What the Romans Did For Us
The post-war Labour government did the following things. It created the National Health Service. It brought in welfare payments and state insurance ‘from the cradle to the grave’. It nationalized the Bank of England, the coal industry, which was then responsible for 90 per cent of Britain’s energy needs, and eventually the iron and steel industry too. It withdrew from India. It demobilized much of the vast army, air force and navy that had been accumulated during the war. It directed armament factories back to peaceful purposes and built new homes, though not nearly enough. It oversaw a rationalization and shake-up in the school system, raising the leaving age to fifteen. It kept the people fed, though, as we have seen, not excitingly fed. It started to fight Communism in Korea and to develop the atomic bomb. It did these things against the background of the worst financial crisis that could be imagined, at a time when its own civil servants were drawing up plans for starvation rationing if the money ran out, and while meeting its obligations to the malnourished people of other countries, left bereft by war or crop failure. It harangued people to work harder and consume less. In its dying months it did its best to amuse and entertain them too, with the Festival of Britain. This combines to form the most dramatic tale in our peacetime history of a State organization doing things it actually meant to.
Without the war, clearly, there would have been no ‘Attlee government’ as we remember it. With the war, though, some major social reform programme became inevitable; wars shake up democracies violently, whether they win or lose. France and Italy saw a huge rise in Communist influence after the war. Britain did not. But had a post-war British government tried to shrug off the hopes for a brave new world shared by so many and encouraged by everyone from archbishops to newspaper editors, what damage would have been done to Britain’s political system? There could have been no return to the thirties. After the privately run chaos and underinvestment of pre-war Britain people from almost all parts of the political spectrum thought central planning essential. Churchill’s Tories would have done many of the things Labour did, just a little less so, and more slowly. By the time the old man returned to power again in 1951, he was promising to do more in some areas, such as housing. The historian of the Welfare State puts it like this: ‘A country which had covered large tracts of East Anglia in concrete to launch bomber fleets, and the south coast in Nissen huts to launch the largest invasion the world had ever seen, could hardly turn round to its citizenry and say it was unable to organise a national health service; that it couldn’t house its people; or that it would not invest in education.’ What was done after the war to remake Britain was not inevitable. There were lots of battles and individual decisions on the way. But some such quiet revolution, some big grab of state power, or extension of political will, was bound to have occurred.