You are not currently logged in. Please create an account or log in to view the full course.
The Attlee Governments, 1945-51
- About
- Transcript
- Cite
The Labour Party, 1945-Present
In this course, Professor John Callaghan (University of Salford) explores the history of the Labour Party from 1945 to the present day. In the first module, we think about the Labour government under Clement Attlee between 1945-51. In the second, we consider the conflicts which emerged between Labour’s ‘left’ and ‘centre-right’ during its years in opposition between 1951 and 1964. In the third module, we think about Labour’s return to power under Harold Wilson in 1964, before turning in the fourth module to explore the growth of the leftist challenge in the 1970s and Labour’s changing relationship with the trade unions. In the final two modules, we consider the leadership of Tony Blair and New Labour, thinking firstly about the reasons for Blair’s electoral success and his domestic policies, before considering how New Labour’s complex legacy has shaped the Labour Party since 2007.
The Attlee Governments, 1945-51
In this module, we think about the Attlee governments of 1945-51, focusing in particular on: (i) the reasons for Labour’s landslide victory in the 1945 General Election, including the impact of the Second World War on domestic politics and the popular support for the Beveridge Report; (ii) the rationale and consequences of Labour’s programme of nationalisation of coal-mining and utilities; (iii) the creation of the National Health Service and the wider welfare state; (iv) Labour’s foreign policy, especially its pro-American orientation during the early phases of the Cold War, its attitudes towards the Empire and its granting of independence to India in 1947.
My name is John Callahan. I'm professor of politics at the University of Salford.
00:00:05The first lecture is concerned with the only governments of 1945 to 51.
00:00:11The first issue with these governments
00:00:17is precisely white.
00:00:19Total labour 45 years before it formed its first majority government
00:00:20and why that majority was so large
00:00:25it was a landslide majority of 146 seats over all of the parties.
00:00:27The obvious, uh, possibility here
00:00:33since this election was called before the Second World War was even over,
00:00:36that the war had something to do with it.
00:00:40In fact, I would say that's probably a majority opinion
00:00:42among historians of labour.
00:00:45So what could it have been about the war which helped to promote a labour victory,
00:00:47the first majority government the Labour Party had ever formed?
00:00:53Well, one aspect of this is perhaps the fact that the war was ideological,
00:00:56that the ID powers were fighting against fascism,
00:01:01that fascism was synonymous with elitism, with racism with authoritarianism.
00:01:05And so the ID powers
00:01:12were seen as being democratic, being liberal
00:01:14and being in favour of human rights.
00:01:19The finally Aikman here, of course,
00:01:22is the fact that one of the allies was the Soviet Union,
00:01:23which yourself was an authoritarian, dictatorial regime.
00:01:26But that wasn't the way it was. It was portrayed during the Second World War.
00:01:29During the Second World War, Stalin was often referred to as Uncle Joe.
00:01:34The Russians have taken the brunt of the fighting for most of the time.
00:01:38After the 22nd of June 1941 people in Britain
00:01:42were very relieved that they were doing so.
00:01:46We were no longer on our own. This was before the American the Americans intervened.
00:01:48So people were generally well disposed towards the Soviet Union in this period.
00:01:52And there are there are home surveys, uh,
00:01:58secret surveys conducted by the Home Office and also by the BBC,
00:02:01which suggests that public opinion was left leaning after
00:02:05the entry into the war of the Soviet Union,
00:02:09and that many members of the public took the view that
00:02:12the Russians wouldn't be fighting quite so hard as they were.
00:02:15Were the regime not, uh, successful in some way that it had something to commend it.
00:02:19So
00:02:25that was a conclusion, of course,
00:02:26that the government didn't necessarily want people to draw but
00:02:28it seems a reasonable conclusion to draw at that time.
00:02:32So there are those ideological dimensions.
00:02:35It was the people's war, according to some people, as I got into some historians.
00:02:38But there are other indications of the
00:02:43leftward swing that perhaps easier to pin down
00:02:45under the terms of the electoral truce.
00:02:49If any constituency became vacant, say,
00:02:51because of the death of a sitting member of Parliament,
00:02:55Labour and the conservatives would not contest against each other.
00:02:58But that gave a space for a new party,
00:03:02the Commonwealth Party set up by Sir Richard Ackland
00:03:05and that campaigned on the basis of full and immediate implementation
00:03:09of the Beveridge report. After 1942
00:03:14and in those by elections, amazingly,
00:03:18Commonwealth overturned huge majorities on the basis of demanding
00:03:21immediate and full implementation of the Beveridge report.
00:03:27The Beveridge report itself, when it was published
00:03:30through Her Majesty's Stationery office, was an instant best seller.
00:03:33There's a lot of reason to believe that the population expected some kind of reward,
00:03:37some kind of recognition of all the years of hardship by
00:03:43not returning to the conditions that pertained in the 19 thirties,
00:03:48avoiding a return to mass unemployment,
00:03:52avoiding a return to slum housing and the means test and moving
00:03:55forward to something more like what we now call the welfare state.
00:04:00So Labour was seen as the body most likely to
00:04:04implement that the conservatives were lukewarm about the Beveridge report.
00:04:08Churchill wasn't really interested in domestic politics in any case,
00:04:13and that it was the Labour members of the
00:04:17coalition government which were prominent on the domestic front.
00:04:19It was Labour members who were, for example,
00:04:23working through the Ministry of Supply
00:04:26to achieve all kinds of objectives necessary to the fighting of the war at home.
00:04:29And maybe because of that these people Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison,
00:04:34Clement Atlee himself,
00:04:39they became well known figures as a result of
00:04:41this and that would of course have helped labour.
00:04:43And it would also have helped them
00:04:45that they were seen as a perfectly efficient members
00:04:47of that coalition government and therefore people who could
00:04:51do things on the domestic front once the war was over.
00:04:54But these are just a few of the arguments that people
00:04:58I want to investigate when trying to explain
00:05:03that Labour victory something like 11.9 million people,
00:05:05voted Labour, about 8.7 million voted.
00:05:09For the Conservatives, the difference is significant but it's not overwhelming.
00:05:13We have a first past the post system which of course exaggerates these sorts
00:05:18of things and it gave Labour 146 majority over all of the parties.
00:05:21Now the second thing, if we move on from the reasons why Labour won that election
00:05:27and look at what they actually did there are two aspects
00:05:33of this which are particularly important on the domestic front.
00:05:36They changed the nature of the economy in some important respects.
00:05:40They introduced the National Health Service.
00:05:44They introduced a range of social services which we associate with beverage,
00:05:46but which the Labour Party has been independently developing in any case
00:05:50and they did one or two other interesting things like there
00:05:55was a Town and country planning act introduced by labour.
00:05:58There was a new Towns act from which we can
00:06:01date the origins of places like Telford and Milton Keynes.
00:06:04This was a very productive government.
00:06:08It was a government that did a great deal.
00:06:10And of course, if we look at its economic performance,
00:06:13there are two things that really stand out.
00:06:17One is that when it came into power, the U.
00:06:19K had spent about a quarter of its national wealth on
00:06:22the prosecution of the war. We were technically bankrupt.
00:06:26We were importing far more than we were exporting.
00:06:30Exports had to be increased by about 75% to
00:06:33bring the balance of trade into something like normality.
00:06:37Um, there were shortages of every conceivable raw material.
00:06:41It's one of the reasons why building new houses
00:06:45was delayed because we simply didn't have the bricks,
00:06:47the mortar and all the other things required for building houses.
00:06:50Nevertheless, some progress was made on that front,
00:06:54but the but the economy was put into, uh, balance by labour.
00:06:58There was a 75% increase in exports. We were in surplus.
00:07:07By the end of the government's time, there was a cost for this.
00:07:12Domestic demand had to be suppressed.
00:07:16There was an austerity regime.
00:07:19People's personal consumption was kept very low.
00:07:21Some aspects of rationing actually intensified
00:07:24during the period of the only governments
00:07:28as compared with the war.
00:07:30Things that hadn't been rationed during the war were rationed,
00:07:32and by the end of that period, by 1951.
00:07:35There's plenty of evidence that people were becoming fed
00:07:38up with austerity and they wanted a change.
00:07:41But that was the price that had to be paid if the balance of
00:07:44payments was to be put back into surplus and labour actually achieve that.
00:07:48The other notable thing, of course, was the programme of public ownership.
00:07:52Here again, there's an argument
00:07:57did nationalising the coal industry's the railways bringing gas,
00:07:59the other utilities, electricity and water into a kind of central coordination.
00:08:05Did this represent a radical step?
00:08:11Some people say it doesn't that already,
00:08:15many of the utilities were supplied through local authorities anyway.
00:08:18Gas, electricity and water
00:08:21that coal and the railways were both
00:08:23technically bankrupt on the private hands that,
00:08:26in fact,
00:08:31what happened was the taxpayer took responsibility for covering those debts.
00:08:31The owners were handsomely rewarded with compensation,
00:08:37which they could go and invest in more profitable activities,
00:08:40while the state undertook to bring coal and railways up to some standard of you know,
00:08:44normality.
00:08:51So it's not obvious that public ownership was especially radical measure.
00:08:53It was seen as such by the labour left because the labour left took the
00:08:58view that there was no planning without a degree of state ownership of industry,
00:09:02and by the end of the anti governments, about 20% of the U.
00:09:08K economy belonged to the public sector.
00:09:12And many people are now saying that gave the public sector that gave the government
00:09:15direct control over enough of the economy to be able
00:09:20to influence the 80% which remained under private ownership.
00:09:24So there was that left wing perception that
00:09:29state ownership was a prerequisite for successful planning.
00:09:32As far as the centre and let's say, sense of right of the Labour Party was concerned,
00:09:37public ownership had simply been on the books for as long as anyone could imagine.
00:09:43The minders have demand first demanded nationalisation of coal in the 18 eighties.
00:09:49The swanky report actually recommended in 1921.
00:09:54So
00:09:59that remains, then an open question.
00:10:00That question of whether Labour did anything particularly radical.
00:10:04As far as the National Health Service is concerned, more people take the view that,
00:10:08yes, this was a radical step here.
00:10:13For the first time, a major,
00:10:15most important service is supplied free at the point
00:10:18when it's needed financed out of general taxation,
00:10:22various compromises had to be made before that could be introduced.
00:10:26Nye Bevan, who was the presiding minister, had to deal with the uh,
00:10:29British Medical Association.
00:10:34He had to find compromise with the doctors,
00:10:36and one of those compromises was that private practise would be able
00:10:38to continue even within the National Health Service hospitals and so on.
00:10:41The other big area that has to be mentioned in connection with
00:10:48this period of labour governments is the area of foreign policy.
00:10:51After all, they coincided with the beginning of the Cold War.
00:10:56This wasn't just the end of the Second World War.
00:11:00There was no general peace settlement as after the first World War.
00:11:02Instead,
00:11:05a cold war began between the Western allies on the
00:11:06one hand and the Soviet Union on the other.
00:11:09Labour was in power when NATO was formed, for example,
00:11:11it was in power. Even when the Korean War broke out in June 1950
00:11:17Labour was prepared to spend up to 14% of the national income on defence.
00:11:23In response to the Korean War,
00:11:28troops of British troops were sent to fight in Korea alongside Americans.
00:11:30Labour was Atlanticist Labour supported NATO labour
00:11:36took the same view as the Americans
00:11:40that it was Stalin
00:11:43and the Soviet Union,
00:11:44which was mainly to blame
00:11:46for the Cold War and the subsequent arms race.
00:11:47It was the Labour government, after all, that decided secretly
00:11:50that Britain needed its own nuclear deterrent.
00:11:54And, of course, that was informed
00:11:57by the argument that Britain
00:11:59had to behave like a great power if it was to be treated as a great power by the others
00:12:01and where that's concerned.
00:12:07The Empire was absolutely central.
00:12:08All leading Labour ministers were of the view that Britain's great
00:12:11power status depended on the maintenance of the Empire Commonwealth.
00:12:16Now India, Pakistan and Salon were given independence again.
00:12:20There's an argument about this. This wasn't exactly, um
00:12:26had active philanthropy.
00:12:30This was in some sense forced upon labour because
00:12:32India was in a state of civil disobedience.
00:12:35And as that at least said to Ernest Bevin and Cabinet,
00:12:38we don't have the divisions to enforce control.
00:12:43So there was withdrawal from those, uh, former parts of the Empire.
00:12:47But as far as the rest of the empire was concerned, for example,
00:12:52sub Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, Hong Kong, Singapore,
00:12:55our bases in the Middle East. All that was to be maintained.
00:12:59So there's no doubt that Labour was pro Empire, uh,
00:13:03certainly regarded Britain as a great power
00:13:08and did everything it could to maintain a special relationship with the U. S. A.
00:13:11
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Callaghan, J. (2019, December 20). The Labour Party, 1945-Present - The Attlee Governments, 1945-51 [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-labour-party-1945-present/the-wilson-governments-1964-70
MLA style
Callaghan, J. "The Labour Party, 1945-Present – The Attlee Governments, 1945-51." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 20 Dec 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/the-labour-party-1945-present/the-wilson-governments-1964-70