Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (37 page)

Democratic Socialism he said was an instrument for implementing the social conscience, and his case seemed to develop along these lines: – The social conscience expressed itself in thousands of families where children were taught the virtues of compassion and kindness and consideration for others. These beliefs were reinforced by Christian teaching which established fresh links in a long tradition of service as well as self, but when the child left the circle of the family, it found the outer material world largely uninterested in such attitudes. ‘Economic necessity quickly frustrated the moral impulse. The very structure of society insisted on disillusionment which led to moral neuroticism . . .

‘If you look at some of the points in the Labour Party programme you will see that they are, in a sense, tantamount to an attempt to let society “resolve its guilt anxieties” – or, putting it another way – to do the bidding of conscience . . .’

Many people sympathized with the sick person, everyone wanted the poverty-stricken mother to find a house for her children, but it was assumed by too many that the resolution of these difficulties was entirely the responsibility of the individual concerned. Under Capitalism poor people were thrust back upon their own limited resources and some encountered inordinate hardship. ‘But if we do what the Labour Government is doing – transform all these thousands of personal and private headaches into public headaches – we can get something done . . . To preach and not to practise, to be obliged by the structure of society to act inadequately or not at all, is to become a moral cripple . . . It is to thwart instead of implement the social conscience . . .’

There was much more in a similar vein

Brome was impressed. ‘Forty minutes and still the phrases came pouring in like Atlantic rollers, full, rich, measured. For a whole hour it went on with hardly a pause, hardly a word from me, and then abruptly he stood up, pleaded pressure of many things and escorted me to the door.’
¹⁰

Anthony Wedgwood Benn – son of a Liberal-turned-Labour peer, in his early 20s, about to come down from Oxford after being a fighter pilot in the war – did not yet have executive responsibilities but in early 1948 he composed his private ‘Thoughts on Socialism’. Arguing that pre-war ‘poverty and squalor and undernourishment’ had made ‘a mockery of the price mechanism as a means of translating needs into economic demand’, he nevertheless accepted that ‘economic efficiency demands a degree of inequality because of the need for incentives’. Even so: ‘A certain standard of health, nourishment and housing must be maintained for all. No one else can do it but the state and in Britain a new paternalism is state paternalism: looking after those who cannot look after themselves. This involves interference, but if this interference is democratically controlled we need not fear that an unwieldy bureaucracy will clasp us in its grip.’ In short, the answer was democratic socialism, with the emphasis at least as much on the first word as the second: ‘We in the English-speaking world have created a wonderful machinery for peaceful change in parliamentary democracy. It has taken 1,000 years . . . Socialism is important, I feel certain, but socialism achieved by force is no good.’

Others sounded a wearier, more sceptical note. ‘The honeymoon between literature and action, once so promising, is over,’ bleakly declared Cyril Connolly, ultimate literary mandarin, bleakly in his magazine in July 1947, some six months after John Lehmann’s Isherwood-induced disenchantment:

We can see, looking through old
Horizons
, a left-wing and sometimes revolutionary political attitude among writers, heritage of Guernica and Munich, boiling up to a certain aggressive optimism in the war years, gradually declining after D-day and soon after the victorious general election despondently fizzling out . . . A Socialist Government, besides doing practically nothing to help artists and writers, has also quite failed to stir up either intellect or imagination; the English renaissance, whose false dawn we have so enthusiastically greeted, is further away than ever . . . Somehow, during the last two years, the left-wing literary movement has petered out.

Nor was a society seemingly pervaded by pernickety, pettifogging bureaucracy any more attractive even for a veteran Fabian. ‘The whole world is full of permits and control of people,’ Lord Passfield (better known as Sidney Webb) lamented two months later in his final letter. ‘I am afraid the old ones such as I fall to have to put up with much.’ Everything, of course, would be all right so long as the people’s party and the people were on the same wavelength. A perceptive observer as well as participant, Gaitskell privately reflected at about this time how often Labour MPs for marginal seats were ‘most unrealistic about the Left Wing character of the electorate’, and he argued that they made the mistake of ‘identifying their own keen supporters – politically conscious and class-conscious Labour men – with the mass of the people, who are very much against austerity, utterly uninterested in nationalisation of steel, heartily sick of excuses and being told to work harder, but probably more tolerant of the Government and appreciative of its difficulties than many suppose’.
¹¹

Gaitskell’s reading of a misalignment between party and people was endorsed in December 1947 by a poll which found that 42 per cent thought the Labour government had so far been ‘too socialistic’, 30 per cent ‘about right’, and a mere 15 per cent ‘not socialist enough’. For Gaitskell’s close friend and contemporary Durbin, such a poll served to confirm that (as he tersely put it in some notes written around 1947/8) ‘British people not socialists’ and ‘the political future is not hopeful’. He had already, in earlier notes, called for ‘co-operation between Public Opinion experts and sociological minded politicians’ in some ‘consumer’s research – to find out what our people really want from the State’. Socialists, he now contended,

must realise that the British people soon tire of any one set of changes – and will soon need a
new emphasis upon the values of personal life
– in a more complex and powerfully unified society.

improved communication with them

services that deal with personal problems

more provision for fun

The fragmentary, unpunctuated nature of Durbin’s notes fails to mask the fact that, by this third year of the Labour government, he was working towards a new, potentially very fruitful, more consultative politics that would be predicated on a realistic assessment of the electorate’s values and priorities.

None of which meant that Durbin himself made much political headway. ‘You will see that God continues to strike heavily,’ he had complained to a friend in October 1946. ‘Trouble at Edmonton, chest trouble and no job in the Government.’ Five months later he was at last given a position, but only as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Works – one of the less inspiring posts. Nor did the autumn 1947 reshuffle bring any joy. ‘I feel a little separated from the consideration of economic policy,’ he wrote with understandable disappointment to Attlee. ‘I know that I have something to contribute to the Government in this direction.’
¹²

The contrast was stark with another economist-turned-politician, Harold Wilson, who in the reshuffle became President of the Board of Trade – at 31 the youngest Cabinet minister of the twentieth century, though in appearance and manner (moustache, incipient paunch, invariable waistcoat, little small talk or sense of humour) middle-aged before his time. It was not quite Pitt the Younger, but it was in its way an equally remarkable advance. The son of an industrial chemist, Wilson in background was solidly northern (mainly Huddersfield), Non conformist (Congregationalist) and more middle- than working-class. From grammar school it was a sure-footed ascent: scholarship to Oxford, a top First, fellowship at an Oxford college, research assistant to Sir William Beveridge, wartime work at the Ministry of Fuel and Power that won him an OBE, a seat (Ormskirk) in 1945, a government position from the start, the call to the Cabinet. The appointment received much publicity – almost all of it favourable – and within days the Cotton Board’s Sir Raymond Streat was watching Wilson open a textiles exhibition and participate in a conference on the export task ahead. ‘I think Wilson made a good impression on my cotton friends and on me personally,’ Streat noted. ‘He is quick on the uptake – too well versed in economics and civil service work to rant or rave like a soap-box socialist.’ A second encounter with the new man followed soon after:

Harold Wilson reacts too quickly, too smoothly and readily for any impression of particular purpose to emerge. Maybe he hardly gives himself time to identify purpose and if his romantically early start in politics is to lead to the acquisition of the qualities of statesmanship he would possibly be well advised to take himself in hand and leave part of the garden in which such plants could grow . . .

He is nice enough as an open-hearted sort of young man and a fond father of a young family to be all right if he does not entirely forget big things by allowing himself to be pre-occupied with a million small ones.

One of Wilson’s biographers, Ben Pimlott, has argued that this was somewhat unfair, given that ‘a million small things’ were at this time the very business of the Board of Trade. But Streat’s was still an acute assessment.

What was Wilson’s ‘particular purpose’? Much has been made of his attachment to Liberalism until the late 1930s and his subsequent lack of a moment of socialist epiphany. Yet what is most striking about his personal-cum-political formation is the cumulatively conclusive evidence that at no stage was he interested in ideas – as opposed to economic statistics, the names and numbers of steam engines, and football and cricket scores. Formidably clever and industrious, he was not (for better or worse) an intellectual. ‘Harold Wilson was a rule-governed convergent thinker,’ reflected one historian, David Howell, after reading Pimlott. ‘He performed according to the rules.’
¹³
And, unlike the young Gladstone when sent to the Board of Trade, he never complained that he had been ‘set to govern packages’.

For the Conservative Party, so crushingly vanquished in 1945, it could be only a long night’s journey into day.
¹⁴
At its first post-war conference, at Blackpool in October 1946, the mood on the platform was still pessimistic. ‘These great, intelligent thoroughbreds, trained from their earliest years to prudent administration and courteous debate, were in their hearts not far from accepting as definitive their electoral defeat,’ one observer, the French political scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel, wrote soon afterwards. But on the conference floor there was a much greater sense of defiance – not least (if one accepts her retrospective account) on the part of Margaret Roberts, newly elected President of the Oxford University Conservative Association. The right-wing newspaper proprietor (and wartime Minister of Information) Brendan Bracken reported to Beaverbrook that the delegates ‘would have nothing to do with the proposal to change the Party’s name’ and that ‘they demanded a real Conservative policy instead of a synthetic Socialist one.’ Although Churchill was initially disinclined to undertake a fundamental review of policy at this stage, in due course a committee chaired by Rab Butler (architect of the 1944 Education Act) was set up.

The outcome was
The Industrial Charter
, published in May 1947 and recognised from the outset as a major policy statement. Less than two years after Churchill’s ill-considered ‘Gestapo’ jibe, the document apparently marked a broad acceptance of the emerging post-war settlement. There would be no denationalisation of the Bank of England or the coal mines or the railways; the new orthodoxy of Keynesian deficit finance – government increasing its spending in order to boost demand and thus employment – was accepted; workers’ rights were to be protected; and producers’ monopolies and cartels were denounced as vigorously as trade union restrictive practices. One passage particularly caught the prevailing pragmatic tone: ‘We Conservatives want to release industry and those who work in industry from unnecessary controls so that energy and fresh ideas may be given their head. But we know that, as things are, there must be some central planning of the nation’s work. The world is topsy-turvy. Raw materials are scarce. Stormy weather must be foreseen. There must be a hand on the helm . . .’ Altogether, commented the
Spectator
, the document removed any ‘excuse for labelling the Conservative Party as at present constituted as reactionary’, adding that ‘in most cases the difference with Labour is more of degree than of fundamental principle.’