Family Britain, 1951-1957 (13 page)

Few were more committed to universalism than Richard Titmuss, who on the Third Programme the following month repudiated as ‘too simple a view’ the Macleod/Powell line that the social services existed only for a portion of the population, with the other portion putting in more than they took out. Rather:

Redistribution now takes place at some time or other over the life span of nearly everyone. Children put nothing in and take out in the form of education, subsidised milk, family allowances, income-tax rebates (if their parents are better off), medical care by doctors largely trained at the community’s expense, and so forth. As adults, people are constantly moving in and out of the territory of socially provided or subsidised services according to varying need and circumstances. In old age, as in childhood, most people take out more than they put in . . .

Without universalism, Titmuss stirringly concluded, ‘the social services would lose their citizenship quality which we found imperative in time of war’. Powell, who had written most of the pamphlet, took to the microphone in April:

The contention, in fact, is that participating in the benefits of the social services has come in the twentieth century to be a mark of membership of the community. Here we see the significance of the term ‘the social service state’, the conception that the very nature of the state is determined by the social services which it assures to its members.

This is, in the fullest and, if I may risk a paradox, the non-party, sense of the word, the
socialist
conception.

The logical fulfilment of such a conception would lead, declared Powell, to ‘the equalisation and elimination of private property’. The underlying question for the future was ‘whether we shall have “the social services” or “the social service state” ’.

It is easy in retrospect to underestimate Titmuss, the intellectual most closely associated with the post-war welfare state (the term itself in common usage by the early 1950s). For example, half a century before Vernon Bogdanor made the entirely persuasive retrospective point that ‘the success of the welfare state depended on a belief in the beneficence of those in power’, Titmuss (in his May 1951 inaugural lecture at the LSE, marking his appointment to London University’s new chair in Social Administration) warned emphatically about the dangers of professional interests within the social services – interests ‘resistant to social change, and sometimes resistant, therefore, to needed changes in the social services’. Or, as he strikingly put it right at the end of the lecture, ‘We shall not achieve a better balance between the needs of today and the resources of today by living out the destinies of tradition; by simply attending to the business of the State.’

Take indeed his address almost exactly a year later at the Jubilee Conference of the Institute of Hospital Administrators. There, to the probable discomfort of his audience, Titmuss’s approach was tough-minded, critical and, above all, looking at things from the patient’s point of view. Recent improvements (better food for patients and arrangements for parents to see their sick children) had come about not through ‘any ferment of self-examination in the hospitals themselves or from the professional ranks of nurses and doctors’, but instead through ‘pressures from without the hospital’; the increasing complexity of hospital administration was liable to lead to ‘excessive preoccupation with means’ and accordingly ‘the danger that the hospital may tend increasingly to be run in the interests of those working in and for the hospital rather than in the interests of the patients’; ‘advances in scientific medicine’, and ensuing division of labour, were making it ‘harder to treat the patient as a person’; and complaints like ‘No one told me anything,’ ‘Nobody asked me’ and ‘I don’t know’ exemplified the recurring theme of ‘the discourtesies of silence’. Almost his most damning observation was that ‘the practice of talking between doctors and nurses over their patients still goes on although it is now known that hearing is the last conscious function to disappear with anaesthesia’. Although cheering up his audience by applauding their motives – such things were ‘done unthinkingly by people who are devoted to their calling, working unselfishly and for long hours in the interests of the sick’ – Titmuss’s was altogether a coruscating analysis. A Liberal in his youth, he would never lose his deep attachment to the values of individual freedom and individual dignity, even as he inexorably moved into a more collectivist intellectual orbit.5 It would have been a happier story for Labour, and collectivism generally, if during the third quarter of the century it had been truer to liberal values and less trusting of the state and its appointed experts.

The debate about the post-war settlement briefly threatened to explode on 27 March 1952. That evening, as the Commons debated the relatively modest health charges now being added to those so controversially introduced by Hugh Gaitskell almost a year earlier, Gaitskell’s old foe, Aneurin Bevan, was in particularly vigorous form. Calling the NHS, still closely identified as his creation, ‘a very great experiment, one of the greatest experiments in human behaviour that the world has ever seen’, he condemned the Tories for their ‘mean-spirited attitude towards the social services’ and claimed that ‘the arms programme of Great Britain is now being made by the Conservative Government into an excuse to dismantle the Welfare State’. As it happened, the next speaker was Powell’s co-author, Macleod, who at once caught the chamber’s (including Churchill’s) attention by calling Bevan’s speech ‘vulgar, crude and intemperate’; he followed up with a highly personal, somewhat unfair, but nevertheless very effective attack on Bevan’s tortuous relationship with the whole question of prescription charges when he had been Minister of Health.

Yet although a great parliamentary performance, and one that was almost instantly mythologised, Macleod’s speech did not itself seek to stake out any new intellectual ground. There was, in the economist John Vaizey’s subsequent regretful words, ‘no critique of the basic concepts of Health Service finances, free treatment at point of service, a state monopoly of medical supplies, state employment of almost all doctors and nurses, and owning all the hospitals’. Not that anyone else was staking out such ground; for, as Vaizey added, surely correctly, the already ‘striking contrast’ with the health systems in America and Continental Europe was ‘not commented upon because nobody thought to do so’, and ‘nobody thought to do so, because in essence the National Health Service was a bipartisan invention, agreed upon and accepted by both parties’ – an invention that, whatever the rumbling disquiet over its costs, was ‘obviously immensely popular’. Less than six weeks after his joust with Bevan, Macleod was appointed Minister of Health. ‘He is shrewd, has a rapier-like brain, is ambitious and clear-minded,’ ‘Chips’ Channon had recently noted about the GP’s son from Yorkshire; this seasoned observer reckoned that the 38-year-old would ‘go far’, even though ‘he is bald and limps, and is unattractive, except for his old man’s smile’.6

Bevan himself by the spring of 1952 was more in the public eye than at any time since his high-profile resignation from the Attlee government a year earlier – a year during which there had emerged in the Parliamentary Labour Party a recognisable group of some three dozen ‘Bevanites’. The 26-year-old Anthony Wedgwood Benn was not among them – ‘particularly obnoxious do I find the complacent assumptions by the Bevanites that the ark of the socialist covenant resides with them’, he reflected in November 1951 – but they did include Barbara Castle and Harold Wilson as well as Richard Crossman. ‘The fact is,’ Crossman justifiably observed in December, ‘that Bevanism and the Bevanites seem much more important, well-organised and machiavellian to the rest of the Labour Party, and indeed to the U.S.A., than they do to us who are in the Group and who know that we are not organized, that Aneurin can never be persuaded to have any consistent or coherent strategy and that we have not even got to the beginning of a coherent, constructive policy.’ Even so, he rightly claimed that ‘what we have, and it is very important, is a group of M.P.s who meet regularly, who know and like each other and who have come to represent “real Socialism” to a large number of constituency members’. He added that this had produced ‘an extraordinary bitterness among those who support the Gaitskell line’, having ‘convinced themselves that we are demagogues who are deliberately exploiting the simple-mindedness of the rank and file for our own ends’.

By March the bitterness had if anything increased, as Bevan and 56 other Labour MPs refused to support the Attlee leadership’s broad endorsement of the government’s armaments programme, in the continuing context of the Korean War. The by now far from left-wing
Picture Post
soon afterwards dubbed them ‘the Bevanly Host’ and sought to assess the implications: ‘Among Labour supporters in the country, Bevan and his brigade are popular. They’re lively, personable, forceful. And many are B.B.C. stars [including Michael Foot on television] – in short, they are a draw. But the Party and the trade unions set more store by loyalty than by brilliance and invective.’ Or as Labour’s newest MP, Denis Healey, had already pointed out, ‘whereas Bevan’s proletarian virility has always hypnotised many middle-class intellectuals, the trade unionists tend to see in him the familiar figure of the self-seeking agitator’.7

Yet whatever one thought of him, there was no doubting the hold that Bevan exercised over many people’s imagination during the 1950s. They included Sue Townsend, growing up in Leicester:

I was wearing my school uniform, eating Golden Syrup sandwiches and reading a book. The lumbering black and white television in the corner was turned on, but I paid it no attention. Then on to the screen came the image of Mr Bevan who was making a speech in a large hall. I was immediately mesmerised – first by his lovely voice, then by his looks. I put my book down and watched as he spoke. His body dipped and swooped as he started to make a point and then jerked upright to ram the point home. His voice wheedled seductively, dropped until it was only a whisper and whooshed back up the register, ending in a shouted joke. Because there was much audience laughter I thought at first that he was a comedian and I half expected him to break into a song and dance routine as comedians did in those days.

There ensued ‘a pre-pubertal crush’ – and ‘when I found out that he was married to Jennie Lee I was tormented with jealousy’. But if Bevan’s oratory was legendary, it came perhaps at the expense of other qualities. Shirley Williams has identified ‘a certain waywardness and caprice, an unwillingness to harness his energy, eloquence and charm to the single-minded pursuit of political power’, and she is surely right. Or, in the equally acute retrospective testimony of one of his main lieutenants, Crossman:

Nye was flawed, because at that critical moment he just wasn’t there. Bevan would have a bad cold on a critical problem. He hated fighting, quite honestly, he hated it. He kept saying ‘Why should I submit myself to this kind of ignominy of fighting people like Gaitskell? Gaitskell will fight; I don’t want to fight. I would like to lead this party; I don’t want to fight it in this ignominious way.’ He hated the in-fighting which you have to do in politics. He wanted victory given to him on a plate . . . Nye was constantly giving up, constantly depressed, lying down in his tent like Achilles. He was that kind of a moody creature; he was brilliant and deeply moody . . . Nye wasn’t cut out to be a leader, he was cut out to be a prophet.

Was Bevan, though, really cut out to be a prophet? One youngish, notably intelligent Labour MP, Wilfred Fienburgh, apparently thought so, declaring in the
New Statesman
in April 1952 that ‘he has the capacity to be both the philosopher and the architect of the social revolution in the second half of the twentieth century’. Fienburgh was writing just days after the publication of Bevan’s
In Place of Fear
, his only book-length testament of political beliefs. The reviews, according to Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘mostly ranged from irritable to hopping mad’; half a century on, it is difficult to disagree with the
TLS
’s verdict that the book was ‘a dithyramb with meanderings into the many side-tracks of Mr Bevan’s private and public experience’ and that ‘except in mood, its many compelling passages do not cohere’. Crucially, just at the point when Labour in opposition was considering its future direction, Bevan’s treatise failed to provide an authoritative statement of Bevanite doctrine for the rest of the 1950s and beyond. Whether in the case of the assumed superiority of public over private ownership, or in that of central planning over Keynesian demand management, there was little in the way of detailed, hard-headed analysis and prescription. In theory looking ahead, in practice much of
In Place of Fear
was addressing the problems of the 1930s, a deficiency at least in part explained by the fact that sizeable chunks had been drafted long before 1952. One particularly striking pre-1945 passage – attacking suburbia as ‘an aesthetic monstrosity, an ethical crime, an economic nightmare, and a physical treadmill’ – was in the event dropped from the book. In similar vein, however, he moralised about the difference between good and bad consumption, declaring that ‘the attempt of Democratic Socialism to universalize the consumption of the best that society can afford meets with resistance from those whose sense of values is deformed by the daily parade of functionless wealth’. Bevan himself was far from an ascetic puritan in his private life, yet it is somehow typical that the final page includes the disapproving anecdote of visiting war-ravaged Italy in 1948 and seeing imported steel being used on the non-essential, profligate task of building cinemas.8 Perhaps one of them was Cinema Paradiso.