Philip Rubenstein
Too Much To Do, Too Little Time, No Money: The Impossible Government of 1945

Philip Rubenstein - Too Much to Do, Too Little Time, No Money: The Impossible Government of 1945

- Welcome, welcome everyone. Well, it’s two minutes past five in cloudy, rainy London. So hello, Shana Tova to all of you, Happy New Year. And we’re going to spend the next hour looking at Britain’s first post-war government, post-World War II government. So, William has spent the last couple of weeks talking about the 20s and the 30s. So, now we’re moving into the period between 1945 to 1951. So, please indulge me for a moment. Imagine that it’s June 1945 and you are Winston Churchill. Victory in Europe and the defeat of Nazi Germany was announced a month ago on 5th of May, and you’re sitting in number 10 Downing Street and you’re thinking, I’ve never actually been elected by the country as their Prime Minister. The last general election was actually 10 years earlier. For those of you who heard William, you’d have heard him talking about that. 1935, when the country elected Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister, who retired in 37, so two years later, and then Chamberlain takes over, and then you take over after the Norway debate in May 1940. And over those 10 years, you’ve led Britain through its darkest hour. And in the words of the American broadcaster, Ed Murrow, you’ve mobilised the English language over that period and sent it into battle. Who’s your opponent? Well, you face Mr. Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, an unassuming man, a man bereft of any oratorical skills, a man you’ve publicly and rather humiliatingly called a sheep in sheep’s clothing.

So, Mr. Churchill, what do you do now? Well, you do the obvious thing. You call a general election, confident that a grateful nation is going to return you to office with a resounding majority. But the outcome of the 1945 general election, it’s turned out, wasn’t a foregone conclusion. In fact, defying all expectation, the country chose to be governed by none other than the sheep in sheep’s clothing, Clement Attlee. And this is the story of that extraordinary administration that governed Britain between 1945, and 1951, and arguably produced more long-lasting reform than any other 20th century government, British government, and possibly, possibly any British government before or since. And when we examine as we will, their litany of achievements, it’s going to beg a question. And the question is, in our febrile political times, are democratically elected governments still capable of producing deep-rooted, long-lasting reform that can change people’s lives for the better? Is it still possible? So, let’s begin with that election and let’s have a look at this. Whoops, let’s get this up. Okay. So, it’s just one month after Churchill’s announced the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, as I said. And funny enough, Churchill had actually wanted the coalition, the wartime coalition, to continue a bit longer. He’d been in coalition with the Labour Party since 1940. And he wanted it to continue until the defeat of Japan, which he was hoping would be a little later that year.

But Labour insisted that the people be given a choice, and Churchill, confident he was going to be elected, was happy to exceed to their insistence. So, he calls the election for the 7th of July, and it starts to become clear from fairly early on that things are going to go wrong and slightly awry for Churchill because the country is exhausted from six devastating years of war, and what they want is a vision of a bright future. And soldiers in the field, especially, are just, they’re fed up, they’re fed up with fighting, they’re fed up with war, and now war’s over, they’re looking forward to a new age of peace and prosperity. And it’s labour that captures this mood. They’re the ones who propose an ambitious social reform programme to transform the future of British society, and they harness the words of William Blake and the hymn. Their aim, they say, is to deliver no less than a new Jerusalem. And they built on ground that’s already been laid. In fact, it was laid three years earlier in the darkest days of the war. Britons were offered a tantalising glimpse of how things could be in the bright dawn of victory. Back in 1942, an economist called William Beveridge, a member of the Liberal Party, publishes a landmark report. And there he sets out a kind of breathtaking view of what the future could look like. And he writes that the five giants, you can see them here, of want, ignorance, disease, squalor, and idleness have to be slayed. And in order to do so, he proposes a system of social insurance that’s going to cover every citizen of the country, regardless of their situation, regardless of the income. It’s nothing less than a cradle to grave welfare state. And it’s the fulfilment of that great promise that Labour dangles before the British electorate in that summer of 1945, and the voters are hungry for it.

By comparison, the Conservatives who are missing the mood have a promise and an offer to the British people that’s vague and unspecific, and instead they believe they can rely on the persona and the wartime achievements of their leader, Winston Churchill, and that’s the way they run the campaign. And what they also fail to see is how their own image as a party has been associated with the problem. And the problem is the hungry 30s, the hungry 1930s that William talked about yesterday. Because for most of the 1920s and the 1930s what everyone remembers is that Britain was led by a conservative government, and whether that’s fair or not, the party is associated with being the party that presided over high unemployment and the miserable poverty of those years. How badly did Churchill misjudge things? Well, I think it’s evident from the very first election broadcast that he did on the 4th of June. So, here’s his voice towards the end of the broadcast. This is an excerpt where he’s warning the country of the nightmarish consequences of electing a socialist party into government.

• I declared you from the bottom of my heart that no socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those are advocating socialism, or voting socialists today will be horrified of this idea. That is because they are short-sighted. That is because they do not see where their theories are leading them. No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed, in the first instance. And this would nip in the bud opinion at its core. It would stop criticism at its very head, and it would gather all the power to the Supreme Party and the party leaders riding like safely pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants. No longer servants and no longer civil.

• Well, the usual brilliant Winston Churchill oratorical flourishes, but did you hear him accuse a Labour government of going into totalitarian behaviours from a very early stage and declaring, “That they would have to fall back on some form of a Gestapo to push through their reforms.” This was the headline the next day in the conservative-leaning Daily Express, Gestapo in Britain, if socialists win. The problem for Churchill is that virtually no one else in the country actually believed this. Because Churchill had been in coalition with these people for five years. He had been in coalition with the Labour Party, who as a result were now seen as respectable and responsible. Not only were they seen as respectable, but they were seen as competent because Winston Churchill had put the key labour leaders in charge of running the country’s economic and home-based ministries. They’d run labour. They’d run supply. They’d run the Home Office, and they were seen to have done a good job. So, while Winston Churchill was running the war, Labour was running the country during the war. Here’s a famous cartoon by David Lowe where everyone is shouting, all behind you, Winston. And this was published in a London newspaper, The Evening Standard, in May 1940, to celebrate the formation of that coalition when Churchill came into government. And who do we see in the front row? Well, we see on either side, we see Winston Churchill, and on the other side that small fellow is Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India.

But in the middle, next to Churchill, we see his Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. Then in the middle, the bulky one is Ernest Bevin, who was made Minister for Labour, and next to him is Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary. The three of them in the middle, all Labour. And the fact is that Clement Attlee had been Winston Churchill’s political partner for five years, and everyone knew him as a mild-mannered patriot and a public servant who was drawn from England’s middle classes. So, all this talk of a Gestapo state in the wings just seemed bizarre to everyone. And it made Winston Churchill seem out of touch to voters. A young conservative supporter by the name of Margaret Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher, was listening to the radio that night of the broadcast and in her biography, she recalls that even she felt that her hero had gone too far that night. So, the result of the 45 election was announced on July 26, so that’s three weeks after polling day. And the reason why it’s taken three weeks extra is because they need time to allow for the military postal votes from all over the world to be collected and counted, and this is important because the military vote overwhelmingly goes to Labour. This is the millions of men and the women who are scattered all over the world, who are mainly just yearning for change and a better life when they’re demobbed and in civilian clothes. Labour won 47.7% of the popular vote, which gave them an enormous majority of 146 seats in the new parliament, and it was clear that politics was going to change utterly. Here is how Pathe news reported the victory the day after.

• [Reporter] Mr Churchill flew back from Potsdam with his daughter Mary on what was to be almost his last day as Prime Minister. Mrs Churchill was there as always to greet him. Electors at Mr Churchill’s constituency, Woodford, gave him a strong vote of confidence. His opponent, Farmer Hancock, seemed to have no hard feelings as he and Mrs Churchill heard the result. Labour’s big three were elected with handsome majorities. Mr Herbert Morrison, tipped as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, romped home at East Lewisham. Later, Mr Morrison said, “We will rebuild London. We will build a fine Great Britain and a prosperous world.” On the eve of Labour’s landslide, Mr Ernest Bevin was assisting little Susan Hare to open cottages at the Merchant Seaman’s home at Limpsfield, Surrey. Mr Bevin, Labour’s probable choice as Foreign Secretary, will join Mr Attlee in the concluding stages of the Berlin Conference. Though defeated, Mr Churchill is acclaimed as a great war leader. Out of the election melting pot comes his successor. Confidently he faces his responsibility to Britain and the world.

• The sweeping victories throughout the country, mark an epoch in the political life of this country. Never before have the electors shown clearly their desire that there should be in this country a Labour government carrying out Labour’s full policy.

• Part of the reason I wanted to show that clip was so that you could just hear Attlee speaking. Very typical of him. You can see his short, balding, neat moustache. No charisma there. Uninspiring speaker. I mean, really boring, dull speaker. Looks like, he looks like a bank manager. And the story goes that when Attlee went to see the king at Buckingham Palace to be appointed to be prime minister, George VI. They both stand there in silence, Attlee because he’s not much of a speaker and the King because he stutters and also isn’t much of a speaker. And finally, Attlee says, “I’ve won the election.” And the King pauses and replies, “I know, I heard it on the news.” And the meeting was over. Churchill had always underestimated Labour’s leader. He’d called him a modest man with much to be modest about. And it turned out that he wasn’t the only one who’d underestimated Clement Attlee. So how did this modest man, who doesn’t seem to be cut out for the job of leader of his party and leader of the nation, how does this modest man get to where he’s got to? The fact is the Conservative Party hadn’t expected to lose, but Labour, for its part, hadn’t expected to win. Attlee had been seen as a caretaker leader. The plan was that after Labour lost the election, which everyone thought they would do, he’d be asked to step aside, and they’d hold new elections. And he led a party full of rivals who’d be very happy to get the job. Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton, who we’ll see in a moment, Stafford Cripps, Bevin, they all wanted the job and they all thought they could do a far better job and would be more suited to the role than the mild-mannered Attlee.

Even after the landslide of the election, when Labour’s won and they’ve won all those seats, the chairman of the Labour Party, Harold Lasky, writes a letter to Clement Attlee, asking him if he’ll step down and let someone else lead the party. And Attlee replies in that typically understated way of his, “Dear Lasky, thank you for your letter, the contents of which have been noted.” And that was that. But what everyone was about to discover, albeit slowly and gradually over a period of time, is that beneath this veneer of dullness and mediocrity there pulsed what one biographer called a hidden fire, a deep-seated devotion to social justice and a steely determination to get things done. Clement Attlee was born and raised in suburban comfort, but in his 20s, he worked in London’s East End where he was exposed to people living in the most appalling conditions, in desperate poverty, limited life chances. And that spurred him on to enter politics, determined to make a difference to those lives and to attack poverty. And over the years, he becomes one of the most diversely experienced British leaders ever to have come to office. I mean, you know before he’s Prime Minister he’d been a barrister, an academic, he served in World War I and was promoted to Major, a social worker in London’s East End, he was the Mayor of Stepney. He was a junior minister in an early Labour government and of course he’s Deputy Prime Minister under Churchill.

And everything he does, everything he sees, he learns from. He learned from Lloyd George’s failure after 1918 when Lloyd George had plans to build what he called a land fit for heroes after World War One, but Lloyd George suffered from a lack of funds, and he determined not to make the same mistake. He painfully witnessed the debacle of Labour’s first periods in office 1924, and then again in 1929 under Ramsey MacDonald. MacDonald who in 29 was forced to break his promises, forced into compromise after compromise to stay in office. And like many of his colleagues, Clement Attlee believed that MacDonald’s actions were a betrayal of the promise that was made to people who were suffering in Britain. His convictions came from deep, deep within. He hated what poverty did to people. And he felt it was his and Labour’s duty to deliver on long overdue changes, which he felt should have been introduced in 1919, and the country should have benefited from all of them from then. And he was a tiger for work. He was known as a tiger for work by his colleagues. As Prime Minister, he worked 14 hours a day from 7:30 in the morning normally to 11:30 at night. So, let’s have a look at this team that he brought into government, or he inherited and kept. This was a team of highly, highly talented people. Ambitious, confident, heavyweight egos. There’s Herbert Morrison at the top, brilliant political organiser, fixer who rose from errand boy to become the leader of London County Council and Churchill’s home secretary during the war, a brilliant manager of government business.

I mean, that’s what Attlee had him do. If you’re in the US, kind of a combination of leader of the house and majority whip, you know, it’s getting all the legislation done and through and that’s what he did so brilliantly. And next to him is Ernie Bevin, Ernest Bevin, born into rural poverty, then rises to become the most powerful trade union leader in Britain, and he’s Minister of Labour under Churchill, and Attlee makes him Foreign Secretary and his right-hand man, his Deputy Prime Minister. Morrison and Bevin despised each other, I mean, hated each other. Someone once said to Bevin that Morrison was his own worst enemy and Bevin replied, not while I’m alive he isn’t. So, Attlee deftly kept them apart. He put Morrison in charge of the home front, and he put Bevin in charge of the international front and that’s how we dealt with them. They were in the same cabinet but they were operationally apart so they couldn’t step on each other’s toes. There was Hugh Dalton also up there in the top row. Flag bearer for the left, very capable but naturally disruptive, gossipy, and always, always full of intrigues against his colleagues. Stafford Cripps below them on the second row, austere, puritanical, intellectual, easy to respect, hard to like. And then also at the bottom, you’ll see we have a Aneurin Bevan, known as Nye Bevan, who was Minister of Health, who unlike his older colleagues, wasn’t in the coalition. He was the youngest of the cabinet. Brilliant, firebrand, more of him later. I’m going to hope you don’t get confused between Bevin, Ernie Bevin at the top and Nye Bevan at the bottom. People do, so we’ll just be mindful of that. So, this is a highly fractious group of people and left to their own devices. They would have plotted, schemed, clashed, undermined each other, sunk each other, and probably sunk the whole ship.

And at the helm is Clement , the captain, and his great strength is that among these towering egos, his own lack of ego. He’s the one who holds the team together through tact and patience. His style is to lead from the back, not the front. He’s a boss who lets his ministers make speeches, take the credit, and get the glory. These are his words from his autobiography many years later. The essential quality of the prime minister is that he should be a good chairman, able to get others to work. Now, this is a very unpresidential view of leadership, but when you’re managing a bunch of highly talented egos, it’s a very effective style. Remember, he knew these people, he’d worked with them for five years under Churchill. He knew how to play on their strengths and how to manage their weaknesses. And slowly but surely, he gains their respect. And also, he gains, he gains, they start to fear him because he soon develops a reputation. As well as being an astute hirer, he’s also a ruthless firer. On one occasion he summons a junior minister to Downing Street and the minister thinks he’s doing a very good job and Attlee breaks the news to him that he’s being sacked, and this minister’s he’s staggered and he he says, but I don’t understand why Prime Minister and Attlee says, I’m afraid you’re not up to it and that was that end of meeting. Attlee effective as he was couldn’t have done it without Ernest Bevin. Bevin, his deputy prime minister, was his partner in government. Bevin had actually challenged him some years earlier for the leadership, but once he lost, he became Attlee’s most loyal ally. He was everything that Attlee wasn’t. Attlee was mild-mannered and Bevin was an attack dog and Attlee knew he needed someone like that by his side.

In 1945, very soon after the election, Herbert Morrison had tried to engineer a leadership coup against Attlee, right after the election. And it was Bevin who crushed it with a fearsome speech in front of 400 jubilant Labour members of parliament, which he then ended with an impromptu call for a vote of confidence in the new prime minister, which of course, Attlee won hands down. The coup attempt was over. So, there they are, you know, this fractious group of talents with grand plans to build their new Jerusalem. The only problem is that there was no money in the coffers. The country was stone broke. It had poured all its wealth into the war effort and by 1945 the country was groaning under a mountain of debt. And money is the key here, and money is the key because of this man, John Maynard Keynes. In 1936 Keynes, an economist, had published his seminal work which is called the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and in it he says, the old solutions of laissez-faire capitalism, he let the market, let market forces sort it all out, don’t intervene. Those solutions we saw in the 1920s and the 1930s, they don’t work. They didn’t work for us. If we’re going to ward off recession, he says, governments have to drive the economy and they have to do this not by cutting spending, but by increasing spending because only by stimulating demand do you then stimulate economic growth. Keynes said his mantra was deliver full employment, invest in public works, raise wages, and that’s how you beat recession.

And of course, for many looking west over the Atlantic this was one of the lessons of FDR and the New Deal, so this wasn’t exactly untried. Labour went for full-on adoption of the Keynesian worldview, but they needed money. Without money, it wasn’t possible. So, step in Ernest Bevin and John Maynard Keynes together, who negotiate with the US to enjoin Britain to the Marshall Plan. And what this means in practise is that they get a loan of $5 billion, which equates to something like $50 billion in today’s money, mainly from the US, also some of it from Canada. And it was at a low interest rate. But I mean, you know, this was, this debt was only paid down under Tony Blair’s government. So, you know, it was only paid down in the late 1990s, but these loans were vital. They were vital because they gave Clement Attlee and his government the headroom to stabilise the economy while they were starting to build the foundations to modernise and to grow. This brings us to one of the most controversial of Labour’s policies, and that is the nationalisation of a number of Britain’s public utilities and industries. The nationalisation programme, in other words the bringing of these industries into public ownership owned by the state and controlled by the state, this programme begins in 1946 when the Bank of England is taken into public ownership. Between 1947 and 1950, Attlee’s ministry nationalises coal, electricity, gas, the railways, iron, and steel. In total, a fifth of the UK economy comes under direct government or public ownership. Now, you know, it’s interesting today when we think of nationalisation, we tend to have two kind of dominant ideas about this, nationalisation. The first is it’s ideological, right? The left believe in public ownership and the right believe that the private sector will always deliver better solutions.

So, it divides between left and right. That’s certainly the way I think most of us see the nationalisation question these days in politics. And the second idea, the second idea is that nationalisation was an experiment that failed. Those of us who lived in the UK certainly through the 1970, will well remember how government control of industry, I mean, it seemed like the kiss of death. These industries were big fat feds and Britain at the time had reputation, you know, it was the word that was applied to Ottoman Turkey in its dying days. Britain was known as the sick man of Europe at the time. And it was Margaret Thatcher who came to power second time in the 80s on her promise to return these industries to the private sector, because that was the only way, she said, that we were going to revive them and revive the economy. So, you know, again the second idea is we equate nationalisation with failure, but back in 1945 this was very different. Nationalisation wasn’t controversial because Britain had experienced 20 years of total industrial stagnation where all the basic industries, coal, shipbuilding, textiles, they were all in decline and they suffered from chronic, chronic underinvestment. Part of the reason is that they were run by hundreds of small, inefficient companies, and very few of them had either the capacity, or the desire to invest or modernise. So, something had to be done.

And nationalisation, bringing them all together in one place where you can get economies of scale, where you can do central planning, where you can have strategy, nationalisation was the solution was seen not as an ideology, but as a practical solution to this big problem. Own them, put them together, invest in them, modernise, and increase productivity. And it wasn’t just Labour who got caught up in this idea. Even the chairman of many of the companies that were nationalised. Most of these chairman were conservative voters. They agreed, they knew their companies and their industries were in a poor shape. And they thought, well, you know what? Let’s try public ownership, we’ve got to do something. So, it was not the dividing line that it is today in politics. In some industries, it certainly had immediate positive effects, particularly in the coal mining industry. And this is because for the million, or so men who worked in coal mining, they worked in usually in the most dire and dangerous conditions. And a new national coal board was set up and it was seen as much of a humanitarian organisation as it was an economic one, because over the years it made massive improvements in health and safety for mine workers that otherwise may not have happened.

But even as early as 1950, right, you know, even that early, the voters could see that the great promise of nationalisation was starting to wear a bit thin. And these state industries were very soon smothered by bureaucracy and the demands of central planners. No sooner had the railways, for example, been taken into public ownership, than jokes started to circulate about unreliable trains, crumbling stations, and that most British of institutions, the soggy buffet sandwich. The New Jerusalem then was taking its sweet time to arrive in post-war Britain, but one of the bright spots, particularly for the worst-off, was the coming of the beverage reforms, the implementation of the beverage reforms. And between 1945 and 1951, Labour passed a series of measures which became known collectively as the welfare state. These reforms were designed to take care of people, as I said earlier, from cradle to grave, in other words, from birth to death. They were a massive, massive extension of what had already existed, a national insurance framework that had been put in place by David Lloyd George before World War I. But under these new reforms, every British citizen was going to be covered, whatever their income, whatever their circumstances. Those without a job would be helped. Those without a home would be helped. Those who had jobs would get proper rights in the workplace. Families would get help with the cost of children. Anyone who was sick would be entitled to treatment free of charge. I mean, this was big and it’s what Labour delivered.

And over those six years the Attlee ministry also built a million new homes, a million, right? And this is at a time when there’s a shortage of construction workers and building materials are in desperately short supply, and as well as all those new homes hundreds, and thousands of existing homes are repaired and improved. This is Seebohm Rowntree, he’s the second son of the famous Joseph Rowntree, a quaker, social reformer, and of course chocolate maker. And the son Seebohm was a social scientist, and he did a number of landmark studies that he was published throughout the 20th century where he looked at poverty in York, and people have extrapolated those results and applied them across the whole of the UK. In 1936, he did a study where he found that in York 30 percent of people living in York lived in absolute poverty. And the two main causes were unemployment, so no work and low wages for those who were able to get work. By 1950, 14 years later, five years into the Labour government, the total poverty figure in York was only 3%, right, 30% to 3%, and most of that he found was due to full employment and higher wages. So, just those two drivers had a massive effect on reducing poverty. Let’s get back to that photo that we saw earlier, that photo of the 1945 cabinet. Let your eye wander down to the bottom row and in the middle, you’ll see the sole female member of the cabinet, Ellen Wilkinson. She’s only actually the second woman ever to be a member of a British political cabinet. Now here she is, Ellen Wilkinson, here she is 10 years earlier.

It’s a great photo where she’s making a stirring speech in front of the Jarrow Marches. She was the Labour MP for Jarrow, which is up in the North East of England. It’s about 510 miles East of Newcastle. And she’s one of the leaders here of the Jarrow Marches. The Jarrow March, it’s a moment when 200 men in Jarrow where their industry has been pretty much destroyed, they march from their town 300 miles to London to petition the government to revive industry. It’s a heroic failure but the march has kind of been mythologized as a great folk movement ever since. Ellen Wilkinson, meanwhile, I mean you know, apart from being MP for Jericho, she’s a kind of a human dynamo. This is some of her CV. Rescued refugees at the Saar border, first reporter to break the news of Hitler’s advance on the Rhineland, visited Gandhi in his prison cell, organised a counter-trial in 1933 to prove the Nazis had burned down the Reichstag, took charge of air raid shelters during the war, and now, now Clement Attlee has appointed her Minister of Education. And her own experience of education is telling. She recalled that age six, she was sent to what she described as a filthy elementary school with five classes in one room. And then she was transferred to an all-girls school when she was older, an experience she described as horrible and unmanageable. So, it was personal for her, and she saw it as her key task to implement the educational reforms that had been passed by the wartime coalition, the 1944 Education Act, a seminal piece of legislation.

And these reforms, among other things, they provided for free secondary education. So secondary school in the UK is normally, well, it’s 11 and onwards. And the legislation said the minimum school age would be raised from 14 to 15, which made a massive, massive difference. She was determined to deliver this by 1947, as the act stipulated, and it meant that she had to recruit an enormous number of teachers suddenly. So, she recruited 37,000 teachers in a very short space of time, mainly ex-service men and women. She also had to create extra classroom space for almost 400,000 extra children, and she did that, and much of it was done by putting up temporary huts. We can speculate on what more she could have achieved because Ellen Wilkinson sadly died in February 1947 after developing pneumonia. She’d suffered most of her life from bronchial asthma, but she’d aggravated it through heavy smoking and an enormous amount of overwork. Finally, on the domestic front, we come to what many believe is Labour’s crowning achievement, which is the National Health Service. Before 1945, health provision in the UK was something of a patchwork. Local authority hospitals here and there, poor law hospitals here and there, and voluntary hospitals, which you had to pay for. And the wealthy also had access to private hospitals in Harley Street and places like that. And the minister in charge of bringing the health service into life was this man, Nye Bevan, the Welsh left-wing firebrand, even today remains a great hero of the left. Sent to work in the coal mines himself, aged 12 years old, fiery speaker, radical socialist, brilliant speaker, and saw it as his mission to build a socialist utopia in Great Britain. And for him, the health service had to be two things. It had to be universal, so available to everyone, wherever they were, and it had to be free at the point of use. Here he is speaking much later on in the late 1950s, when he’s talking about the birth of the health service.

• I’m proud about the National Health Service. It’s a piece of real socialism. It’s a piece of real Christianity too. We had to wait a long time for it. What I had in mind when we organised the National Health Service in 1946, and 1958, and remember when we did it, you know, you younger ones, this is immediately after the end of the Second World War, when we announced the, Sir Winston Churchill then said, a bankrupt nation. But nevertheless, we did these things. And there is nowhere in any nation in the world, communist or capitalist, and they have a service to compare. Now, the National Health Service had two main principles underlining it, right? But that the medical arts, science, and the healing should be made available to people when they needed them, irrespective of whether they would afford to pay for them or not. That was the first principle. The second was that this should be done not at the expense of the poorer members of the community, but in the well-to-do. In short, I refuse to accept the insurance principle. I refuse to accept the principle that the National Health Service should be paid by contributions.

• Ironically, the biggest opposition to the creation of the National Health Service came from the doctors themselves. The British Medical Association, the BMA, put up a bitter, bitter struggle for two years with doctors threatening strike action and the BMA secretary, Dr. Alfred Cox, even claiming it would be a step towards national socialism as practised in Germany, extraordinary. And this is because at the time, the BMA represented mainly the wealthier doctors who relied for their income on patient contributions. You can see in this cartoon how their opposition is captured, how they’re trying to trip Nye Bevan up. But Bevin, in spite of his socialist principles, was something of a pragmatist in the negotiations and he did a deal with the doctors to ensure they were paid decent salaries and he allowed them to continue to treat private patients. So, this was enough to satisfy the BMA and the NHS was born in July 1948. And for all of its problems today, it stands still as a towering achievement. One of Mrs. Thatcher’s ministers, Nigel Lawson, described it when he was in office as the nearest thing that Britain has to a state religion. Some truth in that. So, we turn now to achievements in foreign affairs, to foreign policy. And let’s not forget that Attlee takes office in a world order that’s changing at a bewildering speed. So here are the three wartime allies, Attlee, Truman, and Stalin. In Potsdam in July 45, this is the conference which is going to ratify the decision to carve Germany up into the four zones of occupation.

But we’re only months away from Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, where he describes a new iron curtain that is going to divide the West and the East in a new war, a cold war, which we sadly know remains an unresolved issue even up to the present day. And so, Attlee and Bevin in this new world work with the US to help create both the United Nations in 1945, and arguably a more effective organisation to keep the peace, NATO, in 1949. And they also, the duo of Attlee and Bevin, they made a decision to build a British atomic bomb, and in doing so Britain became the world’s third nuclear power after the US and the Soviet Union. Why did Britain build the bomb? Well in part it was as part of a strategy to counter as part of a strategy to counter Soviet aggression in Europe. But I think even more so, it was born out of a delusion that Britain could position itself as what it thought of as one of the big three in the post-war world. And this was a delusion, it must be said, that was shared across the mainstream of the two parties. It wasn’t just Labour, it was the Conservative Party as well. Britain, as we know, did not become one of a big three. There were a big two during the Cold War. And the reality was captured brilliantly, I think, by a senior government advisor, a man called Sir Henry Tizard, who wrote later in 1949 in his diaries, this is what he said, we persist in regarding ourselves as a great power capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a great power and never will be again.

We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power, we will soon cease to be a great nation. Let us take warning from the fate of great powers of the past and not burst ourselves with pride.“ He was right. He was right, in part because the sun was about to set on the British Empire and Labour knew that, and Labour facilitated it, and above all they knew it was game over for British rule over more than 300 million people in the Indian subcontinent. Hugh Dalton, Labour’s chancellor, wrote in his diary at the time, if you’re in a place where you’re not wanted, and where you haven’t got the force to squash those who don’t want you, the only thing to do is get out. Well, Britain did get out. They did get out of India. And to this day, historians are still arguing about the hurtling speed at which Britain announced partition of India into two states, drew up the borders, and then withdrew its forces. There’s a case to be made that a slower exit from India wouldn’t necessarily have led to a more humane exit and people, I mean some historians cite the mess that the French made in Algeria with a long gradual exit? I don’t know. But the fact is it was done in a rush, particularly the award of boundaries. And whether, how much can you say is cause and effect here, but Britain’s exit, it’s clear, and it’s a matter of record. Britain’s exit from India was followed by unprecedented migration between India and Pakistan, the two new states, successor states, and a horrific, horrific large-scale loss of life. Between 14 and 18 million people moved from one side of the border to the other, often unwillingly, and the numbers of dead as a result of the partition violence still unknown, but estimates put it anywhere between quarter of a million and one million. And the atmosphere of hostility, violence, suspicion between India and Pakistan, between Hindu and Muslim in the subcontinent is still very much felt today. And of course, the other retreat, the other colonial retreat in these years that was infamous was from Palestine.

For over a quarter of a century British administrators had tried and failed to make sense of the mandate that they’d been given to rule Palestine by then the then League of Nations and its successor the United Nations. I mean they you know they tried partition, they tried appeasement, manipulation, coercion, you know, none of it worked. From a Jewish point of view the role of Ernest Bevin as foreign secretary was pretty dismal. He resisted the idea of a Jewish state for as long as he possibly could. He resisted the entry of Jewish refugees into Palestine. He introduced repressive policies against the Yishuv and notoriously, of course, he ordered the return of the exodus to Germany, bearing as it did four and a half thousand Jewish refugees, many of whom were survivors of the Shoah. Be that as it may, the British flag was lowered for the last time in May 1948. And, of course, on the 14th of May 1948, David Ben-Gurion announced the establishment of the State of Israel. I’m not going to say any more about that in part through lack of time, but also because Trudy has brilliantly covered this in her lectures on Britain and Palestine. And I strongly recommend if you’re interested and if you miss them the first time you go to lockdownuniversity.org, the new website, and you check out those lectures. So, the demise of Labour, the demise of Attlee’s government.

The demise of this government is sometimes pinpointed on the angry resignation of Nye Bevan, the Welsh firebrand in 1951. Bevin resigned from the government when it introduced charges for spectacles and dentures, false teeth, in the NHS, and he felt this was a terrible betrayal of the principle that all national health services should be free of charge for everyone. But in truth, the government was already in trouble well before 1951. Following the outbreak of the Korean War, Attlee committed the country to a massive rearmament programme that it simply couldn’t afford. I mean, let’s just put this in perspective for you, right? By 1950, defence spending in the UK was almost 12% of GDP of gross domestic product. Now, today, it stands at about 2.3%, okay. The NATO requirement is minimum 2%. So, 12% hoovers up all the money, and it takes all the air out of the room. It was just mad. And it meant that funds, vital funds, were diverted away from the economy just at a time when things were picking up. This was when Germany and Japan were just getting going. And just at this time, around 1950, Britain takes all this money and sticks it in a defence programme instead of into industry. But even this, I don’t think is the real reason for the demise of the government. The real reason is that all these guys were exhausted. They had simply run out of steam. Don’t forget, most of the senior members of this government had been in the wartime commission. So, they’d been governing for 10 years continuously without a break. Athlee’s team was plagued by ill health. Herbert Morrison had persistent health problems, Hugh Dalton was heavily medicated throughout the time in government, Cripps was ill, often with exhaustion. Ellen Wilkinson, as we know, died early on.

And then there was Ernie Bevin, the key to the government. He had a major heart attack in 1946. And after that, he was just in and out of hospital, and he dies in 1951. And Attlee can’t do it without him. He feels bereft without Bevin. It was his conciliary, his partner in government. So, Attlee calls an election in 1950. He wins but too narrowly. It’s by too narrow a margin. So, he decides he’s going to call a second election in 1951. And owing to the quirks of our system, our electoral system in this country, Labour gained more actual votes than their opposition, the Tories, they gained 48.8 percent, almost 50 percent of the popular vote. But this translated into fewer seats, and so Labour lost the election. Winston Churchill was returned to number 10 Downing Street. So, when we apply our hindsight, and we stick the at the ministry on the scales. I mean we you know there are there are clearly some failures as you’d expect and we’ve touched on a number of these including, you know, the bum rush out of India, and the terrible tragedy that’s ensued and the diversion of funds away from the economy in 1950, just when they were needed. But, and to those, I mean, you know, I’d add a personal one, which is what the, which is the UK government turning a blind eye to the entry of Nazi war criminals. So, desperate were they to bring in anyone who could help them deal with chronic labour shortages in the country. But on the other side of the scale, I mean, my goodness, you know, just take a look at the scale, the sheer scale of their achievements over the course of just six years. And I’ve gone through most of these, so I’m not going to repeat any of them.

But I mean, it’s quite breathtaking. Britain in the Attlee years, I think probably changed the country more than any other government before or since. And it’s only certainly in the 20th century, it’s only the Thatcher years that even come close to the transformative effect, the long-term transformative effect that this government had. So, in the closing couple of minutes, and I’m sorry I’ve gone a little over my time, in parenthesis as usual, I have to ask the question, is there anything that we feel we can learn from the Attlee government that’s useful to us today? Or do we think that the world of politics has changed so much, and the world itself has changed so much for any of this to be relevant? I mean, after all, we’ve got so used to democratic governments not seeming to be able to do very much to make deep, long-lasting, positive impact. I’d like to be optimistic and it seems to me that when you strip out all the ambient noise, Attlee and his team had a combination and it was a mix of three key traits that I would say are essential for any political party, or movement if they’re truly going to make a long-lasting positive difference anywhere. The first is purpose, by which I mean moral seriousness, a credo, and a sense of moral conviction that what they’re going to do matters, and is going to really make a positive difference in people’s lives.

And the second is scale of ambition, not to do small things and not ambition for self-aggrandizement, but ambition to do big things that will make a big difference and an iron will to get them done. And the third thing, which I have to say in the present day seems to be the most challenging of all, is quality and calibre of people. And that means assembling a team of people with real experience, heavyweight experience, people who’ve got a successful track record for managing complexity and getting big things done and done well. So, purpose, scale of ambition, and quality of people. Is that so much to ask for? Thank you. So, thank you very much for that. And Lorraine says Shana Tova. Let’s have a look at some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Shana Tova to you Lorraine.

Q: Valerie asks, good question, if Beveridge is a liberal and he proposed the welfare state in 1942, why didn’t Britain vote for a liberal government in 1945?

A: Very good question. Well, the reality is that the liberal government, is that the Liberal Party had really been very much on the decline ever since the 1920s. Lloyd George was the last great Liberal leader and when the Labour Party came along the working classes felt that they had champions in their corner and so they took most of the vote that had gone to the Liberals, and the Liberals had no natural base as a result, and no great leader either. But they’ve been on a long-term trajectory of decline since the ‘20s. Where are we?

Michael Lostfield says, I believe that there was a brave British officer during the First World War and many times led his men from the trenches against German fortifications. Yes, absolutely. He was. He had an impressive record of service from World War One.

Q: Michael Britton says, Shana Tova. Given the long sweep of history, could Britain afford the reforms of the Attlee administration in the long run, allowing for the loss of manufacturing, the loss of middle-class and the loss of empire? Could reform today be achieved without amassing unsustainable debt?

A: Well, I mean, it’s one of the key economic questions, isn’t it? And it’s one of the questions that divides left and right. And it very much depends on your view of economics, I think. Certainly, it was felt in 1945 that Britain could not do this, that decline had to be arrested and it had seemed that this may be one of the answers, and so Keynesian economics very much, I mean Keynesian economics dominated Britain really from 1945 right up until 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher, for better or for worse. But it’s an important argument and I don’t think it’s one we’re going to resolve today.

Milena Grenfell-Baines says, My husband architect, Sir George Grenfell-Baines, was appointed to design the new town of Newton Aycliffe, and eventually take over the finishing of Peterley by Lord Beveridge whom he got to know well. George was a socialist though not a member of the Labour Party and based the design of Newton Aycliffe on the needs of a family. He also changed the name of his firm from Grenfell Bains, and Hargreaves to Building Design Partnership as he felt a personal name was wrong for a firm, which employed a large number of gifted designers, all of whom deserved recognition. He was the first to introduce a multidisciplinary office where all the different disciplines needed to design buildings work together. The firm was based on socialist principles of sharing the income and profit, but the story about that deserves another day and another time.

Milena, thank you so much for sharing it. Yes, it certainly does. It does deserve its own space and time. But thank you for providing that piece of associated history with this lecture.

Q: Michael Block says, was it Ernest Bevin. or Aneurin Bevan that was involved with Israel?

A: It was Ernest Bevin, whichever one. He was a swine where Judea is concerned, sending Holocaust survivors back to Europe and sinking refugee boats, carrying them to Palestine. There are some historians who make apologies for Bevin and say he wasn’t an anti-Semite, he wasn’t anti-Jewish, he did recognise and acknowledge the state of Israel after 1949, but there are many examples of comments that he made which are anti-Semitic and let’s just say he was no friend to the Jews.

Margaret says many echoes of the state of affairs in the UK today, perhaps our next government might look to the past to rescue the country once again.

Well, I think with that hope and prayer, let me thank everyone and I think that’s probably a good place to end for today. So, let me wish you all a very good rest of the day and a very good evening wherever all of you are. Bye-bye.