5
Constructively Revolutionary
‘Are you still a socialist?’ the historian Raymond Carr asked his friend Iris Murdoch the first time they dined together after the war. She turned on him savagely: ‘Yes. Aren’t you?’ That brusque Oxford exchange probably postdated the Fabian Society’s away-weekend in September 1945 in the city of dreaming spires. A notable line-up assembled to discuss ‘The Psychological and Sociological Problems of Modern Socialism’, and presciently the most prestigious think-tank of the newly elected Labour Party was at least as much concerned with exploring how society at large might become ‘socialist’ as it was with analysing ‘socialism’ itself. Unlike their party leaders, most of the speakers did not assume that party and people were automatically in harmony.
The psychiatrist John Bowlby set the tone. ‘In our enthusiasm for achieving long-sought social aims,’ he argued, ‘we should not overlook the private concerns of the masses, their predilections in sport or entertainments, their desire to have a home or garden of their own in which they can do what they like and which they do not frequently have to move, their preference in seaside resorts or Sunday newspapers.’ Given the undeniable fact of these ‘private goals’, each of which had not only ‘the attraction of being immediately and simply achieved’ but also ‘the sanction of tradition behind them’, Bowlby asked how it would be possible to ensure ‘the understanding and acceptance of the need for the inevitable controls required for the attainment of group goals such as, for instance, full employment, a maximising of production by reorganisation and increase of machinery, or a maximising of personal efficiency through longer and more arduous education and other social measures’. His solution was a mixture of democracy and psychology: ‘The hope for the future lies in a far more profound understanding of the nature of the emotional forces involved and the development of scientific social techniques for modifying them.’ In response, Britain’s most venerated ethical socialist, R. H. Tawney, was relatively sanguine about the possibility of subsuming the private and pursuing group goals – ‘the common people had enormous resources of initiative and ability that were hardly used at all’ – but Bowlby’s friend Evan Durbin, leading Labour thinker and now an MP, was deeply sceptical. ‘People were far more wicked, i.e. mentally ill, than was commonly supposed,’ he insisted, adding that ‘as a whole we were all very sick and very stupid’. As for a solution, ‘selective breeding was probably the answer’.
This was all too much for Frank Pakenham, the future Lord Longford: ‘He failed to understand how virtue was to be promoted by psychologists, who, great as their therapeutic services had been, had as yet given little help in political matters. The conception of wickedness was very important and must be retained; our goal should be a race of good people.’ Another rising star, Michael Young, principal author of Labour’s victorious manifesto, agreed that he had not ‘obtained much direct guidance from the psychologists’. Instead, ‘his mental picture of the future was one of more planning at the top and more democracy at the bottom’, and he explained what he meant by the latter:
As the result of the election, the idea of a ten-year plan had been accepted, but was not really understood by the bulk of people; the work of carrying it out must be publicised and dramatised, and progress must be clearly shown – even symbolic progress. It was dangerous to wait and hope for the best. Herein individual members of the Party must themselves get going and assist the process. He envisaged a whole host of local Advisory Committees in all subjects connected with the social programme of the new Government, for running health centres, for example; and, if the result of setting them up was to raise the minority of the population which actually took part in the work of government by 100% – from 5% to 10% of the total – it would be a great democratic step forward.
In the conference’s final session, a characteristic contribution came from one of Labour’s acknowledged intellectual giants, G.D.H. Cole. He ‘did not agree with Mr Durbin that most people were either wicked or stupid’. Furthermore, he ‘disliked the sharp separation which had been made by some speakers between leaders and led’. And as for what the aim should be, he posited a society in which ‘a large proportion would participate in leadership in some field’ – a fine aspiration which clearly not everyone present thought plausible.
Different people, different visions. For a couple of particularly articulate workers, both of them miners, contrasting political futures were soon unfolding. ‘What strange patient enduring brutes men are!’ Sid Chaplin wrote in February 1946 to his friend John Bate. ‘You can shepherd them to your will, but in their secret way they know and wait. And they are really brilliant at times, astonishingly awkward, but mostly devilishly stupid.’ Chaplin, born in 1916 the son of a Durham pitman, had himself been in the mines since the age of 15, first as a blacksmith and then as an underground mechanic; he was now reflecting on his recent work (‘taking in contributions, negotiating about ½ pensions and hunting out details of compensation’) for the Durham Colliery Mechanics’ Association. ‘You get rid of all fancy illusions and ideals,’ he went on. ‘No, Jean Jacques R., man is not everywhere born free, he is born in harness, and you get so close in this work that you can see his nose twitch, the saliva dribble as he strains for the carrot that is always just beyond reach of his champing jaws.’ Chaplin was also (though not for much longer) a Methodist lay preacher, and four months later he wrote again to Bate: ‘I believe in God and I believe in human beings. I believe that human beings can make socialism work, eventually, as they have made other forms of society. But socialism as a panacea I take with a pinch of salt.’ The Leaping Lad, Chaplin’s first collection of stories, appeared in December 1946 and won warm reviews in the national press for its sympathetic, realistic, unforced depiction of life on the South-West Durham coalfield. ‘Ferryhill Miner as Story Teller’ was the local paper’s front-page headline, and it quoted appreciatively from one of the stories, ‘Big Little Hab’: ‘He lived close to all living and growing things. He was the most fascinating of companions although he was the most inarticulate of men.’2. For Chaplin himself, who would never dream of voting anything other than Labour but no longer believed in a paradise on earth, the book’s success stimulated him to try to become a full-time writer.
The other miner, Lawrence Daly, did believe in a heaven on earth – Soviet-style. He was born in 1924, the eldest of seven children of a miner who was an early member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. With his father being blacklisted by the coal owners and finding work hard to get, he had a tough Scottish upbringing before leaving school at 14 and going down the pit at Glencraig in Fife. Soon afterwards, abandoning his Roman Catholic faith, he joined the Young Communist League, and after two years the CP itself. ‘The Communists were to the forefront in seeking to improve the low wages and terrible working conditions in the coal mine,’ he recalled, ‘and also in seeking to overcome the appalling social conditions in which we lived.’ Daly was also through his teens a vigorous autodidact, taking correspondence courses (through the National Council of Labour Colleges) in economics, trade unionism, English and social history. Determined to expand his horizons, in November 1945 he attended the World Youth Conference in London, representing Young Miners of Great Britain; two months later, he was one of a British party (comprising parliamentary and non-parliamentary delegates) that visited Russia for several weeks. From Leningrad he wrote home describing the ballet at the Kirov Hall and its appreciative audience: ‘It is only one of the many incidents I have seen which make an absolute mockery of the phrase “menace to Western civilisation”. Here culture flourishes in its highest & finest form because it is used to elevate the whole people to the highest possible physical and moral plane.’ Back at Glencraig, Daly became a National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) part-time lodge official and an increasingly active, committed member of the CP. Early in 1947, an episode involving a fellow-miner led to Daly being strongly criticised by some party members. Typically, in a long letter to the local
area committee, he came out fighting: ‘I have been taught by the C.P. to study all the factors in a situation taken together & in their movement. I knew all the local & personal circumstances – far better than Comrade McArthur did – & I believe that when the comrades consider these circumstances, as I have stated them, they will agree that my action was consistently Marxist.’ Daly’s mother may have once used her husband’s copy of Das Kapital to kindle the fire, but the old man, who in letters to young Lawrence signed himself ‘Comrade Pop’, surely approved.3.
In the country at large, there was still a considerable amount of understandable pro-Russia sentiment by the end of the war, and although in the 1945 election only two Communist MPs were elected (one of them in Fife), the British Communist Party’s membership had tripled during the war to about 50,000 (including Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis). As for attitudes to Britain’s other main wartime ally, the picture was distinctly mixed. There was an element of gratitude, certainly, and many personal entanglements, together with a largely frustrated longing for American material goods, but at the same time resentment of a newly risen superpower that seemed unpleasantly inclined to throw its weight around. ‘Personally I’m sick of the sight of Yanks over here and will be mighty glad to see the back of them’ was how Anthony Heap put it in September 1945.
Among the political class, on both right and left, these feelings were intensified by first the abrupt end of Lend-Lease and then the harsh terms, almost certainly reflecting distaste for the Labour government’s nationalisation programme, of the proposed $3.75 billion American Loan. ‘What is your alternative?’ asked the Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, in the critical Commons debate in December 1945; he invoked the unappetising prospect of a dollarless Britain in which ‘all those hopes of better times, to follow in the wake of victory, would be dissipated in despair and disillusion’. In effect there was no alternative but to accept the loan. ‘It was extraordinarily unreal, even absurd, and shabby,’ reflected Malcolm Muggeridge after two long days in the press gallery. ‘Speakers took up their position, but the only reality was the fear which none of them dared to express – the fear of the consequences if cigarettes and films and spam were not available from America.’
Nevertheless, the 23 Labour MPs who voted against included not only predictable left-wing figures like Barbara Castle and Michael Foot (soon afterwards warning that American capitalism was ‘arrogant, self-confident, merciless and convinced of its capacity to dictate the destinies of the world’) but that future epitome of pragmatism and moderation, James Callaghan, who condemned ‘economic aggression by the United States’. Callaghan and the others may have had good grounds for complaint – the American insistence on immediate multilateral trade was to prove as economically damaging to Britain as the other stipulation, that Britain by 15 July 1947 must allow convertibility, ie of sterling into dollars – but the bottom line, fairly or unfairly, was that beggars could not be choosers. A strong sense of grievance would persist on the part of the British left. ‘It is clear,’ complained the New Statesman in November 1946, ‘that on the matters that most affect Britain today, the United States is nearly as hostile to the aspirations of Socialist Britain as to the Soviet Union.’4.
None of which cut much ice with Ernest Bevin – creator between the wars of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), a crucial figure during the war as Minister of Labour, and now Foreign Secretary. ‘His heavy, bullish frame, his rough and uncouth English, his blunt style of speech all combined to make a very powerful performance’ – was how W. J. Brown admiringly described him in February 1946; more recently, one historian has made the bold, counter-Churchillian claim that ‘this bullying, capricious, sasquatch of a politician, was also the most effective democratic statesman that this country produced in the twentieth century’. For Bevin, who had distrusted both Communists and the Soviet Union for more than 20 years, the fundamental premise of British policy towards Moscow had to be one of suspicion, or at best watchfulness. As for the alternative idea, broadly favoured by the Labour left, that Britain might pursue an even-handed path between the Russian and American power blocs, neither Bevin nor Clement Attlee saw it as a realistic possibility. It has been argued that the real instigators of a post-1945 anti-Russian policy, even before the Russians had unambiguously shown aggressive intent, were the mandarins in the Foreign Office. But that is surely to underestimate Bevin’s considerable capacity for independent thought as well as his unrivalled force of character.
He also was well aware that his combative attitude would strike a chord among working-class patriots – so much so that George Orwell noted in the spring of 1946 that ‘the public opinion polls taken by the News Chronicle showed that Bevin’s popularity went sensationally up after his battle with Vishinsky [head of the Soviet delegation at the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, held in London], and went up most of all among Labour Party supporters’. Moreover, Bevin’s strongly anti-Russian stance, typified by his statement to the UN that ‘the danger to the peace of the world has been the incessant propaganda from Moscow against the British Commonwealth as a means to attack the British’, also played extraordinarily well with his natural political opponents, possibly to his consternation but possibly not. Within a week of VJ Day, making his first major parliamentary speech as Foreign Secretary, he was, according to ‘Chips’ Channon, ‘cheered and applauded by our side’ for ‘almost a Tory speech, full of sense’. Mollie Panter-Downes observed in October 1945 that ‘people who three months ago were horror-stricken at the thought of Ernest Bevin negotiating England’s foreign policy are now admitting, handsomely and unexpectedly, that they admire him’. Even high society welcomed the rough-tongued West Countryman, with ‘Jennifer’ recording how at a West End function a few weeks later Lord and Lady Rothermere had been spotted ‘chatting to Mr Ernest Bevin, who was in great form with a fund of amusing stories’.5.
Where Bevin and the rest of the Attlee government were less realistic was in their deep reluctance to accept that post-war Britain could no longer afford to enjoy great-power status. Admittedly there were retreats in these years from Greece, India and Palestine – with the granting of Indian independence a genuinely major if flawed achievement – but the illusion stubbornly persisted that Britain’s rightful and permanent place was at the top table. Perhaps if Bevin had been at No. 11 (as Attlee had originally intended before being dissuaded by the King), fighting the financial battle for overseas retrenchment in a more tough-minded way than Dalton managed, it might have been different – but probably not. After all, assumptions of British superiority, and the rightness of large swathes of the globe being coloured red, were deeply rooted in the national psyche – and continued to be inculcated. ‘The Empire Day celebration at school was absurd,’ Gladys Langford noted disapprovingly in May 1946: ‘Watts [presumably the headmaster at the north London school where she taught] had had posters made bearing names of Dominions and children held these aloft reciting doggerel rhymes – presumably of his composing – relating to their flora, fauna, and products. A few hymns were sung – quite out of tune – and we were exhorted to tell tub-thumpers to pack their bags and go away – that Russians were unpleasant people and Arabs wicked slave-dealers.’ In such a climate it seemed only proper that Britain should have its own independent nuclear deterrent – in short, a British bomb – an objective agreed by the government in January 1947. This very secret decision was ‘not a response to an immediate military threat’, Margaret Gowing would write in her definitive study, ‘but rather something fundamentalist and almost instinctive – a feeling that Britain must possess so climacteric a weapon in order to deter an atomically armed enemy, a feeling that Britain as a great power must acquire all major new weapons . . .’ Or as Bevin had put it a few months earlier at a meeting of the relevant Cabinet committee, ‘We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’6.
What, in the generally difficult circumstances, was the economic way ahead? ‘I find myself,’ John Mayn
ard Keynes privately reflected in April 1946, ‘more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand [ie of the market] which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.’ He died a few days later, but Keynesianism – seeing that invisible hand as at best a regrettable, to-be-circumscribed necessity – was poised to enter into its inheritance. First, though, there was the playing out of the new government’s commitment, explicit in its election manifesto, to socialist planning.
For at least two years, the rhetoric that planning from the centre was the key to a prosperous economy rarely faltered. ‘Planning as it is taking shape in this country under our eyes,’ declared Herbert Morrison, the minister responsible for co-ordinating the planning machinery, in October 1946, ‘is something new and constructively revolutionary which will be regarded in times to come as a contribution to civilization as vital and distinctly British as parliamentary democracy under the rule of law.’ Not long afterwards, there appeared a new edition of Douglas Jay’s The Socialist Case, first published in 1937. Jay himself was now an economic minister, and he not only reaffirmed the immortal maxim that ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves’ but argued that, within the context of a properly planned, centrally run economy, ‘economic freedom – the freedom to buy or sell, to employ or refrain from employing other people, to manufacture or not manufacture – is a secondary freedom, often approaching a luxury, which can and should be limited in a good cause’.7.
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