Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (50 page)

It was, in oratorical terms, one of his great speeches. ‘We have to exercise our imaginations as to what we can do further,’ he declared. ‘Indeed, we have to restate the relationship between the public and the private sector.’ But as to precisely
how
that relationship was to be recast, Bevan was silent, beyond placing his faith in ‘all the essential instruments of planning’ being ‘in the hands of the state’. Indeed, he even conceded that ‘we shall have for a very long time the light cavalry of private, competitive industry’. The verdict of John Campbell, Bevan’s most insightful biographer, is harsh but compelling: ‘The truth was that Labour was approaching a crossroads. While fiercely contemptuous of those like Morrison who wanted merely to “consolidate” what had already been achieved, Bevan could see the way ahead, after steel, only in generalities.’ His speech then took refuge in socialism’s spiritual uplands. ‘The language of priorities,’ he famously insisted, ‘is the religion of Socialism. We have accepted over the last four years that the first claims upon the national product shall be decided nationally and they have been those of the women, the children and the old people. What is that except using economic planning in order to serve a moral purpose?’ He finished with a peroration in which he called on ‘this great movement’ to ‘raise its head high and look at the stars’:

We have become so preoccupied with documents and papers that we sometimes fail to realise where we are going. These are merely the prosaic instruments of a masterly design. These are merely the bits and pieces we are fitting into the great structure, and I am convinced that, given another period of office, we shall not only materially improve the well-being of Great Britain but we shall have established a British society of which Britons everywhere can be proud and which will be an example to the rest of mankind.

Campbell’s reading of the passage is again devastating. ‘Bevan was happy,’ he argues, ‘so long as he thought the
direction
was right and was satisfied that socialist
principles
were still intact.’ The upshot, he adds, was that ‘the debate within the party over the next two years – of which he was increasingly the storm centre – revolved less around issues in their own right than around issues as symbols: symbols of priorities.’
¹⁶

For all the applause ringing in Bevan’s ears, Blackpool confirmed that the consolidators had won – a victory further strengthened when Morrison in tandem with other senior ministers subsequently managed to dilute the commitment to nationalise industrial and life assurance, so that it instead became a ‘mutualisation’ proposal, in effect a mechanism by which a proportion of insurance funds could be compulsorily put into government securities. By the time that compromise had been accepted by the party’s executive, the insurance industry, led by the Prudential, had launched a fierce campaign against any state involvement, and it is unlikely that the watering down did much to allay stoked-up fears.

The most memorable anti-nationalisation campaign, however, was that waged by the sugar monopoly Tate & Lyle. An animated cartoon character, ‘Mr Cube’, was created in July 1949; for the rest of the year and into 1950 the little man seemed to be everywhere. Daily he was to be seen on sugar packages, on ration-book holders (given away free to housewives) and on Tate & Lyle delivery trucks, while intensive advertising in the press was supplemented by shopkeepers handing out millions of leaflets to customers. ‘Take the S out of State,’ was one of Mr Cube’s easy-to-grasp slogans, ‘Tate not State!’ another. The campaign even enlisted the services of Richard Dimbleby, the broadcaster who was well on his way to becoming a national institution. Visiting the company’s refinery at Plaistow ‘with an open mind and an open mike’, he found a strong ‘family spirit’ among the workforce and an ‘astonishingly unanimous’ desire to ‘stay as we are’. The interviews he conducted were made available on no fewer than four million 12-inch records. Altogether, it was an astonishingly effective, American-style campaign, which the government was quite unable to counter.

But arguably, the whole question of nationalisation stood proxy for something larger: a creeping sense that organisations were getting too big, too remote and too bureaucratic. Writing in a mass-circulation Sunday paper in January 1949, the best-known Labour-supporting public intellectual, J. B. Priestley, asserted that irrespective of which party was in power, ‘the area of our lives under our own control is shrinking rapidly’ and that ‘politicians and senior civil servants are beginning to decide how the rest of us shall live’. There was a rapid rebuttal from Michael Foot, who in the Labour left’s house magazine,
Tribune
, accused Priestley of being the ‘High Priest of the new defeatist cult’. Foot did not deny that ‘bigness is an enemy’, nor that ‘once the advantages of some centralised planning have been secured or once a private monopoly has been transferred to public ownership, the next step must be to establish a wider and more democratic diffusion of responsibility’, but he was insistent that post-1945 British socialism was imparting a ‘new meaning’ to democracy itself:

All over Britain the housing programme is being directed and organised by local councillors elected by their fellow citizens. Most of these, together with the chairmen of finance committees and the rest are ordinary men and women, probably most of them working-class. Never in municipal history were local councils charged with such a tremendous responsibility. Never were the trade unions called upon to play a bigger role in the nation’s economy.

In essence, Priestley was suffering from ‘the nihilism of the intellectual who will not deign to join the strivings of the common people’.
¹⁷

On Michael Young, head of research at the Labour Party and principal author of the 1945 manifesto, it was starting to dawn that it was the very task of public-minded intellectuals to understand the lives and aspirations of ‘the common people’.
Small Man, Big World
was the haunting title of his pamphlet published in the winter of 1948/9. After a homely opening paragraph describing a family working together as they put up and decorate their Christmas tree, he set out his guiding preoccupations:

There is no doubt that democracy can most easily flourish in the family and in other small groups built to the scale of the individual. All the members there meet face to face; if a decision has to be made, all can have a direct and personal part in making it, and all can perceive the results of their decisions.

Democracy therefore seems to require smallness. But efficiency, promoted by the growth of science, often requires bigness. This is the great dilemma of modern society . . .

There is no salvation in going back to some misty past in which the small man lived in a small world, no salvation in putting multi-coloured maypoles in every city square or even substituting William Morris for the Morris car. Destroying bigness would not only reduce the standard of living; it would also destroy democracy . . .

But higher efficiency has not been gained without social cost . . . In the small group – in the family, amongst friends at work or in the pub, in the little ships of the Navy – the person has a feeling of comradeship and a sense of belonging: the individual matters and his self-respect is supported by the respect of his fellows. But in the large group the individual is only too likely to be and to feel powerless and insignificant.

How can the individual be made to matter more?

The bulk of the pamphlet then offered some rather mechanistic ways – befitting a party publication, albeit for discussion purposes – in which the right kind of democratic leadership could be secured, closer two-way communication between those at the bottom and those at the top could be established, and the size of organisations could be reduced without harming efficiency.

Towards the end, after duly lauding industrial democracy, ‘the small New Towns which the Labour Government has bravely launched’, community associations, and parish and neighbourhood councils, Young extolled the way in which ‘some of the social scientists, with the psychologists in the lead, are analysing from a new standpoint the complex motives of man’ – and in the process revealing man’s deep need, whatever his aggressive impulses, ‘to love, or contribute to the good of others, and to be loved, or receive the affection and respect of others’. Fortunately, he reflected, ‘the strength of democracy is that it can so fully satisfy these human needs’. Much more research was needed (‘research based on field work in the social sciences is every bit as – in my personal view much more – important than research in the natural sciences’), but the incentive was that ‘this new knowledge will enrich socialism as it will enrich the new society which socialists are making’:

British socialists have been broadly of two kinds – the Fabians with their emphasis on efficiency and social justice, and their devotion to facts; and the idealistic socialists, inspired by such men as Robert Owen and William Morris, with their emphasis on the dignity of man and of labour. The time is coming when the two strands can blend. If the Fabians are ready to follow the facts – the new knowledge about human relations which the social scientists are producing – they may find they are led to conclusions which differ little from those of the socialist idealists. If the latter are ready to restrain their more impractical ideas and compromise with efficiency, idealism need not lead to economic collapse and democratic disaster but to a society, built on the model of the family, which is not only more comradely but more efficient. In this new society human nature itself will increase its stature and the small man at last come into his own.

Fieldwork, the family, the small man: a life-change was beckoning.

‘A pamphlet very much off the beaten track’ was
Tribune
’s verdict, though the magazine conceded that ‘the questions he raises and seeks to answer respond perhaps more directly to the worries of the rank-and-file of the Labour movement than the apparently more practical issues of day-to-day policy’. How had Young reached this point in his thinking? No doubt he had been much struck by the large gap that had seemingly opened up between rulers and ruled since the 1945 election, a gap symbolised in many eyes by the perceived failure of nationalisation to usher in a new set of social relations. But he was also perhaps influenced by his mentor, Leonard Elmhirst, cofounder (with his rich American wife Dorothy) of Dartington Hall, the progressive school near Totnes which Young himself had attended. ‘Remember,’ Elmhirst wrote to him in July 1948, ‘that the social sciences is only another term for political dynamite, because psychology and economics must drive right at the heart of human affairs and will inevitably upset any realisation of the immediate needs of party politicians.’ Young himself later that year described economics to Elmhirst as being ‘to social psychology like hacksaw surgery to chemotherapy’.

He was also about to forge a new, fruitful alliance. ‘Did you see a note about Michael Young in yesterday’s
Observer
?’ Peter Willmott, a mature student at Ruskin College, Oxford, wrote in early 1949 to his wife Phyllis in London. ‘He seems a good chap, right on the line, and I have thought that I might write to him.’ Willmott, whose personal background was far less easy than Young’s, got hold of the pamphlet, liked it, and over a pub lunch in early summer the two men clicked so well that Willmott joined Young in Labour’s research department that autumn. ‘Tall and hollow-chested, bony-limbed and flaxen-haired, with clean-cut jaw, pale-blue eyes and a pale, damp face, he seemed as he stood there to be oblivious to his surroundings’ is how Phyllis Willmott (née Noble) has vividly described her first encounter with Young, at a party where uncharacteristically he was ‘roaring drunk’. It was not long before she came to realise that he was almost invariably ‘diffident and reserved to the point of inhibition when talking about himself’ – but, crucially, ‘showed a keen interest in everything around him (including people) that was at once striking and flattering’.

If Young was on a journey moving inexorably away from party politics, one Oxford economist was poised to go the other way. Born in 1918, educated at Highgate School and Oxford, and a protégé of one of Attlee’s senior ministers, Hugh Dalton, the notably handsome, intelligent and (when he wanted to be) charming Anthony Crosland was by 1949 actively looking for a parliamentary seat. That September, about the time he was adopted as Labour candidate for South Gloucestershire (which fortunately included Bristol’s northern suburbs), he reflected in his diary on how for all the good that Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their fellow Fabians had once done, especially in terms of stimulating state action to counteract economic inequality, it was high time that the labour movement outgrew the puritanism and priggishness of their latter-day followers:

I want more, not less, ‘spooning in the Parks of Recreation & Rest’, more abortion, more freedom & hilarity in every way: abstinence is not a good foundation for Socialism, & the almost unnatural normality of the Webbs, & their indifference to emotional & physical pleasures, really would, if universally influential, make the Socialist State into the dull functional nightmare wh. many fear.