The British General Election of 1945 by R. B. McCallum & Alison Readman

Author:R. B. McCallum & Alison Readman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

Mr. Attlee rounded on Lord Beaverbrook and the Conservative party, and returned the challenge. Echoing an attack by Mr. Bevin19 in which he had said ‘I object to this country being ruled from Fleet Street, however big the circulation, instead of from Parliament’, Mr. Attlee said: ‘The power of great wealth exercised by irresponsible men of no principle, through newspapers with enormous circulations, is a danger to democracy and a menace to public life.’20 He went on to attack ‘Lord Beaverbrook’s record of political intrigue and instability’ and ‘insatiable appetite for power’, concluding: ‘Yet it was he who accused the Labour party of being unfaithful to democratic principles.’

Although great was the wrath and the tumult occasioned by the ‘Laski issue’, yet it left the great mass of the electorate surprisingly uninterested. It may be that the Labour party’s anti-stunt propaganda had been entirely effective. From the outset they had been expecting a shameless Tory stunt. They considered that their party had twice been defeated in the past by such unscrupulous devices.21 They believed that the Tories would cheat them again. Thus they had anticipated the stunt of 1945 by innoculating the people in advance against the poison which the Tory Central Office or Lord Beaverbrook would in due course inject into their veins. Through all their propaganda, in the press, in speeches, and in election literature, there ran a constant note of warning to the electors to beware of tricks, frauds, and stunts. This part of the Labour party’s campaign is perhaps the most brilliant piece of prophylactic political medicine ever achieved in electoral history. When the ‘Laski affair’ appeared the Labour party was ready for it.

The electorate was thus alive to the possibility of stunts, and on its guard against anything which the Tories might try to ‘put over on it’. They had refused to be taken in by the threats in Mr. Churchill’s first broadcast. Many looked upon ‘the Laski issue’ as a continuation of a scare begun in that broadcast. The same arguments were used by the same people; the one followed closely on the heels of the other. Indeed they were often subtly intermingled in the speeches of Conservative candidates. Thus when the Conservatives raised the cry of ‘Democracy in danger’, for the second time in two weeks, a large part of the electorate was inclined to reply ‘Wolf, wolf’.

A third reason for the deafness of the electorate to the warnings of the Conservatives about the dangers of Mr. Laski’s authority in the Labour party was that they were not interested in constitutional issues at this election. Not how the country should be governed, but what the government of the country would do, or give, was in the forefront of all programmes, and the minds of the electors. Those who thought that Socialism by its economic methods would ruin or redeem the State were inclined to regard as minor a mere constitutional issue.

The issues with which the electors felt vitally concerned were domestic issues in the popular, non-political, sense of the term.

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