Ministers at War : Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet (9780465040582) by Schneer Jonathan

Author:Schneer, Jonathan [Schneer, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465040582
Publisher: Perseus Book Group

CHAPTER 10

The Impact of Professor Beveridge

IN JUNE 1940, AFTER NEGOTIATIONS WITH MUSSOLINI HAD BEEN RULED out and a fight to the finish against Germany agreed upon, socialists and Conservatives in the War Cabinet knew they must learn to cooperate and compromise with one another or Britain would lose the war. Ministers on the right agreed, however reluctantly, that in order to prosecute the war most efficiently, the government would have to assume new powers enabling it to intervene in the economy. Ministers on the left accepted that the government would not intervene so often and deeply as they thought it should.

Nevertheless, even during 1940–1942, the period of Britain’s greatest peril, the Grand Coalition experienced ideological conflict. The left sensed the tides of history flowing with it. Leftists in and out of Parliament never ceased calling for Labour ministers to demand further reforms and government interventions. Attlee, Bevin and the others ignored such demands at their peril; they could not ignore them completely. Conservatives attempted to counter them by endorsing less far-reaching measures. Centrists such as Eden, Woolton and R. A. Butler (the former defeatist Foreign Office undersecretary) took the lead here. Indeed, Butler eventually steered through Parliament a sweeping reform of the educational system, although it was not as sweeping as many on the left might have wanted.

Such Tory moderates notwithstanding, the fact remained that generally socialists and Conservatives held very different views about how the country should be organized—not only while the war was being fought, but afterward as well. Many weighed in from both sides, or wished to, on what should be the lineaments of postwar Britain. When America joined the war and victory began to appear likely, ideological conflict in the War Cabinet, in Parliament and in the country as a whole only sharpened. Churchill struggled heroically to contain it. He met with mixed success.

AT THIS STAGE OF HIS LIFE WINSTON CHURCHILL INSTINCTIVELY FAVORED the right over the left in every ideological debate, but he disliked any sort of conflict in his War Cabinet. He thought giving voice to differing approaches to domestic policies diverted ministers from the main task, which was winning the war; moreover, it had the potential for disrupting the War Cabinet’s hard-won unity. Domestic policy, in any event, did not much interest him now. He preferred to focus on the strategic matters raised by the war itself, or upon anticipated challenges to Britain’s postwar international position. In October 1940 he transferred discussion about home-front economic policy from the War Cabinet to the Lord President’s Committee, chaired, after Neville Chamberlain’s retirement, by Sir John Anderson, a career civil servant who belonged to no party.

It was a shrewd choice. “He is agreeable and always agrees with you,” Beaverbrook once observed of Anderson to Churchill, although he himself disliked the man. In Cabinet meetings, Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken, whom Churchill had selected to replace Duff Cooper as minister of information on July 21, 1941, would pass snide notes to one another. They called Anderson “Pomposo.” The

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