A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Does this mean we should cheer our leaders? Certainly not. For most of the modern period politics has served Britain less well than our self-congratulation about parliamentary democracy might suggest. Good people, acting honourably, failed to lead well. We have been run by cliques of right and left who did not understand the direction the country was taking. Hennessy is right: the political class was intelligent and faced terrible choices which are easy to brush aside afterwards when the dangers have passed. But Barnett is also right: we could have had a better country, had we had clearer-minded leaders who did not shrink from telling hard truths, or from treating the voters like adults. So, Labour did not build a New Jerusalem. So, the Tory cabinets of the fifties and early sixties failed to create the restored great power, the New Elizabethan Age they dreamed of. The Wilson and Heath years were supposed to be a time of modernization, a refitted, retooled Britain. They ended with trade unions rampant and the lights flickering out. John Major set out promising to create a country at ease with itself and ended up with a country ill at ease, above all with John Major. Tony Blair’s New Labour Britain was never as cool or efficient as he told us it would be, even before the Iraq war. Nor was it whiter than white. Each failure occurred on its own terms.

  The exceptions were the Labour government of 1945, which developed a Welfare State even if it did not achieve the social transformation it wanted, and Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations, which addressed the British crisis head-on. Both set templates for what followed. But even these two counter-examples are not completely clear. Post-war Labour ran out of popularity and momentum within a couple of years, while Mrs Thatcher’s vision of a remoralized, hard-working nation of savers and strong families was hardly what the partying, divided, ‘loadsamoney’, easy credit, big-hair eighties delivered. What follows is a story of the failure of political elites. Often the famous political names, those faces familiar from a thousand cartoons and newsreels, seem to me like buzzing flywheels with broken teeth, failing to move the huge and complex structures of daily life.

  If that was all, it would be a depressing tale. But it is not. Opening markets, well-educated and busy people, a relatively uncorrupt and law-abiding national tradition, and an optimistic relish for the new technologies and experiences offered by twentieth-century life all make the British experience generally better than political history alone would suggest. In the more recent decades the retreat of faith and ideology, and their replacement by consumerism and celebrity may have made us a less dignified lot. Yet modern Britain has made great advances in science, culture and finance which have benefited, and will benefit, the world. Among the puzzles facing humanity at the beginning of the twenty-first century are global warming; the mystery of consciousness; and how ageing Western societies adapt to the new migrant cultures they require to keep them functioning. British people have been important in bringing answers, just as they were seminal in the development of the Web, and in creating modern music and television. We have become a world island in a new way. In the period covered by this book, the dominant experience has been acceleration. We have lived faster. We have seen, heard, communicated, changed and travelled more. We have experienced a material profusion and perhaps a philosophical or religious emptiness that marks us off from earlier times.

  If, by an act of science or magic, a small platoon of British people from 1945 could be time-travelled sixty or so years into the future, what would they make of us? They would be nudging one another and trying not to laugh. They would be shocked by the different colours of skin. They would be surprised by the crammed and busy roads, the garish shops, the lack of smoke in the air. They would be amazed at how big so many of us are – not just tall but shamefully fat. They would be impressed by the clean hair, the new-looking clothes and the youthful faces of the new British. But they would feel shock and revulsion at the gross wastefulness, the food flown here from Zambia or Peru then promptly thrown out of houses and supermarkets uneaten, the mountains of intricately designed and hurriedly discarded music players, television sets and fridges, clothes and furniture; the ugly marks of painted, distorted words on walls and the litter everywhere of plastic and coloured paper. They would wonder at our lack of church-going, our flagrant openness about sex, our divorce habit, alongside our amazingly warm and comfortable houses. They would then discuss it all in voices that might make us in turn laugh at them – insufferably posh or quaintly regional. Yet these alien people were us. They are us. The cropped-haired urchins of the forties are our pensioners now. The impatient lean young adults of 1947 with their imperial convictions or socialist beliefs are around us still in wheelchairs or hidden in care homes. It was their lives and the choices they made which led to here and now. So although they might stare at us and ask, ‘Who are these alien people?’ we could reply, ‘We are you, what you chose to become.’

  Part One

  Hunger and Pride: Britain After the War

  1

  The Democratic Bombshell

  Many of us find our innermost fears or hopes take arms while we sleep, ready to strike at the moment of wakening. Churchill recorded that, on the morning of 26 July 1945, he woke up with ‘a sharp stab of almost physical pain’ to find himself sure that he and the Conservatives had just lost the general election. There was a long delay for the votes to be brought back from battlefields around the world. Few people thought the war leader could lose power. Most Labour leaders assumed he would be returned. So did the apparently well-informed City experts, the in-touch trade union bosses, the self-certain press, the diplomatic observers passing back the latest intelligence to Washington and Moscow. Churchill was at the very peak of his personal triumph, outshining the King and Royal Family when he appeared on the famous balcony to wave. Never in British history has military success been so personally associated with a civilian leader – not the two great Pitts, not Disraeli at his peak, not David Lloyd George, could rival Churchill’s radio age charisma. True, 1945 had been a most unusual election. The Parliament it ended had begun in the middle of the thirties – nine years, six months and twenty days earlier, making it the longest UK Parliament ever, a Parliament of old men unused to raw party conflict. Churchill would have liked it to go on longer, at least until Japan was defeated. Never quite a party man, he had a coalition cast of mind. It had been Labour which insisted on the election. Now, no one knew what was coming: the scattered and disrupted nature of the electorate meant accurate polling was impossible. The new electoral roll was inaccurate, too, having been based on ration book records. Among those who found they had no vote because of clerical errors was the Prime Minister himself.

  For those with ears to hear, there were intimations of what was about to happen. During the war a high-minded religious socialism had become fashionable at home. As the carnage ground on overseas, an almost Utopian determination to build a more Christian country took root. As early as 1940 the great wartime Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, had called for ‘extreme inequalities of wealth to be abolished’. Going rather further, his Council of Clergy and Ministers for Common Ownership declared private ownership of industry ‘contrary to Divine Justice’. In the forces compulsory discussions about Britain after the war had been led by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, ABCA, organized by a left-leaning educationalist called W.E. Williams. Conservative-minded officers complained about the tone of the pamphlets sent round the army and that Williams had ‘smothered the troops in seditious literature’. One general burned 10,000 of the ‘wretched pamphlets’ in front of his men and warned that they were ‘rank treason’. To this day many Conservatives believe that socialist propaganda foisted on the troops was to blame for their defeat in 1945. In fact, the numbers do not add up; the minimum voting age was 21, which cut out many of the more malleable troops and in any case, there were fewer than two million service votes cast in a total electorate of 33 million.

  The change was happening among civilians. A strong sense that it was time for a fresh beginning had been ref
lected in a series of by-election defeats of Tory candidates when vacancies were caused in the Commons by the deaths of sitting members. (Twenty-two MPs were killed fighting, all but one of them Conservatives.) At Maldon in Essex, the left-wing journalist Tom Driberg had won, standing as an independent. By 1943 candidates for the piously socialist Common Wealth movement, founded by our English traveller J.B. Priestley and by Sir Richard Acland, were winning upset victories up and down England. In April of that year the Battle of Britain pilot John Loveseed won a Cheshire seat; Lt Hugh Lawson won Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales. Most sensationally of all, in April 1945 in Tory Chelmsford, Wing Commander Ernest Millington, a pre-war pacifist and socialist who had then joined the RAF and turned his attention to bombing Germany, defeated the Conservative candidate. Millington, standing for Common Wealth and supported by local vicars, had fought a remarkably aggressive campaign whose tone can be summarized by a banner he put up in the middle of the market town which read, ‘This is a Fight between Christ and Churchill.’ By 1945, there was a whiff of Oliver Cromwell in the air.

  The Labour conference which kick-started the election campaign one hot afternoon in Blackpool is still remembered for the youth of the delegates. Denis Healey was there, in battledress and beret, fresh from the battlefront in Italy, preaching red-hot socialist revolution. Across Europe the upper classes were ‘selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent’ he told the cheering hall. Roy Jenkins, who had helped crack the German codes at Bletchley Park, was there too, a slim and dapper soldier. There was even a socialist Rear Admiral. Labour’s manifesto, well written and snappily designed, would be distributed to nearly two million people, backed by powerful posters, 12 million leaflets and huge numbers of party volunteers. Its most popular passages could hardly have come as a shock. They relied on the blueprint for a fairer, more planned country which had been worked out by the coalition government before the war ended. Labour had the support of only a minority of the national press. Apart from the Daily Mirror and its in-house Daily Herald, the big-circulation papers were all pro-Tory and the two upmarket leftish newspapers, the Manchester Guardian and the News Chronicle, both backed the lost-cause Liberals. Different parts of the country found very different audiences for Labour’s meetings. Attlee was rushing about in his little Standard car, rapping out around eight speeches of a terse twenty minutes apiece every day. He thought his reception was excellent. In some towns the election seemed quiet. In others, huge and attentive crowds turned up to listen and argue back. In Birmingham Roy Jenkins recalled ‘seas of faces looking up in the twilight, a mixture of exhaustion, hope, some kind of doubt. A sea of tired faces looking up in hope, that’s the best phrase I can make of it.’

  Churchill meanwhile was fighting one of the bad campaigns of his life. His theme was that Labour was a sinister socialist conspiracy. In a badly misjudged radio broadcast kicking off his campaign, he let his florid wartime language loose and struck entirely the wrong note. No socialist system, he said, could be established without some form of political police, a British Gestapo. Instead he offered a vision of bucolic good cheer which would have seemed dated in the aftermath of the Boer War: ‘Let us make sure that the cottage home to which the warrior will return is blessed with modest but solid prosperity, well-fenced and guarded against misfortune…’ Attlee answered him with gentle irony. The Gestapo suggestion was grossly offensive but the Labour leader disarmingly replied that it was no doubt Churchill’s way of demonstrating the gulf between his qualities as a great war leader and those of a mere party leader, and that the attack had probably been devised by the press baron Lord Beaverbrook. It was in fact all Churchill’s own work. His wife Clemmie had strongly warned him against it and his party’s chief whip had commented that ‘it is not my idea of how to win an election’. A second line of Tory attack was that Attlee was the mere frontman for extremists. The Labour chairman Harold Laski was portrayed by Conservative candidates as hell-bent on revolution. Laski did use wild language and was on the left of the party, though his father campaigned for Churchill and had recently suggested that a public fund be raised to show Churchill the nation’s gratitude. (The Prime Minister said a better monument for him would be a public park for the children of London on the south bank of the Thames ‘where they suffered so grimly from the Hun’. This was never followed up.)

  Churchill had based himself in Claridge’s Hotel in London and used a private train and a cavalcade of cars to make his speeches around the country. Mostly he won an enthusiastic enough reception, though he was dumbfounded to find himself booed by a large section of the crowd in his final rally at Walthamstow. This was not quite the respectful British nation of myth. Despite these warning signs, the brutal rejection of Churchill for Attlee caused amazement around the world. Before the election result was declared the two men had been together at Potsdam in Germany negotiating the future of post-war Europe with Joseph Stalin and President Harry Truman. Where would Poland’s borders be? How hard should defeated Germany be squeezed? Whose was Greece? Returning to London for the results, Churchill had not even bothered to say goodbye to the Soviet dictator or Washington’s new man. He did not properly pack. He would be back.

  Attlee was by then somewhat more optimistic. He thought it would be close. About that, at least, he was wrong. In 1935 the Conservatives had won 585 seats. In 1945 they won just 213. Labour won more votes that the Tories for the first time ever, giving them 393 seats and a majority of 146. When Attlee returned to Potsdam alone without Churchill, Stalin’s right-hand man, Molotov, was incredulous. He suspiciously cross-questioned the Labour leader about why he had not known the result in advance. Such democratic sloppiness would not have been tolerated further east. Churchill, brooding at home, found it a terrible personal shock. When Clemmie tried to cheer him up with the thought that it might be a blessing in disguise he grunted that, just at the moment, it seemed quite effectively disguised. Yet he quickly spirited a silver lining out from the cloud. The years ahead would be a terrible trial to the British people, Churchill believed. Might not Labour be better left to cope with the disappointments to come? At last, discovering the generosity of spirit that had gone absent without leave during his election campaigning, the old man rebuked one of his aides: ‘This is democracy. This is what we have been fighting for.’

  What had Labour been fighting for? The party’s new MPs arriving in London by train, car and bus were a mixed bunch. Most were inexperienced in the ways of Parliament, as they would soon show by giving a raucous rendition of the Red Flag in the temporary chamber – the historic one having been demolished by the Luftwaffe. There were Fabian intellectuals, wartime rebels, trade unionists and civil servants such as the podgy, moustachioed Harold Wilson, soldiers and teachers, cautious moderates and – so the Communist Party believed – at least nine secret communist plants. All of them had stood on a manifesto written by Herbert Morrison and a young idealist called Michael Young who would go on to found the Consumers’ Association. It called for the establishment of ‘the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain – free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited’. It contained a long list of ideas but it was as realistic as (in private) Churchill had been about the difficulties ahead: ‘The problems and pressures of the post-war world threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years.’ In the years ahead this fighting bulldog tone would quickly grate.

  Some of the new Labour MPs felt they had been elected to overturn the class basis of the country, others that they simply had a difficult list of domestic reforms to get through. As they introduced themselves to one another for the first time, gossiping and exchanging campaign stories, a sizeable minority also believed they had better get rid of the conventional-sounding Attlee and elect a proper leader while there was time. Herbert Morrison, a popular minister who had organized London’s defence against the Blitz, had warned Attlee
that he would stand against him in a party contest. The plot gathered force in the corridors and urinals of Westminster Central Hall. At the same time, Attlee, Morrison, the burly ex-trade union leader Ernie Bevin and the party secretary met at Transport House, the party headquarters a few hundred yards away. As Morrison nipped out to make a call to another supporter, Bevin leaned across to Attlee and growlingly gave him the best advice of his life: ‘Clem, you go to the Palace straight away.’ Clem did. He took tea with his wife Vi and family at Paddington, hopped into their little car and was driven to Buckingham Palace where the King, a staunch conservative taken aback by the turn of events, duly handed him control of the British Empire. Morrison and the other Labour plotters left half a mile to the east had underestimated Attlee. Many people had. He would go on to become one of the two genuinely nation-changing prime ministers of modern British history.

  2

  Hiroshima and Keynes: the Limits of Wit

  The Labour government of 1945-50 is remembered today as among the greatest British administrations ever. Some of the glory is justified. As we will see, it changed the health and welfare structure of the country, nationalized sections of the economy and managed to survive a series of terrible external shocks. But if its aim was to create a British socialist commonwealth with different values and different people in charge – to make a social revolution – then Labour failed. No significant changes to the British class system came about as a result of the work of the Attlee government. Nor was there any loosening of the ties to Washington, ardently desired by many on the left who thought Labour could deal better with Moscow on the dubious principle that ‘left can speak to left’. Labour hoped to keep Britain free and independent, going her own way between the Great Capitalism on the other side of the Atlantic and the Great Communism now in possession of half Europe. Yet under Attlee Britain became dependent on the United States. She could not match America’s overwhelming military power around the world, symbolized by an atomic bomb that Britain had helped create but was not allowed to share. The weakness of Britain’s dying imperium meant her world role would have to shrink dramatically. Attlee understood this much faster than most of his colleagues.