Labour’s 1945 landslide

(1945 Labour Party landslide: an abridged versionappeared in The Socialist)

MANY OLDER workers still remember the 1945-51 Labour government in
Britain – memories of its reforms help maintain a degree of support for
the Labour Party. My personal experience shows why.

Keith Dickinson

Towards the end of World War Two, the doctor told my mother – out of
my ear shot – that "it is only a question of time before your son will
die from his asthma" as she paid him his usual five shillings (25p) for
his visit to see me at our house.

Only a year or so later the first majority Labour government, elected
in 1945, introduced the National Health Service (NHS). People who
remember the huge difference it made passed the story on to their
families, helping to maintain support, even for a Blair government that
has supervised the de facto privatisation of the NHS.

Medicines, treatment, home visits, and hospital visits all became
free at the point of need. In my own working-class family, I could now
receive the latest medicines. I’d missed two-thirds of my earlier
education, but in my final eighteen months I could participate fully,
even in sports activities, until I left school.

The Labour government had been elected as an expression of the
working class’ anger and determination. They had just fought the war on
the battlefields and on the home front and were determined that "never
again" would they or their children go through that horror.

No return to pre-war poverty

Neither did they want to return to pre-war poverty and struggle to
survive. These had created the conditions for the rise of fascism in
Europe, and as they saw it the consequent world war.

Workers blamed capitalism and its direct representatives, especially
prime minister Winston Churchill, portrayed in the media as the man who
won the war, and our "natural" next prime minister.

Even the Labour leaders were guilty of this and Nye Bevan the
ex-miner and left wing MP for Ebbw Vale had to warn a Labour meeting in
Cardiff just before the election, "against the danger of building
[Churchill] up to more than life-size by uncritical hero-worship."

On 26 July, three weeks after the election, to let the soldiers’
votes be counted, it was announced that Labour had won 393 seats with
the remains of the Independent Labour Party winning three and the left
Commonwealth Party one. This was a massive 180-seat majority over the
Tories and their allies.

They won as a result of the Labour Party’s most radical programme
ever and despite the weak leadership who were as shocked as anyone at
the result. Victory was due to Labour’s rank and file members, workers
and soldiers, who reflected the mood nationally. That programme had been
fought for and won at the Labour Party conference in December 1944 (see
separate article).

Despite what Manny Shinwell MP called "Labour’s restrained
manifesto", Churchill attacked Labour’s conference policies on
nationalisation and socialism. His broadcast on 4 June said: "No
socialist system could be run without political police; a fully
socialist programme would fall back on some form of Gestapo".

Vicious campaign

This gave the go ahead to the media and the more rabid Tory members
to conduct a vicious campaign. But as Shinwell said in his
autobiography: "for the workers who read of the (conference) resolution
this seemed to indicate that the evils of unrestricted private
enterprise, which most believed was the source of all their problems,
would be banished if Labour were given a mandate". He doesn’t say that
he advised against the resolution!

The capitalist class had kept making their profits during the war,
exploiting even more the workers’ sacrifices for the "war effort" and
women workers who’d been taken into the factories. Labour ministers in
the coalition government and trade union leaders led vicious attacks on
workers who protested. They supported the imprisonment of Trotskyists
(the only left party supporting those workers’ struggles in that
period).

The war effort greatly increased the workers’ consciousness of their
class and their strength in united action. The government nationalised
coal, oil, gas, electricity, transport, the Bank of England and later
iron and steel – most of them bankrupt industries and all of them vital
services needed to reconstruct capitalist society. And these reforms
were, over a long period, taken away.

From the start, these nationalisations deliberately gave the workers
no say or control. On the contrary they made representatives of the old
private owners into chairmen of the nationalised industries’ boards.

In fact, the 20% of the economy that was nationalised became cheap
services and suppliers to the 80% which they left in private hands. Only
the NHS has prolonged working-class memories of the good things about
Labour. It has required a Tory leadership with a New Labour label to
privatise that.

Nye Bevan, the most left-wing of Labour’s 1945 leadership, was given
the Ministry of Health to organise, hoping he’d take the flak from any
opposition from the consultants and doctors’ organisations who, Bevan
says, had to have their mouths stuffed with gold to get them to tolerate
the NHS. The drugs and health supply industries campaigned against
nationalisation, and went on to make their billions.

Bevan

Michael Foot’s biography of Bevan says he stood by his Marxist
training in the Welsh valleys, and, "If the currents of history were on
his side, the lack of seamanship in their captain and his mates might
still be remedied. Nor did he ever underrate the difficulties of
achieving a socialist revolution by democratic means. No one had truly
attempted the task before. If it could be accomplished without
bloodshed, what a boon it would be, not only for Britain, but for all
mankind!"

Of course Foot obscures the point that Lenin’s Russian revolution –
28 years earlier – had been democratic. Only the forces of the
counter-revolution, backed by the intervention of British imperialism
with 21 other capitalist armies created the bloodshed.

Nonetheless in 1945 there was a revolutionary mood among Britain’s
workers and its pressure was even reflected in parliament. On the first
day of the new parliament Labour MPs celebrated by singing the socialist
anthem, the ‘Red Flag’.

But for all the advances in the welfare state from this government,
capitalism still ruled in Britain and most of the reforms won were
snatched back over time by the ruling class. Generations of workers have
paid the price for this failure.

The next time such a radical mood arrives, the workers’ movement will
need to be armed with the ideas and the leadership to successfully
"seize the time." The building of a new mass workers’ party with a clear
thread of Marxist understanding running throughout the ranks and the
leadership will lay the basis for such a movement.