by Andrew Marr
The inevitable tumble that follows a Report and White Paper – the watering-down, haggling, legislating and organizing – had to take place before the new National Insurance system was finally brought into being in 1948. Yet it was a fantastic feat of organization which puts modern government to shame in its energy and speed. A new office to hold 25 million contribution records was needed, plus 6 million for married women. It had to be huge and to go up quickly. Prisoners of war were used to build it in Newcastle; meanwhile a propeller factory in Gateshead was taken over to run family allowances. The work of six old government departments was brought into a new ministry. More than half the staff who were transferred were still working away with typewriters and fountain pens in the bedrooms of 400 Blackpool hotels and boarding houses where they had been sent for the war. Forms were printed, box files assembled, new teams picked. Jim Griffiths, the Labour minister pushing it all through and refusing to take no for an answer, wanted a thousand local National Insurance offices ready around the country, decently decorated and politely staffed. After being told a hundred times that all this was quite impossible, he got it. Britain has been a subtly different and slightly less dangerous place to live in ever since. The level of help given was rather less than Beveridge himself would have wanted, and married women in particular were still treated as dependents; there was a lot to be argued about over the next fifty years. Still, from Beveridge’s first rough notes in an office where he was thought to be safely out of harm’s way, to a revolution in welfare, sweeping away centuries of complicated, partial and unfair rules and customs, it had been just six years’ work.
17
The NHS: Nye’s Simple Idea
The creation of the National Health Service, which Beveridge thought essential to his wider vision, was an angrier task. Britain had had a system of voluntary hospitals, raising their own cash, which varied wildly in size, efficiency and cleanliness. Later, it also had municipal hospitals, many growing out of the original workhouses. Some of these, in go-ahead cities like London, Birmingham or Nottingham, were efficient, modern places whose beds were generally kept for the poor. Others were squalid. Money for the voluntary hospitals came from investments, gifts, charity events, payments and a hotchpotch of insurance schemes. Today we think of ward closures and hospitals on the edge of bankruptcy as diseases of the NHS. The pre-war system was much less certain and wards closed for lack of funds then too. By the time the war ended most of Britain’s hospitals had been brought into a single national emergency medical service. The question was what should happen now – should they be nationalized or allowed back to go their own way? A similar question mark hung over family doctors. GPs depended on private fees, though most of them also took poor patients through some kind of health insurance scheme. When not working from home or a surgery, they would often double up operating in municipal hospitals where, as non-specialists, they sometimes hacked away incompetently. And the insurance system excluded many elderly people, housewives and children, who were therefore put off visiting the doctor at all, unless they were in the greatest pain or gravest danger. The situation was similar with dentistry and optical services, which were not available to anyone without the cash to pay for them. Out of this Labour was determined to provide the first system of medical care, free at the point of need, there had been in any Western democracy.
Simplicity is a great weapon. Nye Bevan’s single biggest decision was to take all the hospitals, the voluntary ones and the ones run by local councils, into a single nationalized system. It would have regional boards but it would all come under the Ministry of Health in London. This was heroic self-confidence. For the first time, a single politician would take ultimate responsibility for every hospital in the land, bar a tiny number of private ones. Herbert Morrison, the great defender of municipal power, was against this nationalization but was brushed aside by Bevan.
A more dangerous enemy by far were the hospital doctors. What followed was the most important, most difficult domestic fight of the post-war Labour government’s life. The doctors, organized under the Conservative-leaning leadership of the British Medical Association, had it in their power to stop the NHS dead in its tracks by simply refusing to work for it. They were worried about their standing in the new system – would they be mere state functionaries? And they were suspicious of Bevan, quite rightly. He had wanted to have the doctors nationalized too, all employed by the state, all paid by the state, with no private fees allowed. This would mean a war with the very men and women trusted by millions to cure and care for them. But Bevan, the red-hot socialist, turned out to be a realist and diplomatist. He began by wooing the top hospital doctors, the consultants. The physicians and surgeons were promised they could keep their lucrative pay beds and private practice. Bevan later admitted that he had ‘stuffed their mouths with gold’. Next he retreated on the payment of the 50,000 GPs, promising they could continue being paid on the basis of how many people they were treating, rather than getting a flat salary. This wasn’t enough. In a poll of doctors, for every one who said he would work in the new National Health Service, nine said they would refuse to take part. As the day for the official beginning of the NHS drew closer, there was a tense political stand-off. Bevan continued to offer concessions while also attacking the doctors’ leaders as ‘a small body of politically poisoned people’ sabotaging the will of Parliament. Would the old Britain of independent professionals, with their cliques, status and fees, accept the new Britain of state control? They did, of course. More concessions and more threats brought them round. In the end, Bevan was backed by a parliamentary majority and they were not. But it had been a long, tight, nasty battle.
When the NHS opened for business on 5 July 1948, there was a flood of people to surgeries, hospitals and chemists. Fifteen months later, Bevan announced that 5.25 million pairs of free spectacles had been supplied, as well as 187 million free prescriptions. By then 8.5 million people had already had free dental treatment. Almost immediately there were complaints about the cost and extravagance, the surge of demand for everything from dressings to wigs. There was much anecdotal evidence of waste and misuse. There certainly was waste. The new bureaucracy was cumbersome. And it is possible to overstate the change – most people had had access to some kind of affordable health care before the NHS, though it was patchy and working-class women had a particular difficulty in getting treatment. But the most important thing it did was to take away fear. Before it millions at the bottom of the pile had suffered untreated hernias, cancers, toothache, ulcers and all kinds of illness, rather than face the humiliation and worry of being unable to afford treatment. There are many moving accounts of the queues of unwell, impoverished people surging forward for treatment in the early days of the NHS, arriving in hospitals and doctors’ waiting rooms for the first time not as beggars but as citizens with a sense of right. If there was one single domestic good that the British took from the sacrifices of the war, it was a health service free at the point of use. We have clung to it tenaciously ever since and no mainstream party has dared suggest taking it away.
18
The People’s Economy?
The same cannot be said of some of Labour’s other nationalizations. The first, that of the Bank of England, sounds dramatic but had almost no real impact. Exactly the same men stayed in charge, following just the same policies. Nationalization of the gas and electricity industries, themselves already part-owned by local authorities as well as many small private companies, caused few ripples. Labour had talked about nationalizing the rail system from 1908, almost from the moment it became a party. The railway system had been rationalized long before the war into four major companies – London & North-Eastern; Great Western Railway; Southern Railways; and London, Midland & Scottish. By the mid-forties there was almost no real competition left in the system and periodic grants of public money had been needed for years to help the struggling companies out. The distance between rationalized and nationalized is longer than a single letter, of
course, but since the government had taken direct control of the railways from the beginning of the war it was an easy letter to replace.
This did not produce a transport system of delight. Labour had the ultimate Fat Controller world-view. It wanted everything from lorries and ships to trains and barges under one giant thumb. The new British Rail would be only one part of an empire comprising the London Underground, canals slicing through the England of the industrial revolution, the grimy trucks of thousands of road haulage companies, the major ports and harbours and even travel agents and hotels. All this came under a single British Transport Commission. For the railway system, which had been the glory of the country, this meant a subsidiary position, answering to a new Railway Executive and his regional managers who would oversee the 632,000 staff, 20,000 steam locomotives and more than 4,000 electric commuter trains in the country. Among the stock were battered, rackety gas-lit carriages from the days of Queen Victoria and 7,000 horses used to pull rolling stock around shunting yards. The post-war train system was more powerful than the pre-motorway road network, but it was now in dreadful condition and, because of the economic crisis and the shortage of steel, it would be starved of new investment. Unpainted bridges and dripping tunnels nearly a century old, creaking and failing signalling systems, clapped-out locomotives, rusted and broken lines, the lack of electrification and cold, uncomfortable carriages – none of that was the fault of nationalization. But nationalization without new investment was no answer to it either. The only people who did well out of rail nationalization were the original shareholders of the railway companies who were, to their surprise, rather well compensated.
In the forties, coal and steel stirred up more emotion even than transport. Coal provided nine-tenths of Britain’s energy. Its smoke and smell hung heavily over every town and city. When the coal industry fell behind its quotas, or was interrupted by bad weather, the factories closed and the people shivered. Coal was also central to Labour’s story. The 1926 General Strike had begun and ended with the miners and ‘hard-faced colliery owners’ were the group most despised by Labour MPs. Coal was red-hot. The ambitious young Harold Wilson, looking for a way to make a mark, wrote a book about how to modernize the industry. Socialist writers such as Priestley and Orwell used the awful conditions of the miners to rub readers’ noses in what was wrong with Britain. So for Labour MPs, nationalizing the coal industry was what they were in politics for, as well as sweet revenge. The job was given to one of the government’s older and more ideological members. Manny Shinwell had been a tailor’s boy in London’s East End before moving to Glasgow and emerging as a moving force on ‘Red Clydeside’. He was a stirring speaker and veteran MP but when handed the task of nationalizing coal and electricity, he found there were almost no plans or blueprint to help him. All anyone could dredge up was a single Labour pamphlet written in Welsh.
Shinwell managed the job by the due day, 1 January 1947. But his timing was catastrophic. As we have seen it was just then that the freezing weather stopped coal being moved and the power stations began to fail. You can hardly blame socialism for snow but, along with the food minister, John Strachey, Shinwell became a demonized figure for promising that there would be no power cuts. ‘Shiver with Shinwell and Starve with Strachey’ said the papers. More important in the longer term was the lack of planning about how to modernize the industry that kept Britain working, warm and fed. Many mines, operated under Victorian conditions by families which had owned them for decades, simply needed to be closed. In other parts of the coalfield, new mines needed to be sunk for, by 1947, Britain was producing a lot less coal than before the war. Modern cutting and winding gear was desperately required everywhere. So was a better relationship between managers and miners to end the history of mistrust and strikes. The miners got new contracts and a five-day week but the first major strikes spread within months of nationalization. On inauguration day, signs had gone up outside most collieries proudly announcing that they were now managed by the National Coal Board ‘on behalf of the people’. In some cases, ‘people’ was scored out, and ‘miners’ written in. Over time, relations between local managers, most of them from the pre-nationalization era, and the miners did improve a little. Over time, investment did come in, and the worst pits were shut down. But the naive idea that simply taking an industry into public ownership would improve it had been punctured early. What matters is the quality of the managers. The historian Correlli Barnett was unkind, not unfair, to complain that Whitehall chose for the nationalized boards ‘administrators of their own kidney, sound chaps unlikely to rock boats, rather than innovative leaders strong in will and personality’. Coal was under Viscount Hyndley, a 63-year-old marketing man from the industry, an Etonian ran the gas boards and transport was overseen by Sir Cyril Hurcomb from the Ministry of War Transport, ‘a man whose entrepreneurial experience and knowledge of engineering were nil’. The political symbolism of taking over great industries on behalf of the people was striking but as politicians discover anew, every few years, talking about change and actually imposing it are very different things.
By the time the last big struggle to nationalize an industry was underway, the steel debates of 1948-9, the public mood was already turning. Labour did nationalize the iron and steel industry, which differed from coal and rail in being potentially highly profitable and having good labour relations. But it did so with a nervousness that showed the government felt a change in the weather. Labour had worked itself up, proclaiming that ‘the battle for steel is the supreme test of political democracy – a test which the whole world will be watching.’ Yet the cabinet agonized and went ahead only because of a feeling that, otherwise, they would be accused of losing their nerve. In the debates in the Commons, bright young Labour backbenchers rebelled. The steel owners were organized and vigorous. Labour had a torrid time and the Tories seemed to be regaining their spirits. An over-excited Cripps told the Commons: ‘If we cannot get nationalization of steel by legal means, we must resort to violent methods.’ They did get it, but the industry was little shaken. Steel needed new investment almost as much as the coalmines and railways did – new mills, coke ovens, new melting furnaces. Again, though, nationalization helped not at all. Within just a few years more, it was largely returned to private ownership.
Nationalization would give Britain a kind of modernization, but a thin, underfunded and weak variety, nothing like the second industrial revolution its planners hoped for. Reversing it would give Margaret Thatcher some of her greatest victories, in the programme of privatization that followed some forty years after Attlee’s government. The coal industry would virtually disappear after catastrophic strikes. The railways under BR would become a national joke, but then fall further after a botched privatization. The whole notion of state planning would fall from fashion.
19
Squatters and Prefabs
The first stories began to appear in newspapers in July 1946. Out of the blue, fed up with having nowhere decent to live, around forty-eight families had marched into disused army camps at Scunthorpe. Then it happened again, in Middlesborough when thirty families moved into a camp. Homeless people in Salisbury took over thirty huts there. At Seaham Harbour, just up the coast from Newcastle, eight miners and their families chalked their names on empty huts and began unrolling bedding. Then squatting began in Doncaster. In picturesque Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, a hundred families declared themselves the ‘Vache Park Estate committee’ and took over a military base. They elected a Mr Glasspool as chairman, who declared in best Ealing comedy mode, ‘by sticking together, we can do it. If the local authorities try to move us out, they will have a bit of a job now.’ Through August, the squatting gathered pace – Ashton, Jarrow, Liverpool, Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire, Llantwit Major, one of the oldest towns in Wales. In Bath, an RAF aerodrome was seized. At Ramsgate, miners and their families took over gun emplacements. Families marched into an unoccupied Cardiff nurses’ home. A London bus conductor and his family
occupied an empty nursery in Bexley-heath. Some 500 people took over camps outside Londonderry. A Sheffield anti-aircraft battery was taken over. Most of the invasions were peaceful, but the squatters were determined. At Tupsley Brickworks army camp outside Hereford, where German prisoners had been housed, The Times reported that ‘A British corporal refused them admission, but he was overpowered, the gates were forced and a party of about twenty men and a number of women entered the camp. They found ten empty huts, which were promptly allocated.’ Six couples moved into a Royal Artillery camp in Croydon. At Slough, where thirty-two empty Nissen huts stood in the football stadium, squatters waited until the guards were distracted and infiltrated through hedges. Birmingham people took over flats.
By early autumn it was estimated that 45,000 people had illegally taken over empty huts, flats or other shelters. It was only then, however, that the spreading revolt really hit the headlines.
On the wet Sunday afternoon of 8 September, about a thousand people began to converge on Kensington High Street in London. They were mainly young married couples with children, including babies. Most carried suitcases. Taxis piled with bedding, and the odd furniture van, joined them. A carefully choreographed operation, it was organized by London Communist Party officials such as Tubby Rosen of Stepney and Ted Bramley, the party’s London boss. They had been identifying and marking up empty properties in the capital. A reporter from The Times takes up the story: ‘Those who could not find accommodation stood patiently in the rain while the scouting parties were sent out to inspect neighbouring property…Consultations were held under lampposts in the rain and there appeared to be an elaborate system of communications by messengers.’ Around town, properties were duly taken over: Lord Ilchester’s former London home and Abbey Lodge in Regent’s Park, a building just round the corner from Buckingham Palace and flats in Weymouth Street, Marylebone, Upper Phillimore Gardens and further afield, in Ealing and Pimlico.