Twentieth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Kenneth O. Morgan

Author:Kenneth O. Morgan [Morgan, Kenneth O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

Political Radicalism and Reconstruction

At all levels this feeling chimed in with a noticeable mood of political radicalism. Indeed, in the years 1940–5, Britain may be said to have moved more rapidly to the left than at any other period of its history. In government, Labour ministers of the Churchill administration loomed large on the home front. Bevin; Clement Attlee, the deputy prime minister; Herbert Morrison, the home secretary; Greenwood, Hugh Dalton, and others became familiar and trusted figures. They were talismans of the faith that post-war reconstruction would indeed be carried into effect. So, too, were reformist Conservative ministers such as Butler, author of the Education Act. Their outlook harmonized with the new orthodoxies of the planners, many of them Liberal theoreticians such as Keynes or Beveridge, or simply apolitical technocrats.

Beyond the confines of Westminster and Whitehall, it was clear that the public was becoming more radical - at least, it should have been clear, since this was documented in Gallup polls in the newspapers, though little attention was paid by contemporaries to these unfamiliar forms of sociological evidence, of transatlantic origin. In by-elections, there were several successes for the vaguely Christian socialist Common Wealth Party. There was the widespread public enthusiasm for the Red Army, newly popular after Stalingrad and the advance towards Berlin. Even in the armed forces, so it was murmured, left-wing or novel ideas were being bandied about in current affairs groups and discussion circles. Letters home from servicemen in the western desert or the Far East voiced the angry determination for a better deal in the post-war world.

Reconstruction, then, was a far more coherent and deep-rooted concept as the war came to its close. In 1918, many of the blueprints had been poorly conceived and destined for rapid oblivion at the hands of the Treasury. This time it had been more plausibly a people’s war. The ideas were more precise and had both more democratic impetus and more intellectual ballast. The outcome was revealed with dramatic effect as soon as the war ended. The Churchill coalition broke up with unexpected suddenness in May 1945, a few days after the German surrender and with hostilities still continuing in the Far East against the Japanese. To Churchill’s dismay, the Labour Party’s national executive, voicing the wishes of the rank and file, insisted that Labour’s ministers leave the government. A general election was called for July.

The ‘coupon election’ of 1918 had been an unreal exercise throughout. Even if not polluted by the hysterical ‘hang-the-Kaiser’ jingoism to the extent that Keynes had suggested, that element was undoubtedly present. A general patriotic exaltation made the campaign of November-December 1918 a poor guide to the public mood. In June-July 1945, however, the spirit was more sober and focused more precisely on housing and health, full employment, and industrial regeneration, on post-war social imperatives rather than on external or imperial themes. In this sense, the power and prestige of Churchill, the revered war leader, were an irrelevance, even an embarrassment to the Conservative Party.

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