Family Britain, 1951-1957 (14 page)

Only a few weeks later, there appeared another work of Labour political thought – this time the Crossman-edited
New Fabian Essays
, a collection of variable quality by mainly youngish MPs (including Healey and Roy Jenkins), with perhaps the highlight being Anthony Crosland’s lucid, crisply written ‘The Transition from Capitalism’. At the heart of Crosland’s analysis was the claim that ‘by 1951 Britain had, in all the essentials, ceased to be a capitalist country’, that indeed it had become after six years of Labour government a post-capitalist society. Realistically, he accepted that the character of this new society was ‘a mixed one so far as the traditional categories are concerned’:

It is capitalist to the extent that private ownership of industry predominates, that most production is for the market, and that many of the old class divisions persist. It is non-capitalist to the extent that market influences are subordinated to central planning, not over the whole detailed field of labour and production, but in certain strategically decisive sectors; that the power of the state is much greater than that of any one particular class; and that the distribution of the national income is consciously a matter of political decision and not the automatic consequence of market forces. It is managerial to the extent that the control of industry has largely passed (subject to state controls) into the hands of the managerial class, which has usurped the position of the old capitalist class. It is socialist in that the distribution of income is far more egalitarian, that much economic power and parts of industry are socialised, that a national minimum and a welfare cushion exist, and that planning is largely directed to traditional socialist ends.

Welcoming ‘the higher employment, generous social services, less flagrant inequalities of wealth and opportunity’, Crosland saw the shift from capitalism to post-capitalism as an unequivocal good, claiming that ‘the new society is infinitely more humane and decent than the old’.

The final section of his essay was devoted to the question of how to get from this new society (which he rather awkwardly called ‘Statism’) to socialism. He began by defining ‘socialism’ as the pursuit of greater equality – not just greater economic equality and greater equality of opportunity (though in both cases he applauded how these two types of equality had increased since 1945) but also greater
social
equality. ‘Class feeling, and general social
malaise
, still persist in England to a deplorable extent,’ he declared. ‘Britain still is, and feels itself to be, a class society.’ He then identified various possible ways of trying to achieve a classless society – the expansion of free social services, more extensive nationalisation of industries, more widespread controls, more redistributive taxation of income – but ruled each out. Instead, he identified three other areas as potentially far more fertile: first, fiscally attacking the skewed ownership of wealth (with Crosland pointing out that ‘the still gross maldistribution of property enables the upper classes, by spending out of capital, to live at a standard of luxury which their post-tax income would never alone permit’); second, reforming the structure of the educational system, so that there was no longer ‘a social hierarchy of schools’; and third, seeking to transform ‘the psychology of industrial relations, and the general tone and atmosphere in industry’, so that the worker was given ‘a new social status’ and no longer felt ‘the basic class hostility which stems from his total exclusion from either rights or participation’.

But was the creation of a classless society a realistic aspiration? ‘No one should think that this will be a short or an easy task,’ began the only moderately uplifting peroration:

The pace will be limited, not only by the need to preserve the necessary minimum of social peace and cohesion, but also by the difficulty of engendering enthusiasm for further change in a population largely employed and enjoying rising standards every year. There will be no revival of the angry dynamic of revolt against the obvious miseries and injustices of capitalism. The temper of the people will be more contented and therefore more conservative, and public opinion will take time to acclimatise itself to the prospect of each further radical advance.

Accordingly, ‘these difficulties make it the more urgent that we should have a clear vision of where we want, as socialists, to go’.

Crosland’s essay marked the authentic start of the revisionist project – in essence, an attempt to wean the Labour Party away from fundamentalist allegiance to the cause of public ownership and instead, against a background of successful demand management (‘Keynesian techniques are now well understood,’ he noted), shift the emphasis at least as much to social as to economic issues. Yet in terms of the project’s chances of success, it did not help that Crosland himself, for all his undeniable power of intellect and personal charisma, possessed serious flaws. An incorrigibly arrogant streak not only put off potential allies but was also reflected in a thoroughly top-down approach to policy-making; a disordered personal life was complemented in the early to mid-1950s by a deep unwillingness to play the tedious, time-consuming parliamentary game; and his repeated, immoderate denunciations of what he saw as inexcusably outdated social mores appealed as little to respectable trade unionists (the backbone of the Labour Party) as they did to most middle-class floating voters. ‘It’s quite obvious that the general result of the unwritten laws is to make people a great deal more miserable than they would otherwise be,’ he told an
Any Questions?
audience in Bristol (on the evening, as it happened, that Attlee surrendered power to Churchill). ‘We are a nation of very unsmiling and depressed people and we ought to be far more gay and far more cheerful, and far more hilarious, than we are. We’re not nearly hilarious enough as a nation, and the reason why we’re not hilarious enough is because of these miserable unwritten laws, and so I’m wholly against them.’ All of which was said in an ‘attractive, drawling, affected donnish tone of voice’, as an admiring if ultimately critical friend would describe it.9

In December 1951 the veteran Labour politician Hugh Dalton might well have wished it was his handsome protégé Crosland who was helping him make a party political broadcast. Instead, his two colleagues were Tony Benn (‘very useful, moves through life like a cat, attractive, has reserves and sense of humour, but not quite to be trusted’) and Michael Young (‘better at this than at policy making’). Young, principal author of Labour’s historic 1945 manifesto, was still working in the party’s research department, though not for much longer. There exists the first draft of an undated essay by him, ‘Is This The Classless Society?’, probably written during the second half of 1951 and almost certainly rejected for
New Fabian Essays
. A fascinating piece, it anticipates not only Young’s own
The Rise of the Meritocracy
of seven years later but also the concern felt by Crosland (with whom he was friendly) about the inadequacy of equality of opportunity as a goal.

‘If we base our hopes on equal opportunity alone we may find our destination is not Utopia but America,’ Young roundly declared at the outset, before detailing some of the ways in which there had emerged greater equality of opportunity over the past decade. These included a better standard of education for working-class children, the rise in real wages, full employment, the rise of service industries, mass production (bringing an increasing range of goods, such as standardised clothes, within everybody’s reach) and greater geographical mobility. Significantly, these were all examples of levelling up rather than down; he gave the example of public schools, noting that ‘if the last decade is any guide, these schools will take a very long time to die’. In an obvious sense, of course, Young welcomed enhanced equality of opportunity – but not if it came at the expense of enhanced equality of status, nor if its American-style pursuit was psychologically destabilising. ‘In a genuinely classless society, people would not be foes but brothers,’ he insisted. ‘But by stressing competition as the partner of equal opportunity, men are being turned into foes of each other. The stress is on success. The effort is to excel. The aim is to do better than your fellows. The result is a strain on ordinary people which ordinary people are not built to bear.’ Near the end came the direct political message: ‘We want neither rule of the elite or dictatorship of the proletariat, but rule by all of the people.’ And Young called on Labour to develop ‘a practical programme for diffusing power on the grand scale’ – a programme which, ‘particularly by enabling housewives to share power, would sweep the polls’.

Young himself by the end of 1951 had almost certainly come to the conclusion that both he and Labour would find fulfilment through a greater, more subtle understanding of how British society worked and how it was changing. In short, sociology called. It would not, though, be sociology as conventionally practised. In a specially striking passage in his essay, as part of his analysis of the plight of the losers in an increasingly competitive society, he turned to what he saw as the emotionally unnourishing position of the nuclear, non-extended family:

The couple with the young children – are they so well off? They have established themselves in a city suburb, living neatly and comfortably in their little house, going to the pictures when they can find a watcher for their one or two children. But they seldom have any sense of belonging, and would as soon move on as stay. One suburb is much like another in an atomised society. Rarely does community flourish. How can it when people do not live long enough in one place to know more about their neighbours than their names and jobs and the colour of their irises?10

The instincts of the two main parties remained, whatever the internal debates, fundamentally different in the early 1950s. ‘There is an intense distaste for the type of fiscal policy which the Welfare State demands,’ declared Crosland in his Fabian essay of his Tory opponents – an understandable distaste on the part of the better off, given that by the end of the Labour government marginal tax rates were at times reaching 98 per cent, death duties 80 per cent, and there was also in existence a new differential profits tax at a high rate. The desire to regain some fiscal ground was particularly strong on the part of the Tory rank and file, as shown by the overwhelming majority at the party conference in 1952 for the motion that ‘public expenditure has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’. As for Labour, the overriding instinct – on right as well as left of the party – was towards greater social and economic equality. The question of means provoked lively comment, even bitter controversy, but that was the shared aim. Moreover, the distinction between the two parties was just as sharp when it came to the very basic, day-to-day issue of private consumption. The Tories before and after the 1951 election did not disguise their desire to dismantle, as soon as economic dictates allowed, the elaborate wartime apparatus of rationing and ensuing austerity, but Labour took comfort from the belief that its electoral defeat had really been a moral victory (in terms of the popular vote) and that Tory promises aimed at grumbling housewives in the butcher’s or baker’s queue were already being revealed as, in the April 1952 words of the chairman of the National Conference of Labour Women, ‘empty and dishonest’. One party, in short, wanted to ‘free the people’, according of course to a particular definition of freedom; the other did not, or at least not with any great urgency.

Yet in policy-making practice there was considerable compromise and overlap – as opposed to consensus – between the two parties. Full employment, Keynesianism, a mixed economy (including a significant nationalised sector), a welfare state: such proved the inescapable policy framework of the new Tory administration. The underlying psychological realities behind what was essentially a pragmatic response, by a party in which pragmatism was bred in the bone, were arguably threefold. First, the sheer pervasive, emotional power of folk memories of the 1930s as capitalism’s never-to-be-repeated human catastrophe; second, the powerful collectivist legacy of the wartime experience; and third, the deep post-war desire on the part of the middle class, just as much as the working class, for a secure, not overly cut-and-thrust life. ‘The pressures making for statism are far too strong to be held back,’ accurately predicted Crosland, ‘and the Tories are too intuitive a party indefinitely to play Canute.’ One young Canadian political scientist, closely observing the British state of play in September 1952, was so convinced about the narrowness of the gap that he quoted with approval the Edwardian statesman Arthur Balfour about how the two great parties of the country were ‘so sure of their own moderation that they are not dangerously disturbed by the never-ending din of political conflict’.11 The Canadian was Robert McKenzie, for whom no swing between parties was too small to be of interest.

This is not to deny some wider resonance to the very fact of the Tory restoration – a restoration whose most obviously symbolic early action was the systematic, undeniably vengeful demolition of the entire Festival of Britain infrastructure on the South Bank, with the unavoidable exception of the Royal Festival Hall. For John Vaizey, recalling his Cambridge days, the restoration was mirrored by a generally less congenial local scene: ‘The ex-soldiers went; and there came the little sports cars, the ex-National Service officers in cavalry twill, flapped sports jackets and flat caps, the debs and near-debs, the braying voices.’ Nevertheless, the fact was that, at an intelligentsia, ‘activator’ level anyway, the political colouration of the 1950s remained obstinately ‘left’ rather than ‘right’ – irrespective of the change of government, and epitomised by the
New Statesman
’s dominance (in both circulation and, largely, reputation) over the
Spectator
. David Marquand would recall how, as an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-1950s, the conventional wisdom he encountered that ‘the Tories were the stupid party’ and ‘the cleverer you were, the more likely it was that you voted Labour’, had almost ‘the status of a law’.