Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Economic historians have not, on the whole, much dissented. For Correlli Barnett, this cavalier diversion of resources from exports and investment was graphic testimony to how ‘the British governing elite suffered not only from the reflexes of a rich man and a grandee but also from those of a school prefect’, in other words high-mindedly trying to set the world to rights. Even Jim Tomlinson, the best-informed, most convincing advocate of the Attlee government across a range of economic issues, concedes that doubling defence expenditure – even before the war comprising 7 per cent of GNP – was ‘a reckless gamble’. Significantly, though, a study by Peter Burnham of the war’s impact on the British vehicle industry (in particular Leyland Motors) reveals that the ‘more astute’ sections of the industry (including cars as well as commercial vehicles) were able in the early 1950s ‘to increase their industrial infrastructure and secure a high rate of guaranteed profit at the direct expense of the state in a manner which would not have been possible but for rearmament’. And he argues, convincingly, that ‘the reasons for long-term decline must be sought in the market structure and practices of firms themselves in addition to looking at the effects of government policy’.18The Korean War was, in short, all too easily used as an alibi for more fundamental economic failings.

  The more serious, longlasting fall-out from the war was political. At the outset, Bevan and the Labour left were almost unanimously behind the Americans. ‘When you are in a world-wide alliance,’ Bevan told Younger, ‘you can’t retreat from it on a single issue.’ Moreover, although in Cabinet in early August he criticised the United States for resorting to ‘a military defence’ against ‘Communist encroachment’ as opposed to improving ‘the social and economic conditions’ of threatened countries, Bevan remained during the autumn publicly supportive of the rearmament programme. Certainly he did not voice his doubts at Labour’s October conference at Margate, where Panter-Downes described him as looking on the platform ‘like a sort of walking Union Jack – crimson face, pugnacious blue eyes, and a thick, silvering thatch of hair’. She also noted how Bevin looked ‘tired and oddly shrunken’; how Anthony Crosland was ‘alone in courageously pointing out, when rearmament gets going, the problem will be not to reduce the cost of living but to hang on desperately to keep it pegged where it is’; and how ‘in the evenings, when the delegates stopped at the various hotel bars to lower a pint before dinner, the regular customers, attended by their glum, well-tailored Scotties and fox terriers, sat sipping their gins with a self-conscious air of being in dubious company’.19

  Later that month, Cripps at last stood down at No. 11 and was replaced by the obvious choice, Gaitskell. Most senior ministers approved, but Bevan failed to disguise his anger and fired off a letter to Attlee complaining that the appointment was ‘a great mistake’. Gaitskell reflected privately on the personal ramifications: ‘I suspect that Nye is not so much jealous but humiliated at my being put over him. But HW, and others confirm, is inordinately jealous, though in view of his age [34, ten years younger than Gaitskell] there is really no reason for it. But then one does not look for reasons for jealousy.’ It was hardly surprising that Harold Wilson, until recently the coming man in matters economic, should have felt aggrieved. After all, as his biographer Ben Pimlott points out, ‘the Chancellorship had been his childhood fantasy’.

  Malcolm Muggeridge lunched with the new Chancellor in December and found him ‘amiable, and, in his way, intelligent, rather like a certain type of High Church clergyman with a slum parish’. Early in 1951, on 15 January, Bevan set out to Cabinet his profound misgivings about the vastly expanded rearmament programme that Attlee and Gaitskell were now proposing. ‘He did not believe that the Soviet Government were relying on a military coup,’ recorded the minutes. ‘If this was their policy, they would have taken military action before now: he did not believe that they had been deterred from this merely by fear of atomic attack. In his view their main strategy was to force the Western democracies to rearm on a scale which would impair their economies and embitter their peoples.’ Two days later, Bevan was moved sideways by Attlee, to the Ministry of Labour; on the 25th, the Cabinet agreed to the programme, despite Gaitskell admitting that such was the shortage of crucial materials – not helped by American stockpiling – that ‘there was a danger that the increased defence programme might, in practice, yield less and not more production within the next two years’. Only two ministers (including Wilson) made seriously critical noises, while Bevan stayed largely silent.20

  ‘In all this there are personal ambitions and rivalries at work,’ reckoned Gaitskell at the start of February. ‘HW is clearly ganging up with the Minister of Labour, not that he [ie Wilson] cuts very much ice because one feels that he has no fundamental views of his own.’ Even so, Bevan on the 15th still gave his unambiguous public backing to the new programme. ‘We do beg that we shall not have all these jeers about the rearmament we are putting under way,’ he declared in the Commons. ‘We shall carry it out; we shall fulfil our obligation to our friends and Allies.’ It was ‘one of the most brilliant performances I have ever heard him give,’ Gaitskell reflected after Bevan had wound up the defence debate. ‘What a tragedy,’ he went on, ‘that a man with such wonderful talent as an orator and such an interesting mind and fertile imagination should be such a difficult team worker, and some would say even worse – a thoroughly unreliable and disloyal colleague. Will he grow out of this? Will he take on the true qualities that are necessary for leadership? Who can say? Time alone will show.’

  Time for once did not dally. On 9 March, after finally persuading an unwilling but failing Bevin to let go of the Foreign Office, Attlee replaced him with Herbert Morrison – almost certainly to Bevan’s intense disappointment. Attlee would later claim that Bevan had not wanted the position, but this seems improbable. Certainly, after this third personal setback in barely five months, he was in resigning mood when on the 22nd he listened to Gaitskell explain why, in his forthcoming Budget, the introduction of health charges – specifically, charges on teeth and spectacles – was an indispensable part of paying for the expanded defence programme. Tellingly, Bevan ‘found it difficult to believe that the reasons for the proposal were entirely financial in character, since suggestions for a scheme of charges had been put forward persistently for the last three years’. In this he was surely right, for even a broadly sympathetic biographer of Gaitskell concedes of his subject that, following the squalls over health charges the previous year, ‘politically he needed to be backed by the Cabinet to assert his ascendancy over Bevan.’ It was a tactic that looked likely to work, given that around the table only Wilson joined Bevan in refusing to accept that the principle of a free health service would remain intact despite the introduction of charges. Twelve days later (and exactly a week before the Budget), responding to a heckler at a meeting full of dockers in Bermondsey, Bevan at last came out in public: ‘I will not be a member of a Government which imposes charges on the patient.’21

  A fascinated spectator of the unfolding drama was Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who in November had succeeded Cripps as Labour MP for Bristol South-East. ‘I think we were a shade overkeen,’ he afterwards explained to the press about the much-reduced majority, ‘and started knocking at doors a bit early in the morning when even supporters had no interest in politics.’ He let it be known that, as a new MP, it would be necessary for him to lose the stigma of being an intellectual. ‘You’d better acquire the stigma before worrying about losing it’ was the typically caustic response of Tony Crosland, who had taught him at Oxford. Undeterred, Benn made a well-received maiden speech in February (‘South-East Bristol has every reason to be pleased with its new member,’ noted Michael Foot in the Daily Herald), followed on 9 March, the day of Bevin’s resignation, by his first appearance on Any Questions?. The programme came from Itchen Grammar School, Southampton, and to read the transcript is to be struck by how the 25-year-old’s earnest priggishness was combined with an unmistakable boy-scoutish charm. ‘I’m
not a bit ashamed to say that we’ve made lots of mistakes’ is how he began an answer about Labour’s future nationalisation plans, ‘and that we’re going to make a lot more, but what I would say, and I’m not a bit ashamed to say, we’ve profited by experience . . .’

  Benn was already keeping a diary, and the following week he recorded a ‘Gala Smoking Concert’ held by some 80 Labour MPs in the Smoking Room of the Commons. At one point they sang a ditty (conducted by Callaghan, to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’) that owed little to poetry, even less to the political realities of March 1951, and almost everything to a deep, primitive, heartfelt class consciousness:

  We’ll make Winston Churchill smoke a Woodbine every day

  We’ll make Winston Churchill smoke a Woodbine every day

  We’ll make Winston Churchill smoke a Woodbine every day

  When the red revolution comes.

  ‘The awful event of Christmas Day was the stealing of THE CORONATION STONE from Westminster Abbey,’ noted Vere Hodgson near the end of 1950. ‘The poor Dean has broadcast a heart broken appeal to everyone to help find it. He says he will travel to the ends of the earth to get it back.’ She added, ‘It seems the Scottish nationalists have taken it. Such nonsense. As if there is not enough trouble in the world. They should go and fight in Korea . . .’ Despite the Scottish claim that that country’s monarchs had been crowned upon the Stone of Scone since the tenth century, before it had been forcibly removed to England by Edward I in 1296, the bulk of the English press was equally unsympathetic; even the Manchester Guardian condemned ‘the childish stupidity of these Nationalists, which deserves sharp punishment and no extenuation’. No one was more incensed than the King, who (according to Harold Macmillan’s information) had the news kept from him until after his live Christmas Day broadcast, but as soon as he heard wanted to go on the air again to appeal for its return. English public opinion was probably not so different from the royal view of the situation, but Macmillan himself was more relaxed: ‘What a strange and delightful interlude in the great world tragedy – a sort of Scottish harlequinade.’

  Across the border, embarrassment and gratification seem to have been felt in about equal measure. ‘Here, in Scotland, although all reasonable Scots disapprove the act,’ observed Randall Philip, Procurator of the Church of Scotland, ‘there is considerable satisfaction that, for once, England has realised the existence of its neighbour, and considerable chuckling over the Gilbertian efforts of the police.’ These efforts included dragging the Serpentine, closing the Scottish border for the first time in 400 years and much else – all to no avail. It would eventually emerge that the daring theft had been engineered by three male students at Glasgow University and a young Highlands woman who taught domestic science. All four were members of the Covenant movement, demanding that Scotland have its own parliament in Edinburgh. The Covenant had been launched in August 1949 and within a year had collected something like 1.5 million signatures. The Attlee government, accused by the movement of being over-centralising, was unimpressed and gave little ground – a stance fortified in February 1950 by the underwhelming electoral performance of the Scottish Nationalists. ‘Despite the miserable showing so far as votes go,’ one of its badly defeated candidates, the poet and left-wing controversialist Hugh MacDiarmid (standing under his real name, C. M. Grieve), optimistically reflected soon afterwards, ‘“it’s coming yet for a’ that.” While not reflected in the voting, the awakened interest in and attention to Scottish affairs of all kinds is most marked everywhere.’23

  In the event, the much-publicised removal of the Stone proved a significant blow to the Home Rule cause, not only in terms of hardening English opinion. ‘The escapade was popular but inappropriate,’ observes the Scottish historian Christopher Harvie, ‘enhancing emotional nationalism rather than canny moderatism.’ Meanwhile, the Stone itself began 1951 in two pieces, following a misadventure as it was prised from under the Coronation Chair. The smaller bit was stowed away in a friendly house in the Midlands; the larger chunk lay equally undetected in a Kent field. Eventually, once the hue and cry had subsided, the two parts were secretly transported to Scotland and put back together by a well-disposed stonemason.

  Given the broad degree of satisfaction with the two main pillars of the post-war British settlement – full employment and the welfare state – it was perhaps unsurprising that the movement for Scottish independence or even devolution failed to build up an unstoppable head of steam. The prevailing political conservatism was reinforced by a deep unwillingness to face up to clear signs by the early 1950s that the Scottish economy was facing fundamental problems. The over-reliance on traditional heavy industries had if anything become even more pronounced; Scotland’s share of British exports (as measured by value) was declining; and an authoritative report by Alec Cairncross deplored ‘the comparative indifference of Scottish industry to new equipment, new knowledge, and new opportunities for development’. A significant source of comfort to those who did contemplate the economic future was the existence since 1943 of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, charged with developing water power for hoped-for new industrial plants. ‘In a way the Hydro Board symbolised the relationship of government and the economy in the 1950s,’ comments Harvie. ‘Its purposes were vaguely nationalist and vaguely socialist. It served a myth, that of the Highland way of life.’24Certainly the Board (chaired for many years by Tom Johnston, wartime Secretary of State for Scotland) was responsible for bringing electricity to many isolated homes. But whether its dams, pylons and power stations were really going to help the socio-economic regeneration of the Highlands was far from clear.

  The cause of Welsh nationalism was, by contrast, appreciably less conspicuous in these immediate post-war years. Labour was becoming the ever more dominant party of the Welsh political landscape; Attlee and Morrison adamantly refused to allow Wales to have (like Scotland) its own Secretary of State; the Council for Wales that they did permit to be set up in 1949 was on a wholly advisory basis; and the Welsh language continued its long-term decline, with the 1951 Census revealing not only that barely a quarter of the population (mainly in rural areas) could speak it, but that the adult monoglot Welsh speaker had become a rarity. Instead, even more so than in Scotland, most people looked to the new British settlement to protect their interests – arguably to such an extent that in time ‘1945’ became in Welsh history what ‘1688’ and the Glorious Revolution had for centuries been in English history. This version of the past was one in which Bevan – no Welsh nationalist – would play a heroic, starring role, above all through his creation of the NHS. St David’s Day in 2004 was marked by a poll asking the Welsh to nominate their greatest Welsh heroes. There were silver and bronze medals for Tom Jones and Owain Glyndwr; the gold went to the one-time member for Ebbw Vale.25

  One obdurate, difficult, disagreeable man, himself imbued with a deep detestation of Welsh nationalism, refused from the start to buy into the myth. This was the writer and businessman Charles Horace Jones. Born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1906, Jones had flourished during the war as a self-confessed spiv, and indeed looked exactly like one with his pencil moustache, sleek black hair, invariable cigarette and perpetually sardonic expression. For some years afterwards he ran a crafts business in the town, but gave it up in 1950 to combine writing (including much lampooning doggerel as well as satirical articles and pamphlets) with standing for hours at a time against the lamp-post in Merthyr’s high street opposite the jeweller’s. There, in the words of an unsympathetic obituarist, ‘he would harangue anyone who had the slightest connection with the town’s public life, from councillors to lollipop ladies’. Jones, who usually carried a knuckleduster in his pocket, was not a man to cross, but in his malevolent way he offered over the years an acerbic, remarkably sustained commentary on the institutions running post-war Wales and often benefiting handsomely from the new settlement. It was a settlement he saw as inimical to personal initiative and intrinsically liable to foster corruption. He may
have had a case. But there remains something rebarbative about the man whose favourite aphorism (among many) is still remembered in Merthyr: ‘The best place to bury the hatchet is in your enemy’s head.’26

  12

  A Kind of Measuring-Rod

  Gladys Langford encountered the welfare state in action on the first Monday in September 1950:

  To Local branch of Nat. Health Insur. to get a new card as I must now pay 3/8 weekly if I want the additional 26/- weekly when I have been 10 years insured. The clerk was a most incompetent person and when she finally accepted the card the L.C.C. had returned to me she said ‘We will send you an arrears card as it is one stamp short’. I said ‘Oh, I will get a stamp at the P.O. opposite and then it will be stamped to date and save unnecessary labour here and in the Post Office for delivery’. The silly so-and-so refused to let me do this, repeating parrot fashion – ‘We will send you an arrears card’!!!1.