CHAPTER THREE
‘You can trust Mr Attlee.’
Labour election poster, 1945
The political contradictions left unresolved at the end of the First World War were bound to unravel in a destructive, terrible manner. The rise of fascism in Europe and the scramble to redivide the world between the Great Powers posed significant problems for socialists, and the destruction by fascists of mass socialist movements in Germany, Italy and Spain had seriously weakened the left internationally. On the eve of the war, the Labour left was a shadow of its former self. Key figures on the left felt the sting of the party’s disciplinary whip as the lights went out over Europe once again. By late 1938, Cripps was disillusioned about the prospect of any alliance with ‘progressive capitalists’ and had swung back to opposing the Popular Front, calling for a campaign of left parties to oust the National Government from power. With Franco about to seize Barcelona and finish off the Republic, Cripps wrote to the NEC asking them to reopen the debate on a united front campaign of all socialist parties in Britain to support the Spanish left. Exasperated by Cripps’ repeated refusal to accept defeat, the NEC wrote to him demanding a public pledge of loyalty to the agreed party line of no intervention. Cripps refused, pleading democratic imperatives, and was expelled. Now the NEC’s blood was up, they cast about for other dissidents to make an example of. They did not have to look far. At a public meeting on the day of Cripps’ expulsion, Bevan declared to the audience: ‘if Sir Stafford Cripps is expelled ... for wanting to unite the forces of freedom and democracy they can go on expelling others. They can expel me. His crime is my crime.’1 The NEC duly expelled Bevan less than a week later. George Strauss suffered a similar fate. Bevan at this point was despairing: ‘If every organised effort to change Party policy is to be described as an organised attack on the party itself, then the rigidity imposed by party discipline will soon change into rigor mortis.’2 The problem was ended when Cripps performed a volte face and ended up endorsing the National Government in order to defeat Hitler.
The wartime coalition agreement also meant that Labour would not stand against the Conservatives or Liberals in any by-elections – general elections having been suspended for the duration of the war. Labour members brought up on the horrors of the vicious Tory governments of the inter-war years had to stomach maintaining a Tory majority of 200 in the Commons. Understandably many rebelled, with the consequence that during by-elections the ILP or a new left party called The Common Wealth Party would get significant votes. A lot of local CLP activists clandestinely supported such candidates, who were putting forward anti-war arguments and demands for a socialist government after the war.3 Jennie Lee stood as an independent in a bitterly fought by-election in Bristol in 1943, grappling with the paper shortage and no petrol for travelling around the constituency by speaking at open air rallies on car roofs. Lee’s message was simple: working people needed socialist domestic policies. She openly identified with the 1942 Beveridge Report, which outlined the key areas for post-war domestic policy: ‘A vote for Lee is a vote for Beveridge.’4 Lee lost the election, but re-joined Labour shortly afterwards, saying that the conditions that had caused the split with the ILP were ‘no longer a guide to her political views’.5 Within the ranks there was concern that the party leadership would drag its heels on the implementation of Beveridge’s recommendations. In her maiden speech to the 1943 party conference, Barbara Betts warned that it was ‘Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today!’ Her speech ended up on the front of the Daily Mirror.
Within the party itself, serious opposition to the policies of the PLP was rare. Cripps had been readmitted to Labour in 1942 and entered the Coalition Cabinet, from that point ceasing to play any role on the left. A 1944 conference resolution moved by Ian Mikardo, calling for wide-scale nationalisation and workers’ control of industry, was passed with very enthusiastic support from the party rank and file in opposition to the NEC and ministers. Bevan was involved in a running battle over the question of press censorship and publicly attacked Churchill and Morrison for banning the Daily Worker and threatening to censure the Daily Mirror. He also led two damaging backbench rebellions against the government, opposing Bevin’s partisan handling of various miners’ strikes in 1943–4 and his implementation of the notorious 1AA legislation that threatened to put striking workers in prison for five years. Bevan laid into the ‘trade union bosses at the top’ who had lost contact ‘with the people at the bottom’ (an unforgivable criticism of the TUC which left Bevan as a marked man at Transport House after the war).6
Laski – popular with the members but disliked by many in the party hierarchy and by trade union bureaucrats (who loved to refer to him as Professor Laski in a snide dig at the intelligentsia) – called for the nationalisation of land and of the Bank of England to raise morale after the retreat at Dunkirk. When he approached the Labour Party Policy Committee with this proposal he was entirely rebuffed. Dalton argued that what was needed was air-force victories and improving the means test. Afterwards he laughed that the committee had sent Laski ‘away with his little tail between his little legs’.7
Bevan and Cripps urged support for the war effort, writing in Tribune: ‘Every good socialist will do his utmost to assist the anti-fascist forces’, adding that it was important that socialists not ‘permit the war to degenerate into a simple struggle between rival imperialisms’.8 This was essentially George Orwell’s position. What the left lacked was a clear alternative to the war that escaped the abject failures of pacifism, which had been so spectacularly undermined by Chamberlain’s failures to guarantee ‘peace in our time’. The problem was a reflection of the complexity of the situation – this was not a simple rerun of the First World War; the threat of fascism was very real and not just based on jingoistic anti-German bluster. This was an imperialist war and an anti-fascist war. The left had to consider how to handle the contradictions at the heart of the international crisis. The ILP’s pacifist position alienated some members like Lee, who argued that there was a marked difference between the clearly inter-imperialist nature of the 1914–18 conflict and the urgency of an international fight against fascism.9
A priority for many Labour was to ensure that working people came out of the war in a better position than they had been in during the 1930s – to win the war and win the peace. Labour leaders mobilised the British working class in support of the war on the basis that a fair share of the spoils would go to that same class as a reward for their sacrifice. On their side, the capitalist class could rely on loyalty from the party of the trade unions, a willing ally through difficult times. The danger for the capitalists was the increasing radicalism of the working class in the face of war, and the need to both mobilise mass forces and introduce economic planning to ensure victory. Could they rule in the same way, even if they won the war?
Socialism Without Tears
A sense of hope in the country had lifted Labour’s 1945 election victory above anyone’s expectations. Labour’s new cohort of MPs sang The Red Flag as they stood outside Parliament, much to the concern of Attlee and the king, but there was nothing much that could be done to stop the cheers from the Labour ranks. This caused some consternation. ‘These new Labour MPs are a strange looking lot – one regrets the departure of the sound old Trade Unionists and the advent of this rabble of youthful, ignorant men’, complained Tory MP Sir Cuthbert Headlam.10 Huge rallies up and down the country greeted the newly elected Labour MPs. With 393 out of 640 seats in Parliament the dramatic defeat of the ‘war hero’ Churchill was a sweet prize for the labour movement (added to by the crushing defeat of the Liberals, reduced to 12 MPs). The left-wing MP J.P.W. Mallalieu recalled his victory rally in Huddersfield: ‘an open air meeting of 10,000 people. As I spoke, the voice of an elderly man kept coming from the crowd, repeating the age old fear of the British working class: “Don’t let us down lad! Don’t let us down!”’11 Roy Jenkins noted at the time how he would be surrounded by men in the pub after election rallies, ‘a sea of tired faces looking up in hope’.12
The historic 1945–51 Labour government cannot be understood outside the context of how British politics had changed during the war. Although 1945 is often portrayed as the high point of Labour’s parliamentary-route socialism, the reality is a little more complex. It would be wrong to portray Attlee’s government as simply a Labour victory over the capitalists. The economic and social changes were not Labour’s alone; they enjoyed broad support across the establishment. The Beveridge report of 1942 was written by a Liberal. The Tory MP R.A. Butler had already introduced wholesale reform in school education in 1944. The sweeping state ownership of key industries needed for the war effort demonstrated that in times of crisis relying on the market to deliver efficiently was impossible, which made Labour’s nationalisation agenda seem far more like common sense. Planning had been necessary to ensure that production was orchestrated in such a way as to have any hope of victory against one of the most formidable war machines ever established. Public ownership was no longer seen merely in terms of class war, but as a new form of socialism that was beneficial to both workers and capitalists – all part of the national good.13 This consensus, known as Butskellism,14 was what really allowed the Labour Party to manage the state effectively. The Attlee government ruled with the consent of the British ruling class, which was why Attlee, who had earlier argued that you couldn’t get ‘socialism without tears’, now seemed to be able to introduce widespread nationalisation with no upset at all. The elites blessed Labour with their consent to manage the state, as long as certain requirements were met (which we shall come on to soon). Arguably, Attlee’s government was a continuation, not a revolution.
The philosophy of the Labour government was instinctively integrationist, welding legitimate class demands onto the existing power relations of British capitalism. When President Truman visited George VI he nervously inquired about the nature of the recent Labour victory. In response to his question, ‘I hear you’ve had a revolution?’, he received the bemused reply, ‘Oh no, we don’t have those here’.15 The king himself had a hand in the Cabinet, pushing for Bevin to be foreign minister instead of Attlee’s preference, Hugh Dalton. Attlee acquiesced.
What was expected of the Labour government in return for its loyal integration into the state? In compensation for the nationalisation of their dilapidated and failing industries, the capitalists expected a king’s ransom. The amounts handed out to the previous owners of the nationalised industries were huge: the mines cost the taxpayer £164 million, electricity £540 million, gas £265 million and the railways £1 billion.16 Considering that a number of these had been loss making, the enormous levels of compensation were a slap in the face to working people still labouring under rationing and living in slum housing. Overall, the nationalisation programme encompassed the most unprofitable 20 per cent of the economy – the only major exceptions being steel and road haulage.17
Alongside the need to preserve British capitalism there was a genuine fear of a possible outbreak of revolutionary activity among demobbed working-class soldiers. In places like Egypt the army had mutinied after concern grew in the ranks over a possible continuation of war, this time against the Soviet Union. The war-weary men wanted to return to their homes, jobs and a decent life. The consensus around the need for radical measures to prevent radical dissent was best expressed by the representatives of the ruling class themselves. The Tory MP Quentin Hogg voiced their fears when he warned Parliament in 1943 that ‘If you don’t give the people social reform, they will give you social revolution.’18
As such, the 1945 Labour government can be seen as the product of the balance of forces at the time. It came to power not only because it guaranteed the continuation of capitalism, but also because of the deeply held wishes of the working class to get their reward for the sacrifices made during the war – a reward that few believed Churchill and the Tories would deliver. In the wake of the Great Depression and the war there was a real need for a socialised, collective response to the country’s problems.19 For many on the left it appeared that the years of hard work building a clear socialist programme after 1931 had paid off. The 1945 election manifesto famously announced that Labour was ‘a socialist party, and proudly so’ – language that seemed a far cry from the compromising rhetoric of the MacDonald era. Many were convinced of the socialist nature of the government by the extent of its nationalisation of key industries. Many workers and the Labour left generally believed that this was just the first salvo in the fight to forge a socialist commonwealth: more nationalisations would follow. Finally, it seemed that the problems of poverty and social deprivation would be resolved.
When Attlee announced his Cabinet it included names familiar from the left: Bevan, Shinwell, Cripps and Wilkinson all took positions. Other left MPs like Jennie Lee (having left the ILP) and Michael Foot were editing Tribune, which at that time was close to the government on most questions. Outside of the Cabinet, Harold Laski was chairman of the Labour Party. This was a strong showing of people who were not just ‘Labour’ but also socialists of one stripe or another.
Some on the left nevertheless expressed doubts even in those heady days of excitement at the arrival of the New Jerusalem. Some of the new left MPs had misgivings in their hearts as they entered Parliament on the first day, though their exuberance at having achieved such a monumental victory probably drowned out the doubts – initially at least. Tom Driberg, part of the 1945 intake, was concerned about the overall composition of the Cabinet: ‘On the whole it is a government of the right rather than the left of the Labour movement.’ Dalton at the exchequer, Bevin at the foreign ministry and Morrison as Deputy Leader and Leader of the House of Commons were a powerful faction of the right at the heart of government.
For most on the left there was no need to debate the way the Labour government nationalised industry and built the welfare state, at least not at first. The election manifesto of 1945 had clearly stated that Labour’s ‘ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain – free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organised in the service of the British people’. In reality, however, the government could have gone further; the ‘socialist commonwealth’ still looked a lot like state nationalisation under a Labour government with progressive taxation on the rich – a social democratic programme, not a socialist one. There would be no ‘mucking about’ with the state: Attlee pursued no significant democratic reforms and constitutional arrangements were untouched; the House of Lords was left intact.
Inside Parliament, the Labour majority was simply too large for the Tories to pose a threat, and the left largely fell in line with the overall direction Attlee was taking. This created a sense of unity that had been lacking for years. But as the government wore on, debate opened up over crucial questions.
Unruly Workers
In relation to the much-vaunted nationalisation measures, there was anger on the trade union shop floor over the manner in which the reforms were carried out. Old management structures remained intact, ‘jobs for the boys’ at the top of the public sector replicated the old class structures of the privatised industries, bullying was rife as the tensions between workers and managers remained, and workers did not feel that they had any real say in how the companies were run. Between 1947 and 1951 there were over 8,000 unofficial strikes in the newly state-owned companies.20 The dilapidated nature of the companies prior to nationalisation contributed to the sense that state control was inefficient and bureaucratic – an argument that Margaret Thatcher and others were to deploy successfully in the 1980s, when the post-war settlement was aggressively terminated by the Tories.
What socialists saw as a step towards the New Jerusalem, the capitalists saw as a useful crutch to maintain capitalism. Capitalists will support nationalisation if it secures a positive business environment, ensuring profit remains relatively untouched. State intervention is acceptable so long as it increases business and profit opportunities. This meant that in exchange for the NHS, some state ownership and improved welfare provision, the capitalists demanded a higher level of exploitation of the working class. The outcome was a 30 per cent increase in production between 1946 and 1948 with no corresponding increase in wages. In February 1948 Stafford Cripps introduced an austerity budget with a wage freeze across the economy. The TUC endorsed the freeze as a way to stop inflation. In response to Cripps’ budget a Tory minister sneered that it marked ‘the end of an era of socialist policy and socialist propaganda’.21
The formation of the NHS was one of the most essential victories of any Labour government in British history, representing a bold move based on the notion of collective and social welfare with universal accessibility. Nationalising the hospitals had not been in the manifesto – Bevan had to fight for it against opponents like Morrison and the British Medical Association, who did not want to become state employees. The notion that ‘the NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it’ recognises that it represented the crystallisation of the balance of class forces at the time, and that such an institution could not permanently survive intact under a capitalist system. The Tory opposition to the NHS provoked some of the most militant class-based politics from Labour. Bevan’s natural hatred for the Conservatives was undeniable, and their behaviour in trying to sabotage his project left him livid. At a Labour rally in 1948 he set out his forthright views: ‘So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin, they condemned millions of people to semi-starvation.’ The comments were considered scandalous but Bevan was unapologetic, though he never used the phrase again.
When the government finally turned to the nationalisation of steel in 1948, it exposed the limits of consent and revealed the lengths to which the capitalists would go to defend their profitable businesses. Attlee understood the reason for the opposition: ‘of all our nationalisation proposals, only iron and steel aroused much feeling, perhaps because profits were greater here than elsewhere’.22 As a response to the move towards incorporating profit-making enterprises into the public sector, the sugar company Tate and Lyle launched the ‘Mr Cube’ campaign against nationalisation. Mr Cube was a cartoon character who appeared on two million sugar packages and 100,000 rationing books. As part of the campaign, material was sent to over 4,000 schools, more than 3,000 speeches were made in working men’s clubs and factories, and £200,000 was spent on advertising. The opposition to nationalisation from business, the Lords and the steel industry itself was described by one minister at the time as a ‘concerted action by a number of people for sabotaging an Act of Parliament’.23
The opposition ground down the nationalisation bill and the political will to implement it. When steel was eventually nationalised in the final phase of the Labour government in 1950, it was only a half-hearted attempt. The largest steel companies were aggregated into one umbrella corporation as a prelude to a proper state takeover that never happened. The bosses sabotaged the government’s efforts when the British Iron and Steel Federation refused to acknowledge the new corporation. As such, in 1951 it was very easy for the new Conservative government to put iron and steel back into the private sector. The outcome of the fight over steel nationalisation was the Parliament Act of 1949, which limited the ability of the Lords to interfere with the Commons. A more radical government would have proposed abolishing the Lords entirely, but in true British fashion Attlee decided only to tinker around the edges.24
Despite the continued austerity regime on the home front, the class struggle remained muted compared to the 1920s. No doubt the links between the trade union leaders and the Labour government was a deciding factor.25 Better to suppress strikes in favour of a legislative programme that appeared to be working than to be seen to destabilise the government. When the détente between the union leaders and the Cabinet failed to stop workers taking action over wages or working conditions, the Attlee government was not averse to using the army to break strikes. In fact, between 1945 and 1951 the army was ordered on 18 separate occasions to cross picket lines and do the jobs of striking workers. The notorious strikebreaking Supply and Transport Organisation was (secretly) re-established by the civil service, with the blessing of Cripps in the Cabinet. The Attlee government’s attitude to striking workers was symptomatic of the party’s general view that strikes against a Labour government by trade unionists were unacceptable, and that it was the government’s job to ensure the wheels of industry kept turning.
Washington or Moscow?
On foreign policy, the Labour left was split between pro-Soviet, anti-Soviet and ‘third force’ tendencies. As the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe and pro-Stalinist regimes were installed, some still saw in it a nascent anti-capitalism. Within the PLP, Konni Zilliacus, the MP for Gateshead and a prominent ‘fellow traveller’ of the communist left, was the most sympathetic to Stalinism. Zilliacus was a foreign-born intellectual who spoke nine languages. In the Commons he had one of the keenest minds for international issues and often travelled abroad, including to communist countries such as Poland. He saw both Stalin and Josip Tito in Yugoslavia as comrades in the cause of socialism. Others on the left, like Michael Foot, were far more critical, openly denouncing the dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. Some went further however. What repelled Foot and others on the left were the obvious crimes of Stalinism. Those who had been initially supportive of the revolution in 1917 were now presented with a very different type of regime, one of show trials, secret police and one-party states.
The burning fear was that another war might break out soon, this time between the Soviets and the West. The British army was not demobbed, men were still being conscripted after the war, and the rumour was that they would be sent to ‘fight the reds’. A large part of Labour’s election victory was down to the belief that they could better negotiate and work with the Soviets, unlike the bellicose Churchill who favoured a confrontation. Now there was also concern that a belligerent attitude had developed in the Labour Cabinet, spearheaded by men like Bevin, who was to play a crucial role in establishing NATO as a means of counteracting the growing power of the Soviet Union.
Bevin was very happy to spend money on continuing conscription and establishing permanent army bases in Europe. His pro-militarist policies attracted criticism from many, including Emrys Hughes, editor of the left-wing Glasgow Forward and an MP after 1946, who asked: ‘if we are going to have this millstone of a large army around our necks, where are we to find the money for housing, education, better health services and all the other things that people will expect (and rightly so) from a Labour government?’26 Around this time, there was growing opposition in the trade unions: a communist-backed motion put to the TUC on foreign policy – which was highly critical of the Attlee government’s policies, especially the ‘encirclement of Russia’ strategy adopted by NATO – won 2.4 million votes.27 Unknown at the time, Attlee’s cabinet had agreed in secret to build a nuclear weapon. Smarting from being talked down to by the Americans, Bevin spoke enthusiastically of wanting an atomic bomb: ‘we have got to have this thing whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it!’28
It was opposition to Bevin that prompted the initial revolts in the PLP. The belief was that the foreign minister was acting against the election pledge of the party to mediate between Washington and Moscow. The brewing opposition, in the form of articles in Tribune and motions put to PLP meetings, escalated after June 1946, causing the party apparatus to threaten expulsions for outspoken critics, via an article in The Daily Herald in October. Not content with writing critical articles, the left agreed to push the debate out into the open. Richard Crossman sought to amend the King’s Speech to call for a ‘third force’ (European social democracy) against both Soviet and American ideologies, but his rebellion stalled after pressure from the government. Bevan played no public role in the first serious challenge by the Labour left after the war; being in the cabinet he did not want to make it look like there was a split on the front bench.
As a local adjunct to the debate around the Soviet Union, the CPGB attempted to affiliate to the Labour Party once again in 1946. They argued that they were keen to forge a united working-class party but their critics labelled them hostile entryists bent on creating a one-party state. Although their affiliation was never a realistic idea (Labour was generally unrelentingly hostile to communism at this stage), that didn’t mean party leaders were complacent about the CPGB gaining more influence among their members again. Increasingly fed up with what they saw as an attempted hostile takeover, the Labour leaders moved to prevent the affiliation of parties like the CPGB from ever happening again. Labour was a broad church, but not that broad. Herbert Morrison moved an amendment to the party constitution which stated that any organisation ‘having their own programme, principles and policy for distinctive and separate propaganda, or possessing branches in the constituencies or engaged in the promotion of Parliamentary or Local Government candidates or owing allegiance to any political organisation abroad, shall be ineligible for affiliation to the party’. The supposed growing influence of communism in the party was something that deeply concerned its chairman, Morgan Phillips. Charged with rooting out pro-communist dissidents or Trotsykists, Phillips helped organise a network of informers across the party, both in Parliament and outside, who were tasked with gathering evidence from speeches, articles or pub conversations that might single someone out as a red. The information was then sent to Transport House to be compiled in files that were referred to as ‘The Lost Sheep’ – a worrying echo of the McCarthyite witch-hunts brewing across the Atlantic.
Keep Left
The Keep Left organisation was born out of the winter crisis of 1946–7. Severe weather had led to a coal shortage, forcing a three-day week on industry and leaving many homes without heat or light. Keep Left emerged as a grouping out of regular meetings between left MPs, Mikardo, Bruce, Foot, Crossman and others. They believed that more planning and strategic thought by the government could have prevented the crisis. This was not simply about the principle of pushing forward the socialist agenda, it was also born out of a serious concern that Labour would lose the next election unless more radical policies were implemented to deal with the crisis.
Keep Left were also suspicious of the emergence of the US as a superpower, and did not want Britain to become an American satellite. To the Labour left the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and the end of US isolationism was simply Washington’s excuse to expand its spheres of influence to ensure profits for Wall Street. Laski and others condemned the actions of the US and NATO in countries like Greece, Japan, Turkey, Iran and Italy.29 As the Soviets consolidated power in Eastern Europe, Keep Left advocated a third-force approach to oppose both power blocs.
They agreed to produce a Keep Left pamphlet and circulate it before the Labour conference as a critique of what they saw as compromises and prevarication on the part of Attlee and his allies. Published by the New Statesman, its main demands were for a third force in Europe led by a socialist Britain, and for a ministry of economic affairs to develop more strategic planning. Those behind Keep Left started off well, helping to organise a backbench rebellion in the Commons in March–April 1947, when 70 MPs voted against the National Service Bill, arguing that conscription should be reduced from 18 to 12 months. This act of defiance brought hell down on their heads from Bevin and his allies.
The pamphlet proved popular in the left press and among party members. The honeymoon period for the government was over and after two years it was more acceptable to be openly critical and to demand more ambitious social policies. The growing debates in the party were infuriating the hierarchy, and as their backbenchers became more rebellious the patience of the Cabinet dwindled rapidly. A backbench rebellion forcing a change in government policy to please the left was simply unacceptable, and discipline had to be reintroduced. In masterful fashion, Attlee, Dalton, Morrison and Bevin chose a combination of stick and carrot to batter the left back into irrelevance, or at least into silence, whichever was easier.
They hoped to end the fight at the 1947 conference. First Denis Healey was tasked with writing a rebuttal of Keep Left, in a pamphlet called Cards on the Table which was circulated to every delegate. The chair opened up the session with an attack on Russia’s destabilising influence and support for US efforts to secure post-war stability. Then Bevin spoke in the hope of repeating his performance in 1935 when he had delivered the fatal blow to George Lansbury’s influence in the party. Bevin spoke at length about the crucial work he had been doing, setting up NATO, establishing the UN, liaising with Washington over their plans for Marshall Aid in Europe. He referred to the actions of the parliamentary left as a ‘stab in the back’ and demanded ‘loyalty’ from them. Of the supposed middle-class intellectuals who made up the Labour left he bitterly remarked: ‘I grew up in the trade union movement, you see, and have never been used to this sort of thing.’30 After his bravura performance the left was routed and heavily defeated in the conference votes. Bevin was a past master of the standard trick used by trade union bureaucrats against their political enemies: smear them as middle-class outsiders in the workers’ movement in a demagogic appeal for votes.
After the Marshall Plan announcement and the return of Crossman and others to the Labour fold, only a small minority of MPs were left to oppose the pro-American orientation of Bevin and Attlee. The retreat of the centre-left allowed the party leadership to make its move against the far left. Transport House turned on MPs Leslie Solley and Zilliacus and others who, having regularly clashed with Bevin and company over issues like NATO, were suspected reds. Facing expulsion from the party, Zilliacus was even prevented from speaking in his own defence at conference by an almost unanimous block vote of the unions.
Towards the end of the first Attlee government there were two attempts to reinvigorate the left. A follow-up Keep Left pamphlet, imaginatively titled Keeping Left, was published in 1950, but by this point the intellectual mood in the party had shifted considerably. Former advocates of socialism in 1945, or of a swift Emergency Powers Act, were now consoling themselves that what the British wanted was a ‘Scandinavian style social democracy’.31 Keeping Left did not represent much beyond its initial signatories in the PLP, and it certainly didn’t inspire the kind of excitement in the left press that its predecessor had done – no doubt because in repeating the old arguments it did not break any new ground.
A more grassroots organisation was the Socialist Fellowship, launched in 1949 by Ellis Smith and Fenner Brockway, who was by now returned to Parliament as a Labour MP. The Fellowship was an attempt to rebuild something similar to the pre-war ILP or Socialist League, bringing together Trotskyists like Gerry Healy and John Lawrence (and their newspaper Socialist Outlook), with left MPs and some communist fellow-travellers. It achieved quite considerable success with modest resources. One useful role played by this short-lived initiative was its organising of a series of informal conferences against the looming crisis on the Korean peninsula, to argue against British involvement in any US-led war – but the debate over what position to take on Korea caused splits. A group led by Tony Cliff left to form the Socialist Review Group, arguing that it was unprincipled to choose between Washington’s and Moscow’s expansionist ambitions. Brockway and Smith resigned from the Fellowship after they supported a pro-war motion in Parliament, a tragic decision by Brockway who had maintained a relatively principled anti-imperialist stance throughout his political life. Despite these losses, by early 1951 Socialist Outlook had a circulation of nearly 10,000, and rallies around the country were addressed by leading activists such as Harry Constable from the dockworkers. This was markedly more success than had been achieved by Keep Left, which had confined itself to the chambers of Parliament – the place where the left was inevitably weakest. Momentum was growing around the Fellowship as it intersected with a developing anti-war mood and the revival of class struggle among builders and dockers, but Transport House swung the guillotine and proscribed the organisation – just as they had done with the Socialist League. The Fellowship obeyed the NEC instructions and dissolved itself, though Socialist Outlook continued for another three years before it too was banned by the party hierarchy.
After scraping back into power at the 1950 general election, the 1950–1 administration was not much to write home about in terms of new policies. It is something of a pattern with Labour governments that they run out of ideas after two years – this was certainly the case with Attlee’s ‘socialist revolution’ after 1945. The Labour Party approached the 1950 election with no real strategy or many new ideas. Laski called for ‘a bit of fire and inspiration, of guts and glory’ in the manifesto, but none was forthcoming. Labour secured a victory and an extra 1.5 million votes, but lost 78 MPs to a resurgent Tory Party. With a wafer thin parliamentary majority of six, the pressure on the left to stay in line was formidable – rebellious talk was frowned upon even more than before.
The impact of the Labour left in the period of the most successful Labour government up to that point was limited. The 1946 ban on ‘factionalism’, ostensibly to stop the CPGB joining the party, also had a detrimental impact on the Labour left, which was unable to seriously coordinate its efforts from below without running the risk of attracting the attention of Transport House. The incorporation of ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, Bevan and Cripps into the Cabinet seriously affected the ability of the left to act independently, and the moving target of the role of the Soviet Union in the world confused many socialists. But the deeper problem was that the demands of the left in the CLPs over workers’ democracy and social control of industry were not taken into the PLP at any stage as the left MPs had no parliamentary strategy to speak of. The PLP left never properly challenged the top-down public ownership model of the state-run enterprises. In other words, they fell into the same trap as the Labour right in associating socialism primarily with corporatist state ownership of industry.
This is not to denigrate the tremendous achievement of the NHS – still a pinnacle of socialist policy – but it does beg the question: why more wasn’t done across other sectors of the economy? Greater collective ownership of the profitable parts of the economy relates to the strategy of production for human need – the fundamental plank of socialism. By limiting themselves to the implementation of the 1945 manifesto the Labour left exposed the fact that it wasn’t Attlee who was held back by timidity but them. The responsibility of managing a capitalist state seemed to produce a collective amnesia, almost as if everything the Socialist League had debated and theorised had been forgotten.
The key political problem was that the left limited itself to criticism of how much should be nationalised, rather than starting a debate over what was meant by collective ownership. Labour’s policy during this time was essentially a state corporatist one, which the Tories fundamentally agreed with. An alternative programme that included significant changes in the state industries, workplace relations, the constitution, and Britain’s role in the world would have produced a far more transformative result. Arguably the basis was there to do this; what was lacking was the political will.
If there was one political mistake the Labour left made in this period it was in believing that the Labour right had essentially the same strategy but just disagreed on the pace of change. Bevan, in his speech to the Durham Miners Gala in 1948, urged the movement to give Labour more time: ‘We need twenty years of power to transfer the citadels of capitalism from the hands of a few people to the control of the nation.’ The arguments around consolidation versus expansion of the public sector during the late 1940s were part of this narrative. But Attlee’s government, involved in strike breaking and secretly pursuing nuclear weapons, was ripe for deeper criticism. While concerns over the slow pace of social reform in Britain rumbled on, it was the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 that finally inspired the Labour left to break ranks. Attlee called another election in 1951 and won nearly 14 million votes, more than the Tories. But the Tories won more MPs, and Churchill became Prime Minister, cutting off the path to the New Jerusalem for over a decade.