3 - The Influence of Affluence: The Road to 1979

Summary

The war in Europe ended on 7 May 1945, when Germany surrendered to the Allied forces. Less than three months later, the Labour Party won the British general election with a huge majority of 146 seats. If ever a day can be chosen as a turning point in British working-class history, 26 July 1945 must be a prime candidate. After the deprivations of the 1930s and the sacrifices of the war, a people's government had at last been elected with the power to implement socialist reforms. The result seemed in one way to be a huge surprise. The Tories, after all, were headed by the great war leader Winston Churchill – surely he would secure the patriotic vote? But the Second World War was really two wars with two aims: a military campaign to defeat fascism; and a political and social campaign to eradicate poverty and the worst forms of social inequality. The Tories were too closely associated in the people's memory with the social horrors of the 1930s for them to be trusted with the job of postwar reconstruction. The war had also familiarized people with the experience of a powerful state, so there was no widespread fear of centralized economic and social planning. Indeed, the election signalled a determination by the British people to challenge decisively the destructive power of laissez-faire capitalism. The year 1945 marked a new beginning in the social and political history of Britain, but it was also the culmination of a longer tradition of radical demands for redistribution that had its roots as far back as the second part of Tom Paine's The Rights of Man (1792). In the nineteenth century, the Chartist dream was that universal suffrage would create a government that would truly represent the common person against the interests of the élite minority. But despite the gradual introduction of mass democracy into the British political system, a stubborn streak of conservatism in the British working class meant that neither of the first two Labour governments (1924, 1929–31) had secured parliamentary majorities, and a reactionary coalition government ruled Britain from 1931 to the end of the war. Now all that had changed.