50 years what he meant was that Gladstone in economics being kept with money if you like had dominated Britain for 50 years he wanted his conception of the labor movement and the trade unions to be there for 50 years and what he meant by it was this the organized labor should be seen as part of the state which should be consulted before measures were passed affecting his interests now during the general strike he said in the 1920s labour was treated as just a factor of production by the Conservative government's that they were they would pass policies they wouldn't consult the trade unions people be thrown out of workers result or put on difficult circumstances that shouldn't happen again and that in future all governments wear the label conservatives would have to consult the trade unions before taking actions which affected them in other words the trade unions after the 1920s were moving away from the idea that they were somehow in opposition to the state they were going to become part of the state and this will symbolize in the 1930s by the general secretary of the Trade Union Congress Walter citrine colleague of Evans accepting from the national government a night for that they would just as not a part of the state as people in business now AB Evans idea lasted until the winter of discontent in 1979 you may say it was carried out to a level of caricature whereby the trade unions were not just consulted on matters of policy but claimed to have a veto on matters of policy and said if government doesn't do what we want we will go on strike we will use strike weapons Devon was very cautious about using and you may say the trade unions in the end destroyed that very strong position they had under Ernest Bevin so they lost that consultative language existed to 1979 under conservative as well as labor governments but the public sector were strikes in that year we will destroyed that and one Labour supporter of the time said it was the public sector workers who put Margaret Thatcher into power and she thanked them after that in her own individual way now the third most significant member of the government I think was a now in Bevan and Churchill always used to put the emphasis on the second syllable because he rather liked Bevin but did not like be van and Bev Ann was on the left of the Labour Party the son of a minor and he was the only leading minister in the Ackley government who had not been in the wartime coalition and he was given the key position of Minister of Health and housing and the architect of the National Health Service now later on there was a rise of a fourth character in the government who challenged the van which was you gates kill a huge gates kill had a very rapid promotion he entered Parliament in 1945 at the age of 39 by the end of the Labour government in 1951 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and second man in the government and he was a new type of figure in the Labour Party because he came from what you might call the educated professional University classes the kind of people now were dominate for both parties but Labour Party perhaps in particular he'd been in he'd been an economics Don at London University before going into politics and he didn't have the kind of background in the working-class movement the older leaders had and when Gaitskell became Chancellor in October 1950 an iron Bevin wrote a letter to at Leeper testing about the appointment saying that Gaitskell had no roots in the labor room he was ruthless he didn't understand had no experience of working-class life and therefore it was a bad appointment and this rivalry between gates can Bevin and Bevin continued both of them died early Bevin in 1960 gates key 963 played a large part in keeping labour in opposition in the 1950s and it reached a climax in something I will describe later in a battle in the National National Health Service in 1951 over seemingly trivial issue but I think quite important symbolic issue of whether you should introduce charges for false teeth and spectacles and that led to the resignation of an from the government and in effect the breakup of the Labor government now the Labour Party won the general election in 1945 with a majority of 146 a great shock to many people though there was just one opinion poll at that time Gallup opinion poll and it gave absolutely the accurate prediction on result on the day of the election it gave absolutely the correct figures but there was any one opinion poll and no one believed it everybody thought that Winston Churchill would be bound to win the election and indeed the Labour Party leaders themselves thought that Churchill would win because at the end of the war Churchill made a proposal that the coalition be continued and that was turned down by the Labour Party now later on it was found out what had actually happened that Churchill made his proposal after consulting at Leith and Bevin and they both said yes let's continue the coalition another way they didn't want an election in which they thought they'd be defeated but when they took that proposal the National Executive of the Labour Party were actually defeated on that proposal so they were driven out of the coalition against their own wishes that was known later it wasn't known at the time that that was going to happen now if you followed opinion polls a Gallup poll was introduced into Britain in 1937 there'd be no doubt that the Labour Party was going to win the election they were 12% ahead in the opinion polls at the time the election sorry they were 12% ahead in opinion polls in February 1945 six months for the election in July in July they were 6% ahead shortly after the publication of the beverage report in December 1942 they were 18 so they had a huge lead a lot of people in writing about the election mentioned the Wade Churchill conducted the campaign he made an extreme attack on the Labour Party say you couldn't introduce socialism without some form of Gestapo which seemed rather odd when you've been working with these people they party people in government and people didn't think at Lee was very much like Hitler or Himmler and it was rather in our other foolish but there's no evidence at the election campaign altered people's minds at all indeed you may argue that without Churchill the Conservatives would have done even worse and I think the reason for what happened in the election must be sought not in the campaign but what had happened before in the growth of ideas of social responsibility and socialism now Atlee wrote to a Labour Party theorist in 1945 he said although you are a theorist and I'm only a working politician I think that I give more and you give less attention to changes with conception than to alleged of achievements for instance I've witnessed now the acceptance by all the leading politicians in this country and all the economists of any account of the conception of the utilization of abundance from 1931 onwards in the house and others press this it was rejected with scorn it is now accepted and important results flow from it it colors all our discussions on home economic policy there follows from this the doctrine of full employment the acceptance of this again colors our whole conception of the post-war set up in this country you will appreciate that in discussions with cabinet colleagues not at our party the full acceptance of these conceptions concedes much of our case in advance though he said the case for socialism had been made during the war and emphasized by memories of what happened after the first war the supposed betrayal but the second war was to be a People's War followed by a people's peace and the Atlee government did I think the foundations of what became a post-war settlement it set the weather for perhaps even up to today and Margaret Thatcher tried to undermine part of it but some of it shouldn't incidentally she in her memoirs pays great tribute to at leisure great radical patriot Italy admired him but a lot of Ashley's legacy I think still remained but the post-war peony like set the whole framework for the future now what was a settlement and how did it come about during the war I mentioned a few moments ago the beverage report and that was absolutely crucial it came out in December 1942 in the middle of the war it had a huge sale a hundred thousand copies were sold in the first month an abridged edition sold 600,000 copies shortly afterwards no government document outsold it until a Denning report on the Profumo affair in 1963 and Beatrice Webb predicted this would be a bomb thrown into the political arena and so it was because it's a suggested widespread change it was dismissed by the Conservatives as blunder I think this was Churchill's crucial blunder he dismissed it as false hopes and area visions of utopia and Eldorado and people said the concern said we can't afford it and the conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer sir Kingsley would many in this country had persuaded themselves he said the cessation of hostilities will mark the opening of the Golden Age many were so persuaded last time also however this may be the time for declaring a dividend on the golden age is the time when these profits have been realized in fact not merely an imagination well that idea might have been thought sensible in the 1920s and 30s you might think it's sensible now don't have these social advances and you can afford to pay for them but that one what people thought then they said we've been cheated last time and we want them now and people were worried that the Conservatives would stop the implementation of the beverage report now in February 1943 there was a Labour backbench motion - the government resisted that the beverage report should be put into immediate effect and a 121 MPs voted for that amendment which was against the government 97 Labour MPs voted for it and only two Labour backbenchers out of the government actually supported the government soul a part of the whole voted for the immediate implementation of beverage interesting enough Lloyd George's last vote in parliament he vote the great old social reformer he who voted for this amendment and that was when Labour became I think the majority party in the country got that mood understood the mood the idea of social security for all from the cradle to the grave now beverage said there were five giants that had to be slain and those giants will want disease ignorance squalor and idleness and his report was primarily dealing with won't the disease of the disease would be dealt with by naive' Evans Health Service squalor would be dealt with by the Labour Party's program a municipal housing education idleness was being dealt with by the 1944 white paper of the coalition government proposing universal secondary education for all and idleness was also going to be dealt with by a doctrine of full employment now beverage said that his plans had three assumptions built into them the first was that in the post-war period we'd have full employment because he said his insurance system cannot insure against mass unemployment and we've seen that I think those who were here the lectures last year saw how the insurance system broke down with mass unemployment and there were hopes that were actually met that unemployment could be kept below 3% that was a doctrine of the white paper on full employment in 1944 and in the immediate post-war year was much below that so in practice there was full employment and that meant you could insure against other employment which would be purely transitional and interruption to earnings you could insure against that and anyone in that position would be benefited from the insurance fund now the welfare state is sometimes I think Richard as a kind of charter for malingerers and beverage had no sympathy with that at all he said that anyone who wasn't prepared to work should be sent to a compulsory retraining camp and he said that young people who weren't working should be given no benefit at all but they should get trained and get a job he wasn't the caricature of Santa Claus too sometimes thought Dean in his own life he was a highly austere he used to wake up at 6 o'clock to an icy bath and do two hours work before breakfast during the war after his report was issued he became for brief time a liberal MP from 1944 to 5 and the defeat in 1945 became leader in the House of Lords of liberals but he wasn't in any way to like a softie so that was his first presupposition that there should be full employment the second presupposition that there should be family allowances because poverty and large families could not be dealt with by insurance and that would remove he said the most single important cause of poverty now that was introduced by the caretaker conservative government which succeeded the coalition while they're preparing for an election in 1945 family allowances were introduced and significantly these allowances were not means tested because if they had been the low paid with better families sorry low paid with large families would be better off out of work unless the benefit rates would so if he wanted decent benefits they weren't not be means-tested now the third presupposition of the beverage report was there should be a National Health Service and that would be particularly important beverage thought because it would restore the sick to the labor market very rapidly and he said that was a hidden benefit of the National Health Service which does not show in the account books now the National Health Service also in his view should not be based on insurance but financed by the taxpayer so these three areas of pre suffrage and full employment family allowance is funded by the taxpayer and then a National Health Service funded by the taxpayer then he said all the remaining social security problems could be dealt with by national insurance and in return he said for a single weekly contribution you would receive a pension sickness benefit and unemployment benefit when you were unemployed and that would apply to everyone all wage earners all the self-employed and their families so it was a unified and new unified system in place of the piecemeal patchwork Social Security's a single system which would cover everyone in the country but not to be financed out of taxation but out of contributions and that was fundamental for beverage because he said that was a mark of citizenship he said benefit you may think it's an optimistic he said benefits in return for contributions rather than free allowances is what the people of Britain desire - they don't want something for nothing Messe optimistic they want benefits in return for contributions and the important thing that it would be universal and not just for those in need the majority of people who get the benefits would not be in need and that was fundamental for beverage because he said if you're going to get the welfare state to work you have to have a middle class constituency for it he said if it's just residual and apply just to the poor there'll be no political pressure to keep up the standards but if it benefits everyone you will have those standards and so it's much easier to finance the welfare state if the middle classes are involved in it if they receive the benefits for which they pay taxes so you get what you pay for and you don't pay more than your neighbors now beverage did admit that there would be some people who just couldn't work under the system so you'd have public assistance for those and that would be means-tested out of taxation it'd be some people he regard a small proportion of what he called inadequate s-- who would not be able to work or help society and that would be funded out of taxation and therefore means-tested but this is a residual element and he said to a delegation of trade unionists there are not many people who will not behave properly again amazing that's optimistic there are not many people who will not behave properly but those who do not behave properly have got to be made to do so so there'd be a stigma attached in those days to getting what he called public assistance and beverage set thought the no irreducible class of effective spats of small number of inadequate s-- but no feckless and lazy people who didn't want to work everyone he don't want it doesn't work now the advance of this system as he put it forward were huge first you end the degrading means test of the interwar years where you had to prove your income man and who would cohabiting with and all the rest secondly there was no supervision of individual behavior were you genuinely seeking work or not the only test was whether you've made your contributions and insurance would be a badge of citizenship it would encourage work and saving at Winged also an encouragement of voluntary action thrift because people get more benefits in the compulsory ones if they save and took out their own private social security scheme with pension schemes or private sickness and child whatever it is a bit more of that now all this was attacked from the right-wing as going to lead to fecklessness and laziness which beverage hadn't wanted and one right-wing MP aap Herbert produced a jingle the time the beverage report came out he said won't it be wonderful after the war there won't be no rich and there won't be no poor we'll all get a pension about twenty four and we won't have to work if we find at the ball oh won't it be wonderful after the war or the beer will be better and quicker and more and there's only one thing I would like to explore why didn't we have this old war before but this is very unfair beverage I should say hated the term welfare state he never used it didn't like it he said he what it wasn't a Santa Claus State something for nothing the phrase he liked was a social service state the social so didn't like welfare state because what he meant was that everyone should be a citizen bit like New Labour's vision and some everyone should be a citizen now the weaknesses of the system even then were quite striking I think the first was it didn't make proper provision perhaps you couldn't in those days for women because the vast majority of women were not in labor market 7/8 of married women at that time did not work and so the benefit they got were was based on their husband's contribution and the benefit for employed married women was lower than that for the men since the men provided the home and the more important that they should be provided for but most important of all the single woman at home who'd be caring for elderly relatives which there a large number then certainly were not getting any benefit at all may have to rely on public assistance nevertheless one female Labour MP Edith Summer skill said beverage with a new Magna Carta for women on the grounds that it treated women equally but differently that married women were part seen as part of the team as it were and the the benefit was calculated in that way secondly a beverage presumed full employment which began to collapse in the 1970s and you could then be unemployed through no fault of your own for quite long periods hasn't happened in the interwar years thirdly benefits beverage said should be above subsistence level but they were being eroded gradually by inflation and gradually as we all know the pension came to be much lower than the subsistence level and now there are about 10 million people on means-tested relief which beverage did not want and the contributory insurance idea is a useful fiction in 1999 Inland Revenue and the contributions agency merged and in national insurance is now just a kind of poll tax it's not really any form of insurance and what we do now is to fund out of direct Asian taxation with a means test targeting the poor which exactly what bevery didn't want and the further point is the greater resistance to high taxation in the post-war period in 1945 taxation would be paid by a married man with two children just above average earnings now someone on 30% of average earnings is paying income tax so that more people bought into taxation and the current system is much more like the means-tested system beverage sought to replace its it's a paradox on the whole thing a welfare state beverage hated the phrasing would've hated what we have now a means-tested system entirely and for this reason that the system has become residual it's a benefit for the poor only who use it so it doesn't have middle-class support and that's why there's much more of a political constituency for spending on the health service and on education which already where almost everyone uses a health says everyone uses much more of a political constituency for spending on that then there is on Social Security now a beverage you may say also made some very optimistic assumptions about human beings and that's the deepest change I think occurred since the 1940s we had a Dunkirk spirit at the time the end of rationing planning solidarity all that's gone away the idea of service all gone away one of the reasons why I Bevin was so hostile to charge in the health service was he said he'd implied people weren't using it responsibly he said of course the British people be responsible with the Health Service and the only reason that health expenditure increases the deficit from the 1930s but you shouldn't assume that people will use the health service irresponsibly and in a lecture in 1954 the Fabian Society Bev Bevan nigh Bevin said he wanted to create a new kind of authoritarian society that shocked people he said one where the authority of moral purpose is freely undertaken that's what the label is about that people in particular working-class can motivated by something other than the capitalist incentives of fear and acquisition and he said full employment would diminish fear and austerity because they were holding down consumption with rationing zone that'll diminish the possibility of acquisition capitalism you said breeds desire for instant gratification socialism teaches people to strive for better things he said look about you he said in 1950 absenteeism is down were productions up we've got voluntary wage restraint he said this meant that all these ideas in beverage can actually work but from the 1950s onwards there was an emphasis on affluence and consumption and move away from the collective society and move from the left to right societies move right would since now I haven't finished what I want to say about the labor government next time I will talk about the National Health Service and the other reforms and treatments of the government I won't say this that there's been a movement to the right fairly steadily I think certainly up to Margaret Thatcher then spat slight reversal but we've not gone back to act Lee and as I said the Labour Party just lost the election in 1951 by whisker by 17 seats we got more votes than the Conservatives now any government would win the 1951 election would almost certainly win the elections of the 1950's because you had a world boom consumption boom and so on and somehow people talk about post-war consensus but I want to put to the proposition suppose a Labour Party had won in 1951 might we have moved in that direction and athlean Bevan foresaw towards a different kind of society in other words might we have moved in towards a Scandinavian direction become a Scandinavian sort of social democracy perhaps higher rates of taxation greater role for the state the public sector might Britain to become what my Bevin hoped it would become a social democratic kind of laboratory it seems to me a possibility and I'll just end with a comment Bevin made rather sad at the end of his life he died in 1960 and after labor had lost the 1959 election a third one in a row he said the British working-class had its historic opportunity but it missed it is that part of the history of what might have happened in the post-war years that that turning which we almost took or were we going not to take that turning anyway in other words worthy I the assumptions of socialism of athlean bends and just so contrary to human nature that they would never have been fulfilled and we would have moved in that market direction of whatever the results of the 1951 election of course that's an unanswerable question which is why I asked it but I will continue next time with the National Health Service and the other achievements of the Labour government thank you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 28,216

Rating: 4.7755103 out of 5

Keywords: Political History, British History, Post-war politics, Attlee, Clement Attlee, History, Politics, Westminster, Bogdanor, Vernon Bogdanor, Political History Lecture, Political History Talk, History Lecture, History Talk, Social History, WWII, World War 2, World War II, World War Two, Gresham, Gresham College, Gresham Professor, Professor of Government, Professor of Political History, Free public lecture, Free education

Id: kkMQyuTKPxY

Length: 55min 54sec (3354 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2011