Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through by Duncan Weldon

Author:Duncan Weldon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2021-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

12

Never Had It So Good

Given the lasting impact of the Attlee government, the fact that it lasted only six years is somewhat perplexing. By 1951, though, the government was already looking tired. The key ministers had been in office not since 1945 but since 1940. Waging a total war and then fundamentally reshaping Britain’s political economy over the course of a decade was presumably rather taxing work. The introduction of some NHS charging provoked Cabinet resignations (including that of Nye Bevan, the minister who had presided over the NHS’s birth) and left the government looking not just listless but also divided. In the long run the expansion of welfare payments, the provision of free healthcare, the material increase in education funding and the commitment to full employment would offer a great deal to many British voters, but in the short term life under the latter half of the Attlee government did not necessarily appear great.

The devaluation of 1949 was not only a blow to prestige but materially raised the cost of imported goods. Cigarette prices rose by 14 per cent, which is the kind of thing a nation of smokers tends to notice. That, combined with continued rationing and restrictions, not to mention a higher tax burden, left workers feeling somewhat squeezed. The prioritising of exports and public services over investment not only crimped business investment but also house building. Offered a choice between the larger state of the Attlee government and a return to the pre-war norm, it is almost certain that the British people would have stuck with Labour in the 1950s. But that was not the choice that was before them. The Conservative Party that was re-elected in 1951 had once again re-invented itself. Churchill might still be leader, but his domestic agenda was more in keeping with the New Liberal reformist spirit of his youth than his spell as a tight-money Chancellor overseeing the return to gold in the 1920s. Fundamentally the Conservative electoral proposition in 1951 amounted to ‘You can keep all the stuff you like, but we’ll also roll back restrictions on personal spending and build more houses.’ That proved a popular offer, one that would keep the Conservatives in power until the mid-1960s. Such was the perceived continuity with Labour, in terms of the overall economic approach, that the term ‘Butskellism’ (named for Labour’s last Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, and his Tory successor Rab Butler) has come to be used to describe the broad macro policies of 1945 to 1979. Butskellism was never as coherent or as unchallenged as is sometimes believed. But there was certainly a great deal of economic continuity over the three or so decades following the Second World War.

In 1957, Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Prime Minister, proclaimed in Bedford: ‘Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never seen in my lifetime.’ As he famously put it, ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.