Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Finally, on Sunday the 17th, the Cabinet decided there was no alternative but to suspend convertibility. There were three more days of the Fifth Test at The Oval – Compton taking another century off South Africa, while according to Wisden ‘the terraces presented a dazzling scene with the sun blazing down on the compact mass of people in the lightest permissible summer attire’ – before Hugh Dalton on the 20th announced suspension on the radio. ‘It is in fact a default,’ was the implacable verdict of the Financial Times. ‘Such a misjudgement of the situation and such precipitate abandonment of the position taken up so recently cannot fail to bring the gravest discredit upon this Government of self-styled planners.’ For most people, however, national humiliation probably mattered rather less than the further cuts announced exactly a week later. ‘“LESS–LESS–LESS” shrieks the “Daily Express” headline this morning,’ noted Florence Speed on the 28th – with the weekly meat ration, for example, being cut from 1s 2d to 1s – while Lees-Milne reported himself that day as ‘terribly upset by the announcement that the basic petrol ration is to be cut off and all foreign travel to cease’. Yet in Henry St John’s office in Bristol, this announcement of the latest cuts ‘was freely commented on, but there was no sign of revolt, or any constructive criticism’.5. Phlegm? Or indifference? A good question, to which perhaps the most plausible answer is that it was a bit of both.

  In the short term, the response of the ‘self-styled planners’ was seemingly to turn to more planning, with Stafford Cripps in September assuming the newly created position of Minister of Economic Affairs, effectively replacing Morrison as planning supremo and enjoying, at least on paper, more clout than the somewhat beleaguered Dalton at the Treasury. On the face of it representing a renewed commitment to centrally directed economic planning, in reality it was the deftest of ploys by Attlee, who in the face of a possible putsch against his leadership thereby neatly detached Cripps from the fellow-plotters Dalton and Morrison. Only weeks later, Dalton was forced to walk the plank after carelessly revealing part of the contents of his Budget speech shortly before delivering it; Cripps replaced him, with his new ministry effectively being subsumed into the Treasury. Over the following year, Cripps proved to be a remarkably effective and dominant Chancellor – arguably the outstanding occupant of No. 11 since Gladstone, certainly since Lloyd George before the First World War. One consequence was a huge boost to the institutional authority of the Treasury, where by this time the out-and-out planners, advocating physical controls (especially over manpower) to achieve a planned economy, were heavily outgunned by the supporters of Keynesian demand management. Indeed, Dalton’s ill-fated November 1947 Budget, seeking through fiscal policy to reduce the level of demand, had already made it clear where the Treasury stood; and Cripps, though nominally a committed planner, in practice became increasingly aware of planning’s defects and limitations.6.

  Nevertheless, not only did many controls remain in place, but the intellectual shift itself took time to take effect. The influential Evan Durbin, for instance, was hardly a left-winger, yet he was deeply reluctant to abandon socialist planning. Typically, he did not duck the problems, arguing in a 1948 essay that if it was inefficient allocation of manpower that had been mainly responsible for weakening the economy by the time of convertibility, then the only way in which that difficulty could be addressed in a democratically planned manner was through a differential wages policy – given that it was unacceptable to increase significantly the degree of compulsory direction of labour that already existed. Durbin, like everyone else, knew that the stumbling block to his strategy was the trade unions and their deep attachment to free collective bargaining.

  Moreover, although the TUC did, through gritted teeth, agree in the spring of 1948 to an informal policy of wage restraint, essentially as a quid pro quo for government efforts to restrain inflation, this agreement neither contained a differential element (such as might stimulate labour mobility) nor implied any endorsement of a wages policy as part of the permanent landscape of a planned economy. ‘We shall go forward building up our wage claims in conformity with our understanding of the people we are representing’ was how the most powerful union leader, Arthur Deakin of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), had put it in 1946, adding that ‘any attempt to interfere with that position would have disastrous results’. Nothing had changed fundamentally since then or was likely to change. For all those temperamentally and philosophically wedded to pulling levers from the centre, Keynesian demand management offered a more or less acceptable way out of the planning impasse.

  The convertibility crisis also undermined planning in the sense of reconstruction, inevitably leading as it did to a number of major capital-investment cuts. Work on the first wave of New Towns almost ground to a halt, prompting some tellingly patronising, Goldsmithian lines from ‘Sagittarius’:

  O thou, the city planner’s lawful pride,

  With industry and housing side by side,

  Abandon’d ere thy ground-plan was unroll’d,

  Farewell, sweet Stevenage! thou art pigeon-hol’d.

  Here winsome rented dwellings would have been,

  With sun-trap fronts towards th’ unlitter’d green,

  Thy Civic Centre, seat of sober pomp,

  Thy glitt’ring Dance-Hall for the modest romp,

  Thy communal canteen and cultural hub,

  Thy decent shop and semi-rural pub.

  It was almost as slow-going in the blitzed cities, where large swathes of bomb sites seemed to be settling in for a new duration, while in one, Hull, council elections in November 1947 showed clearly that local people were far more concerned with getting housing as soon as possible than, as they saw it, with watching the local authority engage in expensive, high-falutin’ town planning for some distant point in the 1950s – or beyond.7.

  There were even continuing misgivings in Coventry. ‘We all wish to see a beautiful and well-planned city rise from the ruins of the old,’ one Coventry resident protested earlier that year, ‘but you cannot expect people, who are living in overcrowded conditions, with meagre supplies of food and clothing, properly to appreciate the present scheme of transformation in Broadgate. When they see the tons of cement and brickwork, together with the labour personnel involved upon the project, it only seems to widen the gap between their present conditions and the hopes of something better in the near future.’ The scheme, though, went ahead, and in May 1948, on a Saturday of blazing sunshine and huge crowds, Princess Elizabeth visited Coventry to declare the redeveloped Broadgate open and lay the foundation stone for its new shopping precinct. ‘With your blessing we shall create not only a city of fine buildings, but a happy and prosperous community,’ declared Alderman George Hodgkinson, the prime moving force behind Coventry’s rebuilding, in his speech of thanks. That day the main local paper was similarly bullish: ‘As we look around us we have reason for satisfaction. The old, homely Broadgate we knew was obliterated by bombing. That could never be restored, but in recent months new roads have been constructed, and a garden island has appeared where not so long ago was desolation. Truly Broadgate is a fitting centre-piece for a well-planned city. The foundation stone of the shopping precinct marks the beginning of bigger things.’ In sum, Elizabeth’s visit ‘has given Royal recognition to Coventry’s post-war achievements and aspirations’.8.

  Certainly immediate economic difficulties did not stop the activators looking ahead. In 1947 the Labour-run Birmingham City Council, very much under the sway of its dynamic City Engineer Herbert Manzoni, managed to raise a huge loan for the compulsory purchase of five of the city’s most run-down areas, more than half of whose 30,000 dwellings were back-to-backs. The move confirmed that in Birmingham, as in other big British cities, there would one day be the juggernaut of large-scale slum clearance. A meeting in April 1948 of the Society of Women Housing Managers tackled the question of how it might work:

  Miss Thompson said the breaking up of an old community was a serious thing, a
s there was often a strong social bond in these areas. The key, she thought, was to get to know the people first, find out the forces making the social cohesion, and try to work in harmony with them.

  This point was taken up by Mrs Barclay, president, who said that even when a community was only being moved a short way it seemed almost impossible to re-create the same social bond. The very fact of living in new houses seemed to produce a kind of exclusiveness.

  The Danish architectural writer Steen Eiler Rasmussen would almost certainly have agreed with this patient, listening, female approach. Author of London: The Unique City, an instant classic on publication in 1934, he included a solemn warning in his new edition in 1948:

  The evil comes in when architecture is treated as free art, like music and ballet, with the aim of expressing the special mind of its originator. Some so-called modern architects prefer to pose as romantic figures like Beethoven whose countenance seems to reveal the vast profundity obscure. It is good for picture papers and promotes respect for the profession. But as we see today that even music has suffered from overemphasis of the emotional side it is obvious also that the art of domestic architecture cannot stand a too romantic interpretation.

  Instead, as a less hubristic but indispensable goal, ‘it must find its justification simply in forming a satisfactory setting to modern life’.

  Yet what exactly was ‘modern life’? And what in urban terms might be ‘a satisfactory setting’ for it? ‘I have never seen any scientific calculation as to what is the right density either for a town or a part of it,’ the minister Lewis Silkin brusquely told a gathering of town planners in July 1948. And he specifically queried those planners’ most sacred cow, the concept of the neighbourhood unit: ‘The assumption is that by dividing up your population into groups of 10,000 to 20,000 and surrounding them by open spaces, railways and main roads you will get nice little communities living happily and sociably together. On what evidence is that based?’ The door was swinging open for a whole new world of applied social research. Or as James Lansdale Hodson had reflected shortly before, ‘We remain very ignorant of the state of the nation. Not half enough social scientists are examining what’s going on.’9.

  Altogether, the mood by 1947/8 on the non-Communist left was undeniably mixed but still at some fundamental level united. Not everyone might have agreed with Michael Young’s nomination of 1960 as a realistic target date for the building of a socialist society, but most would have empathised with the defence of post-war changes made by the central character in J. B. Priestley’s The Linden Tree, opening in London in August 1947:

  Call us drab and dismal, if you like, and tell us we don’t know how to cook our food or wear our clothes – but for Heaven’s sake, recognise that we’re trying to do something that is as extraordinary and wonderful as it’s difficult – to have a revolution for once without the Terror, without looting mobs and secret police, sudden arrests, mass suicides and executions, without setting in motion that vast pendulum of violence which can decimate three generations before it comes to a standstill. We’re fighting in the last ditch of our civilisation. If we win through, everybody wins through.

  Shortly afterwards, in early September, one of Young’s colleagues in Labour’s research department, the young writer Vincent Brome, had a lengthy, revealing conversation with Bevan. ‘Inevitably we spoke of democratic Socialism. We analysed what the Labour Government was trying to do, we examined the difficulties surrounding it, and then, suddenly, he defined Socialism in terms very different from the normal’:

  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 we
ll 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