Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (7 page)

As early as February 1941, the city council was able to make the choice between two competing plans for the centre’s redevelopment. One plan (by Ernest Ford, the City Engineer) emphasised continuity and traditional street patterns; the other, Gibson’s, envisaged an entirely new centre that, set inside an inner ring road, would boast not only impressive – and culturally improving – municipal facilities (including library, civic hall, museum, adult educational institution, and school of art and art gallery) surrounded by large open spaces but also a largely pedestrianised shopping precinct of six- or seven-storey buildings. Perhaps emboldened by Gibson’s appeal – ‘Let it not be said by future generations that the people of Coventry failed them, when the ideal was within their reach’ – the Labour-controlled council voted 43 to 6 in his favour.

The decision immediately attracted considerable national attention, and in a visit about a year later the King himself made approbatory noises and ‘expressed the opinion that in all schemes of re-planning towns and cities which had been badly bombed, the future amenities for the citizens were of supreme importance’. During the rest of the war, despite concerns from Whitehall about cost and precedent, the City Council held firm to Gibson’s plan. ‘A cauldron in which experiments were taking place’ was how the Bishop of Coventry proudly saw his city early in 1945. Speaking to the local Rotary, he added, ‘England was watching to see if the city was going to do its job and allow a full life to the people.’
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Given Coventry’s unique pre-war place in the national psyche as the hub of the thriving British motor industry, the cutting edge of the second Industrial Revolution, this was perhaps not an absurd claim to make.

But would the new, rebuilt, reconstructed Britain enjoy – as Gibson in his plans clearly hoped it would – a new, more democratic, more socially concerned, more politically conscious culture? ‘When Work is Over’ was J. B. Priestley’s contribution to
Picture Post
’s 1941 ‘Plan’ for Britain and, apart from ‘real holidays for all’, his main vision of leisure in the post-war age seemed to involve more facilities to study the arts and the setting up of civic centres of music, drama, film and talk. Increased leisure as such, he emphasised, was not necessarily a boon: ‘We do not want greyhound racing and dirt track performances to be given at all hours of the day and night, pin table establishments doing a roaring trade from dawn to midnight, and idiotic films being shown down every street.’ Priestley himself kept his distance from the Labour Party, but during the war there was a comfortable, almost automatic assumption on the part of Labour politicians and activists that the conflict was producing a more egalitarian society and thus a more serious-minded, socialist people. Herbert Morrison, for example, was apparently convinced by the spring of 1944 that there now existed a ‘genuine social idealism’, reflecting the ‘altered moral sense of the community’, and that accordingly the British people were ‘moving into an altogether different form of society, working in an altogether different atmosphere of ideas’ – a revolution of outlook, shifting from the values of private enterprise to the values of socialism, that meant that the people would never again ‘be content with limited and material aims’.
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These were not assumptions shared by Evan Durbin, the Labour Party’s most interesting thinker of the 1940s and arguably of the twentieth century. Durbin – born in 1906, the son of a Baptist minister – was an attractively paradoxical figure. He once remarked that his three greatest pleasures were ‘food, sleep and sex’ but accused D. H. Lawrence of ‘shallow abstractions’ in relation to ‘freedom in sexual relations’; politically, he defined himself as a ‘militant Moderate’; and, as a trained economist who had lectured through the 1930s at the LSE, he combined a strong belief in economic planning with the conviction that the price mechanism was indispensable if the liberty of consumers in a modern democracy was to be ensured. During the 1930s, Durbin became close to the young psychiatrist John Bowlby, and the influence of Bowlby ran through much of his major work,
The Politics of Democratic Socialism
, published in 1940. As for economics itself, Durbin made a brave gesture towards the ‘sound money’ school – its citadel the City of London – that had wrecked Ramsay MacDonald’s 1931 Labour government, by declaring that ‘it is not wise in the long run to expect to live upon golden eggs and slowly to strangle the goose that lays them’.

Towards the end of his book, an arrestingly bleak passage shows how far removed Durbin was from the average political or economic thinker:

Although wealth, physical health and social equality may all make their contributions to human happiness, they can all do little and cannot themselves be secured, without health in the individual mind. We are our own kingdoms and make for ourselves, in large measure, the world in which we live. We may be rich, and healthy, and liberal; but unless we are free from secret guilt, the agonies of inferiority and frustration, and the fire of unexpressed aggression, all other things are added to our lives in vain. The cruelty and irrationality of human society spring from these secret sources. The savagery of a Hitler, the brutality of a Stalin, the ruthlessness and refined bestiality that is rampant in the world today – persecution, cruelty and war – are nothing but the external expression, the institutional and rationalized form, of these dark forces in the human heart.

Among the many phrases that stand out is ‘the brutality of a Stalin’ – language not yet much heard (as George Orwell had already lamented) on the left.

In 1944, by this time seconded to Whitehall and contemplating standing as a candidate in the next general election, Durbin locked horns with Hayek after the latter’s
The Road to Serfdom
was published. Planning, Durbin insisted, was used by socialists to ‘indicate a principle of administration and not an inflexible budget of production’; and he emphasised anew that ‘the centrally directed economy can be, and should be, instructed to adapt its programme to the changing wishes of the consuming public and the changing conditions of technical efficiency.’
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It was the characteristically assured, with-the-grain response of a man seemingly poised for the most glittering prizes.

How in fact
did
all these noble aspirations for a better post-war world strike the much-invoked, less often consulted and still heavily (about 75 per cent) working-class British people?

Some observers as well as politicians were convinced that the plates had shifted not just in terms of the formation of an elite progressive consensus (though with hindsight one can see how the extent of that consensus was possible to exaggerate) but also in terms of opinion and sentiment at large. ‘At every period,’ reflected a Political and Economic Planning (PEP) broadsheet in the winter of 1941/2, ‘there have been idealists who have wanted to reform the world; only at rare moments has the demand for the assertion of new principles and new liberties surged from the bottom of society upwards with such overwhelming force that serious opposition is not possible. Now is one of those moments.’ The well-informed journalist and author James Lansdale Hodson, in the overall ‘ledger of war’ that he drew up in February 1945, might not have disagreed: ‘Glancing, if one may, at the minds of our people, I think we have moved Leftwards, i.e. turned more progressive in the sense that not many would wish to go back to where we were in 1938–9. The love of books and good music has grown. Our A.B.C.A. [Army Bureau of Current Affairs] and other discussion groups in the Forces have encouraged a number, at all events, to enjoy arguments and the methods of democracy, and our production committees have worked similarly in factories.’ Such was also the conviction of Richard Titmuss, who in 1942 was commissioned to write an official history of the wartime work of the Ministry of Health.

The eventual magisterial account,
Problems of Social Policy
(1950), would make canonical the interpretation that there had indeed been a sea-change in the British outlook – first as the mass evacuation of women and children from the main cities brought the social classes into a far closer mutual understanding than there had ever been before, then as the months of stark and dangerous isolation after Dunkirk created an impatient, almost aggressive mood decrying privilege and demanding ‘fair shares’ for all. Between them, according to the Titmuss version, these two circumstances led to a widespread desire for major social and other reforms of a universalist, egalitarian nature. The Beveridge Report and the rest of the reconstruction package followed. Tellingly, in his treatment of the Blitz, Titmuss noted that ‘there was nothing to be ashamed of in being “bombed out” by the enemy’ and that ‘public sympathy with, and approval of, families who suffered in the raids was in sharp contrast to the low social evaluation accorded to those who lost material standards through being unemployed during the 1930s’.
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In the round, such a Whiggish, feel-good reading – unity forged through adversity, irresistible pressure from below leading to longed-for change, human nature actually improving – would, not surprisingly, take some shifting.

And of course, there were plausible grounds for it. In August 1942, a year and a half after Orwell in
The Lion and the Unicorn
had detected a ‘visible swing in public opinion’ towards socialism and a planned economy since the fall of France, Mass-Observation asked working-class residents of Holborn and Paddington what changes they hoped to see after the war. ‘Well, I can’t say I’m sure,’ was the rather helpless reply of one middle-aged woman, but others were more forthcoming. ‘C’ in M-O annotation referred to ‘artisan and skilled workers’, with ‘D’ being ‘unskilled workers and the least economically or educationally trained third of our people’:

There’ll have to be more equalness. Things not fair now. Nobody can tell me they are. There’s them with more money what they can ever use. This ain’t right and it’s got to be put right. (
M
65
C
)

I think the biggest change of all should be security for the ordinary people; I mean, nothing like the depression that followed the last war.

I think a lot could be done to avoid that. (
Inv. asked how
). I’m afraid that’s too big a question. (
M
30
C
)

I think I’d like a lot of changes. (
What particularly?
) I don’t know. (
F
50
D
)

I do feel that the schooling of children should be a sort of pooled schooling; every child should be allowed to have the same chance; not because a mother has more money she should be allowed to send her child to one school – the class distinction in the schools, I think that should be wiped right out . . . (
F
30
C
)

Oh, lots. (
asked what
) Much better living for the ordinary working man. (
Anything else?
) Better housing and everything. (
F
25
C
)

There’ll have to be changes. Did you read about that old bitch Lady Astor? She’s one that’ll be changed, if I had my way. It’s the likes of her that causes revolutions. (
M
45
C
)

Later that year, in early December, the publication of the Beveridge Report caused a sensation. One London diarist noted that it had ‘set everybody talking’, and Beveridge himself conceded that ‘it’s been a revelation to me how concerned people are with conditions after the war’. Among ‘my friends and colleagues’, stated an engineering draughtsman, ‘the publication of the Report caused more discussion and interest than any war news for a long time,’ and he added that ‘the tone of
all
the discussions was favourable.’ From Mass-Observation’s national panel of some 1,500 regular correspondents (from ‘all walks of life, living in all parts of the country’, though in practice almost certainly with a middle-class bias), more than 300 wrote in to express their views, with only a handful against. Reconstruction hopes seemingly remained high and widespread later in the war. Debates in 1943/4 in the Forces ‘Parliament’ in Cairo saw strong support for bills to nationalise the retail trade and restrict inheritances; a poll by Gallup in July 1944 found 55 per cent welcoming the idea of a national health service (and 69 per cent preferring the prospect of health centres to the normal doctor’s surgery); and shortly before Christmas that year almost one in four of the adult population listened to a series of eight Home Service programmes about full employment.
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