The Road to 1945
‘The Road to 1945, British politics and the Second World War’ by Paul AddisonOriginally published in 1975. 1994 edition.
A brilliant book all about the political situation during the Second World War and how, during the period of National Coalition, the influence of the social progressive grew dramatically. This was allowed to be the case partly because of the scale of control the government was forced to take both socially and economically during the conditions of total war. This experience paved the way for the Labour program of state intervention and ultimately to the birth of the welfare state in Britain…
posted by Benjamin Nakizo at 8:51 AM
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P16: In the 1930’s Labour had no experienced statesmen and a civil service resistant to change and the implementation of ‘bid ideas’. By 1945 this had changed completely, the civil service was used to performing large tasks, many Labour MP’s had been full time ministers and Atlee had been able to ‘rehearse the premiership whenever Churchill was absent’.
P17: An important period came towards the end of 1942. British victory at El Alamein was followed three weeks later by the publishing of the Beveridge report. Britain now had hope and a future.
P18: The war also saw opportunity for moderate figures, sidelined previously, to shine. Notably John Maynard Keynes and his followers.
P18: “The political influence of the ration book seems to me to have been greater than that of all the left-wing propaganda of the war years put together”.
P23: “The passion for modest progress, which captured the home front during World War II, is only comprehensible as a blissful release from the frustrating circumstances which afflicted reform between the wars” .
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was an old school Victorian liberal who refused to apply (or extend) the functions of state towards ending the depression.
P29: When Roosevelt came to power in the United States in 1933, and took emergency powers to combat the depression, Baldwin commented that the regular constitution of the United States had broken down and was giving away to dictatorship”.
Chamberlain who was PM from 1937 but a minister of state before hand was no social visionary but a very effective administrator and under his leadership the limbs of state began working in co-operation, yet no radical changes were made.
P30/31: In the 1930’s the conservatives did attempt some moderate changes, they offered protective tariffs to industries willing to reform and moved away from laissez-faire. Yet their reforms sought to safeguard and stabilise the existing industrial order and did little to create more jobs or provide social safety nets.
P31: “The orthodox response to a downturn in the economy was to reduce taxation and expenditure”. Chamberlain considered expenditure on rearmament “which did so much to restore prosperity in the late 1930’s” as economic suicide leading to inflation, industrial unrest and the collapse of British exports.
P32: “The doctrines of economy and the balanced budget ruled out any major experiment in the cure of mass unemployment”.
P39 – 42: Low rumblings had been heard before the war in regards to social change and indeed a ‘moderate’ opinion can be seen as having its roots in this era, despite its popular perception as an age of extremes. Indeed it was these extremes that gave the moderates two clear markers through which to steer. Keynes obviously was at work and building up support during this period. In response to Max Nicholsen’s article A national plan for Britain many reformers began a policy group called ‘Political and Economic Planning’ and a further group was created called the ‘Next Five Years Group’. Meanwhile figures like Eleanor Rathbone and Sir John Bord Orr published books on social reform, The Disinherited Family and Food, Health and Income respectively. Others like Ebenezer Howard and Sir Montague Barlow published works on the need for increased planning of industrial and residential districts.
Of great importance to this small reforming group was the Tory MP Harold Macmillan. His influential book The Middle Way. He was joined by another Tory MP, Robert Boothby.
P44: “As Britain moved towards war, there was an increasing compatibility between the Conservatism of Boothby and Macmillian, and the aims of the Labour Party”.
P46: Not only this but, following Labours total internal collapse in 1931 it was slowly rebuilding and Bevin won out as the ideological leader in its reconstruction. He proposed a more gradual form of socialism than the outright revolutionary rhetoric of many of his fellow party members. “By the end of 1937, the [labour] party was behaving more like a potential government than ever before”.
Even Labour’s position against rearmament came into doubt as it became increasingly clear that Hitler had little inclination to back down and also as the 1936 Spanish Civil War saw Labour supporters enthusiastically urging intervention and support for the Spanish government. To support Spain in armed struggle against fascists made their refusal do prepare Britain for such an eventuality seem absurd.
P52: As Chamberlain plunged into the deep end of appeasement, Labour quietly began to fall under the influence of the leading Conservative opponents of his foreign policy”.
So we can see that even before the war the Labour party was gathering its strength at the same time that a ‘moderate’ opinion was beginning to emerge across both parties. The roots of Labours eventual election victory can be seen even before the social and political upheaval of the total war experience.
P62: “to see the formation of the Coalition government of May 1940 simply as ‘the nation closing its ranks’ would be a mistake. The Coalition was formed in a particular fashion. It might have been formed as the result of an invitation from the Conservative leadership to Labour to join in the running of the war, in which case the Conservatives would have retained the initiative in high-level politics. In fact it resulted from the public shipwreck of a Conservative administration, and the corollary was that Labour were not in reality given office: they broke in and took it, on terms of moral equality.”
P102: “But the fall of Chamberlain was also one of those critical moments when Patronage and initiative begin to pass from one set of hands to another. The critics of the National Government – the Labour movement, the state-army of philanthropists and social engineers and the anti-appeasement Conservatives – had finally got the better of their old opponents. They were able to cast themselves in the crisis as a national fire-brigade, saving an Empire as great as that of Rome from the feeble grip of Chamberlain, a Birmingham Nero. Such was the way in which Morrison, Keynes, and Churchill, bore themselves. It was extraordinary that Labour, and a variety of social reformers, should find themselves playing the patriotic card against orthodox Conservatism. But this was to be the end. Having, as they believed, been summoned to help the nation, they soon began to assert the right to change it.”
P107/8: After Dunkirk the Daily Mirror launched an aggressive assault on the appeasers of the pre-war period, asking for their immediate resignation from office. Churchill took the Mirror’s Chairman, Cecil King, to one side and told him that should the paper continue its attacks then he, along with Chamberlain would have to resign and the government would collapse.
The book ‘Guilty Men’ sold over 200,000 copies during the war despite many top booksellers refusing to stock it. It blamed the ‘men of Munich’ for the disastrous war record thus far and its message of Conservative party incompetence smeared the Tories name. An important stage in the undoing of the Conservatives.
Bevin was a top Union leader who was given a Labour seat and became a MP purely in response to Churchill inviting him to become minister of Labour in the new coalition government despite him not actually being a Member of Parliament. He addressed a special emergency conference of trade union executives on the eve of Dunkirk and told them: “If our Movement and our class rise with all our energy now and save the people of this country from disaster, the country will always turn with confidence forever to the people who saved them. They will pay far more attention to an act of that kind than to theoretical arguments or any particular philosophy”.
P118: The Conservatives began to feel a little comfortable as their Labour colleagues and various left wing spokespersons began to dominate public life and promote their view that total mobilisation in wartime could serve as a social model for a better tomorrow. A chief proponent of this view was J.B. Priestly and his very successful ‘post scripts’ radio show that one in three adults. Typical of his message is this passage:
“Now, the war, because it demands a huge collective effort, is compelling us to change not only our ordinary, social and economic habits, but also our habits of thought. We’re actually changing over from the property view to the sense of community, which simply means that we realise we’re all in the same boat. But, and this is the point, that boat can serve not only as our defence against Nazi aggression, but as an ark in which we can finally land in a better world”.
P119: The thesis that war was the midwife of social progress was common to a wide spectrum of opinion.
P126:
“Churchill, when he could be persuaded to think about the subject for a moment or two, had fairly generous Whig sentiments about ‘the forward march of the common people’. Addressing the boys of Harrow, his old school, on 18th December 1940 he declared: ‘When this was is won, as surely it will be, it must be one of our aims to establish a state of society where the advantages and privileges which have hitherto been enjoyed only by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many, and by the youth of the nation as a whole’. But Churchill’s inclination was to absorb himself completely in one thing at a time. In his view the peace would have to be framed after the war was won, or almost won. Talk of the future would divert attention from the terrible urgency of the immediate crisis, and stir up political controversy. Moreover he found such questions humdrum, gruel after the champagne of grand strategy. Bevan wrote: ‘His ear is so sensitively attuned to the bugle of history that he is deaf to the raucous clamour of contemporary life’. Reconstruction, then, could not come about through Churchill. But gradually it flowed around and past him, like a tide cutting off an island from the shore”.
P129: “The roots of class remained untouched, but above ground there was much levelling and trimming”.
P141: “The popularity of Russia probably worked in favour of the Labour Party, in spite of the profound hostility of its leaders to communism. In this respect and many others the war ripened public opinion while the Labour Party machine lay rusting and the voice of Labour was stilled”.
P142: It is important to note that the Labour political machine was significantly retarded during the war as its supporters found themselves restricted and committed elsewhere without time to organise. This is not what conservative commentators originally proposed. They put the shift to the left down to the fact that those on the left were often those kept behind in reserve occupations while those more likely to lean to the right were actually away fighting.
P184: The intellectual throughout the war helped create this idea that there would be a better future and that the working classes would build it. Before the war their middle class guilt would have made them pity the working classes but when the war makes them the heroes they feel they can contribute to the war effort by telling them just exactly how brilliantly they were indeed doing and by creating a future in which they would be rewarded he could spur them on and therefore take his place amongst those who contributed to the war.
Labour also benefited from the very nature of the national government coalition. With Atlee the new Deputy Prime Minister an official leader of the opposition had to be found to give the national government someone to go up against in the house of commons. Throughout the war this role was always filled by a member of the Labour party. So you had the strange situation of Labour ministers doing work in their ministries and winning credit that way and when and where they failed to perform Labour could take credit for highlighting that fact and leading an effective opposition. (p182/183
P184: quote taken from the economic historians WK Hancock and M Gowing: “There existed, so to speak, an implied contract between Government and the people; the people refused none of the sacrifices that the Government demanded from them for the winning of the war; in return, they expected that the Government should show imagination and seriousness in preparing for the restoration and improvement of the nations well being when the war had been won. The plans for reconstruction were, therefore, a real part of the war effort.”
Addison then goes on to tear this idea apart. Hope in victory was important but the exact details of the post war world mattered less to the average worker’s morale than did immediate material comforts.
BRILLIANT QUOTE FROM ADDISON:
P188: “The agitation for reconstruction arose from the joint frustrations of the Centre and the Left, frustrations which applied with equal force in the years 1941 and 1942 to the conduct of the war. The student immersed in wartime polemics sees, in his overheated imagination, Colonel Blimp being pursued through a land of Penguin Specials by an abrasive meritocrat, a progressive churchman, and J.B Priestly.”
Stafford Cripps came into the cabinet thanks to some fortunate political shuffling and a low in public morale when he returned from Russia where he had been envoy. He led an unsuccessful mission to solve the Indian issue and then returned to attempt to take on Churchill himself. Addison sees that there was a big space for him to take up the moderate course on the home front while, leaving foreign affairs to Churchill, and positioning himself perfectly for the post war period. Yet instead he acted far too soon and tried to oust Churchill immediately. He made various critical comments of the PM and looked to capitalise on what he believed would be military defeat in Africa. Churchill was looking politically unsteady at this point so it did seem like a good time to act. Yet Africa pulled through and Churchill once again reached dizzy heights of popularity. Cripps resigned from the war cabinet and took up a small ministerial post outside the cabinet.
P229: “But the root explanation of the eclipse of Conservatism in the war years was the obsolescence of its outlook. The rank-and-file of the party, notably the backbench M.P.s elected under very different circumstances in 1935, lost touch with both the progressive trends of government policy, and with the movement of popular opinion”.
The conservatives began to split in two. This can be seen in the lobby groups formed in 1943. Many Conservatives joined the ‘Society of Individualists’ which included Conservative M.P.s and industrialists in a bid to ensure state control of industry was handed back again after the war. On the other hand many others joined the Tory Reform Committee and they supported proposals like the Beveridge Report. In response another group was formed in secret, the ‘Progress Trust’ to specifically counter the influence of the Reform Committee.
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