The Attlee Governments 1945-1951

Kevin Jefferys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138837461
• eBook ISBN: 9781317898931
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

In 1945 the Labour Government set about a major transformation of British society, Dr Jefferys's analyses the main changes and relates them to debates within the Labour party, on the nature of its aims and how best to achieve them.

Part One: The Background

1 Labour and the Road to 1945

The Labour Party came of age in 1945. As the Second World War drew to a close in Europe, the coalition government* of Conservative and Labour forces which had governed Britain since 1940 broke apart. Winston Churchill, the nation’s inspirational wartime Prime Minister, now called upon the electorate to return him as the head of a new Conservative administration; he alone, Churchill claimed, was capable of dealing with the domestic and international legacy left by six years of war against Nazi Germany. Among politicians and commentators, it was widely anticipated that Churchill would sweep back to power in the general election of July 1945, just as Lloyd George had triumphed in 1918 as ‘the man who won the war’. But this prediction proved to be wildly inaccurate. As the election results filtered through, it became apparent that the Labour Party had won a landslide victory. At the last pre-war election, held in 1935, Labour had trailed the Tory-dominated National government* by more than 200 parliamentary seats. In 1945, however, Labour secured nearly half the popular vote, winning 393 seats, compared with 210 for the Conservatives. On an average swing of 12 per cent, Labour made sweeping gains in towns and cities across the nation, capturing scores of constituencies that had never before returned a Labour member to the House of Commons. Hence it was not Churchill but the relatively unknown Labour leader, Clement Attlee, who went to Buckingham Palace to accept an invitation from the King to form Britain’s post-war government (16). The war years had clearly wrought a remarkable political transformation. ‘We’, one Labour MP was reputed to have shouted at his opponents across the floor of the Commons chamber, ‘are the masters now’ (32).

But the road to 1945 – and the formation of the first-ever majority Labour government – had been long and arduous. Labour had only emerged as a distinct political force around the turn of the century, and for many years made little impression on the two dominant groups in Edwardian politics, the Conservatives and the Liberal Party. Before the First World War, the Labour Party, as it officially became known in 1906, was primarily a working-class pressure group. In an effort to protect workers’ interests by securing greater parliamentary representation, leading trade unionists decided to ally themselves with socialist societies such as the Independent Labour Party*. It was in the latter that many senior ministers in the 1945 government, including Attlee, began their political careers. Historians have long been divided over the extent to which the rise of Labour can be traced back before 1914, though it is generally agreed that the new Labour alliance – of socialists and trade unionists – faced many teething problems. In competing for votes under the restricted pre-war franchise, any limited parliamentary successes were the product of electoral agreements with the Liberals, and the small band of Labour MPs at Westminster were distinguishable from progressive Liberals more in terms of social background than political philosophy. On the other hand, the seeds of future Labour success could be seen in rapidly growing trade-union support, bringing greatly increased financial resources and a growing identification of Labour as the natural party of the working classes (15).

The Great War led to a critical breakthrough for Labour. Asquith’s Liberal government came under increasing strain in meeting the demands of total war, and gradually after 1916 Liberal forces became polarised between followers of Asquith and his replacement as Prime Minister, Lloyd George. The carnage on the Western front* placed immense strain on all the political parties, but building from a lower base Labour was suddenly presented with new possibilities. In 1918 a new constitution and organisational structure was adopted; from now on, Labour was pledged in theory to ‘Clause Four Socialism’*, although in practice most party supporters remained wedded to a ‘labourist’ ideology, emphasising collectivist social change rather than outright rejection of capitalism. Above all, the 1918 constitution was a symbolic reflection of Labour’s newfound confidence. With the Liberals in disarray, the party was well placed to benefit from a massive extension of the franchise after the war, and finally severed any lingering electoral ties with local Liberal forces. The strength of the Labour Party, as it had been before the war, was still confined to the industrial heartlands of Britain – in northern England, Scotland and Wales – but by the early 1920s Liberalism had lost its claim to be the established party of the left in British politics. In 1924 the arrival of a new force in national politics was confirmed when Ramsay MacDonald went to Downing Street to form the first Labour government (17).

The experience of 1924 was not, however, a happy one. As head of a minority administration, dependent upon Liberal support in the House of Commons, MacDonald had few ambitions beyond demonstrating that Labour was ‘fit to govern’. In terms of electoral strategy and party organisation, MacDonald proved an effective leader, but the first Labour government had little to show in the way of legislative success before a fresh election returned the Conservatives to power. Nor did MacDonald fare any better in domestic policy when Labour increased its share of the vote sufficiently to form a second minority government in 1929. The paucity of serious party thinking on economic issues was now exposed as a severe recession took hold, deepened by the effects of the Wall Street crash* in the United States. Labour’s cautious and economically orthodox Chancellor, Philip Snowden, was powerless to prevent a steep rise in unemployment, and in 1931 the Cabinet split openly over proposed cuts in unemployment benefit. MacDonald defected to form a new ‘National’ government*, including Conservatives and many Liberals, leaving his former colleagues to stand condemned for their handling of the economic crisis. In the subsequent general election, the party was reduced to a rump of only some fifty MPs. The crisis of 1931 subsequently entered Labour mythology as the year of MacDonald’s ‘betrayal’; at the same time, it had cruelly highlighted the limitations of the formative Labour movement, both in terms of a lack of imaginative leadership and a failure to devise coherent and sustainable policies (33).

But the débâcle of 1931 did, in the longer term, open up a new phase in the party’s history. Against the backcloth of the ‘hungry thirties’, it seemed for a while that Labour might move towards advocacy of direct attacks on the capitalist system. Pressure from the grass roots was channelled through a new organisation, the Socialist League, and the party’s annual conference in the early 1930s resounded to calls for wholesale central planning and restrictions on bastions of the establishment such as the City of London. The challenge from the left, however, was gradually contained. Both the industrial and political wings of the movement continued to be dominated by men of less militant persuasion. Trade-union leaders, notably the powerful head of the Transport Workers, Ernest Bevin, on the whole had little sympathy with the radical demands of the Socialist League. The Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) also came increasingly under the control of centrist figures such as Arthur Greenwood and Herbert Morrison, Labour leader of the London County Council. Although Attlee was regarded initially as a stopgap figure, part of the reason for his emergence as leader of the PLP in 1935 was that he shared a broad concern with pragmatic reform, rather than with what was widely seen as the rhetorical and unworkable theories of the left. The emergence of an Attlee-Bevin axis at the top of the Labour movement, which was to continue for the next generation, produced some immediate effects. The party quickly rebuilt itself in industrial Britain and was able at the 1935 general election to recover much lost ground, though without seriously challenging the ascendancy of the National government* (26).

The new leadership also presided over a gradual redefinition of Labour policy. One of the lessons of 1931 for the party leadership was that the electorate would never again be convinced by the old-style rhetoric of MacDonald and Snowden. In its place, a talented group of Labour economists, guided by the former academic Hugh Dalton, evolved a new form of democratic socialism which combined demand management* with physical control economic planning*. The result was Labour’s Immediate Programme of 1937, a pragmatic and radical policy document which called for wide-ranging state intervention to tackle unemployment, together with proposals for social reform that went far beyond prevailing Conservative practice. This domestic rethink – foreshadowing much of Labour’s policy in office after 1945 – was also accompanied by a new realism in foreign policy. After Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the Labour movement gradually moved away from its traditional commitment to neo-pacifism* and abhorrence of ‘capitalist war’. The party became increasingly hostile to the appeasement of the fascist dictators practised by the leader of the National government* after 1937, Neville Chamberlain. Although personal antipathy towards Chamberlain led Labour leaders to decline his offer of coalition once war had broken out, there was no doubt that Labour followers throughout the country would support the fight against Nazism (26, 101).

By September 1939 the Labour Party thus looked to have become once more a credible party of government. But there were as yet few signs that the electorate had lost faith in Chamberlain’s National government. The experience of the Second World War changed all this, and provided the backcloth to the landslide victory of 1945. After Chamberlain fell from power in May 1940 – the result of frustration with early British setbacks in the war – there was a pronounced swing to the left in public opinion, though this was masked at the time by the suspension of normal political activity and by Churchill’s immense popularity as war leader. The movement of public opinion began, following Britain’s humiliating evacuation from Dunkirk, as a reaction against the so-called ‘guilty men’: Conservative leaders such as Chamberlain were accused of enabling Hitler to stand so menacingly across the Channel by mid-1940. More important as the war progressed was the egalitarian ethic which followed on from mobilisation of the entire civilian population and from the intense physical dangers of life in the Blitz*. If the Great War of 1914–18 had been fought for King and Country, then the conflict against Hitler soon came to be seen as a ‘People’s War’ (5). After the ‘turn of the tide’ late in 1942, when the defeat of Nazism could for the first time be seriously contemplated, Labour also benefited from a sudden awakening of interest in welfare reform. Indicators of public feeling now showed a marked anti-Conservative trend, exacerbated by the Prime Minister’s cool response to the Beveridge Report* on social security and other proposals for social change (1). By concentrating so exclusively on the war effort, Churchill clearly misjudged the desire of the British people to create a New Jerusalem – a theme made central in Labour’s electoral propaganda at the end of the war [doc. 1]. Only the Labour Party, it now seemed, could offer both immediate redress for a war-weary population and a long-term commitment to a reconstructed, welfare state. As David Howell has written: ‘“bread and butter plus a dream”. That was the secret of 1945’ (12).

The war years also produced some further refinements in Labour policy. Traditionally, historians have claimed that the war created a new ‘middle ground’ upon which all political parties would henceforth compete for power. Paul Addison in particular has argued that in contrast to the negative hostility of the inter-war years, there suddenly emerged between Conservative and Labour forces a common commitment to social reform, a new ‘consensus’ which foreshadowed an era of much closer party co-operation after 1945 (1). Without doubt, the atmosphere of a ‘People’s War’ generated immense pressure for the creation of a brave new world, but how far this amounted to a new political consensus remains open to question. The coalition’s reconstruction programme, some historians have argued, never proceeded very far in practice because of intractable ideological differences between the main parties. Mainstream Conservative opinion, following Churchill’s lead, continued to have grave doubts about the cost and desirability of greatly enhancing state activity. The welfare state and the mixed economy*, in other words, were not inevitable products of the Second World War, but derived to a greater extent from Labour’s democratic socialist tradition as it emerged and developed after 1931 (14). Much of Labour’s programme, such as its commitment to nationalisation, became more acceptable during the war years when the public became accustomed to wholesale planning of the economy. At the same time, partnership in Churchill’s coalition, though uncomfortable for many party activists, allowed Labour leaders such as Attlee, Bevin and Morrison to demonstrate their ministerial capabilities. This schooling in the hard realities of high office, combined with the sharpening of party policy and the popular enthusiasm shown at the polls in 1945, enabled Attlee to come to power in circumstances markedly different from those that attended the earlier MacDonald administrations. At the end of the Second World War, Labour had not simply swept to power; for the first time in its history, the party was ready to use it.

2 Into Power

News of Labour’s electoral victory occasioned much surprise. Most commentators had assumed that Churchill would remain in power, and even seasoned Labour campaigners were slightly bemused as the scale of the party’s landslide became apparent [doc. 2]. Fifteen minutes after Churchill left Buckingham Palace in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce on the evening of 26 July, Mr and Mrs Attlee arrived in their Standard 10 looking, according to the King, ‘very surprised indeed’ at the turn of events (105). After accepting the royal invitation to form a government, Attlee left to prepare for office amidst noisy cheering and singing, though his assumption of power was not quite as untroubled as it seemed. Earlier in the day, Herbert Morrison – who had unsuccessfully challenged for the leadership back in 1935 – claimed that under party rules an administration could not be formed before the PLP had given its approval. With the backing of Ernest Bevin, Attlee met this challenge as he was to meet many in the future: he ignored it (20, 24). These manoeuvres behind the scenes were not allowed to spoil the party’s victory celebrations, and indeed in some ways Morrison’s challenge was deceptive. For unlike MacDonald’s experience in the 1920s, the Attlee years were – with a few important exceptions – to be characterised by strong leadership and by a high degree of unity at all levels of the Labour movement. Almost immediately after becoming Prime Minister, Attlee left to discuss post-war problems at the Potsdam Conference*, returning now as Britain’s official representative, rather than at Churchill’s invitation as before. But before leaving, Attlee made sure that the nucleus of his Cabinet team was in place. Within twenty-four hours of the election result, in fact, press commentators were already noting the existence of Labour’s ‘big five’; a group of senior ministers who were to dominate British politics for the next five years.

Herbert Morrison was not alone in doubting the abilities of the new Prime Minister. Several of his contemporaries, and historians in turn, have found it difficult to explain how the aloof, enigmatic Clement Attlee – ‘Clem the Clam’, as the King called him – could prevail over his colleagues throughout these years. He was, according to some critics, a ‘modest man with much to be modest about’; or, at best, ‘a good mayor of Stepney in a bad year’: a reference to the London borough where Attlee had established himself in Labour politics after 1918. On the ‘equivalent of the Richter scale for oratory’, notes Peter Hennessy, ‘the needle scarcely flickered’ (9), and there was no doubt that Attlee’s terse style made him a difficult, at times unnerving, colleague. One junior minister found himself summoned to Downing Street, thinking he was to be congratulated on the work of his department. ‘What can I do for you, Prime Minister?’ he asked. ‘I want your job,’ Attlee replied. The minister was stunned. ‘But … why, Prime Minister?’ he enquired. ‘Afraid you’re not up to it,’ Attlee said, concluding the interview (95). What this incident also illustrated, however, was Attlee’s considerable self-confidence, the product of his middle-class background and public-school training. He might, Kenneth Morgan writes, more accurately be described as ‘an immodest little man with plenty to be immodest about’ (21). Certainly Attlee’s confidence grew after 1945 as he showed himself to be an effective co-ordinator of government policy. He conducted Cabinet affairs briskly, without the rambling diversions of Churchill’s leadership, and with the exception of events in 1947, he commanded loyalty from Cabinet colleagues. As for the Labour movement as a whole, Attlee may have lacked MacDonald’s charisma, but this was seen to be no bad thing, and it was more than made up for by integrity and loyalty to the party’s major policy aims. Whatever his shortcomings, none of Attlee’s colleagues were equipped in the same way for the unique demands of the premiership [doc. 3].

The Prime Minister’s closest colleague was Ernest Bevin. In the aftermath of the election, Bevin was marked down as an obvious choice for the Treasury. His reputation had been built around industrial and economic expertise, initially as Britain’s most powerful trade-union leader between the wars, and then as Minister of Labour in the wartime coalition, where he played a vital role in mobilising the civilian population. For a variety of reasons,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
• FOREWORD
• Part One: The Background
• 1 Labour and the Road to 1945
• 2 Into Power
• Part Two: Analysis – Labour in Office
• 3 Forging Britain's Post-war Settlement, 1945–46
• 4 The Economic and Political Crises of 1947
• 5 Ernest Bevin and Overseas Policy
• 6 On the Retreat, 1948–50
• 7 The Second Attlee Administration
• Part Three: Assessment
• Part Four: Documents
• GLOSSARY
• reference
• Index