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.’18It 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’.19In 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. (M65C )
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. (M30C)
I think I’d like a lot of changes. (What particularly?) I don’t know. (F50D)
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 . . . (F30C)
Oh, lots. (asked what) Much better living for the ordinary working man. (Anything else?) Better housing and everything. (F25C)
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. (M45C)
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.20
One activator who had no doubt that things were going the right way was Mrs Madge Waller, who in March 1942 chaired a meeting at the Housing Centre in London. In her introductory remarks she assured the audience that ‘there seemed to her to be a fairly general opinion that after the war everything was going to be better, especially among young people’; remarked that ‘she had come in contact with several who were thinking and talking about planning for post-war Britain’; and declared that after ‘an almost wasted quarter of a century – muddled thinking and mere talking about planning, without any real plan – we would probably not be allowed t
o “muddle through” again’. She then introduced her main speaker, Tom Harrisson, co-founder five years earlier of Mass-Observation.
Almost certainly the audience, including Mrs Waller, sat up in their seats as Harrisson at the outset stated bluntly that the growing assumption ‘that everyone wanted a better Britain in future’ was ‘rather a false one’:
There was quite a striking number of people who were thinking not in terms of helping to make this country better to live in, but of getting out of the country after the war and going to America, Australia, etc. A strong feeling was growing up that people should have less planned and ordered lives and could be themselves more. Certain types of people were in favour of more co-operation in planning, but a very large number of people of the working-class population were so appalled by what would have to be done after the war that they felt rather hopeless about the task.
For elaboration, Harrisson then turned to the study that Mass-Observation had been making of what people wanted after the war compared with what they expected:
What were most hoped for were equality of opportunity, better housing and education, socialism, security, abolition of unemployment, and a mass of other things which might be lumped together as town planning, but was not consciously thought of as such. Their expectations were far inferior to their hopes . . . People had the right hopes, but the feeling that these hopes would not or could not materialise was very strong. Overwhelming emphasis was laid on what had happened after the last war. Disappointment then had created a kind of neurosis that seemed unconquerable to a lot of people.
He ended this section of his talk with his killer facts: ‘It had been found that five people were pessimistic to every one that was optimistic about reconstruction plans in general after the war, and that proportion increased to nine to one in certain heavily-raided areas.’21
The evidence suggests that Harrisson was broadly right – that although in 1940/41 there was at least some popular, largely positive engagement with post-war reconstruction issues, from 1942 the trend was (apart from a blip at the time of the Beveridge Report) the other way. Indeed, some qualifying remarks even need to be made about Beveridge. Before it appeared, a wide-ranging survey (supervised by G.D.H. Cole, a leading socialist intellectual) into popular attitudes to welfare found that, in the words of its Manchester investigator, ‘some seemed to be quite satisfied in an inarticulate sort of way’ and ‘the majority just did not know’. At the time of the report’s celebrated publication, there was a significant minority of dissenters (‘If people here stand for the trades unions putting this bloody Beveridge scheme across they deserve to lose the sodding war’ was how one middle-aged man, who called himself a ‘Jack of All Trades’, put it to an Mass-Observation observer in London), and it is far from clear how many outside the middle class were among those who bought the report in either of its forms. Moreover, from soon afterwards there was widespread cynicism about whether it would ever be implemented, typified by a 55-year-old woman of the ‘artisan class’ telling an interviewer that ‘soon as it’s over and they’ve no further use for you, they’ll have a general election and apologise that they can’t stand by the promise of the war government – it’ll happen just as it did last time’.22
A Gallup poll taken in April 1943, asking people whether they would like to see ‘any great changes’ in their way of life after the war, probably captured accurately enough the popular political mood. Of the 57 per cent who agreed with that proposition, 35 per cent had ‘no comment’ on what changes these might be; 16 per cent hoped for ‘better working conditions, better wages, work for everybody, no unemployment’; 15 per cent nominated a ‘better standard of living all round, pension and security when old’; a bare 3 per cent mentioned ‘socialism’ or a ‘changed economic system’; and only 1 per cent plumped even more idealistically for ‘no more wars, better international understanding’. The widespread middle-class feeling that the focus on reconstruction was premature may well have been shared instinctively by at least some in the working class. ‘Meeting many people in various occupations daily, I find, with my own opinion, too much is being broadcast by the BBC, and circulated in the newspapers, re post-war plans,’ wrote a correspondent styling himself ‘Commercial’ to his local paper in Wolverhampton later that year. ‘It is generally agreed that these plans could be arranged without all this prattle, because it definitely tends to make everyone certain that our Government know just when this war will finish, and encourages people to sit easy, instead of getting on with the job.’23
In the workplace there was (in the context of full employment in a wartime economy) an undeniable new self-assertiveness – Hodson in his ‘ledger of war’ complained that ‘the working-classes, feeling their power, have often shown some ruthlessness, manifested by bus drivers refusing to stop at halts, transport workers striking on Christmas Day, coal-miners refusing sometimes to do a decent day’s work’ – but this was far from automatically translating into any enhanced political radicalism. War Factory, Mass-Observation’s 1942/3 study of a Gloucestershire factory producing radar systems where the workers were mainly women, revealed resentment, boredom and alienation as the predominant sentiments, including predictably little interest in the progress of the war. Soon after Beveridge, an engineer from Dudley told M-O that, as far as his fellow-workers in an electrode factory were concerned, the prevailing atmosphere of each man for himself had ‘dulled the mind to all except personal problems’. Nor were the armed forces quite the radical hotbed they have sometimes been depicted as. Analysis of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs suggests that their debates were seen more as an opportunity for a welcome respite from military duties than as an occasion to engage in serious political discussion; the future novelist Nicholas Monserrat wrote of the sailors under his command that ‘there is no time and, in effect, no occasion for political interest’; or as Hodson heard an officer with the 79th Armoured Division in Germany put it just before the war’s end, ‘in fifteen months in the ranks I never heard politics mentioned’.24
Was there perhaps widespread popular anticipation of a future national health service? Those who have scoured wartime diaries report remarkably few sightings, and indeed the 1944 Gallup poll revealing 55 per cent approval also showed a not inconsiderable 32 per cent in favour of the status quo. Polling evidence demonstrated that approval towards the end of the war for Labour’s nationalisation plans was reasonably broad (usually in the 40–60 per cent range) but invariably shallow, with few people seeing it as a high-priority issue. As for education, a poll in early 1945 found less than half those questioned had heard of the recent Education Act and a mere 13 per cent were aware of its provision to remove fees from grammar schools. Understandably, Orwell’s earlier optimism about a newly radicalised people had by this time completely vanished. ‘I overhear very little discussion of the wider issues of the war,’ he told his American readers in autumn 1944. ‘Everyone expects not only that there will be a ghastly muddle over demobilization, but that mass unemployment will promptly return.’ And he added, ‘Everyone wants, above all things, a rest.’25
There was plenty of further statistical underpinning available for these and similar assertions. In the autumn of 1943, for example, more than 500 interviews by Mass-Observation across the country found that 43 per cent expected heavy post-war unemployment, 46 per cent another war after the present one, 50 per cent uncertain or without an opinion as to whether the government was paying too much or too little attention to post-war reconstruction, and 49 per cent (up from 19 per cent a year earlier) saying that their main priority after the war was to ‘relax or have a change’. But in the end, over and above the figures, we need to listen to the voices, as in the cynical, mistrustful, rather truculent tone of four young tradesmen in an army unit – reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Tommy’ – describing their expectations of demobilisation:
It’ll be the same old story, those who can pull the strings will be all right, the other poor buggers can look after t
hemselves.
Just the same mess as last time.
Personally I don’t trust the Government and I don’t suppose they’re likely to worry much about us. We’re heroes while the war’s on, but we can look after ourselves afterwards.
I can’t see they can afford to unload everybody at once, or there’ll be a lot of trouble. Chaps aren’t going to stand for it.
In August 1944, with the long war clearly drawing to an end, an MO team was in Gloucester. ‘What do you feel the next ten years of your life will be like?’ it asked a group of working-class mothers. ‘Are you looking forward to them, or aren’t you looking forward to them much?’ The replies have a wonderful – and revealing – authenticity about a world where the big picture was infinitely more local and immediate than any of the activators ever imagined:
Oh God! I’m not good at answering questions.
Well, yes and no. As long as I don’t have any more kids I shall be all right.
Don’t know. Really I don’t.
Why, yes.
Well, I suppose I am – we like to think the future’s going to be better.
Austerity Britain Page 6
