Books

The New Eventide

Ferdinand Mount

1945: The World We Fought For Robert Kee (Hamish Hamilton £12.95) Prospect and Reality: Great Britain 1945-1955 T. E. B. Howarth (Collins £14.95) Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy 1945-51 Alec Cairncross (Methuen £35)

Looking back, we feel somehow that there ought to have been more celeb- rating. Those who were going to get lit up when the lights went up in London did, but not for long, and there were fewer of them than had been expected. VE-Day brought none of 'the almost savage plunging into revelry' which had marked the more sud- den Armistice of 1918; there was little drunkenness, small, family parties for the most part rather than large crowds, 'a conscious sense of release from strain, rather than triumphant exaltation', accord- ing to A. J. Cummings of the News Chronicle. In part, of course, this was because the world was not yet at peace. 'We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed. remains unsubdued . .

But the main reason for the restraint was surely exhaustion, always the great deflater after any prolonged strain, from 0-levels te world war. Historians seem to think it unmanly or unkind to dwell on the quality of Britain's exhaustion after the war. The glory and the deliverance were so great, the patience and the courage so im- perishably steadfast that there was some- thing petty about harping on the cost. Yet the more one reads, the more prevailing and oppressive becomes the sense of a country drained of its reserves — mentally, Physically, militarily, financially. The Americans took the markets. The Russians took the territory. We were left with memories — all the more misleading as models since they were not illusory but Utterly genuine — memories of a national unity and commitment that were too in- tense to outlast the war which had brought them to the surface.

When Truman stopped Lend-Lease — abruptly, without consultation, let alone negotiation — two days after the Japanese surrender, Britain was as bust as a country can be. We had sold off a large part of our overseas assets; we had run up vast debts as an occupying power in countries like Egypt and India. Britain's overseas milit- ary expenditure had been greater than America's. We had lost nearly a third of our merchant shipping; our exports were less than a third of their prewar level; we ended the war with the largest external debt in history. At the same time, we were still attempting to police the world and feed the Germans.

No other country had such debts; no other country continued to shoulder re- sponsibilities out of all proportion to its resources. Postwar Britain seemed to be full of gaps and drains — the dollar gap, the dollar drain, the inflation gap, the brain drain; again and again, the short- hand of economic journalism drew atten- tion to a country striving to make ends meet, stretching to cover ground which was outside its range, driven to consider any dodge to keep the creditors at bay. During the dollar shortage of 1947, some ministers .suggested a ban on the showing of Amer- ican films; Attlee scribbled on his copy of a paper from Dalton and Cripps that we

should need to mobilise gold and sell our art treasures.

Wishful thinking naturally arises to fill such gaps. Ministers believed, not wholly discouraged by Keynes, who was in charge of the negotiations, that the Americans would be delighted to give us the money we needed, rather than lend it on strictly commercial terms. Keynes had believed that there was no 'serious risk of an overall shortage of gold and dollars in the first three postwar years'. Shinwell actually claimed that 'we are not suppliants for financial assistance', but then Shinwell took the biscuit for fatuous optimism, as in his famous declaration before the coal crisis which he engineered almost single- handed in the winter of 1946-47: 'Every- body knows that there is going to be a serious crisis in the coal industry — except the Minister of Fuel and Power.'

It should be said that Labour's Chancel- lors of the Exchequer were for the most part exceptions to this slack-minded Micawberism. In their different ways, Dal- ton, Cripps and Gaitskell all did their best to recall their colleagues to the realities of Britain's plight, and to take the necessary action in good time. Sir Alec Cairncross offers an engaging mandarin's eye view of the Attlee years. Politicians are in general portrayed as spoilt and ignorant children who have to be brought into line by nanny: 'more commonly, Ministers were the reluc- tant pupils of their officials . . . The co-ordination of economic policy inevit- ably depended heavily on the calibre of the officials advising Ministers' — although, of course, ha ha, 'the issue, as always, was decided by Ministers'. Sir Alec refers caustically — and correctly — to 'the tendency of Ministers to decide what they have little or no power to influence, and leave undecided what is plainly within their discretion'. The view is lent extra enchant- ment by Sir Alec's habit of awarding his old colleagues their Christian names while referring to the politicians curtly by their surname only, as though they were upper servants:

James Meade was agitating for the budget surplus in 1946 and Robert Hall maintained the pressure successfully when Cripps be- came Chancellor. It was Dalton who, although no Keynesian, first budgeted for a surplus, but in doing so he was following a policy already accepted at the official level under the influence of the economists. The devaluation of 1949 was due more to Robert Hall than to any other individual.

Naturally, since the economists were really in charge throughout the period, it is no wonder that Sir Alec concludes cheer- fully

. . . whether one tries to look forward from 1945 or backwards from forty years later, those years appear in retrospect, and rightly so, as years when the government knew where it wanted to go and led the country with an understanding of what was at stake.

It was James and Alec and Robert who had gradually weaned Cripps and Dalton and the rest away from their bizarre preoccupa- tions with planning and controls and edu- cated them in the importance of old- fashioned things such as prices and interest rates. Each year, the Attlee gov- ernment's Economic Survey contained fewer and fewer hard figures and meant less and less. Only the nationalisation programme churned on, despite the fact that nobody in government was really clear what nationalisation was for.

Sir Alec, however, is not much in- terested in nationalisation. Indeed, he frankly copies much of his, rather skimpy chapter on the subject out of Sir Norman Chester's magnum opus. The Cairncross view remains decidedly macro; simul- taneously Olympian and parochial, he breathes only the thin air of Whitehall and, now and then, of Washington. The sense of life in a car factory in Coventry or a milk bar in Maidstone does not flow through his pages.

Which is a pity, since if we steer so emphatically clear of the real world, we are unlikely to glimpse much of an answer to the question which persists in bobbing up: Why did Britain fall behind? The continen- tal countries, Sir Alec tells us, did not have our debts and our responsibilities; and we did not have their reserves of labour on the farms and in the refugee camps. But if that were so, the relative gap in performance should surely have begun to close over the years as all these factors receded in import- ance. In fact, in the early Fifties, most of our continental competitors lengthened their stride and the gap widened. Sir Alec says firmly:

It does not seem possible to explain the difference in economic performance either before 1951 or afterwards in terms of differ- ences in economic regime: the use of plan- ning or market mechanisms; the sophistica- tion of the controls; the monetary and fiscal policies adopted. There is too much in common in performance and too little in common in policy.

I wonder. Did Germany's 'economic mira- cle' have nothing at all to do with Erhard's free-market policies — adopted in the teeth of British government advice? In a book of 527 pages, is not even the name of Ludwig Erhard worth a fleeting mention?

Sir Alec does throw in one more ex- planation for Britain's inferior perform- ance right at the end. In traditional civil • service style, he blames the workers:

British manual workers felt entitled to better treatment after the war than they had en- joyed before it, with regard to the level of production . . . The mysteries of Lend- Lease, foreign borrowing and the dollar drain were not for the likes of them to fathom. They looked to the government to ensure distributive justice whatever hap- pened to production and no government could ignore the prevailing mood. Regard- less of the case for or against redistribution of income, rationing and other controls were inevitable politically under post-war condi- tions in Britain.

So this, then, is the answer. Rationing was too popular to be abolished. The poor ignorant yobs wouldn't be parted from their little buff books.

It may be hard to depict the coming of the Labour government, even ironically, as the embodiment of a New Dawn. One could just as well discern in Mr Attlee's success a pent-up sense of national fatigue — the yearning for a New Eventide which would organise matters rather more kindly and take care of painful, long-standing social problems. No doubt this yearning included within it some expectation of a greater fairness in the distribution of goods and services, as well of full employment and improved welfare. These yearnings were probably shared by most people in Europe. But they fell a long way short of a clear or positive desire for anything that could be called a socialist society; and indeed non-socialist governments else- where in Western Europe managed to give satisfaction. Nor has Sir Alec demons- trated, and this is the crux, that Britain was so irredeemably comatose and enfeebled as to be beyond the Erhard treatment. If so, why was Labour nearly ejected within five years?

Those who feel that Sir Alec's picture does not adequately represent the temper of the times — those sour, shabby, but strangely mild times — will turn with relief to the popular histories put together by Mr Howarth and Mr Kee. Both are well- written and well-chosen scrapbooks. Mr Howarth, the former High Master of St Paul's, spices his narrative with plenty of schoolmasterly acerbity; Mr Kee, kinder and imbued with fitting sobriety in the face of the horrors of 1945, is moved to indigna- tion mostly by the behaviour of the Times which kept up its superb record of weasel-

hearted equivocation throughout the year (no doubt to a large extent through the presence of the Stalinist E. H. Carr on its staff). Anyone who opposed Stalin's de- signs — whether in Greece or Poland or

Yugoslavia — could expect to be ditched or reviled by the Times while Uncle Joe was always given the benefit of the doubt:

All the evidence suggests that what Marshal Stalin desires to see in Warsaw is not a puppet Government acting under Russian orders but a friendly Government which, fully conscious of the supreme importance of Russian-Polish accord, will frame its own independent policies in that context.

I like 'in that context'.

The Guardian came out a good deal better and was on occasion, then as now, willing to attempt a picture of things as they were:

Shabbiness has descended deeply upon us. Much of London is still plaster-faced, so without paint that it looks dingier than other cities. Scarcity of cosmetics and corsets and good stockings affects the appearance of hard-working women, and the upper middle- class West Londoner who used to be quoted as an exemplar in male dress has at last settled deep into shabby and ill-mended costume and his pre-war wardrobe fails and

i fades . . . In the bitter Christmas weather many girls went without stockings. At night now there is more light to reveal our shabbiness. In December here the lights went sufficiently on for one to see the cab on the opposite side of the street and now motor-car lamps are legally unmasked.

This is surely more like the world of the late 1940s and the townscape of 1984. Mr Kee reminds us of many other things: how badly the British and the Americans got on after the war, the purge of collaborators in France, and, above all, the horror of the opening of the concentration camps, one after the other, in the weeks before VE- Day: Theresienstadt, Maidanek, Au-

schwitz, Nordhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen (The last-named made the most impact on this country since it was liberated by the British). A year which had begun with the German dead piled up high like logs in the forests of the Ardennes and had still Hiroshima and Nagasaki in store offered limited scope for celebration. It was into this terrifying world that the Attlee government emerged, blinking, the heir of vague hopes, quite a bit of goodwill and the clanking of the old electoral wheel of fortune. For all the Tory huffing and puffing about the sinister role of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, Bevan was surely more or less right in arguing that the General Election was 'the registration of a change which had occurred in Britain before the war began'. If the experience of the war had done anything, it was only to consolidate the belief, so characteristic of the 1930s, in co-ordination, nationalisation and the ability of civil servants to run anything. It was, after all, as far back as 1937 that Douglas Jay had penned his immortal words — which are worth quot- ing at some length, as Mr Howarth does, since they are even more patronising than in the truncated form:

Housewives on the whole cannot be trusted to buy all the right things, where nutrition and health are concerned. This is really no more than an extension of the principle according to which the housewife herself would not trust a child of four to select the week's purchases. For in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.

Hence the chickens in Gambia which

laid no eggs and the 21/2 million acres of groundnuts in East Africa Ca stirring ex- ample of what science can do to make life worth living' — the Times), which were intended to produce 609,000 tons of peanuts each year ('groundnuts' was a euphemism to forestall derision) — and in fact produced a grand total of 9,000 tons in five years. 'The extensive, tough and pli- able roots of the Kongwa thorns and the multiplicity of stumps have proved beyond the power of normal rooting machines.'

At the same time as these exotic diver- sions, the usual difficulties were being dodged at home: overmanning, lack of competitiveness, reluctance to close old high-cost factories and invest in new ones and so on and on. It would be melancholy to rehearse them all again here; it is important only to point out that such shortcomings did not lie hidden until the 1950s and 60s, let alone the 70s. They were identified from the start — and ducked almost as quickly.

The gentlest — and truest — diagnosis remains, I think, what King George wrote to the Duke of Gloucester at the beginning of 1946: 'I have been suffering from an awful reaction from the strain of the war, I suppose, and have felt very tired.'