A lot of people have fought or worked pretty hard for Britain in the last five years; and a good many have died for her. As a matter of fact, practically every man and woman in Britain has fought or worked in this war. They will want a say in what is done with their victory.

It is the people of Britain who have saved her: the soldiers, the sailors, the airmen and the millions of men and women in the factories. In 1940 the people saved this country after the men who had ruled her had taken her so far down the road to disaster that it scarcely seemed possible that she could be saved. We do not mean to let Britain get into that kind of mess again, ever. To make sure of that some fundamental changes in how Britain is ruled, and in what kind of people rule her, will have to be made. The fact is that the tiny clique of very rich people who really ruled Britain before this war put their own narrow, selfish interests before the vital interests of the country. They showed it in a dozen ways—they were so scared of Russia, for example, that they actually helped and encouraged Hitler to rearm, because they thought he would attack Russia and not us. They can never again be trusted to rule this country. They would do the same thing again. They would let the country down for the sake of protecting their money. Henceforward the only true guardians and champions of Britain are the millions of ordinary men and women whose interests are the same as the interests of their country: who do not own thousands of pounds of capital, about the safety of which they are always worrying, and for the sake of which they are willing to let their country down.

But in order that the ordinary men and women of Britain may rule their country, some basic changes will be necessary. It won’t be enough just to change the Government We shall have to change, step by step, the economic system under which we live. For the people can only rule the country when they control its land and industries.

This book is not an attempt to work people up to demand something better after the war. There is no great need for that. People are demanding that already, and will do so more and more. This book tries to tell people why things were as they were before the war, and how to change them.

Just over 17½ million of this 20 million—nine out of ten—had incomes of under £5 a week. (And 12 million of these got little above a bare living.) You may, broadly speaking, call these 17½ million people and their dependants the working class, although not all of them were manual workers. Then about 2 million people got incomes of between £5 a week and £20 a week (£1,000 a year). You may call them and their dependants the middle class. And just over a quarter of a million people had incomes of over £20 a week. You may call them the rich.1

That was the way in which we divided up the national income before the war. It meant that nine out of ten of us were either wage-earners, mostly getting a bare living, and none getting more than £5 a week (or dependants of wage-earners).

Now, children whose parents can spend only 4s., or even 6s. a week each on their food do not necessarily die. But they tend to become mentally and physically stunted.

At a teachers’ conference (Conference of the National Federation of Class Teachers, September 1937) a little incident from the county of Cumberland was described. A group of children were given some eggs to eat; but they did not know how to eat them, never having had them before. Similarly, some children from the town of Barnsley in Yorkshire, on being offered custard, butter and bananas, refused them all, never having tasted them, and not knowing if they would be able to eat them. This was in England in 1937. It is worth remembering that we lived in a very rich country which allowed half of its children to be brought up in these conditions.1

Such an exactly equal sharing out of the national income is not possible, and no one proposes it. But it is worth while to make the calculation, in order to prove that the constantly repeated assertion that general poverty is inevitable because there is not enough wealth to go round is, simply, a lie.

Even in a very bad year before the war we actually produced enough to make it unnecessary for any British family to live in want.

Remember that in peace-time between 1½ and 3 million (according to the state of trade at the moment) of the 12 million insured workers of Britain were kept permanently unemployed—producing nothing. If unemployment was as bad amongst the million uninsured workers, that means that between 2½ and 5 million potential wealth-producers (out of 20 million) were kept permanently idle. Say (to be on the safe side again)1 that an average of 3 million wealth-producers out of the 20 million, or one worker out of every seven, were kept idle all the time.

Well, for a start, let us put them on to work. Then there are the probably even larger number of workers who (through no fault of their own) are made to do fundamentally useless jobs; jobs which, as I shall show below, are really only “made work”—work made necessary only by the extremely peculiar way we arrange our economic life in peace-time. All these millions of workers—for there are millions of them—are available for increasing the national output of real wealth.

In America, however, such an estimate did actually (by a queer accident) get made. It is an authoritative job, and the results were published in a book called the Report of the National Survey of Potential Product Capacity.1

The conclusion was that America in 1930 could have produced enough wealth to give every family of four an income of £915 a year (nearly £20 a week) at 1929 prices! (And in proportion for larger and smaller families, of course.)

Now, it may be said that we could not produce as much wealth as that per head in Britain. I’m not so sure about that myself. I think British labor is in some respects quite as efficient as American labor. But let us say that a British estimate would show that we could only produce enough to give £750 a year (£15 a week) to every family. Even if this wealth was not distributed exactly equally—more being earned by skilled than by unskilled workers, for example—it would still mean complete comfort and security for all.

For think what we have done in these last five years of war! First we have taken four or five million of the cream of our manpower—our young men (and to a lesser extent our young women) and put them into uniform. In uniform their job has been to fight, or to help those who were fighting, so they have been able to produce nothing. Next, we have taken almost all of the rest of our best workers, with all our most modern plants and equipment, and turned them on to war work of every conceivable kind. Their job has been to produce munitions and war equipment of all sorts. And they have produced them. Out of our shipyards have poured battleships and aircraft carriers and cruisers and destroyers, and corvettes and submarines, and merchant ships, too, to help to replace the four or five ships a day which the U boats were at one time sinking. Out of our aircraft factories have rolled the fighters and the bombers. Just one fact in this field. During 1943 our published losses, sustained mainly in our bomber offensive against Germany, were almost exactly 2,000 bombers. Yet at the end of the year we had a much larger force of bombers than at the beginning! Think what that alone means in productive effort. Have you ever seen a heavy bomber being made? Have you ever seen the almost unimaginable complexity of its four huge engines, its wiring system, its instruments, its radio devices? Well, in the course of smashing up Germany’s industry we lost 2,000 of them in one year, and more than replaced our loss. For none of these bombers were imported from America. And the same thing, in greater or lesser degree, is true of our output of tanks and guns and of every other kind of weapons of war.

The point I am making is this: after all that—after we had taken four or five million of our best workers right out of the productive system, after we had put almost the whole of the rest of our resources in machines and man and woman power into war production—we were still able to feed, clothe, house and generally support ourselves not too badly. Of course we have been very short of lots of things: of lots of attractive kinds of foods, of nice clothes, and—far more important, of course—of new houses. How could it be otherwise, when we were giving everything to a desperate war? But the staggering—and terribly sad—thing is that lots of people have actually been better off in war than in peace-time. Although there has been little enough to buy in the shops, their money has been coming in for certain every week, and, owing to rationing, they have been sure of getting their share of whatever there was. What a comment that is on the sort of way we organize—or disorganize I call it—our economic life in peace-time!

This, then, is the true measure of what we could do in peace-time. Imagine the standard of life and the security which we could all have had in the past five years if all the men and women in the Services plus all the men and women, the machines and the productive facilities on war work, had been producing peace-time goods and services. Think of the houses we could have built with the same work which went into warships; think of the labor-saving devices, the electricity, the gas cookers, the refrigerators, the clothing, the better foodstuffs, the transport and educational facilities and the thousand and one other peace-time goods and services which we could have had for the same number of hours of work which went into those 2,000 lost bombers (and all the others which we didn’t lose), and the tanks and guns, etc., etc., which we have had to build in the last five years!

Naturally there are some qualifications to that We can’t and won’t go on working as long hours in peace-time as we’ve done in war: several hundred thousand married women will devote themselves to their families instead of to industry; we shall have to pay by exports for some of the imported food, etc., which America has sent us under Lease-Lend for nothing (on the other hand, we ourselves have sen...