But was the creation of a classless society a realistic aspiration? ‘No one should think that this will be a short or an easy task,’ began the only moderately uplifting peroration:
The pace will be limited, not only by the need to preserve the necessary minimum of social peace and cohesion, but also by the difficulty of engendering enthusiasm for further change in a population largely employed and enjoying rising standards every year. There will be no revival of the angry dynamic of revolt against the obvious miseries and injustices of capitalism. The temper of the people will be more contented and therefore more conservative, and public opinion will take time to acclimatise itself to the prospect of each further radical advance.
Accordingly, ‘these difficulties make it the more urgent that we should have a clear vision of where we want, as socialists, to go’.
Crosland’s essay marked the authentic start of the revisionist project – in essence, an attempt to wean the Labour Party away from fundamentalist allegiance to the cause of public ownership and instead, against a background of successful demand management (‘Keynesian techniques are now well understood,’ he noted), shift the emphasis at least as much to social as to economic issues. Yet in terms of the project’s chances of success, it did not help that Crosland himself, for all his undeniable power of intellect and personal charisma, possessed serious flaws. An incorrigibly arrogant streak not only put off potential allies but was also reflected in a thoroughly top-down approach to policy-making; a disordered personal life was complemented in the early to mid-1950s by a deep unwillingness to play the tedious, time-consuming parliamentary game; and his repeated, immoderate denunciations of what he saw as inexcusably outdated social mores appealed as little to respectable trade unionists (the backbone of the Labour Party) as they did to most middle-class floating voters. ‘It’s quite obvious that the general result of the unwritten laws is to make people a great deal more miserable than they would otherwise be,’ he told an Any Questions? audience in Bristol (on the evening, as it happened, that Attlee surrendered power to Churchill). ‘We are a nation of very unsmiling and depressed people and we ought to be far more gay and far more cheerful, and far more hilarious, than we are. We’re not nearly hilarious enough as a nation, and the reason why we’re not hilarious enough is because of these miserable unwritten laws, and so I’m wholly against them.’ All of which was said in an ‘attractive, drawling, affected donnish tone of voice’, as an admiring if ultimately critical friend would describe it.9
In December 1951 the veteran Labour politician Hugh Dalton might well have wished it was his handsome protégé Crosland who was helping him make a party political broadcast. Instead, his two colleagues were Tony Benn (‘very useful, moves through life like a cat, attractive, has reserves and sense of humour, but not quite to be trusted’) and Michael Young (‘better at this than at policy making’). Young, principal author of Labour’s historic 1945 manifesto, was still working in the party’s research department, though not for much longer. There exists the first draft of an undated essay by him, ‘Is This The Classless Society?’, probably written during the second half of 1951 and almost certainly rejected for New Fabian Essays. A fascinating piece, it anticipates not only Young’s own The Rise of the Meritocracy of seven years later but also the concern felt by Crosland (with whom he was friendly) about the inadequacy of equality of opportunity as a goal.
‘If we base our hopes on equal opportunity alone we may find our destination is not Utopia but America,’ Young roundly declared at the outset, before detailing some of the ways in which there had emerged greater equality of opportunity over the past decade. These included a better standard of education for working-class children, the rise in real wages, full employment, the rise of service industries, mass production (bringing an increasing range of goods, such as standardised clothes, within everybody’s reach) and greater geographical mobility. Significantly, these were all examples of levelling up rather than down; he gave the example of public schools, noting that ‘if the last decade is any guide, these schools will take a very long time to die’. In an obvious sense, of course, Young welcomed enhanced equality of opportunity – but not if it came at the expense of enhanced equality of status, nor if its American-style pursuit was psychologically destabilising. ‘In a genuinely classless society, people would not be foes but brothers,’ he insisted. ‘But by stressing competition as the partner of equal opportunity, men are being turned into foes of each other. The stress is on success. The effort is to excel. The aim is to do better than your fellows. The result is a strain on ordinary people which ordinary people are not built to bear.’ Near the end came the direct political message: ‘We want neither rule of the elite or dictatorship of the proletariat, but rule by all of the people.’ And Young called on Labour to develop ‘a practical programme for diffusing power on the grand scale’ – a programme which, ‘particularly by enabling housewives to share power, would sweep the polls’.
Young himself by the end of 1951 had almost certainly come to the conclusion that both he and Labour would find fulfilment through a greater, more subtle understanding of how British society worked and how it was changing. In short, sociology called. It would not, though, be sociology as conventionally practised. In a specially striking passage in his essay, as part of his analysis of the plight of the losers in an increasingly competitive society, he turned to what he saw as the emotionally unnourishing position of the nuclear, non-extended family:
The couple with the young children – are they so well off? They have established themselves in a city suburb, living neatly and comfortably in their little house, going to the pictures when they can find a watcher for their one or two children. But they seldom have any sense of belonging, and would as soon move on as stay. One suburb is much like another in an atomised society. Rarely does community flourish. How can it when people do not live long enough in one place to know more about their neighbours than their names and jobs and the colour of their irises?10
The instincts of the two main parties remained, whatever the internal debates, fundamentally different in the early 1950s. ‘There is an intense distaste for the type of fiscal policy which the Welfare State demands,’ declared Crosland in his Fabian essay of his Tory opponents – an understandable distaste on the part of the better off, given that by the end of the Labour government marginal tax rates were at times reaching 98 per cent, death duties 80 per cent, and there was also in existence a new differential profits tax at a high rate. The desire to regain some fiscal ground was particularly strong on the part of the Tory rank and file, as shown by the overwhelming majority at the party conference in 1952 for the motion that ‘public expenditure has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’. As for Labour, the overriding instinct – on right as well as left of the party – was towards greater social and economic equality. The question of means provoked lively comment, even bitter controversy, but that was the shared aim. Moreover, the distinction between the two parties was just as sharp when it came to the very basic, day-to-day issue of private consumption. The Tories before and after the 1951 election did not disguise their desire to dismantle, as soon as economic dictates allowed, the elaborate wartime apparatus of rationing and ensuing austerity, but Labour took comfort from the belief that its electoral defeat had really been a moral victory (in terms of the popular vote) and that Tory promises aimed at grumbling housewives in the butcher’s or baker’s queue were already being revealed as, in the April 1952 words of the chairman of the National Conference of Labour Women, ‘empty and dishonest’. One party, in short, wanted to ‘free the people’, according of course to a particular definition of freedom; the other did not, or at least not with any great urgency.
Yet in policy-making practice there was considerable compromise and overlap – as opposed to consensus – between the two parties. Full employment, Keynesianism, a mixed economy (including a significant nationalised sector), a welfare state: such proved the inescapable policy framework o
f the new Tory administration. The underlying psychological realities behind what was essentially a pragmatic response, by a party in which pragmatism was bred in the bone, were arguably threefold. First, the sheer pervasive, emotional power of folk memories of the 1930s as capitalism’s never-to-be-repeated human catastrophe; second, the powerful collectivist legacy of the wartime experience; and third, the deep post-war desire on the part of the middle class, just as much as the working class, for a secure, not overly cut-and-thrust life. ‘The pressures making for statism are far too strong to be held back,’ accurately predicted Crosland, ‘and the Tories are too intuitive a party indefinitely to play Canute.’ One young Canadian political scientist, closely observing the British state of play in September 1952, was so convinced about the narrowness of the gap that he quoted with approval the Edwardian statesman Arthur Balfour about how the two great parties of the country were ‘so sure of their own moderation that they are not dangerously disturbed by the never-ending din of political conflict’.11 The Canadian was Robert McKenzie, for whom no swing between parties was too small to be of interest.
This is not to deny some wider resonance to the very fact of the Tory restoration – a restoration whose most obviously symbolic early action was the systematic, undeniably vengeful demolition of the entire Festival of Britain infrastructure on the South Bank, with the unavoidable exception of the Royal Festival Hall. For John Vaizey, recalling his Cambridge days, the restoration was mirrored by a generally less congenial local scene: ‘The ex-soldiers went; and there came the little sports cars, the ex-National Service officers in cavalry twill, flapped sports jackets and flat caps, the debs and near-debs, the braying voices.’ Nevertheless, the fact was that, at an intelligentsia, ‘activator’ level anyway, the political colouration of the 1950s remained obstinately ‘left’ rather than ‘right’ – irrespective of the change of government, and epitomised by the New Statesman’s dominance (in both circulation and, largely, reputation) over the Spectator. David Marquand would recall how, as an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-1950s, the conventional wisdom he encountered that ‘the Tories were the stupid party’ and ‘the cleverer you were, the more likely it was that you voted Labour’, had almost ‘the status of a law’.
What were the implications of that prevailing, unquestioned colouration? In April 1979 – a pregnant moment – the chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, David Donnison, valuably summarised the key assumptions over the previous quarter of a century or so of ‘liberal, progressive, social democrats, men and women of the centre-left’:
(1) The growth of the economy and the population would continue.
(2) Although inequalities in earnings thought to be required to keep the economy moving would persist, they would be gradually modified by a social wage provided by social services distributed with greater concern for human needs, and by the growing burden of progressive taxes required to finance those services.
(3) Despite fierce conflicts about recurring but essentially marginal issues, the people who constitute the broad middle ground of the electorate – the people with middling skills and incomes: ‘middle England’ you might call them – could gradually be induced to give general support to these ideas and the programmes which follow from them.
(4) Therefore government and its social services, accountable to this central consensus, were the natural vehicles of progress. Equalizing policies would be carried forward by the public services, propelled by engines of economic growth which would produce the resources to create a juster society without anyone suffering on the way.
(5) Therefore, too, among the generally trusted instruments of progressive social change were doctors, teachers, town planners, nurses, social workers, and all the professions which man the public services.
(6) ‘Social’ policies were regarded as dealing with the redistribution of the fruits of economic growth, the management of its human effects, and the compensation of those who suffered from them. Thus social programmes were the concern of ‘social’ departments of government responsible for health, welfare, social security, housing, education and social control. The economy could be left to the economists and the departments of government concerned with economic management.
Not all these rather comfortable assumptions were fully in place by the early 1950s, but already they were unmistakably in the air. Even so, a 1952 Gallup poll surveying what qualities people thought contributed most to a successful marriage – with agreement on politics (6 per cent) bottom of the list – was perhaps a salutary reminder that activator assumptions were not necessarily everyone’s assumptions.12
‘I’ve yet to meet a Communist who wasn’t interested in money,’ the hero of Biggles Follows On tells Algy, Ginger and the rest. ‘It’s not having any that makes him a Communist. He wants some, and the only way he can think of is to get his hands into the pockets of those that have.’ This latest W. E. Johns yarn (subtitled A Story of the Cold War in Europe and Asia, pitting Britain’s most popular aviator against his old wartime foe Von Stalheim, now employed by the Russians) was published in 1952 – by which time the Cold War was, with the Korean War continuing, still at permafrost intensity. ‘I had a political argument with my father in which he called me a communist and I called him a warmonger,’ Kingsley Amis reported in July to Philip Larkin. ‘All quite as usual, you see.’
Earlier that month there was a revealing episode concerning the Red Dean of Canterbury, the notoriously pro-Soviet Hewlett Johnson. Returning from a visit to China, where local Christian leaders had presented him with an appeal protesting against what they claimed to be American bacteriological warfare in North Korea and north-east China, he found himself at the centre of a storm. To The Times he was ‘irresponsible’, to the Economist ‘malignant’; even the Manchester Guardian condemned ‘his credulity, his capacity to believe nonsense, his ecclesiastical pomp’. The Chinese Christian protest was, in one historian’s words, ‘buried beneath a welter of personal abuse that suggested to the public that it was Johnson who was responsible for the germ warfare allegations’. Predictably, he received zero support from his archbishop, the establishment-minded Geoffrey Fisher, and in the ensuing House of Lords debate, Johnson was accused – virtually without demur – of being a traitor, a Communist Party lackey, an ‘enemy of Western civilisation’, and an agent of Moscow doing ‘the greatest mischief he can to the Anglo-American amity’.
Positions were just as entrenched in intellectual life generally, typified by how difficult the innovative new historical journal Past & Present – set up by the Historians’ Group (including Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill) of the Communist Party of Great Britain and characteristically subtitled ‘a journal of scientific history’ – found it to get contributions from non-Marxist historians. Later in 1952 the prevailing climate was encapsulated in a hostile review of Jack Lindsay’s Byzantium into Europe. ‘Marxian historiography is fundamentally opposed to the canons of western scholarship,’ declared the prestigious TLS, calling this a fact that ‘raises the question, which will have seriously to be faced, sooner rather than later, by those concerned with academic appointments, whether, in fairness to his pupils, any individual who adheres to the Communist doctrine can be allowed responsibility for the teaching of history’. As for Lindsay himself, he had presented ‘a picture of Byzantine civilisation which will be wholly unrecognisable by anyone on this side of the Iron Curtain who is neither a Communist nor a fellow-traveller’. The following week a letter from Christopher Hill deplored the use of a TLS review ‘to advocate a witch-hunt in the historical profession’, but soon afterwards an editorial broadly supported the paper’s reviewer. At the same time, in a shameful episode, the long-standing editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, sacked Basil Davidson – who had recently written a series of superb articles on the rise of Black Nationalism in Africa – because the word was out, in fact misleadingly, that he was a fellow-traveller. He soon became, in the words of Martin’s generally favourable biographer, ‘a sk
eleton in Kingsley’s cupboard’.13
Increasingly by this time there was focus on the shop floor – in part reflecting a shift in Communist Party thinking after its electoral disaster in 1951 (100 seats contested, none won, deposits lost 98). The Communist Technique in Britain was the title of a 1952 Penguin by Bob Darke, a Hackney-based bus conductor who had recently left the CP after 18 years. It was, Mark Abrams wrote in his review, a powerful, compelling piece of testimony:
He never rose to the top ranks, and he never had much use for the Party’s intellectuals and theoreticians. From beginning to end he was merely a tireless N.C.O. fighting and leading his platoons in the trenches of the class war. He was never without a role in one or more sectors of the working-class movement – branch chairman of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, official of the Fire Brigades Union, of the Hackney Trades Council, the London Trades Council, Hackney Borough Councillor, convener of Peace Campaign meetings, organiser of Tenants’ Committees, patron of youth cycling clubs. At every one of these and a dozen similar tasks, the author worked single-mindedly, not for his constituents, but for the Communist Party. He describes calmly and factually how a handful of Party members, always prepared to use chicanery, barely disguised embezzlement, bullying, lying, forgery, conspiracy, steadily exploited for the advancement of the cause, the poverty, political laziness and altruism of their neighbours and workmates. Almost every trade union branch and most large factories in the borough came under their influence.
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 11
