A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  By late 1937, though, largely through the efforts of Hugh Dalton, the party’s spokesman on foreign affairs, Labour had shifted from semi-pacifism to opposition to appeasement and support for rearmament. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, radical journalists such as Frank Owen and the future Labour leader Michael Foot lambasted the ‘guilty men’ who had supported Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Chamberlain resigned in May 1940; Winston Churchill replaced him as Prime Minister; and Labour along with Liberals joined his government.

  The conduct of Labour members of the War Cabinet massively enhanced the reputation of the party: Cripps jettisoned the image of left-wing maverick to become a highly effective minister in charge of aircraft production; Herbert Morrison evolved as a key figure on the home front; and Ernest Bevin, as Minister for Labour, managed the delicate balancing act of supplying the war effort while not only protecting but also enhancing workers’ rights. However, although the War Cabinet projected a front of national unity, Churchill’s premiership did not go uncriticised during the 1940s. Frank Owen, writing under the suitably radical pseudonym of ‘Thomas Rainsboro’, attacked the Prime Minister’s failure to come to the aid of the Soviet Union following the German invasion of 1941, and repeatedly called for the opening of a second front to relieve the Russians.

  The war effort transformed British society: as everyone pulled together, the nation was infused with a spirit of egalitarianism. The mood was reflected in the pioneering journalism of Tom Hopkinson and J. B. Priestley, feeding a conviction that, should peace come, this time the opportunity of creating a ‘land fit for heroes’ would not be squandered. The Beveridge Report of November 1942, with its promise of a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare system, made its dry, academic author an instant celebrity and popular figure-head. The white paper of 1944 underscored a government commitment to full employment, underpinned by a revolution in economic theory, which had seen the triumph of interventionist, Keynesian fiscal policy. What had seemed forward-thinking policies in the 1930s became necessities in the context of total war – industries were to be nationalised, inherited wealth was to be taxed, the medical profession was to become state-directed and publicly funded. A mood of popular radicalism could be detected in the country at large, with electoral successes for the Christian Socialist Common Wealth Party and widespread public enthusiasm for the Red Army and its heroic defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad.

  Even Winston Churchill’s revered status as war leader could do nothing to halt the tide of popular opinion moving towards the left. The election of 1945 saw a landslide unprecedented since the great Liberal victory of 1906, with Labour winning 394 seats to the Conservatives’ 210. The quiet, clerkish, hitherto Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee was installed in 10 Downing Street as the head of a government with one of the largest popular mandates ever. The moment when Labour finally took power with a decisive majority was at once exhilarating and bewildering. The measures taken during the 1940s had all, by and large, been the product of the necessities of war. Now, with peace, an uncertain future presented itself to Britain’s new governors. As one new minister, James Griffiths, put it, ‘After this – what?’

  The achievements of the Attlee government are without doubt the most celebrated in the history of the Labour Party. Here, it is often claimed, was a socialist administration that radically transformed British society through the creation of a welfare state and the nationalisation of key industries. The problem, though, was that these achievements were only partly those of Labour figures, and also, by 1945, they were not that radical. The Keynesian interventionist approach adopted towards the economy was now neither innovative nor, indeed, distinctly socialist: elements of it could be seen in Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, in Lloyd George’s later political works, even in the policies advocated by the New Party and the BUF. The key architect of the new system of social security, William Beveridge, was politically a Liberal and briefly stood in the Commons as MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed until he lost his seat in 1945 to a Conservative. And it was a Conservative politician, ‘Rab’ Butler, who was responsible for the formulation of the 1944 Education Act that laid the framework for a comprehensive system of education available to all.

  Attlee’s administration certainly scored many key victories, most notably Aneurin Bevan’s successful creation of the National Health Service in 1946 in the face of fierce opposition from the British Medical Council, as well as the establishment in the same year of a national insurance system along the lines developed by Beveridge. However, these were achieved only by making significant concessions at various points. Public schools thrived, despite the advent of free state secondary education, as they reaped the financial rewards from their dubious status as charitable institutions. Bevan had to permit the medical profession to continue private practice and allow ‘pay beds’ within nationalised hospitals. The provision of public housing was limited by pressure from the building industry and from those who argued for a ‘property-owning democracy’. These compromises would eventually lead Bevan and two other ministerial colleagues to resign in April 1951, over the imposition of NHS charges for dentures and spectacles.

  Even the most apparently socialist element of government policy between 1945 and 1950, nationalisation, was less controversial than it seemed. In some cases, particularly that of coal, these were industries long earmarked for public control; in others, there was little resistance, as the government effectively took on loss-making enterprises. When Attlee’s government stood for re-election in 1950, it was noticeably unambitious about rolling out the policy: only sugar, cement and water were listed as industries suitable to be taken under public control.15 As the journalist Anthony Howard later remarked, ‘Far from introducing a “social revolution” the overwhelming Labour victory of 1945 brought about the greatest restoration of traditional social values since 1660.’16 By the start of the 1950s the Attlee administration had, in some ways, profoundly changed the nation. The creation of the NHS had helped cut infant mortality by half and the ‘white plague’ of tuberculosis had been virtually wiped out.17 In other ways, however, the differences were almost imperceptible: the old terraced slums remained, their smoky coal fires providing the sole source of heat, and with communal lavatories still the norm for half of the nation’s population.18

  Gradually, though, postwar austerity gave way to growing affluence, supported by the safety-net of the welfare state, rising wages, negligible unemployment and easier consumer credit. In such a period of plenty, radical political solutions appeared unnecessary. Overall, the ideological ground between the two parties perceptibly narrowed during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1950 a group of nine Conservative MPs, including the future Prime Minister Edward Heath, produced the pamphlet One Nation, in which they committed themselves to the principle of full employment, describing it as the ‘first responsibility of government’. The Labour Party lost the 1951 general election to the Conservatives, but neither Churchill, in his second term as Prime Minister, nor his successors, Eden, Macmillan and Douglas-Home, attempted to reverse the social policy of the first postwar administration. Keynesian economic policy continued to dominate government thinking, the unions retained their powers of collective bargaining and the welfare state was further entrenched.

  Outside the political mainstream, more radical groups were faltering. The CPGB, by 1951, had committed itself to taking a parliamentary, reformist route towards a socialist Britain. British communism, always a numerically far smaller force than its Italian or French equivalents, was badly hit by the revelations of Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in which he denounced Stalin, and more cataclysmically by the actions of Warsaw Pact tanks and troops against Hungarian and Polish protesters in 1956. Peter Fryer covered the events for the Daily Worker, but saw that his dispatches were being doctored by the central party leadership. Their actions led Fryer and many other British communists to leave the party. By the 1960s the CPGB would, ironically, be repres
ented in Parliament in the Upper House only, when Wogan Philips, a lifelong member of the party, inherited his father’s title as Lord Milford.

  This political consensus built around Keynesian economics and the welfare state would remain relatively unchallenged until the 1970s. Even then, the resurgence of the left wing within Labour ranks, and the championing of figures such as Tony Benn by many constituency members, was more a reaction to present circumstances than the resurfacing of a suppressed strain of long-term thought within the party. From this point of view, the policy review initiated by Labour after its third successive election defeat to the Conservatives in 1987 represented an opportunity to return to the party’s radical-Liberal roots. Recent far-left impositions such as withdrawal from the Common Market, unilateral nuclear disarmament and further nationalisation were swiftly jettisoned.19 Rather than heralding the arrival of ‘New Labour’, the party’s increasing emphasis in the 1990s on moral values, individual responsibility and ‘social justice’ rather than social planning really represented the revival of ‘very old Labour’.

  The achievements of the Labour Party have frequently been located in the British ‘radical tradition’. In a sense, this represents no more than the continual process of agglomeration and reinvention that the tradition has undergone since the medieval period. It is like an old, familiar standard: the tune remains largely the same, but different players add flourishes of their own. The appropriation by Labour and the TUC of Cable Street and the Jarrow Crusade may represent a few bum notes. Equally, the new coda of the establishment of a welfare state might not be as radical or socialist as it might at first seem. If many Liberals and even some Conservatives could welcome the welfare state, equally, most leading Labour figures accepted the goodness of the constitution bequeathed by radical Liberalism and, if more indirectly, through the efforts of popular radicals including the Chartists. Voices such as that of Stafford Cripps in 1933, urging even a temporary Labour ‘dictatorship’, were swiftly marginalised.

  This was more than an attempt to dodge ‘red scare’ tactics. In 1934, in the wake of the violent BUF rally at Olympia, Attlee told the Commons:

  Whatever differences we may have with hon. Members in other parts of the House, I believe we all value our English political institutions. We feel in this House something that makes us all members one of another in the building up of the structure of Government, in which for so many years we have avoided these violent outbursts. We have managed to carry on and to make transformations in our society without rupturing friendly personal relations, without dividing house from house, without dividing our whole social life as it is divided in some continental countries by a political line. We believe that that tradition is worth preserving and that it is essential to preserve it.20

  Despite the horror and barbarism of what subsequently unfolded in Europe, it is rarely asked whether the anti-fascists who used violence to combat the BUF pursued the right tactics. Certainly, their actions punctured the confidence of Mosley’s Blackshirts, but the BUF was never a well-supported party and by the time of the ‘Battle of Cable Street’, its membership was already in decline. In fact, it was the broad support for the British constitution and parliamentary democracy, even during periods of acute economic depression and social distress, that made the country such a poor recruiting ground for either communists or fascists. The danger, though, was that the widespread acceptance of this constitutional tradition could, in turn, lead to a dangerous complacency about the security of British democracy.

  EPILOGUE

  I never thought I would be in the House of Commons on the day Magna Carta was repealed.

  Tony Benn, June, 20081

  On 18 June 2008, the Shadow Home Secretary David Davis formally resigned as an MP in protest at the government’s narrow victory over the counter-terrorism bill and, specifically, the extension of the limit for detention without charge from twenty-eight to forty-two days. In his resignation speech, Davis alluded to the upcoming anniversary of Magna Carta, ‘a document that guarantees the fundamental element of British freedom, habeas corpus. The right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason.’2 Although, through his resignation, it was he who attracted most press attention, other Conservative politicians, including Sir John Major and Bill Cash, expressed their disgust at the government’s apparent assault on ancient British freedoms.3

  The opponents of forty-two-day detention were a rather motley crew, including old left-wingers such as Tony Benn, Conservatives such as Davis and celebrities such as Sir Bob Geldof.4 The invocation of Magna Carta may have been inaccurate: one columnist, Simon Heffer, noted that Habeas Corpus was actually codified in law in 1679, not 1215.5 It may also have signified a misrepresentation of the debate itself: Davis had already conceded that twenty-eight days’ imprisonment without charge might be justified, surely itself a significant breach of ‘ancient liberties’. Yet, the controversy sparked by his resignation revealed the enduring power of the belief that Magna Carta is a talisman of British liberty. It was a belief that could unite a civil liberties campaigner, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, with an old Eurosceptic MP, Bill Cash, if not necessarily inspire the voters of Haltemprice and Howden. (Though Davis won the by-election with 72 per cent of the vote, he had no significant opponents and the voter turnout was half that of the 2005 general election.6)

  The campaign over forty-two-day detention does not mark the first time in recent years that Britain’s radical tradition has attracted some odd political bedfellows. In an article published in September 2006 promoting his part-memoir, part-musing on national identity, The Progressive Patriot, the left-wing singer-songwriter Billy Bragg wrote that reading about Britain’s ‘tradition of dissent’ had taught him that

  the freedom I enjoyed had had to be fought for, from the Peasants’ Revolt to the Diggers & the Levellers, to the Chartists and the Suffragettes. For the first time I heard of Tom Paine and the Tolpuddle Martyrs, of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and the Battle of Cable Street. I began to appreciate how the Labour landslide of 1945 had shaped my life through the establishing of the Welfare State.7

  Bragg’s book was prompted by the election of a British National Party councillor in his home borough of Barking. It contributed to a long tradition of works by (mainly English) left-wing writers, politicians and performers who sought to ‘reclaim the flag’ from the far right. The irony, however, was that not only had the BNP appropriated the flag, but their election manifesto had co-opted Bragg’s cherished ‘tradition of dissent’. The 2005 BNP manifesto, entitled Rebuilding British Democracy, described the country as ‘the birthplace of modern democracy’ and claimed:

  From Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt, through the Levellers, the Chartists, the early Labour movement and the suffragettes, we have defied the executioner, the rack, and the prison door to wrest liberty of conscience, speech, action, and political association from monarchs, barons and bosses, and from popes, priests and censors.8

  The fact that both Bragg and the BNP could see themselves as inheritors of the same ‘radical tradition’ is a reminder of that tradition’s malleability. For Bragg, it was inevitably hitched to the Labour movement. Yet there was much, historically, of the radical tradition that could appeal to Conservatives, too. The ‘state socialism’ that formed one strand of the Labour Party’s ideological heritage, though a relatively minor one, arguably sat less well with most British radical movements than did the historical Liberal/modern Conservative emphasis on low taxation, individualism and self-reliance. Thomas Paine may have wanted to redistribute taxation to fund pensions and education, but he was generally in favour of reducing the burden of taxes. Through most of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical thinkers such as Paine distinguished between the ‘idle’ and the ‘deserving’ rich, though the identity of these fat-cats shifted over time from aristocratic landlords to plutocratic capitalists. Few radical movements were genuinely intent on social ‘levelling’, and even those fig
ures who did advocate land reform, such as Thomas Spence or Feargus O’Connor, largely did so with the dream of creating a Britain of self-sufficient, independent smallholders. The urge remained at root individualist, or at best localist, rather than collectivist. This historical preference for a smaller rather than a bigger role for the state was scarcely surprising, given that for most of British history the main business of government was to wage war, to raise funds to pay for it and to recruit men to fight it. The impact of war taxation and conscription was felt hardest by the poor. Until even the second half of the twentieth century, local communities, rather than central government, were seen as the best engine for social and economic reform.