Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  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.’13And, 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.14At 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.’

  That October, at the party conference in Brighton, the progressive-minded, thoroughly non-grandee (son of an actuary) Reggie Maudling, prospective candidate for Barnet and one of the bright young things on the research side, moved an amendment that the Charter be accepted by the party as a whole. Sir Waldron Smithers, the entirely unreconstructed MP for Orpington, protested that ‘the party must not allow itself to become infected with the Socialist bug, and it must stick to its principles or perish’. But amid soothing words from Butler (including the phrase ‘private initiative in the public interest’) and a certain amount of well-rehearsed procedural legerdemain, the Maudling amendment was carried with only three dissenters. It was, the Spectator reflected with overall satisfaction, ‘a responsible act’ that demonstrated ‘a positive will to govern on the part of
the rank and file’.15

  In reality, the Tories were not in quite such ideological retreat. Not only did The Industrial Charter consistently identify private enterprise as the rightful mainspring of economic activity, but the language almost throughout emphasised the individual at the expense of the collective. ‘The ultimate restoration of freedom of choice’ for the consumer, ‘status as an individual personality’ for the worker, and ‘a personal incentive to reap a greater reward for greater responsibility’ for the manager: all were contrasted, in ‘a free and resourceful nation’, with Labour’s belief that ‘the men and women who fought and worked together in the war can now be exalted, controlled and regimented into producing goods, building houses and rendering services in time of peace’. Variety as against uniformity, ‘humanising’ as against nationalising, giving people ‘opportunity’ as against orders – this was to be the new, distinctive rhetoric of post-war Conservatism, a rhetoric far removed in the late 1940s from Labour rhetoric, even right-wing Labour rhetoric.

  Moreover, although no one in the Tory leadership imagined that there could be a return to the minimalist, ‘nightwatchman’ state of the nineteenth century, it was far from clear that old-fashioned economic liberalism had been totally banished. ‘I do not agree with a word of this,’ Churchill memorably told Maudling after being given a five-line digest of the newly endorsed Charter; the next most senior Tory, Sir Anthony Eden, was already pushing hard for ‘a property-owning democracy’ despite the fact that public housing was poised to expand as never before; and a possible Tory Chancellor, Oliver Lyttelton, a hard-money man from the City, was privately contemplating the radical free-market solution of floating the pound. In short, the ‘pinks’ like Butler (who himself plugged ‘co-partnership’ essentially as a tactical antidote to nationalisation) and Harold Macmillan (author of The Middle Way in the 1930s) were far from having captured the party. A few weeks after the Brighton conference, the somewhat puzzled thoughts of Sir Cuthbert Headlam, a backbencher instinctively sceptical of Keynes et al, were probably representative of much of party opinion:

  I find that this pinkish portion of our party are more prominent but less popular with the rank and file than they used to be. People instinctively dislike their economic planning and plotting and yet can see no alternative to some policy of the kind in present conditions. In this I fancy they are right – the great thing, however, is not to emphasize the necessity for controls so much – if and when we come back into power, it will be time enough to decide how much Govt. intervention in the conduct of industry is required.16

  There was still, in sum, much to play for – both within the party and, notwithstanding Labour’s partial retreat from planning, between the parties.

  Not that most people were fussed either way. ‘A very large number of people know little about party politics and care little,’ declared a Mass-Observation report in the summer of 1947 about public reaction to the Charter. ‘Any effort at all to obtain interest in a particular political party or policy is immediately confronted with a solid wall of disinterest and disbelief in at least a third of the people of this country’ – a state of mind co-existing with ‘extreme confusion on any subject even remotely concerned with party politics’. Asked about the differences between the two main parties, most of the survey’s respondents were unable to identify any; as for those who did, the analysis rarely went beyond the personal or the non-political. ‘The Labour are out for themselves and don’t care about the people, but the Conservatives are wonderful, Mr Churchill should be sitting on the throne of Heaven’ was a not untypical reply, in this case given by a 55-year-old charwoman. Less than a fifth of the sample, shown copies of the Charter and other recent political pamphlets, confessed to having ever seen or even heard of any of them. Among those willing to engage with its policies, a worker’s charter was generally seen as irrelevant and profit-sharing as impractical. ‘It’s all right on the outside but it’s the inside that counts’ was how a Labour-voting baker summed up his response to the pamphlet. ‘I just don’t trust them, that’s all.’

  Still, whatever its limitations in terms of popular appeal, there is no doubt that the Charter played an important part – if probably more by language than content – in making the Tories once again electoral contenders. For one septuagenarian, obstinately unwilling to stand down even as his finest hour passed into the history books (at this stage mainly being written by himself), this was a gratifying development. ‘She told me that her father was very elated by the municipal election results, and was now confident that his party had a following in the country,’ Lees-Milne noted in November 1947 after dining with Sarah Churchill. ‘Already people in the streets were more respectful to him.’17

  11

  Ain’t She Lovely?

  The forces of conservatism were not to be underestimated. In March 1947 Bishop Barnes of Birmingham set out in The Rise of Christianity a theology that rejected the evidence of the Virgin Birth, the Miracles and the Resurrection. Over the next year his book sold more than 15,000 copies and generated a huge, wildly varied postbag. ‘It is such a brave book,’ the actress Sybil Thorndike wrote to him, ‘and coming from a priest of the Church it is more than brave. It has been a releasing for me, and I am sure it must have been for many people.’ The controversy came to a head in October 1947 when, at a meeting of Convocation, Geoffrey Fisher – Archbishop of Canterbury and uncomfortably aware that a majority of bishops were itching to pass a vote of censure for heresy – explicitly disavowed Barnes. ‘If his views were mine,’ he added, ‘I should not feel that I could still hold episcopal office in the Church.’

  Soon afterwards, the Sunday Pictorial, noting that ‘at the very least the fundamental beliefs of millions are called into question’, asked its readers to send in their views. The upshot was a torrent of words (more than three-quarters of a million in one week), with 52 per cent of letters supporting Barnes, 32 per cent against and the rest neutral. Tellingly, his opponents highlighted hypocrisy at least as much as doctrinal impurity. ‘Dr Barnes should be expelled from the Church of England for denying the very truths he is paid a large salary to defend,’ declared P. G. Thurston of Waterworks Road, Hastings. Ruth B. Hall from Ashford, Middlesex, agreed: ‘Resign, man! And at least be honest. At the moment you are taking money under false pretences, in my opinion.’ There was, as Mass-Observation’s Puzzled People survey had shown, a widespread dislike for the established church, seen by many – in a way that had little or nothing to do with theology – as smug and excessively privileged. Barnes himself did not step down. But it was clear that within the church leadership the liberals were in a distinct minority, a minority that did not include Archbishop Fisher, a man of ‘benign authoritarianism’ (in the phrase of his Times obituary) who had earlier been a public-school headmaster and intended to run the Church of England along similar lines.1.

  A few weeks later, Fisher was solemnising the first post-war royal marriage. It had been a contentious choice of husband on Princess Elizabeth’s part. In January 1947, before the engagement was announced, a Sunday Pictorial poll found that although 55 per cent were in favour of a marriage between her and Prince Philip of Greece (with the stipulation ‘if the Princess and Prince are in love’), 40 per cent were against. Many readers felt that she ought to marry a commoner, one declaring that ‘the days of intermarriage of royalty have passed’; others saw the marriage as frankly ‘a political move’; and plenty echoed the xenophobic view of one household in the Euston Road: ‘We, the Russell family – a father and two sons who have served in both wars – say, “Definitely no!” to a marriage with a foreign prince.’ Lord Mountbatten, Philip’s uncle, was already sufficiently rattled that he had asked the editors of the hostile Beaverbrook press whether they thought opinion would soften if his nephew were naturalised. They had agreed it might help, and Prince Philip of Greece in February duly became Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN.

  In July the engagement was at last announced. ‘Any banqueting and display
of wealth at your daughter’s wedding will be an insult to the British people at the present time,’ the Camden Town branch of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers immediately warned the King, ‘and we would consider that you would be well advised to order a very quiet wedding in keeping with the times.’ Amid a generally warm press response, the reaction of Florence Speed was probably representative. ‘Princess Elizabeth is engaged (official),’ she noted, ‘& judging from the laughing photographs of her taken after a dance at Apsley House last night it is the “love match” it is claimed to be & we are all glad about it.’ As for Philip, she added that he was ‘the type “easy on the eye”, which any young girl would fall in love with’. Although a poll taken soon afterwards revealed that 40 per cent professed indifference to the prospect of the royal wedding in November – typical remarks including ‘Feel? What should I feel?’, ‘I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me’ and ‘It’s not my business, it’s up to them’ – by October those actively approving of the marriage were up from 40 to 60 per cent. Even so, James Lees-Milne recorded some disturbing news on 18 November, after dining with Simon Mosley of the Coldstream Guards: ‘Says that 50 per cent of the guardsmen in his company refused to contribute towards a present for Princess Elizabeth. The dissentients came to him in a body and, quite pleasantly, gave him their reasons. One, they said the Royal Family did nothing for anybody, and two, the Royal Family would not contribute towards a present for their weddings.’ Moreover, ‘when Simon Mosley said that without the Royal Family the Brigade of Guards, with its privileges and traditions, would cease to exist, they replied, “Good! Let them both cease to exist.”’