Repression is when you lose yours.' lem up:
We must organise now:
to provide full employment to rebuild a better Britain to provide social services to secure adequate health, nutrition and care in old age, for everybody to provide full educational opportunities for all abour Party has survived from that day: the myth of 1945.
arty that brought you 1945.' 1982 has killed all three parts of this myth.
ght a European nuclear war from Britain.
attlefield.
'orse than any major European workers' party.
3 we know it. If she loses, all the signs point to an SDPown.
abour tradition.
ons of strategy raised by the current crisis of the British scialists should still support them in 1983. ith Herbert Morrison. ocialist Challenge 7 January 1983 page 6 4 recession is when the guy next door loses his job. A HIRTY-SEVEN years ago a new era began. The Labour Party, icked by twelve million voters, won a 154-seat majority with mandate to build a new world on the ashes of fascism and Its goals were modest. The 1942 party conference summed Hardly the socialist millenium: yet it gave working people ›mething they never had before. It gave them freedom from iar of disease, war and joblessness: freedom from want and aprivation. It gave birth to an enduring myth, on which the The myth had three parts. First, that the new order would st. Second, that it could be won without strife, through the ste alone. Third, that Labour could survive forever as 'the The new order hasn't lasted: it's ending now. Unemployent has topped four million and it isn't going to fall. The pries think tank wants to wind up free health and schooling ir good; the Cabinet says it cannot pay the nurses £700m but sent twice that sum on a senseless war, for an island it can't ven make fit for penguins; and the USA is getting ready to Strife hasn't ended: under four successive governments, cluding two Labour, the country has become an industrial And Labour hasn't survived. From 47.8 percent of the vote 1945, its share of the poll has steadily declined until now, ith Thatcher's assault at its height, it is in the low thirties:
Thatcher wants to cash in on this failure. She is getting lady for an election: if she wins, it will finish the Labour Party abour coalition unless the labour movement mobilises from ow on to prevent it. And if we prevent a coalition and secure Labour victory, the result will turn the Labour Party upside Changes on this scale signal something new in politics -mong other things, we believe, the break-up of the postwar What will replace it? How should socialists react? In the oming months we shall devote space to the important quesolitical system and the Labour Party. In this article ALAN REEMAN asks what lay behind the 1945 policies and whether osses and their servants in the labour movement. Lord Rothemere THE MYTH of 'Labour's tradition' is the second most potent in politics after the 'British way of life'. It is also the spearhead of the Labour right wing's When Spellars was asked why he won in Northfields, he said 'because we are going back to the party's traditions.' What tradition? Surely not that of 1917 when Snowden called for soviets? Or 1924 when Labour formed minority government Communists were still in the party? Nor, to be fair to comrade Spellars, can he mean the tradition of Ramsay betrayal, or the thirteen years of Tory rule after 1951. Spellars means anything intelligible. he means the 'official version' of 1945; 1945 as the Labour voter sees it.
Labour's 1949 police, but for one It is easy fact: they worked. For twenty-five years, as far as millions of working people were concerned, daily life brilliantly confirmed what moderate Labour politicians claimed. People had jobs, schools, hospitals, social SCOTTA - and they were convinced that the Labour Party was responsible.
It is impossible to communicate with the Labour voters that Spellars mobilise without understanding this. generation which grew up under the welfare state firmly believes it was Labour's creation.
Something else has to be done: we have to separate the goals of the 1945 government from its methods.
The demands for jobs, social security, the welfare freedom from war are working class demands; our demands. capitalist system cannot durably grant them. Our difference with Labour's leaders is not that we want socialism instead of these demands. What we say is that socialism is the only way to get them.
The myth of 1945 persists because for twenty-five years, give or take a prescription charge or two, working people were granted these demands without socialism. with Labour's leaders is about how you explain this fact.
Above all we disagree with the most basic myth of all: the idea that the ruling opposed gramme. The official tradition has it that the Tories opposed the Welfare State, and that the Welfare State was therefore won by the act of voting abour.
Many things flow from this idea. First, that the vote itself was brought change - instead of the fifteen years of gigantic social upheaval that went before it. Second, that the same change can be won again by voting Labour and without parliamentary struggle. Thirdly, that the chief enemy which working people must defeat to win more reform is the Tory Party, and that everything including the struggle Labour's own right wing leaders -should be sacrificed to this end.
Why is the idea so strong? One reason is that Britain was the only maJor European country neither occupation nor fascism. British working class never had their desperate ruling class, Indeed, trade smashed union strengin coupied during tne war. Britain was the only European country in which the rate of exploitation fell after the war. It was therefore easy to mistake the Tories' parliamentary mutterings for real opposition.
virtually the only industrial country where the new policies — which were applied throughout the West - were introduced by a working class part! governing on its own. counter- France the Communists were part of John coalitions. In Germany it took years rebuild the American there was no socialist party.
seen as the achievement of modern social democracy. In the rest of the world people saw things as they really were, social democracy was an achievement Philip of the welfare state.
La time to refute Labourism's claim; for while the the ruling class not only tolerated the new policies, but devised them The policy which underlay it all state spending to soften the effects of MacDonald's slumps famous British bourgeois economist John Maynard Keynes, No: if Treasury advisor throughout the war.
was invented by William Beveridge, a stoutly orthodox civil servant Whitehall advisor who believed that "The well-to-do represent on scorn against the left The and The difference proextraability ThAn ter stocks have come to the top.
against Paper on 1 December 1942, tion The others cutter Ignorance, The got Keynes benediction and a pro year. Cheap at the price.
Did the ruling Working people did not think eleven regions recorded anxiety that the Above all, however, Britain was In Italy and socialist party.
In Britain the welfare state was and understood that modern Yet the facts were around at the was the brainchild of the senior social security policy and the whole a higher level of character and working CACOPO because in the course of time the betHis report, published as a White was the oundanon or everying Labour did It declared that Want is only one of five giants on the road of reconstruc- materialise are Disease Squalor and Idleness.' It mise that it would cost only £100m per class want it?
SO: pletely wrecking it, wartime intelligence trom ten out o *ver TInS DIan plan will because of vested interests: particularly mentioned are the Insurance Companies, the BMA (The organisation) and big rep business. It is felt among the rank and opp file that even if these powerful interests do not jointly succeed in com- to c they will hotly at contest every inch of the ground, the ask will therefore SO did mutilated that the benefits ultimately fro
explosion plutoclacy Keith ship balancing in favour of it. Among employers, only 16 percent thought they would gain: but seventy-three percent were in favour of it. In the 'upper income bracket the figures were 29 and 76.
The ruling classes understood that despite short-term losses they might suffer, it was politically necessary and economically possible. The shock of the depression, and fear of a social after the war, convinced them of the need for a fundamental shift in capitalist strategy.
This was why Labour was allowed to carry out its programme. le com mitted Churchill himself to broadcast in 1943 in favour of 'national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave,' and declare that there must be no unemployed after the war, for we cannot have a band of drones in our midst, whether they come from the ancient aristocracy or the modern For the ordinary type of pub-crawler.' In a speech which would make Joseph blush with shame he called for the state to work in partner-.
industry to exercise influence upon development which can be turned on or off as circumstances require, and argued that 'there is a broadening field for Churchill. were lukewarm were against reform and favour when we look at the Labour's own leaders. cluding Bevin, tion!
Committee
ly Keynesian was accompanied by the Health Service Act of to introduce socialism was Winston Labour's leaders attitudes Hugh Paper on Employment Policy of Ma lo Kmended by much as bold, tramework able, and worthy of full support; it National White of February 1944, the Butler Education August and the September posals. All these were jointly agreed
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Did the Tories oppose the Welfare State?