Chapter Four
Britain and the Politics of Social Patriotism

Paul Addison

1. War and Integration

For anyone discussing the history of modern Britain one essential habit is bifocal vision. For just as the brain co-ordinates the images of the left and right eyes, so historians have to combine in their analysis two dimensions of change in British society. The left eye reveals to us a country which has long been described as 'class-ridden', a convenient short-hand phrase for a society rejoicing in a rich diversity of distinctions of income, status, class and power. An unbroken line of commentary to this effect runs from Paine and Cobbett to contemporary sociology, and that line runs in a bold thread through the Second World War. Precisely how social divisions ought to be defined is, admittedly, a knotty problem, and one that will have to be left unravelled here. But most historians would agree that traditional social divisions were prominent in Britain between 1939 and 1945. Britain was, after all, the oldest and most stable of industrial societies, and it would have been astonishing had the social structure suddenly undergone massive change. There is abundant evidence to the contrary. At the height of the war effort in 1942 a survey of war industry by Mass-Observation, People in Production, demonstrated in graphic detail the gulf between management and the shop floor. Simultaneously the sociologist T.H. Pear was commenting on the social distance between the governors and the governed:

...this two-class division in English society means that public life is administered by people who, quite literally, know next to nothing at first hand of the life of the public, and are not even conscious of their own ignorance, and tacitly assume that they are typical English men and women.1

Taking for granted a strong measure of continuity, the majority of British historians nonetheless agree that during the war there occurred a modest but lasting shift in the centre of social and political gravity. This contention is to be found in the work of Richard Titmuss on social policy, A.H. Halsey on social structure, Arthur Marwick on social history, or Maurice Cowling and myself in the sphere of political change. It is enshrined in the final paragraph of A.Q.P. Taylor's English History 1914-1945. Lively dissenting arguments about the 'impact of war' have been advanced by Angus Calder and Henry Pelling, but to debate their viewpoints here would take the discussion too far afield. Most historians detect in the war years a modest levelling process which redistributed income and influence in favour of the working classes. No sooner do we glance at the period than we see looming up before us those two giant landmarks, the Beveridge report of 1942 and the Labour victory at the 1945 general election. There may be ingenious arguments which appear to divorce these events entirely from the war effort, or the pattern of welfare; but there are also ingenious conjurors who appear to saw the lady in half. Rather than debate the question, I shall take it as read for the remainder of this essay that the war was accompanied by a significant shift in the social and political balance.

The war, then, relates to the vast corpus of literature which focuses on inequality and all its related components of stratification. But as was remarked before, modern Britain has to be

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observed through the right eye as well as the left. If the left eye reveals a country based on class, the right shows us a country based on community, stability, consensus, co-operation and unity--these too deserve their historians. Even more important than the division of Britain into classes or strata has been the capacity of all these groups to live together, work through common values and institutions, and, not least, to wage two great wars in partnership. On the negative side the strength of community in Britain was illustrated by the case of the Irish. Their alienation from the United Kingdom demonstrated indirectly the unity of the English, the Welsh and the Scots. The point at which Irish nationalism took off, during and after the First World War, was also the moment at which Welsh and Scottish nationalism fizzled out. On the positive side, the organised working class from the mid-nineteenth century onwards became firmly attached to trades unionism, parliamentary politics, and the monarchy: the significance of undercurrents of marxism or syndicalism is that they did indeed remain undercurrents.

There are many difficulties in pursuing the perspective of unity and stability. To begin with, the subject is still largely unexplored: the literature on the making of community is negligible beside the literature on the making of class. Secondly, the language involved is fraught with ambiguity and possibilities of misunderstanding. There is good reason to be careful in using terms such as 'community' or 'consensus'. They lend themselves readily to cynical manipulation by the public relations officers of totalitarian regimes. More innocently, they are employed by tender-minded commentators who cannot or will not understand the role of discipline and conflict in society. But such terms deserve to be given a tough-minded and historical application. Historians, for example, recognize that no community arises out of the amiability of human nature. Communities are in the first instance welded together. A repressive Whig aristocracy brought order and unity to Britain in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth the police, the judges, the churches and the employers all played a part in the moulding of a respectful citizenry. And, as A.H. Halsey observed in his Reith lectures of 1977:

We also do well to remind ourselves of the integrating aspects of war. It is a paradox of external conflict that it promotes equality and fraternity within the nation. This is true especially of modern 'total' war. If all must be called upon to fight for their country, all must be brought to believe that they have a stake in it. Both World Wars brought renewed promise for the future. They reinforced patriotic sentiment.2

This essay takes its cue in part from Professor Halsey's notion of the integrating effects of war. But it is also an expansion of my own previous analysis of the growth of political consensus in wartime. The thrust of the argument is that war defused class anxieties and led to a greater measure of agreement between the parties over the long-term management of Britain. Between the wars the political nation was polarized by social fears, which were reinforced by rival ideologies. The effect of war, and of coalition politics, was to bring about a rapprochement, and to some degree a fusion of values, between Right and Left. The Conservatives assimilated new priorities in the realm of social welfare, the heat was taken out of the debate between capitalism and socialism, and Labour was permeated by Churchillian assumptions in defence and foreign policy. So while the party system was resumed in 1945 with all the old rhetorical vigour, it now rested on a new foundation of social patriotism common to all parties and more significant in the long run than the issues between them. This essay attempts to show how the new synthesis was brought about and to suggest why it survived for a generation after the war. And if as a political historian I focus on the political world, I shall try to relate politics to social and economic life.

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2. Politics between the Wars

A good way to begin a discussion of the Second World War is by reference to the First. Kenneth Morgan, in his book Consensus and Disunity, has shown how the First World War consigned to the scrap-heap the pre-1914 controversies between Liberals and Unionists. Edwardian politics were superseded by wartime collectivism. The Lloyd George government of 1916-18 embraced members of all parties, trades union as well as business leaders, and the 'general will' for victory. By 1918 wartime unity had generated an equally far-reaching consensus over postwar reconstruction which included social reform at home and League of Nations principles abroad. Dr. Morgan judges that the Coalition, above all through Lloyd George himself, offered some kind of vision of social harmony and international conciliation which many young men and women entering politics in 1919 found neither ignoble, nor undeserving of support. The Coalition tried to seize the opportunity, fleeting though it was, to take advantage of the war years and to create a middle way for a nation at peace with itself and in fruitful collaboration with its allies.3

The experiment was, however, frustrated. The British rebelled against national unity and returned to sectional and party battles. And this time party politics reasserted themselves in the form of the class-based competition between Labour and Conservative.

Dr. Morgan leans heavily upon the term 'consensus'. Contemporary historians are usually thought to have an axe to grind (they usually do), and to speak of 'consensus' in Britain today (1979) is at once to be suspected of conspiring to break up the Labour party in favour of a new combination led by Mr. Steel and Mr. Jenkins. Yet the term has a descriptive value on which non-marxist scholars should be able to agree. By definition a plural society is one which contains a variety of parties, pressure-groups, and economic interests. Power is unequally distributed among them and the degree of consensus depends upon the extent of agreement among the most powerful groups. In determining the extent of agreement both the electorate and the government are vitally influential. Voters have the power if they wish to accelerate or retard conflict by their choice. For example, had they voted in large numbers during the 1930s for the communist and fascist parties, they would have been opting for something close to civil war. Government has an even more powerful role of arbitration. Normally British governments try to find compromises which satisfy as wide a range of interests as possible: but they may also set out deliberately to isolate and repress powerful groups, as Baldwin set out in May 1926 to defeat the TUC. 'Consensus' does not imply complete harmony either in society or the political world, for such a thing is impossible. Dr. Morgan knows full well that during the First World War militant shop stewards were flinging spanners into war industry, while in Parliament the Asquithian Liberals sounded a discord after 1916. But consensus does imply a will towards compromise, and a modus vivendi, at a number of levels in Britain: (1) between the Cabinet and the Opposition front bench; (2) between capital and labour; (3) between ethnic groups, or between the centre and the regions; (4) among voters, in the sense that the great majority are willing to sustain moderate party politics. While these four variables can be distinguished they are in practice interdependent: if one collapses, all come under strain.

By comparison with many European nations over the same period, Britain between the wars was a kind of Sleepy Hollow where Baldwin could dream of pastoral innocence. By the yardstick of its own history, however, Britain was divided. The source of the division was class, for politics ran along class lines for the first time since the 1840s. True, there were middle class socialists and working class Tories, but everyone knew that Labour were the party of the trades

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unions and the Conservatives the party of the industrialists. But class itself did not provide the explanation for disunity. Classes can often live together in peaceful coexistence, as can great powers or indeed men and women. The polarization of politics was due to a number of factors which aggravated class relations. To examine these in full would require another essay. They were, in brief, the economic Depression which began in 1920 and snowballed into the Great Slump of 1929; and the concomitant rise of ideological debate between socialists and capitalists in Britain, and communists and fascists in western Europe. The depression created widespread social insecurities which affected the middle classes as well as manual workers; the rise of ideology played on and reflected these anxieties. All the time a vigorous unpolitical Britain was busy attending football matches and young farmers' dances, without a thought for great issues; but the political nation was torn and embittered. The Labour party, somehow exempting Baldwin, literally hated the National government of 1931 for its minor economies at the expense of the unemployed. Conservatives and old-fashioned Liberals feared the inflationary possibilities of Labour governments as much as the prospect of nationalization. In the course of the 1930s these internal fears were gradually projected on to the European scene. Attlee believed that Chamberlain sympathized with fascist dictators for class reasons. Chamberlain believed that Labour were playing the game of Soviet Russia and embroiling western Europe in civil war. In the Spanish Civil War the Conservatives were almost solidly in sympathy with the Nationalists, while Labour were equally solid for the Republicans. Here again were the emotions of the General Strike, out this time for export. The alienation of Labour from the conservatives was reflected in one of the most sensitive and crucial areas of national policy: defence. For most of the 1930s the two major parties were in outright disagreement over the fundamental question of national security. From 1933 to 1937 Labour firmly rejected rearmament and as late as April 1939 opposed conscription. For a nation unwittingly on the brink of the Battle of Britain, this division was a dangerous element of weakness.

The strength of the political system, on the other hand, lay in the stability of parliamentary politics. As long as parliamentary or pluralistic politics survived, so did a latent capacity for reconciliation. After 1931 there were several undercurrents making for a fresh synthesis. There were younger Conservatives like Walter Elliot, with a cross-bench mentality; revisionist Labour politicians like Herbert Morrison; and trade union leaders who preferred half a loaf to no bread. There was much talk at the end of the decade of cross-party combinations to secure a 'national' foreign policy. And there was the specific phenomenon which has been aptly termed 'middle opinion'. The phrase refers to a broad and loosely-knit series of groupings which for one reason or another advocated a mixed economy, social welfare measures, and an agreed. line of resistance to Italy and Germany.

The most coherent prophets of middle opinion were John Maynard Keynes and Harold Macmillan: The General Theory appeared in 1936, and The Middle Way in 1938. The personnel of middle opinion consisted of a sprinkling of Liberal, Labour and Conservative backbenchers guided and inspired by the "progressive intelligentsia" Here again is a term requiring elucidation. Progressive intellectuals were in one sense like a box of liquorice all- sorts. Some were public-spirited doctors or social scientists rather than party animals. Some were classical Liberals like Gilbert Murray; some New Liberals like J.A. Hobson; some socialists like Harold Laski. But whatever their disagreements they all had two beliefs in common: first that capitalism required a greater measure of collectivist regulation, and second that fascism must be opposed. The deep divide of the 1930s was between progressives of all shades on the one hand and the National government on the other. This explains why, after the mid-1930s, socialists and communists began to take up the cause of middle opinion. In order to

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unite progressives of all kinds behind a common foreign policy, they dropped for the time being their demands for socialism and prepared to settle for better social services and the nationalization of coal. It was these notions of moderate collectivism, planted in the 1930s, which were to push through the floorboards of the wartime Coalition.

3. Warfare and Welfare

The British welfare state, founded by the Liberals prior to 1914, had subsequently been adopted and augmented by the Conservatives. During the Slump it acted as a giant but rather leaky umbrella which afforded some shelter to the bulk of the labour force. Yet welfare became in the 1930s a major political issue. The social services were increasingly criticized by a vocal welfare lobby, spearheaded by progressive intellectuals and appealing particularly to Labour MPs. The welfare lobby were not simple pragmatists asking for more. Rather they were demanding national minimum standards of income and nutrition, calculated according to the needs of physical efficiency. The Conservatives for their part were struggling at this point to control and contain public expenditure, while the civil service was dominated by the power of the Treasury, the headquarters of the battle for economy. The government, therefore, stoutly resisted the demands of the welfare lobby. In 1936 the nutritionist John Boyd Orr was summoned to meet Kingsley Wood, the Minister of Health. Kingsley Wood wanted to know why Boyd Orr was making such a fuss about poverty and malnutrition when neither of them any longer existed. The episode epitomizes the politics of welfare in the 1930s.

The effect of the Second World War was to depoliticize welfare by establishing common standards which all parties accepted. The conservatives found themselves hustled along, by pressures largely beyond their control, to a point where they felt bound to accept a quantum leap in welfare provision. They stumbled into a commitment to comprehensive social security benefits at levels they had previously ruled out. They espoused a costly National Health Service which the party would have confidently vetoed before the war. By 1945 the Conservative and Labour parties had virtually identical welfare policies, though it must be granted that there were still contrasts of shading and emphasis.

How and why did the Conservatives assimilate these new policies? In my book The Road to 1945, and an article summarizing its conclusions, I have already analyzed in some detail the pattern of domestic politics in wartime, so I shall try to cover this particular ground as briefly as possible. With the formation of the Churchill Coalition in May 1940, and the retirement soon afterwards of Neville Chamberlain, the Conservative party lost the initiative in domestic affairs, and lapsed into an incoherent and fairly passive force. The vacuum was filled not only by the Labour party, but by collectivists of a variety of hues: Reith, Keynes, Beveridge, Cripps. One of the consequences of this new order was the triumph of the welfare lobby.

From May 1940 to December 1942 the Churchill government struggled through the crisis of the war, beset by the perils of invasion, the blitz, and the Battle of the Atlantic. In obscure corners of Whitehall one or two Ministers were tunneling away at post-war problems, but the administration as a whole from Churchill downwards had no time for such matters. Yet throughout this period there was pressure on the government to announce a commitment to social reform as an integral part of its 'war aims'. This agitation owed something to the rankand-file of the Labour party, who were anxious to use the party's bargaining power in the Coalition to extract concessions from the conservatives. But the campaign was initiated, and in

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the main conducted by, the progressive intelligentsia. Prominent among the publicists demanding the promise of a 'new Britain' were J.B. Priestley, Julian Huxley, John Boyd Orr, E.H. Carr, Harold Laski, Ritchie Calder and Francis Williams. The arguments they advanced for linking social reform to the war effort are interesting but need not concern us here. The nub of the matter was a bid for power and influence by a band of collectivist intellectuals strongly entrenched in the universities, the press, and publishing. For a long time the campaign seemed to have no effect. Churchill was adamantly opposed to the reintroduction of domestic politics in the middle of the war, and brushed aside letters from Laski or editorials in the newspapers. but in the end Churchill was outflanked and outmanoeuvered by William Beveridge. Beveridge was to take all the proposals for welfare advocated by the progressive camp and incorporate them in his report. His impact on social policy in 1942 is comparable with the impact of Churchill on the conduct of the war in 1940.

Beveridge is sometimes inaccurately described as a lifelong Liberal. But as his biographer Jose Harris has demonstrated, Beveridge's outlook underwent longterm fluctuations. In the Slump he was an enthusiast for the National government, wage cuts, deflation, and the market economy. But with his nose for trends Beveridge by the late 1930s had begun to gravitate back towards collectivism. The war, with its machinery of economic controls, aroused his enthusiasm for planning, and he described his report as taking Britain 'half-way to Moscow'. Formally speaking the report was a government document. In reality it was the manifesto of Beveridge as the leader of progressive opinion. Having been put in charge of a lowgrade technical committee on social insurance, Beveridge had become fired by the ambition to make history. He proceeded to map out a comprehensive programme for a state-provided national minimum which encompassed all-in social insurance, family allowances, employment policy, and a National Health Service.

How far Beveridge should be credited with machiavellian foresight is difficult to judge. But his report on the day of publication proved to be the British equivalent of a coup d'Žtat, and the coup was to prove irreversible. The forces of inertia were in an unusually feeble state: the Treasury eclipsed by the mechanisms of physical planning, the conservatives aware of their dependence on Labour and 'the people'. The report happened to appear at the turning-point of the British war effort when peace and victory first came into sight. In November the church bells rang out in celebration of the victory of El Alamein; in December the BBC and the press rang out their own bells in celebration of the Beveridge report. The Labour ministers insisted that Beveridge's proposals should be accepted as the basis of post-war planning, and from January 1943 social reconstruction was built into the administration as a priority second only to the requirements of the war effort. A government white paper of 1944 formally endorsed the Beveridge plan, which thus became the property of all three parties to the Coalition. The Conservatives accepted the New Deal with varying degrees of enthusiasm: a minority were vocally pro-Beveridge, a minority strongly but secretly opposed, and the middle ranks pragmatically absorbed the spirit of the age. The Beveridge report was so overwhelmingly popular that rejection of it would have entailed political suicide.

4. The Question of Economic Planning

It would be misleading to echo the old nursery rhyme by announcing that wherever the Coalition went, consensus was sure to follow. In economic policy the picture was more complex. The Second World War brought with it an apparatus of state controls which closely resembled that of a centralized socialist economy. Food supplies, raw materials, building,

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investment, consumption and manpower were all regulated by Whitehall through a system of quantitative allocation. The Labour oligarchy of politicians and union leaders played a prominent part in the administration of controls, which also appealed on ideological grounds to the socialist instincts of the party. Within the Conservative party, controls were accepted as essential for the war effort, but from 1942 onwards there were signs of a backlash, and by 1945 Beaverbrook and others were waging a strong campaign against them. In the 1945 general election there was a confused debate over the issue which has been admirably summed up by McCallum and Readman:

The Conservatives attacked the controls mainly because they saw in them the instrument by which their opponents could carry out the planning policies which they regarded as pernicious. The Conservatives were determined to prevent measures which had been introduced for temporary use in an emergency, being retained permanently for other purposes.... But the Labour party angrily declared that the Tories wanted to whip off controls at once, so that they could make a thundering profit out of the sale of scarce goods. 'The anti-controllers and anti-planners desire to sweep away public controls, simply in order to give the profiteering interests and the privileged rich an entirely free hand to plunder 4the rest of the nation as shamelessly as they did in the nineteen-twenties.'4

Historians of the period must certainly take account of the conflicting prejudices of the parties over controls. But campaign oratory and partisan statements can be very misleading. If we compare 1945 with 1918 it becomes apparent that in 1945 the parties shared three powerful common assumptions about economic management which had not been present in 1918. At the end of the First World War the Lloyd George government had decided to dismantle economic controls as swiftly as possible. This decision had been followed by a dramatic inflationary boom and an equally dramatic deflationary slump. During the Second World War both trade union leaders and industrialists on the one hand, and the leading Conservative and Labour ministers on the other, were determined to prevent a recurrence of this experience, and to plan for a transitional period during which controls would be retained. This commitment had been spelled out in the 1944 white paper on employment policy. Contrary to the allegations of the conservatives, the Labour party had no strategy for the translation of temporary wartime controls into permanent features of economic planning. There was in this respect a large gap in Labour thinking. After 1945, as Samuel H. Beer has demonstrated in Modern British Politics, the system of controls began to break up because in a plural or 'democratic' society quantitative planning was unworkable in peacetime. For their part the Conservatives were not, as Labour alleged, planning to abolish controls at a stroke. On the contrary, a number of surviving controls inherited by the incoming Conservative government of 1951 were retained: building controls continued until 1955 and coal rationing until 1958.

The second area of common ground lay outside party politics proper, in the 'corporate state' created by the war. Between the wars successive Conservative governments had operated a double standard in relation to industry, keeping close contact with industrialists but seeking to exclude the trade unions from consultation. After 1940 the trade union leaders were recruited to Whitehall. But it did not of course follow that now the employers were excluded. On the contrary, the war established a tripartite system in which the Federation of British Industries, the TUC and the civil service collaborated through a dense network of advisory committees. The archetypal body in this respect, set up by Ernest Bevin in May 1940, was the Joint Consultative Committee of the Ministry of Labour, with its seven industrialists nominated by

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the British Employers' Confederation (the twin body of the FBI), and seven industrialists nominated by the TUC. In a sense, therefore, the battle between the parties in 1945 was very much a ritual conflict representing the historic clash of capital and labour in years gone by. Behind the rhetorical class war there loomed a new industrial constitution in which both parties had a vested interest. There were strong anti-capitalist sentiments in the Labour party of 1945. But from the point of view of Attlee's Cabinet, management of the economy depended heavily upon the co-operation of businessmen. While it lasted, the system of controls was administered largely by men drawn from the private sector. Investment, for example, was controlled by a Capital Issues Committee which consisted of seven bankers, stockbrokers and industrialists. The employees of a single firm, Unilever, filled ninety posts in the Ministry of Food. But quite apart from the formal structure of controls, Labour depended upon the voluntary co-operation of industrialists. Thus in 1948 the Federation of Industries successfully enjoined on its members a policy of dividend restraint which, matched by wage restraint on the part of the TUC, lasted until 1950. During the Second World War, co-operation was the primary ingredient of the relations between capital and labour, and the co-operation was maintained into the post-war world. Nor was this state of relative harmony confined to the higher regions of industrial and state bureaucracy. The war initiated greater co-operation at shop-floor level, and this too survived the outbreak of peace.

Finally, the third of the new elements of consensus introduced during the war: Keynesian economics. Kinglsey Wood's budget of 1941 was the first budget to be based on Keynesian techniques of income analysis. From 1941 to 1948 the Keynesian 'revolution' was not of great importance, for the economy was managed primarily though physical rather than financial and fiscal controls. But Keynes and his disciples had penetrated Whitehall and secured some recognition for their objectives in the employment white paper of 1944. Through this document the coalition committed itself and its component parties to "the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war." The progress of Keynesianism into the bloodstream of politics was slow, and was only just beginning in 1945. But the war had brought about the first injection, and in the long run Keynesian doctrines were to prove beautifully adaptable to the minds of both revisionist Labour and moderate Conservative politicians. For Labour revisionists, Keynesianism promised to deliver many of the benefits of socialism--above all, full employment--while dispensing with the cumbrous and unpopular mechanism of nationalization. For Conservatives, it served as a prophylactic against socialism, as a means to expansion of profits in the private sector, and as a popular formula for government. For both sides Keynesianism promised a higher standard of living without the need to resort to class conflict. Like all economic doctrines it claimed a scientific base and was proclaimed in its heyday as a revealed truth which all men of goodwill must follow. Only in recent years have we been able to realize the extent to which Keynesianism was a precarious theory sustained by circumstances rather than its inherent validity.

5. The Patriotism of Labour

At the beginning of this essay it was argued that the war brought about a partial fusion or exchange of values between Right and Left. The Conservatives absorbed new standards of social welfare; Labour, new attitudes in defence and foreign affairs. In pursuing the second half of this equation it is as well to observe that no party is a monolith, least of all the Labour party, which Harold Wilson has well described as a 'broad church'. Both during and after the Second World War there were left-wingers who rejected or at any rate deviated markedly from the political consensus defined here. But we are entitled for present purposes to identify the party

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with the policies of the parliamentary leaders and the National Executive Committee.

The Second World War accelerated a reorientation of Labour attitudes towards defence and foreign affairs which began in the mid-1930s. The extent of the change can be simply illustrated. When the National government began to rearm in 1934, Labour opposed the decision, maintaining that all arguments ought to be pooled under the international control of the League of Nations. But after 1945 an inner ring of Attlee's Cabinet decided in secret to build an independent British nuclear deterrent. Admittedly this was a decision concealed from Parliament and party alike, but parallel changes of heart were openly expressed. In 1919 the Labour party had urged the immediate abolition of conscription, and still opposed it in 1939. In 1947 the party accepted a twelve-month period of conscription, later extended to two years. After six years of Labour government, Britain in 1951 had a higher per capita expenditure on defence than the United States.

How is the transition in Labour attitudes to be explained? It is often the case that ideas and assumptions are proved inadequate by the march of events. The early Labour party was deeply utopian in belief and its subsequent history was partly a study in the bankruptcy of rational idealism. The Slump exposed the bankruptcy of Ramsay MacDonald's analysis of domestic affairs. The Nazi revolution undermined Labour's theories of international relations, which rested broadly on the assumption that capitalism was the root of war and international conflict. This diagnosis derived originally from the radical critique of imperialism developed by Hobson and Brailsford before 1914, and the attack on secret diplomacy and the balance of power launched by the Union of Democratic Control during the First World War. According to the radical thesis, the causes of war were economic and lay in the competition between rival oligarchies for trade and investment: traditional diplomacy was the accomplice of plutocratic interests. The peoples of the world, on the other hand, were supposed to have a vested interest in peace and international co-operation. After 1931, as quasi-marxist ideas began to influence the party, the analysis was sharpened. Bevin, who is generally depicted as a hardheaded 'realist', told the Labour party conference in May 1939 that one of the greatest sources of international disorder had been the financial policy of the City of London. "I am anxious", he declared, "to prevent this movement fighting for the preservation of the Paris Bourse, the London Stock Exchange, the Amsterdam Exchange, and Wall Street."5 In the 1930s the consequence of Labour's analysis was a highly paradoxical contrast between the foreign and defence policies of government and opposition. Labour urged the government to organize international cooperation to halt aggression through the machinery of the League of Nations: they claimed to be the party of world order. But simultaneously they resisted until late in the day plans for rearmament. The government, on the other hand, pressed on with rearmament but rejected the role of international policeman on the grounds that the League of Nations would either fail or precipitate a general war. Both parties aimed at international appeasement: but Labour espoused grandiose utopian methods of obtaining it, while the government opted for piecemeal pressure and negotiation.

The impact of the war on Labour's international outlook is the subject of Trevor Burridge's book, British Labour and Hitler's War. He argues that the war brought out in the main body of the Labour movement a latent realism or commitment to national interests and the balance of power. This was reinforced by the experience of Labour leaders in wartime government. The notion that Labour's role in the Coalition was confined to the home front is, he points out, incorrect. Labour ministers from 1943 onwards took part in the discussion and formulation of international policy and were well aware of the advice of the foreign Office and

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the Chiefs of Staff. In September 1939 Labour was united by the belief that the enemy was not Germany or the German people, but Nazism, and this distinction remained 'a cardinal tenet of all official Labour pronouncements on the war until 1943, and was never relinquished by the Left wing.' But this residual optimism was purged by the ordeal of total war. By 1943 Attlee was confiding to Dalton that he had been mistaken about the Versailles Treaty: it had been too soft, not too hard on the Germans, and this time Germany must be stripped of her industry and rendered incapable of starting another war.

Disillusion with the German people was accompanied by a greater sense of realpolitik in world affairs. In the early 1930s Labour had preached against blocs, alliances and the theory of military deterrence. By the end of the decade Labour had so adapted its concept of the League as to convert it into a Churchillian grand alliance, armed to the teeth. The Second World War vindicated both the theory of the balance of power and the necessity of the use of force. The perpetuation of the wartime alliance was understood by 1945 as the only guarantee against the resurgence of Germany. From this position it was but a short step to the maintenance of the balance against the Soviet Union. In 1920 Bevin had been ready to organize the Councils of Action to prevent a war with Russia over Poland. In 1948 he was ready to organize NATO to defend western Europe against Russia. In the 1930s Aneurin Bevan had eloquently opposed rearmament. But in 1940 he wrote lyrically of the Battle of Britain fighter pilots in the pages of Tribune, and in 1948 was ready to challenge the Russian blockade of west Berlin by sending through a land force convoyed by tanks.

The Labour party between the wars, in spite of two brief periods of office, felt and behaved like outsiders in a country that belonged to someone else. The war did a great deal to overcome this sense of alienation. Faced with the prospect of Nazism, Labour recognized that they too had a profound vested interest in the maintenance of British society. Even Chamberlain's Britain, Orwell concluded, was worth fighting for. The active participation of intellectuals and trade unionists in the war effort put an end to a generation of frustration and stimulated a sense of patriotism. Two illustrations, one from the intelligentsia and one from industrial Britain, will serve to bear this judgment out.

One of the Labour party's rising young economists in the 1930s was Evan Durbin. The son of a Baptist minister, Durbin belonged to the radical nonconformist tradition, and his father had been a pacifist in the First World War. In 1942 Durbin wrote the following passage of candid self-criticism:

When I was a young man I did not realise the essential nature of courage and discipline. It appeared to me then that the military virtues were overrated and that the ordered drill of the barrack square was repulsive, and faintly absurd. I hated the harsh and melancholy note of the bugle. I thought personal liberty and the free mind (priceless possessions) were endangered by the strengthening of our armed forces and the growth of order.

But where should we be now if mine had been the prevailing opinion of the nation? What would have happened to my personal liberty if we had stripped ourselves of weapons and cultivated exclusively the graces of civilisation? The answer is obvious--cultured intellectuals and members of pacifist societies would have been scrubbing out latrines in concentration camps and the mass of the people would be labouring under an intolerable slavery.

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We are still free because some of us are more sensible than myself. The pacifist continues to speak in pulpit and market-place because the strong ships of the Royal Navy patrol the Straits of Dover and our merchant seamen drown in the Atlantic approaches. The cultured intellectual is able to make his quiet (though necessary) contribution to winning the war in the offices of Whitehall because of handful of Air Force pilots are soaring into battle above the clouds of Kent and Sussex, Tobruk and Asmara, Malta and Cyprus.6

A glance at the writings of Strachey, Orwell or even Kingsley Martin would reveal a similar process of re-education.

One of the great symbols of the divided society of the pre-war years was the town of Jarrow, celebrated for the march of its unemployed workers to London in 1936. In February 1978 BBC TV presented a documentary, Kelly, which displays another aspect of the history of Tyneside. With the coming of rearmament the local shipyards were once again set to work, and among the ships they built was the warship Kelly, commanded by Lord Louis Mountbatten. The launching of the Kelly was a great event, a symbol of the renewal of Tyneside. In 1940 the Kelly in a heroic episode was almost sunk but managed to limp home to be greeted by cheering crowds on the banks of the Tyne. Mountbatten, therefore, became something of a Tyneside hero; and the legend of Jarrow is matched locally by the legend of the Kelly. The exploits of one particular warship are of course exceptional, but the episode demonstrates a connection between rearmament, full employment, and patriotism, which must surely have coloured the outlook of trade union leaders after, as well as during the Second World War.

6. The Post-War Legacy

To a remarkable extent the wartime synthesis of patriotism and social reform survived into the peace and formed the basis of a post-war era of relative tranquility and agreement. There were storms over the nationalization of steel, Suez, and (within the Labour party), the H- Bomb. But there remained the strong bipartisan pillars of the welfare state, the managed economy, and NATO. If we inquire why the post-war consensus lasted so long, the answers are not far to seek. The Second World War, unlike the First, was followed by an era of full employment and economic growth which sustained good industrial relations and the politics of social compromise. Then again, the Second World War, unlike the First, was almost immediately followed by a second external crisis in Europe as the Cold War tightened its grip. The pressure for national unity was sustained by Stalin. Finally, there was a common conviction among political leaders that the inter-war years were a period of failure which must not be repeated: there must be no second Jarrow march and no second Munich, no more League utopianism and no more pacificism. The Slump and the recurrence of war were mighty shocks which enforced a more searching inquiry into the ills of the world than had been attempted after 1914.

The era of consensus is now past in Britain, replaced by an era of militant pressure- group politics in which governments themselves are forced to take tough and unpopular decisions which swell the volume of discontent. The Second World War, therefore, has become the subject of nostalgia, a nostalgia which focuses upon a warm spirit of community at a time when social differences were comical rather than tragic. The Second World War is a social myth in the true sense of a story which embodies a genuine collective experience. The generation which lived through the war years has always in mind the reference point of wartime

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community. Thus both Michael Foot and Margaret Thatcher have sought to evoke, from their different angles, the spirit of 1940. There is, therefore, considerable point in the kind of anecdotal social history, spurned by sociologists, which dwells on Churchill's V-sign, 'Dad's Army', Vera Lynn and NAAFI canteens. For people of many different backgrounds, there are common memories encapsulated in many a hoary yarn. The British now live in a new set of conditions and it is of course impossible to put the clock back. In any case who would want to do so when the price would be another Hitler? But the myth of community in the Second World War is itself evidence in support of this essay. The social and political history of Britain is not merely about the competition of various groups for wealth and power. It is about the cohesion and stability of a community. The Second World War was a period of modest working class advance, consolidated by the post-war Labour government. But this advance was a part of a wider process which established for a generation a greater degree of social harmony and political consensus.

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Transcribed and formatted by Patrick Clancey, HyperWar Foundation