Part 9
The urge for change to meet changing conditions at home and new forces abroad was not universal. The people of the middle class had not yet fully understood what the war had done to Britain's economy and especially to that section of it which supported them. There was very strong opposition to the first post-war American loan in sections of this class, largely from people whose confidence had not been shaken by the cataclysm. The austerity imposed by Sir Stafford Cripps, the Socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer, was neither understood nor welcomed. The withdrawal from India was hotly opposed--and, it should be remembered, not purely on imperialist grounds. For two hundred years the middle class had provided the officers and civil servants who led and administered the Indian Army and the government of British India. As a class it knew a great deal more about India and the Indians than the union leaders and earnest young intellectuals of Mr. Attlee's government knew. The Socialist speakers and newspapers scoffed at "the toffy-nosed old ex-colonels" who predicted bloody and prolonged rioting between the Hindus and the Moslems once British power was withdrawn. The rioting began, and before it was over the bloodshed was greater than in all the British punitive actions from the Mutiny onward.
None of this generally Conservative opposition could halt or even check a Labor government that had been voted into power in 1945 with 393 seats in the House of Commons as opposed to 216 for the Conservatives and 12 for the Liberals. The Tories were out, the new day had dawned, and the Labor Party, in full control of the government for the first time in its history, set out to remake Britain.
No one in Britain could plead ignorance of what the Labor Party was about to do. Since 1918 it had been committed to extensive nationalization of industry and redistribution of income. Moreover, it came to power at a moment when the old patterns of industrial power and political alignments had been ruptured by war and when voters other than those who habitually voted Labor were acknowledging the need for change.
The 1945 policy statement of the Labor Party was called "Let Us Face the Future." It dotted all the _i_'s and crossed all the _t_'s in Labor's program.
The statement began with a good word for freedom, always highly esteemed by political parties seeking power. But it added an interesting comment. "There are certain so-called freedoms that Labor will not tolerate; freedom to exploit other people; freedom to pay poor wages and to push up prices for selfish profits; freedom to deprive the people of the means of living full, happy, healthy lives."
The statement went on to promise full employment, to be achieved through the nationalization of industry; the fullest use of national resources; higher wages; social services and insurance; a new tax policy; and planned investment. There was to be extensive replanning of the national economic effort and a "firm constructive government hand on our whole productive machinery." The Labor Party's ultimate purpose at home was "the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain--free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public spirited, its material resources organized in the services of the British people."
In 1948 Harold Laski, the Labor Party's ideological mentor, said in the course of the Fabian Society Lectures that the party was "trying to transform a profoundly bourgeois society, mainly composed of what Bagehot called 'deferential' citizens, allergic to theory because long centuries of success have trained it to distrust of philosophic speculation, and acquiescent in the empiricist's dogma that somehow something is bound to turn up, a society, moreover, in which all the major criteria of social values have been imposed by a long indoctrination for whose aid all the power of church and school, of press and cinema, have been very skillfully mobilized; we have got to transform this bourgeois society into a socialist society, with foundations not less secure than those it seeks to renovate."
Doubtless these ominous words failed to penetrate into the clubs and boardrooms that were the sanctums of the former ruling class. But it was hardly necessary that they should. The businessmen and the Conservative politicians understood Harold Laski's objectives.
Nationalization of industry is the most widely advertised economic result of Labor policies between 1945 and 1951. In assessing its effect on the changes in Britain since 1939, we must remember that neither was it so new nor is it so extensive as Americans believe. The British Broadcasting Corporation was created as a public corporation as long ago as 1927. Today most manufacturing in Britain remains in the control of private enterprise.
Between 1945 and 1951, however, the Labor government's policy of nationalization created corporations that today operate or control industries or services. In two industries, steel and road transport, the trend toward nationalization has been reversed. But the following list shows the extent of nationalization in Britain today.
_Coal_: The Coal Industry Nationalization Act received the Royal Assent in May of 1946, and on January 1, 1947, the assets of the industry were vested in the National Coal Board appointed by the Minister of Fuel and Power and responsible for the management of the industry. For a century coal was king in Britain, and British coal dominated the world market until 1910. Coal production is around 225,000,000 tons annually--the peak was reached in 1913 with 287,000,000 tons--and the industry employs just over 700,000 people.
_Gas_: Under the Gas Act of 1948 the gas industry was brought under public ownership and control on May 1, 1949. The national body is the Gas Council, also appointed by the Minister of Fuel and Power. The council consists of a full-time chairman and deputy chairman and the twelve chairmen of the area boards.
_Electricity_: The Central Electricity Authority in April 1948 took over the assets of former municipal and private electricity supply systems throughout Great Britain with the exception of the area already served by the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, another public corporation. But the industry had long been moving toward nationalization. As early as 1919 the Electricity Commissioners were established to supervise the industry and promote voluntary reorganization. The industry is a big one, employing approximately 200,000 people, and production in 1954 was over 72,800,000,000 kilowatts.
_Banking_: The Bank of England, Britain's central bank, was established in 1694 by Act of Parliament. Its entire capital stock was acquired by the government under the Bank of England Act of 1946. As the central bank, the Bank of England is the banker to the government, its agent in important financial operations, and the central note-issuing authority.
_Transport_: On January 1, 1948, under the Transport Act passed in the preceding year, most of Britain's inland transport system came under public ownership. Nationalization embraced the railways and the hotels, road-transport interests, docks and steamships owned by the railways, most of the canals, and London's passenger-transport system. The public authority then established was the British Transport Commission. Originally the Commission appointed six executive bodies to run various parts of the system: the Railway Executive, the Road Transport Executive, the Road Passenger Executive, the Hotel Executive, the London Transport Executive, and the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive. This generous proliferation of authority affected an industry that employs nearly 2,000,000 workers.
Transport was one of the nationalized industries whose organization was altered by the Conservatives when they returned to power in 1951. Believing that "competition gives a better service than monopoly," the Tories passed the Transport Act of 1953. This returned highway freight-haulage to private enterprise and aimed at greater efficiency on the railroads through the encouragement of competition between the various regions, such as the Southern Region or the Western Region, into which the national system had been divided. The act also abolished all the neat but rather inefficient executives except the Road Passenger Executive, which had been abolished, unmourned save by a few civil servants, in 1952, and the London Transport Executive, which was retained.
_Airways_: British governments since the twenties have been involved in civil aviation. Imperial Airways received a government grant of £1,000,000 as early as 1924. By 1939 the Conservative government had established the British Overseas Airways Corporation by Act of Parliament. In 1946 the Labor government, under the Civil Aviation Act, set up two additional public corporations: British European Airways and British South American Airways. The latter was merged with BOAC in 1949.
_Communications_: The government took control of Cable and Wireless Ltd., the principal overseas telegraph service, on January 1, 1947. Thus, the Post Office now operates overseas telecommunications from the United Kingdom and, of course, all internal telephonic and telegraphic systems.
These were the most important milestones on the Labor Party's progress toward nationalization. Viewed dispassionately, they were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. There had been a trend toward nationalization in electricity for some years. Objective investigators had suggested nationalization to aid the failing coal-mining industry, and during the war (1942) the Coalition government had assumed full control of the industry's operations although private ownership retained control of the mines.
We should avoid, too, the impression, popular among the uninformed in the United States and even in Britain, that nationalization meant that the workers took over management of the industries concerned. There was no invasion of boardrooms by working-men in cloth caps. On the contrary, employees protested that nationalization did not affect the management of industries, and such protests were backed by facts. In 1951, after six years of Labor Party rule, trade-union representation among the full-time members of the boards of the nationalized industries was a little under 20 per cent, and among the part-time members the percentage was just below 15 per cent. Five boards had no trade-union representation.
The nationalization program of the Labor government between 1945 and 1951 nevertheless marked an important change in the structure of British society. The financial and economic control of some of the nation's most important industries was transferred from private to public hands. The capitalist system that had served Britain so well found its horizons limited in important fields.
There is now no important political movement in Britain to undo the work of the Labor government in the fields mentioned above. But as long as a generation survives which knew these industries under private control, harsh and persistent criticism will persist. Some of it is just. The standard of efficiency and comfort on British railroads, for instance, has deterioriated since pre-war days. But in many instances the critics are attacking aspects of the nationalized industries which are the result not of nationalization itself but of the gradual wearing out of much of the nation's industrial plant. Two wars, a long depression, and a prolonged period of economic austerity during which only the most important improvements and construction could be financed have had their effect. Both British industry and the transport system upon which it rests--railroads, ports, highways--need immediate improvement and new construction.
Nationalization, however, was only one means of altering the bases of British society. The historian of the future may consider that the tremendous extension of government responsibility for social welfare was a more important factor in the evolution of Britain. The Welfare State has been a target for critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Its admitted cost, its supposed inefficiency are denounced. British critics, however, avoid a cardinal point. The Welfare State is in Britain to stay. No government relying on the electorate for office is going to dismantle it.
This is not a reference book, but we had better be sure of what we mean by the British "Welfare State" as we consider its effect on the society it serves.
The system is much more extensive than most Americans realize. The government is now responsible through either central or local authorities for services that include subsistence for the needy, education and health services for all, housing, employment insurance, the care of the aged or the handicapped, the feeding of mothers and infants, sickness, maternity, and industrial-injury benefits, widows' and retirement pensions, and family allowances.
The modern John Bull can be born, cared for as an infant, educated, employed, hospitalized and treated, and pensioned at the expense of the state and ultimately of himself through his contributions. This is the extreme, and it arouses pious horror among those of conservative mind in Britain as well as in the United States.
Again, as in the case of the nationalization of industry, we find that much of the legislation that established the Welfare State did not spring from the bulging brows of Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Beveridge, or Aneurin Bevan, but is the latest step in an evolutionary process. National Insurance is the logical outgrowth of the Poor Relief Act of 1601, before there were Englishmen in America, and the contributory principle on which all later measures in this field have been based first appeared in the National Health Insurance Scheme of 1912.
The present system is big and it is expensive. The national and local governments are spending about £2,267,000,000 a year (about $6,347,600,000) on social services for the Welfare State, and the expenditure by the Exchequer on social services amounts to over a quarter of the total.
Yet, as this is Britain where established custom dies hard, voluntary social services supplement the state services. There are literally hundreds of them, ranging from those providing general social service, such as the National Council of Social Service, through specialized organizations, such as Doctor Barnado's Homes for homeless children and the National Association for Mental Health, to religious groups such as the Church of England Children's Society and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. The existence and vigor of these voluntary organizations testifies to the wrongness of the assumption that all social work in Britain today is in the hands of soulless civil servants.
Of all the actions taken to extend social services under the Labor government, by far the most novel and controversial was the establishment of the National Health Service, which came into being on July 5, 1948. The object of the National Health Service Act was "to promote the establishment in England and Wales [other acts for Scotland and Northern Ireland came into force simultaneously] of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people of England and Wales and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness, and for that purpose to provide or secure the effective provision of services."
Before we consider what the service does, let us think of those it was designed to help. The British working class up to 1945 suffered to a considerable degree from lack of proper medical and dental care. Doctors and dentists were expensive, and in addition there was a definite psychological resistance to placing oneself in their care. Health and medicine were not popularized in Britain, as they were in the United States; among the poor there was still a tendency to consider discussion of these subjects as ill-mannered.
There has been some change since the war, but not much. Britons of all classes were surprised, and some of them a little disgusted, by the clinical descriptions of President Eisenhower's illness in American newspapers. But the National Health Service has done much to reduce the old reluctance to visit the doctor or the dentist because of the expense.
Three subsequent acts in 1949, 1951, and 1952 have modified the scheme slightly and have provided for charges for some services. But the National Health Service is otherwise free and available according to medical need. Its availability is not dependent on contribution to National Insurance.
What does the service do? The Ministry of Health is directly responsible for all hospital and specialist services on a national basis, the mental-health functions of the old Board of Control, research work on the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of illness, the public-health laboratory service, a blood-transfusion service.
These broad general headings cover an enormous organization, the basis of which is the General Practitioner Services, which covers the medical attention given to individuals by doctors and dentists of their own choice from among those enrolled in the service. About 24,000 or nearly all of the general practitioners in Britain are part of the service. Of approximately 10,000 dentists in England and Wales, about 9,500 are in the service.
Again, costs are high. For six years Labor and Conservative administrations have sought to keep the net total annual cost of the National Health Service to just over £400,000,000 or $1,120,000,000. To limit the drain on the Exchequer it was found necessary to charge for prescription forms, dentures, and spectacles. Like any welfare scheme, the National Health Service invited malingerers and imaginary invalids who cost the doctors--and the state--time and money.
I asked a young doctor in the West Country what he thought of the scheme. "Well, I don't know if it has contributed much to the health of my bank statement," he said, "but it has contributed to the health of the folk around here. People are healthier because they don't wait until they're desperately ill to see a doctor. And the care of children has improved tremendously. Perhaps this might have come naturally under the old system. I don't know. But it's here now, and we're a healthier lot."
The opposition view was put by an elderly doctor in London who opined that so great was the pressure on the ordinary general practitioner from "humbugs" that he never got a chance to do a thorough job on the seriously ill. The hospitals, he added, were crowded with people who "don't belong there" and who occupied beds needed by the really sick.
This controversy, like those over the nationalization of industry, will continue. Again there seems little prospect that any government will modify in any important way the basic provisions of the National Health Service Act.
In company with the National Insurance, which applies its sickness, unemployment, maternity, and widows' benefits to everyone over school-leaving age, and the National Assistance Board, with its responsibility for the care of those unable to maintain themselves, the National Health Service has established the Welfare State in Britain. Another important function has been largely taken out of the hands of private individuals and delivered to the state.
What effect did the nationalization of industry and the establishment of the Welfare State have on British society? Obviously, the first removed from the control of the moneyed and propertied classes certain powers over the economic functioning of Britain. The second, because of its cost, made certain that the heavy tax rates introduced during and just before World War II would continue. These taxes were paid principally by the middle class, which, at the outset, refused in many instances to use the National Health Service.
The effect was a leveling one. The dominant class was stripped, on one hand, of some of its power to control a large section of the national economy, although, as we have seen, it managed to retain its direction of the nationalized industries. At the same time this class found that it must continue to pay year by year a high proportion of its earned income for the state's care of its less prosperous fellows. The decline in the influence, prosperity, and prestige of the old middle class was definitely accelerated by these two bold advances toward socialism.
From the standpoint of the prestige of this class in Britain and, frankly, of the usefulness of many of its members to the state, the withdrawal of British rule from India and Burma and the steps elsewhere toward the liquidation of the Empire were blows as grievous as the creation of the Welfare State and the nationalization of some industries.
Americans should realize that to Britons the Empire was not simply a place to work and get rich. The people who did the Empire's work usually retired with only their pensions and a conviction (which is not much help when you need a new overcoat) that they had done their duty.
The propaganda of India and Pakistan and of their well-wishers in the United States has obscured for Americans the grand dimensions of the British achievement in India. For a hundred and ninety years, between Plassy in 1757 and the withdrawal in 1947, British rule brought peace and justice to peoples hitherto sorely oppressed by irresponsible tyrants, many of whom were corrupt and decadent. The British stamped out thuggee and suttee, ended the interminable little wars, introduced justice, and labored to build the highways, railroads, and canals that form the skeletons of independent India and Pakistan. All this was done by a handful of British officials and white troops in the midst of the subcontinents millions.
Parenthetically, it might be remembered that when the British Indian army, which served with the British Army in India, existed, and when the Royal Navy had the strength and facilities to take it where it was needed, there was peace between Suez and Singapore.
The British are proud rather than defensive about their record in India. Even the anti-colonialists of the Labor Party note that free India and Pakistan operate under British political and legal forms. Most of them, even those who knew the country well, regarded withdrawal as inevitable after World War II. But it will take more proof than Mr. Nehru is prepared to offer to convince many Britons with roots in India that the people are happier, that justice is universal, that corruption is declining.
This attitude galls the Indians and their friends, who never liked the British much. But in the great days of empire the British didn't care about being liked. This is a significant difference between the American and British approaches to responsibility and leadership in international affairs. The American visitor abroad worries about whether he and his country are liked by the French or the Egyptians or the Indonesians. The Briton, when the Empire's sun was at the zenith, never gave a damn. What he wanted was respect, which he regarded as about as much as a representative of a powerful nation could win from the nationals of a less powerful nation under economic, political, or military obligation.
"We ran that district with three officials, some Indian civil servants, the police, and their white officers, and we ran it damned well," an official recalled. "There were some troops up the line, but we never needed them. When we made a decision or gave a judgment, we adhered to it. We made no distinction between Moslem and Hindu. There was justice and peace. No, of course they weren't free. They weren't ready to govern themselves. And d'you think they'd have traded those conditions for freedom and communal rioting?"
I asked the official the population of the district.
"Three, three and a half million," he said.