Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (84 page)

That autumn, at another Fabian conference on ‘Problems Ahead’, Crosland offered his critique of Young’s earlier analysis. The two men were friends, but this did not stop Crosland speaking somewhat derisively about Young’s ‘ideas of groups of extroverts (in shorts) indulging in jolly bouts of brotherly love over glasses of milk’. Overall, though, he fully endorsed Young’s thrust that Labour needed to abandon its overly statist ways and instead rediscover the ‘moral-cultural-emotional appeal of the William Morris tradition’, a tradition that was ‘still a perfectly effective Socialist dynamic’. Crosland’s mentor, meanwhile, continued to gaze watchfully as well as lovingly upon his protégé. ‘Am thinking of Tony, with all his youth and beauty and gaiety and charm and energy and social success and good brains . . . & with his feet on the road of political success now, if he survives to middle age – I weep,’ the by now veteran Labour politician Hugh Dalton confided to his diary soon afterwards. ‘May he live to reap all the harvest of happiness and achievement which his gifts deserve!’
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If there was an equivalent of Crosland in the much larger Tory intake of 1950, it was probably Iain Macleod. Both men were cerebral, charismatic and socially liberal; they had a similarly quixotic, highhanded streak in their respective temperaments; and each was capable of engendering great loyalty from some colleagues, fierce dislike from others. For Macleod, as the son of a Scottish doctor who practised in Yorkshire, it was natural that the social services should become his formative parliamentary speciality. In his maiden speech in March, focusing largely on NHS spending, he sought to identify where Labour’s welfare state had taken a wrong turn:

Today the conception of a minimum standard which held the field of political thought for so long, and in my view should hold it still, is disappearing in favour of an average standard. To an average standard, the old-fashioned virtues of thrift, industry and ability become irrelevant. The social services today have become a weapon of financial and not of social policy. This may sound Irish, but it is both true and tragic that, in a scheme where everyone has priority, it follows that no one has priority.

Macleod was, in other words, questioning the principle of universalism and instead advocating what would become known as ‘selectivity’, or ‘targeting’.

Later in 1950, he was one of the principal authors and co-editors of a substantial pamphlet called
One Nation: A Tory Approach to Social
Problems
, according to the title page jointly written by nine new MPs (including Enoch Powell and Edward Heath, though the latter probably did not contribute significantly). Despite its consensual, nonadversarial title, with its deliberate nod to Disraeli, the pamphlet had a surprisingly hard edge, especially given the probable imminence of the next general election. The old, pre-1945 themes of sound finance, voluntarism, charity, efficiency and self-reliance were all invoked; it was claimed that ‘the social well-being of the nation’ had ‘already been endangered by the redistribution of wealth’; and a key criterion ‘governing the size of the social services budget’ was that ‘the good it does must outweigh the burden which it places on the individual and on industry’.
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The pamphlet, published in October, made a considerable impact, and its authors soon established the One Nation Group as a regular dining club. Such developments were a clear indication that not all the young political talent was now going to Labour; they also suggested that the nature of the post-war welfare state was not yet set in stone.

To the man who in 1950 was poised to emerge, even more than Bevan, as the conscience of this new dispensation, the concept of selectivity was anathema. That spring saw the publication of
Problems of
Social Policy
by Richard Titmuss – 42, no academic qualifications and still a relatively little-known figure. The book, an account of the social services during the war, transformed Titmuss’s life. Its most influential cheerleader was the doyen of British ethical socialists, R. H. Tawney, who in the course of an ultra-admiring three-page review in the
New
Statesman
, with the author’s name misspelled throughout, noted how ‘a recurrent theme’ was ‘the gradual, un-premeditated, emergence from a morass of obsolescent cant of new conceptions of the social contract’. Within months, Titmuss was appointed to the LSE’s first chair in Social Administration, the position he would occupy for the rest of his life.

Over the years, there have been many attempts (perhaps stimulated by the absence of a full-length biography) to characterise Titmuss’s beliefs and outlook. According to A. H. Halsey, ‘his socialism was as English as his patriotism, ethical and non-Marxist, insisting that capitalism was not only economically but socially wasteful, in failing to harness individual altruism to the common good’; Alan Deacon has emphasised Titmuss’s essentially moralistic conviction that only if social services were universal would they ‘not only redistribute resources but do so in a manner which itself fostered a sense of mutual responsibility’; and Hilary Rose has argued that for Titmuss the key people in bringing about ‘the good society’ – a society based on the values of equality and community – were to be the enlightened, altruistic middle classes, ‘with greatest hope being placed on those whose lives were expressed within public service, whether as officials or professionals’.

There was also fascination with Titmuss the person. One physical description, soon after his death in 1973, evoked an El Greco quality, with ‘his great eyes, emaciated face, long body and that indefinable air of what one could only call saintliness’. Yet like most saints, he was not a man altogether at ease with himself. ‘In discovering the huge disparities in life chances between those at the bottom and those at the top of the social scale, he was at the same time commenting on his own lack of fortune in not being born at the top,’ his daughter, the feminist writer Ann Oakley, has reflected. ‘Awareness of class was central to his intellectual perception of society. But it was also constantly felt as an aspect of his own life.’ Put another way, Clark’s Commercial College, where he had learnt book-keeping at the age of 15, was very different from Dartington (Young) or Highgate (Crosland) or Fettes (Macleod). Unsurprisingly, as Oakley added about Titmuss’s far from straightforward relationship with the British establishment, ‘you didn’t have to be a detective to discern my father’s concealed adulation of certain unsocialist institutions’.
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The Attlee government had two fundamental foreign-policy decisions to take in the summer of 1950. The first concerned Europe. On 9 May the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, publicly unveiled his plan – largely the work of Jean Monnet – for a supranational body under which member states would pool their production of coal and steel. By early June it was clear that Britain was unwilling to participate in what would become in due course the European Coal and Steel Community – the start of ‘Europe’ as an economic-cum-political project, with the Schuman Plan billed from the outset as ‘a first step in the direction of European federation’. Ernest Bevin was still Foreign Secretary; his biographer Alan Bullock has emphasised that his negative response was essentially determined by ‘practical arguments such as Western Europe’s dependence on American support’ and ‘the importance to Britain of her position as a world trading power, and as the centre of the Commonwealth’.

It was not a decision with which most of the British political class were inclined to quarrel. Although Edward Heath made a passionate maiden speech arguing that the European cause was one where Britain needed ‘to be in at the formative stages so that our influence could be brought to bear’, a much more typical Tory attitude was that of Major Harry Legge-Bourke: ‘I do not believe that common interests or even common fears are enough; there must also be common sympathies and common characteristics. Whilst those exist in the United Kingdom and in the United States, they do not exist in Europe.’ Gut instincts were similar on the Labour benches, where (to his subsequent mortification) a young Roy Jenkins voted against British participation. Some weeks later, Mamaine Koestler was present at a notably cosmopolitan, intellectual dinner party where the line-up included her husband Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron and Arthur Schlesinger Jr, as well as two of the more cerebral Labour politicians, John Strachey and Richard Crossman:

Very lively discussion about the isolationist line of the Labour Government, and of the British in general. John and Dick defended this against everybody else; their line is that they’d be delighted to see France, Germany, Italy and Benelux getting together so long as Britain doesn’t have to be in, submitting to the authority of shady foreigners and having the welfare state corrupted by immoral inhabitants of non-socialist countries.
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The echo of ‘socialism in one country’ – the old Soviet battle cry – was unmistakable.

‘The press, on the whole, approved of the cautious reserve of the British reply,’ reported Mollie Panter-Downes in her
The New Yorker
‘Letter from London’ on 6 June; she might have cited the still inordinately powerful Beaverbrook papers, which were positively vitriolic about the French initiative (‘Let us say No, No, a thousand times No,’ screamed the
Sunday Express
). Nor was there any significant enthusiasm from the captains of industry, to judge by the cool response of the Federation of British Industries: with Britain’s share of world trade holding up well, there was no appetite for novel solutions to as yet unidentified economic decline. As for the attitude of the man in the street, Herbert Morrison’s reaction at the start of June, when told that the French were demanding to know the British position, arguably said it all: ‘It’s no good. We cannot do it; the Durham miners won’t wear it.’
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An impressionistic assessment no doubt; but the prevailing, deeply entrenched mixture of insularity and ‘Britain is best’ in society at large hardly suggests that Morrison and his colleagues were acting against the popular will.

The other major foreign-policy decision concerned Korea, after the tanks of Communist North Korea had crossed the 38th parallel on 25 June and proceeded to invade South Korea. The British reaction could hardly have been more instant: not only did Britain at once join with the United States in supporting the UN resolution condemning North Korea’s aggression, but within 48 hours the decision had been taken to place the British Pacific Fleet under American command, following President Truman’s offer of military aid to the South Koreans. Thereafter, as the Korean War unfolded (including serious Chinese involvement on the side of North Korea), the Anglo-American alliance gave – and was intended to give – every impression of being rock solid.

Such unflinching commitment to a policy of intervention, notwithstanding the undeniable absence of any direct British economic or strategic interest in Korea, inevitably had a profound impact on defence expenditure. As early as August, the three-year estimate for defence spending was increased from £2.3 billion to £3.6 billion, while in January 1951, under continuing American pressure, that figure was raised to £4.7 billion. ‘The Prime Minister’s defence statement yesterday displayed a greater sense of realism and urgency than the government’s critics had expected,’ the
Financial Times
grudgingly conceded after this second drastic hike. ‘It reflects a determination, at last, to match the vigour of the United States in defending Western security.’ The veteran American diplomat Paul Nitze was more generous some 40 years later. ‘You can call it hubris or you can call it courage,’ he told the historian Peter Hennessy. ‘I think we had much to admire the British for [for] what you could call hubris, but which I consider to be breathtaking courage.’

Why did the Attlee government make this huge and arguably irrational commitment? In part because of a mixture of unhappy memories of Labour and appeasement in the 1930s and the haunting fear – persistent since the late 1940s – of Soviet tanks rolling across Western Europe. ‘Mr Bevin does not believe that the Russians will venture on aggression against Europe if the European Powers show their determination to fight,’ the Foreign Secretary informed his ambassadors in August, ahead of the announcement that National Service was to be extended from 18 months to two years. Memories of appeasement were particularly sharp for Gaitskell, who succeeded Cripps at No. 11 in October and thereafter was primarily responsible for sanctioning, even encouraging, the massive rearmament programme. ‘The deep conviction which Hugh had formed in the Munich years played a dominating part in his mind,’ his close friend and fellow-minister Douglas Jay recalled. ‘He did not make the crude mistake of confusing Stalin or Mao with Hitler. But he did believe that military dictators were usually arbitrary and often expansionist.’ Accordingly, ‘he became convinced that, as in 1938–40, we must take some deliberate economic risks to defend basic freedoms.’
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