National pastimes

Alongside the National Health Service and National Coal Board, the Labour government of 1945-1951 created National Parks and a National Theatre. An Arts Council of Great Britain was founded, to subsidise the visual and performing arts and make them accessible to all (in 1994 separated into distinct bodies for England, Scotland, and Wales).

In 1946 the BBC launched its "Third Programme" - now Radio 3 - to present classical music and cultural programming (alongside the talk-based and informative Home Service - now Radio 4 - and the Light Programme - now Radio 2 - that provided light music). Through the Third Programme the BBC commissioned new musical compositions, plays, poems and documentaries. Dylan Thomas, for instance, originally wrote Under Milk Wood for performance on the Third Programme. It was taken for granted by the government, the Arts Council and the BBC that wide access to "high culture" was desirable and desired, even though conservatives in the 1940s and radicals in the 1960s insisted that only a narrow elite could derive benefit from it.

New Towns were built with recreational zones of parkland (that pictured here the Fairlands Valley Park in Stevenage), new schools were expected to have not just a yard to play in but some sort of sports field, and council estates had playgrounds for children.

Lewis Silkin, Minister for Town and Country Planning in Attlee's government, went so far as to refer to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 (which created the National Parks and guaranteed recreational access to the countryside) as "the most exciting Act of the post-war Parliament."

The National Trust was a non-governmental organisation founded in 1895 to preserve vanishing aspects of British rural life (countryside, coastline, old buildings). From 1935 it ran a programme of "Country House Rescue", the country house (and the country house garden) being typically British cultural achievements, many no longer economically viable. In 1946 the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, set up the National Land Fund: as a memorial to the war dead, country estates would be bought up with funds from the sale of surplus military stores, and turned over to the National Trust (still an independent charity) to maintain public access. Unique ensembles of architecture, furniture and landscape that would otherwise have been broken up and sold piecemeal were kept whole and opened to the general public. This was sometimes described as "a form of land nationalisation acceptable to the owners".

Since 1908 local authorities have been obliged to set some land aside to be made available as "allotments" to people who wanted to grow their own fruit and vegetables. This obligation was reinforced and clarified by the Allotments Act 1950, passed at a time when rationing was winding down and building land was at a premium, making it harder for local councils to take back allotments and use the land for building.

Throughout the United Kingdom, an infrastructure was created, partly by central government and partly by local authorities, that was intended to make healthy and stimulating recreation available to all.

Austerity

When the Second World War ended, the united Kingdom was close to bankruptcy. At the end of 1945 Attlee's government managed to secure a loan of over $3 billion from the United States Federal Reserve, negotiated by the world-famous economist John Maynard Keynes (and finally paid off in 2006). After 1948, Marshall Aid was also very important in keeping the country solvent.

Attlee's government used a number of measures to try to ease the transition from a wartime back to a peacetime economy, and to build up foreign currency reserves: controlling imports, concentrating investment in production for export, imposing currency controls, and regulating domestic consumption through a continuation of wartime rationing on food, clothes and fuel. These were the main forms of economic planning exercised by the Labour government.

Not only was rationing maintained, it was in some cases extended. Neither bread nor potatoes had been rationed during the war, but bread was rationed from 1946 to 1948, and potatoes for the duration of 1947. "Derationing" began in 1948, but was not complete until 1954 (three years into Churchill's second term as Prime Minister).

These "austerity measures" were the most unpopular aspect of Labour policy. The Labour Party won the 1950 general election with a much reduced majority, and when an early general election had to be called in 1951 (after Bevan's resignation and with several Labour ministers ill or dying) the Conservatives were returned to power.

Nationalisation

The second major plank of the Labour platform, next to social welfare, was national ownership of key sectors of the economy. Clause IV, part 4 of the constitution of the Labour Party stated the aim:

To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

This was put into practice by the Attlee government primarily with regard to energy, heavy industry, and transport.

Attlee’s government opted not for the “Post Office model” of state ownership (an organisation run by a government department, with the Post Master General a political appointment), but for “State-owned Corporations” (the government bought up private companies, amalgamated them, and turned them over to a board of directors, the government taking the place of shareholders rather than of management). Attlee called this “a mixed economy developing toward socialism”. The policy was not entirely new: immediately prior to the First World War Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had talked the government into acquiring a 51% stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (renamed British Petroleum in 1954, now BP), in order to ensure the supply of oil for the needs of the Royal Navy. The British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) was a state-owned company established in 1939 to control civil air communication between Britain and the Empire overseas. Attlee's government adopted the policy on a new scale.

The state became the major shareholder in key national industries but appointed a board that in its daily decisions was supposedly free of political control, and to some extent was expected to run the companies profitably and efficiently much like the board of any other company. When the Bank of England was nationalised in 1946, the directors already in place were simply appointed as the new board. The Labour government did not by any means consider the "best obtainable system of popular administration and control" to be a workers' co-operative.

For the government to take these steps required a raft of new legislation.

• The Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946 empowered the government to buy out the numerous private mine owners (for a total of £164 million) and amalgamate the mines under the National Coal Board (established 1 January 1947).
• The Electricity Act 1947 merged over 600 private electricity companies, municipal electricity departments, and the Central Electricity Board under the auspices of the British Electricity Authority (established 1947). In the following years electrification reached many rural areas that had not previously received electricity because it would have been unprofitable for private companies and prohibitively expensive for local authorities.
  
• The Gas Act 1948 merged over 1000 private and municipal gas companies into twelve regional, state-owned corporations, the “Area Gas Boards” under a Gas Council (established 1948), what later became British Gas.
• The Iron and Steel Act 1949 merged 80 of the main iron and steel companies under the Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain (established 1951), leaving around 2000 smaller companies in private ownership operating under a system of licences and government oversight. This was the first target for denationalisation after the Conservatives returned to power in 1951.
• The Transport Act 1947 gave the government the authority to bring the railways, road haulage companies and ports under state ownership and control through the British Transport Commission. It amalgamated the existing, privately-owned railway companies - the Great Western Railway (GWR), the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) and the Southern Railway (SR) - under the control of the Railway Executive of the British Transport Commission. From 1948 the railways operated under the name British Railways (eventually shortened to British Rail).
• The Civil Aviation Act 1946 established government control of commercial flights within the British Isles and to Europe and North Africa through British European Airways (BEA). BEA was eventually merged with BOAC to form British Airways (in 1974).
  

To provide modern management for these massive state-owned corporations, the government also set up the British Institute of Management (1947), which in 1951 began to award the Diploma in Management Studies, the first accreditation for professional managers available from a British institution.

A useful study (in French) of the nationalisation policy pursued by Attlee's government is Kenneth O. Morgan, "La politique de nationalisation en Grande-Bretagne", Le Mouvement social 134 (1986), pp. 37-54, which for those on the university network can be accessed on JSTOR.

New Towns

The County of London Plan (prepared 1943) proposed a “Green Belt” around London, to stop further urban sprawl, and the building of “New Towns” beyond the Green Belt to re-house workers from London. The legal basis for the implementation of these poposals was provided in the New Town Act 1946. The first of the New Towns was to be Stevenage, a sleepy little place half way between London and Cambridge.

At a town hall meeting called to reassure the outraged inhabitants of Stevenage, Lewis Silkin, Minister for Town and Country Planning, declared that:

Stevenage will in a short time become world-famous. People from all over the world will come to Stevenage to see how we here in this country are building for the new way of life.

Silkin left the meeting to find that the tyres of his car had been let down, sand poured into his fuel tank, and that the sign for Stevenage railway station had been changed to read "Silkingrad".

In effect (as can be seen from the picture of council housing and council flats in Stevenage), this "new way of life" was often one of living close together in buildings with communal stairwells, halls and corridors, and relaxing together in communal parks and gardens. It is not what most of those rehoused would have chosen for themselves, but it was a vast improvement on bombed-out slums.

Further New Towns or "satellite towns" outside London were designated in 1947-1950 at Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Harlow, Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield (both just south of Stevenage), Basildon, and Bracknell.

There was a further new town in the East Midlands, at Corby (near Leicester), and two in the coal-mining and ship-building North East, at Newton Aycliffe and at Peterlee.

New homes

The immediate response to the wartime loss of housing stock was to put up "prefabs" (prefabricated buildings), such as these in Liverpool. Although intended as temporary solutions, some 1940s prefabs remained in use to the end of the 20th century, and perhaps even to this day.

The Labour government did build a million new homes to meet the accute shortage of housing, but this was far from sufficient, and the prohibition of private building projects did little to help. Slum clearance and the building of council flats continued well into the 1960s.

Before the war, the squalor of slums in the major cities of the British Isles had been legendary. One of the most notorious such slums was the Gorbals, in Glasgow, pictured here. Children had nowhere to play except the street, and access to running water and plumbing was shared with several dwellings. In the decades after the war, council flats were built inspired by the example of Le Corbusier, moving the social problems out of tenements, alleys and back yards and into the halls and stairwells of vertical blocks. The same pattern was to be found in almost every major city.
Not all council houses or council flats were anything like so monstrous, as the examples below (from Wolverhampton and London) indicate:

Butler Education Act

The Conservative politician R.A. Butler was President of the Board of Education in Churchill's wartime coalition government. In 1944 he saw a bill into law that determined the shape of education in postwar Britain.

The Education Act 1944, also known as the Butler Education Act, contained a number of important provisions.

Most significantly, it made secondary education free and compulsory up to the age of 15. Previous legislation had made school attendance up to the age of 14 compulsory, but this was widely flouted (George Formby was far from unique in leaving school at the age of seven), and the poorer pupils who stayed in school beyond the age of 11 were often in "senior elementary education" rather than secondary education. Girls, in particular, were beneficiaries of the new law.

The act instituted the "Tripartite System". At the age of 11 pupils leaving primary school would sit an exam to determine their "abilities and aptitudes". This exam was initially known as the "scholarship exam", later as the "11 plus", and would determine whether their secondary education would take place in a grammar school, where the emphasis was on Latin and maths (for the most academically able 20 to 25%), a technical school (but very few technical schools were built as they required considerably more investment), or a "secondary modern" school (for the vast majority). This meant that children from poor backgrounds who already showed academic ability at the age of 11 were much more likely to get a good academic education than had ever been the case before, but most children from poor backgrounds were sent into a system designed to prepare them to carry out manual or household work.

One of the provisions of the act with no parallel in most European countries - and certainly not in the United States, where the separation of Church and State has been a highly emotive issue in education - was that "each school day begin with an act of worship" at which the whole school was present (although teachers could opt out on an individual basis, and parents could opt out their children). This "school assembly" was often, in effect, little more than a morale-boosting or inspirational song or speech, but it gave the school day a different shape from that of many other countries.

Central government laid out the new requirements, but left it to Local Education Authorities to see that they were met. There were major programmes of school-building and of teacher-training to make the functioning of the system possible.

A private sector of fee-paying "independent schools" continued to exist, providing socialisation into the relatively closed circle of the nation's elite, and for children with wealthy parents a way to get a decent education without needing to be terribly bright. Some of these schools were the famous "public schools" ("public" in the sense that anyone could attend who could afford the fees - there was no parish, civic, professional or other qualification), such as Eton (George Orwell's old school) or Harrow (Churchill's old school) - a far cry from the sort of Secondary Modern pictured above. Such schools did also provide a small number of places to "scholarship boys".

The National Health Service

The most characteristic and unusual achievement of the Attlee government was the foundation of the National Health Service, or NHS, a system of universal healthcare, free at the point of treatment. As the government information brochure emphasized:

But it is not a "charity". You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers.

Whatever government had emerged from the general election of 1945 would have had to embark on schemes of national insurance, education, home building and employment (at the very least, to ease the social pressures of demobilisation). The Christian Democrats who came to power in many parts of Western Europe in the aftermath of the war also did all these things. But a state-owned, centrally-directed system of free universal health care funded through taxation (rather than a government-regulated independent system funded through compulsory mutual health insurance) was socialised medicine at its most socialist. The Minister of Health responsible for bringing the NHS into existence was Aneurin ('Nye') Bevan, a Welsh miner who had got into Labour politics by way of trade union organisation. The NHS proved so popular that, unlike the nationalisation of key industries, it was something no Conservative government would ever dare undo.

In its early days, the NHS provided medical, dental and optical treatment, all free to the patient, and the service would cover whatever a doctor prescribed as necessary to health. The rather naive hope was that as the nation's health improved, the cost of the NHS would fall. Very quickly, as early as 1951, cutbacks had to be made, with charges imposed for some optical and dental treatment. This led to a crisis in the Labour party between the left-wingers and the moderates, with Bevan resigning from the government (followed by Harold Wilson, on whom more at a later date). To try to cover the costs without cutting services or increasing direct taxation, Conservative governments introduced major increases in national insurance contributions in 1952 and again in 1960, and added some charges for prescriptions. Visits to the doctor, hospitalisation, nursing care, necessary specialist treatment, and even transport to hospital for those with mobility problems all remained free.

A celebratory account brought out for the 60th anniversary of the NHS's foundation, in 2008, can be seen on youtube (click through; embedding has been disabled). Below, a short BBC Wales report on the NHS's founder, 'Nye' Bevan (also interesting simply to get a taste of Welsh accents).

History of Modern Britain 1

A television documentary that covers many of the main points of the course is A History of Modern Britain by BBC politics editor Andrew Marr. Some clips from it will be familiar to you from class already.

The first episode, dealing with the years 1945-1955, below.

The New Jerusalem

The Labour government of 1945-1951 built the British welfare state on the foundations of measures taken by the Liberal government of 1906-1914 and by the wartime coalition government headed by Churchill in 1940-1945. The aim was not only to repair the damage of war, but particularly to prevent a recurrence of forms of social deprivation that had been common before the war. Five areas were of particular concern: poverty, education, health, housing and employment; identified by William Beveridge as "five giants" on the road of social progress: Want, Ignorance, Disease, Squalor, Idleness. The three men of particular importance for laying the groundwork of the post-war welfare state are the Liberal William Beveridge (for social insurance), the Conservative R. A. Butler(for compulsory secondary education), and the Socialist Aneurin Bevan (for the National Health Service). The Prime Minister whose government implemented their reforms was Clement Attlee.

"Want" was to be tackled on the basis of the recommendations in the "Beveridge Report" (see here), through a series of acts of parliament, most importantly the Family Allowances Act 1945, National Insurance Act 1946, National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act 1946, Pensions (Increase) Act 1947, and National Assistance Act 1948.

"Ignorance" was to be beaten back by the implementation of the Education Act 1944 (see here). Not only was education to be free (and compulsory) to the age of 15, schools were also to provide their pupils with free meals, free milk, and free medical services.

"Disease" would be overcome by the creation of a National Health Service, providing universal medical care free at the point of need. The service began operation in 1948, on the basis of the National Health Service Act 1946.

"Squalor" would be abolished by programmes of slum clearance, the building of council flats and houses in existing towns (see here), the creation of planned communities (see here), and the regulation of existing accommodation through such measures as the Landlord and Tenant Act 1949.

"Idleness" was to become a thing of the past thanks to economic planning for full employment. In the words of the aristocratic left-winger Anthony Wedgwood Benn, elected to parliament as a Labour MP in 1950, "There was a feeling that if we can plan for war we can plan for peace."

Whatever government had been formed in 1945 would have had to do something about social issues, and some of the first steps in planning and legislation (commissioning the Beveridge Report, the Butler Education Act) had already been taken by the coalition government. The main reason for the Labour Party's landslide victory in the 1945 election was that the electorate knew that a commitment to tackling such problems was central to Labour's political identity, in a way it was not for the Conservative or Liberal parties.

Important measures were also taken to give ordinary people better access to healthy or cultural free-time activities (see here).

Less popular than the social legislation, but not very controversial at the time, were the measures to nationalise key parts of the economy, particularly energy, transport, and heavy industry (see here). What did make the Labour government unpopular, losing them seats in parliament at the 1950 general election and returning the Conservatives to power in the 1951 general election, were the "austerity measures" (see here) that included micromanaging domestic consumption.

Clement Attlee, Prime Minister 1945-1951, expressed the commitment to building a new society by quoting the poetry of William Blake:

Let us go forward into this fight in the spirit of William Blake:
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall the sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

A useful six-minute overview of the aims and achievements of Attlee's government, from a present-day American perspective, can be found here.