The war had been won by the British people
acting in rare unison. Traditional class differences
were softened by the wartime experience of
common danger and loss. But in all essentials the
class structure survived and was to impede
Britain’s post-war progress. It survived above all
in education, so denying equal opportunities to
talented children from the lower classes. Social
mobility improved, but far too slowly. The first
post-war Labour government, though not revo-
lutionary, did move the country in new direc-
tions, taking a gradualist road to impose more
state control and planning on private industry,
and to provide through social legislation a society
that would care for the basic needs of all.
Labour’s social policies were more successful than
its industrial ones. Britain’s wealth was more equi-
tably shared but it was created at a slower rate
than the more successful European economies
achieved after the war. The Labour government
of 1945–50 enacted the measures that laid the
basis of the post-war welfare state. It also set up
the National Health Service and nationalised the
coal and steel industries and the railways. The
enactment of such a large and radical legislative
programme required many compromises, and
these, together with the avoidance of direct state
control, ensured that Britain did not experience
the kind of socialist revolution imposed on the
communist states of Eastern Europe.
The first post-war Labour government presided
with success over the transition from peace to war.The miseries of the 1920s and the 1930s haunted
Labour politicians and the working people alike.
Careful planning and staggered demobilisation of
the millions serving in the armed forces ensured
that jobs were waiting for the returning men – and
that they would not be temporary jobs, as many of
them had been after the First World War. Strict
rationing was continued, low wages and subsidised
food prices kept the cost of living down, while the
provision of health care and social security was
spreading a safety net for the lowest income
groups. In comparison with devastated continen-
tal Europe, Britain in the post-war 1940s was rel-
atively well off. There was a market for all it could
produce and as yet little serious competition. The
immediate problem was the balance of payments:
Britain did not export enough to earn the dollars
to pay for imports from the US, to continue high
defence expenditure abroad and to feed the British
occupied zone of Germany, whose people would
otherwise have starved. It still saw itself as a world
power, the number three behind only the US and
the Soviet Union, and, though recognising that
the American alliance remained the indispensable
first condition of West European security, deter-
mined to maintain an independent capacity to
defend itself and its still far-flung imperial inter-
ests. In 1945 it seemed unwise to count on any
long-term US commitment to Western Europe. In
any case, British and American interests overseas
frequently clashed, as for example in the Middle
East.(^1) Chapter 49
BRITAIN
BETTER TIMES AND RETREAT FROM EMPIRE