The lessons of 1945-1951 Tories in opposition

ROBERT BLAKE

On the morrow of the 1945 general election the Conservatives faced a period of opposition comparable only with the years after 1906. But they behaved much more sensibly. It is often said that history teaches no lessons or else the wrong, ones. Yet it is not always the case and after 1945 the party leaders did manage to avoid the major errors of Balfour and his shadow cabinet. They were helped by two great contrasts between the situation then and that of forty years earlier. They were not divided on any major issue of policy like tariffs, and they had in Churchill a leader who was a figure of world fame and prestige. Yet, in spite of their more favourable position after 1945, it took two elections to bring the Conservatives back to power—and even so they won by the narrowest of margins and on a minority of the popular vote.

One must, as always in elections, look both at what people were voting for and what they were voting against. The Conservative party undoubtedly made a major effort to re- think its political programme, reorganise its internal constitution, and recover its parlia- mentary morale. Let us take each in turn.

The first thing to bear in mind is that it was over thirty years since the party had had occasion to give any thought to its role in opposition. From 1915 to 1945, the Conserva- tives, whether on their own or as partner of a coalition—usually the dominant partner— had been in office nearly all the while. Two brief intervals—ten months in 1924 and twenty- six months in 1929-31—were not enough to alter the fact that the party had been essen- tially the party of government for longer than almost any of its members, bar Churchill, could remember. Churchill, moreover, had ex- perience of office dating back even earlier— though on the other side, of course. In the art of conducting His Majesty's Opposition the Conservative front bench was either wholly out of practice or wholly inexperienced.

A party in office inevitably gives little thought to ideology or principles. Indeed, why should it as long as things are going well? Problems come up one after another and are solved—or not solved—by empirical criteria. Advice from Whitehall, reports of royal com- missions, external pressures, the trade cycle, the need to meet sudden crises blowing up from nowhere, or to placate a public uproar —these are what actuate governments. No doubt their reactions are influenced by some sort of vague ideological colours, but the need to make those colours into a coherent pattern does not arise. Anyway, it is often impossible, given the contradictions, reversals and incon- sistencies which events may force upon even the most honourable and efficient of ministries.

But in opposition the situation is quite different. A party has to avoid, on the one hand, the charge of peevish factiousness and, on the other, that of pallid imitation of the government. It also has to steer a tricky line between policy statements so clear that they give hostages to fortune or so vague that they offer no alternative at all. Churchill at first was strongly against giving hostages to fortune. At Edinburgh in 1946, despite much pressure for a 'programme,' he defined the Conservative policy as 'Liberty with security; stability combined with progress; the main- tenance of religion, the Crown, and Parlia- mentary Government'—points from which scarcely anyone in any party would have dis- sented. Nor was he much more specific when Eden and Oliver Stanley later that year pressed him to give a clearer lead at the Blackpool conference. His 'eight points,' observed the Scotsman, 'would describe Conservative eco- nomic policy at any time in the past thirty or forty years, if not further back than that.'

Churchill was more interested in the world scene. His experience as Chancellor of the Ex- chequer in Baldwin's second government had not been happy. He had never been very good on 'bread and butter politics.' Economic affairs only engaged his sporadic interest, though if he was interested he could act decisively—wit- ness the veto that, on Lord Cherwell's advice, he imposed in 1952 on the proposal of the Treasury to establish a floating pound. He seems to have taken a good deal of persuasion to give his imprimatur to the most important policy document issued by the party in these years—Mr R. A. Butler's 'Industrial Charter.'

The significance of this document is not that the Conservatives acted on it at all obviously when they got back into power, for in fact it was largely concerned with problems that were to be irrelevant in the 'fifties, such as unemployment, deflation, etc; resembling in this respect, of course, the preponderance of Labour thought at the time. Still less was it important because it converted the ordinary voter. Its effect was essentially on the opinion- forming classes. It was a successful attempt to counter the Labour argument that the Con- servatives were the party of industrial laissez- faire and 'devil take the hindmost.'

It did indeed emphasise the importance of removing !unnecessary' controls, and it was this part of it on which the Conservatives may claim to have acted when they got back— although a host of other reasons would have made any government inclined by then to. cut away the undergrowth of restrictions surviv- ing from the war, and any opposition would have inclined to press more keenly than any government for such a popular move. But its importance at the time of the issue was com- parable politically to the Crystal Palace and Manchester speeches of Disraeli in 1872. Of course, given the modern world of collective committee work, it lacked the vigour and col- our of Disraeli. Yet in its cool, humdrum and slightly flat language it did present a recog- nisable alternative to the reigning orthodoxy.

The reorganisation of the party was prob- ably more important than any rethinking qf policy. As after every defeat-1868, 1880, 1906, 1910—there was a constitutional reshuffle, change of committee nomenclatures and rela- tionships, and a general move for better representation of party sentiment. If you ask why this always happens, the answer is that defeat gives a lot of people much annoyance and much time on their bands. No party in

power ever dreams of bothering about this sort of thing. Yet we should not dismiss it as wholly a matter of mutual recrimination and prospective window-dressing. Every now and then the moment of defeat does produce a real change.

The postwar reforms which took place in the party organisation are usually attributed to that greatest of all Conservative party managers, Lord Woolton. The magnitude of his achievement is beyond dispute, but it is fair to say that some significant developments took place under his predecessor, Ralph Assheton (Lord Clitheroe), who was chairman at the time of the election and remained in office till July 1946. These included the revival of the Research Department, founded by Neville Chamberlain in 1929, the formation of the Con- servative Political Centre, the growth of the Young Conservative Organisation, and a major expansion of the work of the Advisory Com- mittee on Local Government.

Lord Woolton was a late convert to con- servatism. Although a member of Churchill's cabinet, he remained independent, and only joined the Conservatives on the morrow of their crushing defeat—a gesture which greatly touched Churchill. He had begun life as a Fabian and a social reformer. He subsequently went into the retail business and became chair- man of Lewis's Stores. In the war, thanks to his administrative genius and talent for public relations, he was appointed Minister of Food. He had a soothing if somewhat plummy mode of speech which inspired confidence. House- wives munching that dreadful wartime comes- tible named after him as 'Wootton Pie' came to regard him with a certain wry affection. Long before the end of the war he was a national figure; apart from Neville Chamber- lain, the first chairman of the party who could be thus described.

When he first took over he was horrified at the apparent lack of system that prevailed, but he wisely realised that the organisation of a party is not the same as that of a business. Ex- cessive streamlining, by causing offence to a multitude of faithful workers, might defeat its own purpose. He decided instead to concen- trate on membership, money and propaganda. He was determined to make the party spend and not hoard. He adopted the seemingly para- doxical technique of the businessman accus- tomed to disbursing a large sum of money on promotion of sales. He resolved to over- spend on publicity, propaganda, etc, and thus force the local party organisations to raise the necessary funds. At the same time he resolved to cut off one of their traditional sources, the heavy personal subscriptions through which in some safe constituencies the member virtually bought his seat.

This latter step was formally recommended in 1948 by a committee under Sir David Maxwell Fyfe and was adopted at the party conference. It had a double purpose: first, to democratise the selection process, in the sense that no financial barrier need inhibit the choice of candidates, who were now forbidden to subscribe more than £25 per annum to the local fund (or £50 if already a Member); secondly, to force constituency parties to collect money from local supporters and thus in that very process to secure much better con- tacts which would be the basis for a far more efficient electoral organisation.

Of these two purposes the second proved the more important. The type of candidate could not greatly change in the immediate future, for most of them had already been adopted under the old rules, and so the per- sonnel involved in the elections of 1950 and )951 was scarcely affected by the Maxwell Fyfe recommendations. Nor, in fact, has there been any great change in the type of person seeking Conservative nomination since then, still -less in the type actually nominated. The most that can be said is that a cause of egalitarian criticism has been cut out, and the party's 'image' to that degree improved.

The effect on the local parties themselves, however, was much more important. There can be no doubt that the need to collect a very large number of very small subscriptions, instead of relying on a very small number— perhaps only one—of very- large subscriptions, gave the constituency organisations a notable impetus towards recruitment of members. Lord ,Woolton's appeal for central funds—an extra million pounds—was a great success and his appeal for an extra million members equally satisfactory. The figure went up from 1,200,000 in 1947 (itself an increase of 226,000 on the previous year) to 2,250,000 by the end of June 1948. Thus, by gross over-expenditure and by cutting off an important source of income, , Lord Woolton had achieved a major step to- wards the restoration of the party's prosperity. No doubt there is a moral to be drawn from ,this, but not, I fear, one that applies to private life.

Lord Woolton faced the problem, too, of the party's name. As had occurred before after defeat, there was an agitation in some quarters to change it. There has always been a section of the party which regards the title 'Conser- vative' as a vote-loser. Lord Woolton favoured 'the Union Party' as a substitute—not a very inspired idea, given its similarity to the old but now irrelevant name of 'Unionist.' Luckily he decided that he could only lead this par- . ticular card from strength, not from weakness after defeat. However, the next best thing to changing the name of one's own party favour- ably is to change that of one's opponents un- favourably. He decreed that henceforth in speech and writing Conservatives should never use the word `Labour' with its suggestion of honest British toil, but always substitute 'Socialist' with its alien, doctrinaire, continental overtones. This practice has been followed ever since—with what amount of real political ad- vantage no one can say.

The Conservative revival was helped by an intellectual movement in their favour. Etatisme, which had been all the rage in the 'thirties, lost its charm in the highly regimented England of the war and postwar years. A very influen- tial book at this time was Professor F. A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom, published in 1944. It was essentially anti-socialist in its implica- tions. The universities saw a notable revival of Conservative sympathies among the under- graduates and to some extent among the dons, too. The Conservative Research Department, headed by Mr Butler, contained as members during the period Mr Macleod, Mr Maudling and Mr Powell—people of whom many things have been said, but not that they are stupid. The Labour party had lost its near-monopoly of intellect and ideas.

The least easy aspect of the Tory revival to assess is the effectiveness of the parliamen- tarians. This is because of the general difficulty of deciding just what a parliamentary Oppo- sition can be expected to achieve in modern conditions. It certainly cannot block legisla- tion. The Conservatives probably extracted the maximum concession that could be squeezed out of Labour by a judicious use of the Par- liament Act to postpone the vesting date for steel nationalisation till after the next election. Otherwise the most that an Opposition can do is to present itself as a plausible alternative, trip up the Government whenever it safely can without incurring the charge of factiousness, and build up as adverse a picture as possible of the majority party against the day of the next election.

On the whole, the Conservatives managed all these tasks quite well. If Churchill was often absent, and did not always fire at the right target, he was invariably 'news' whatever he said or did—and he possessed a devastating turn of phrase. Anthony Eden was sweetly reasonable. Harold Macmillan, Oliver Stanley and Oliver Lyttelton were acidly unreasonable, and did much to create a popular image of Labour ministers either as sour, puritanical, doctrinaire pedagogues or else as frenzied rabble-rousers actuated by malice and class hatred. Sir Stafford Cripps, who was not only a non-smoking vegetarian teetotaller, but looked like one too, seemed to epitomise the first category, and Aneurin Bevan the second.

This brings us to what is surely a much more important factor in the electoral change than any positive action by the Conservatives. The elections of 1950 and 1951 were as much votes of no confidence or lack of confidence in Labour as of confidence in the Conservatives.

Labour had won in 1945 because it had appeared as something more than a working- class party. It had undoubtedly carried a sub- stantial section of the middle class, and this was a major element in its victory. But a great deal happened during the next five years to alienate that section of the community. Mr Shinwell and Aneurin Bevan did their bit. The working class was all that mattered, said Shinwell once in a public speech; for the rest he did not care 'two hoots or a tinker's cuss.' Bevan, in an even more famous speech, de- clared his hatred of the Tories. `So far as I am concerned,' he said, 'they are lower than vermin' He got the maximum of publicity. As he had recently described the British press as the most prostituted in the world, this' vas not surprising. The Conservatives evinced great fury.

Elderly colonels in south coast watering places formed 'vermin clubs.' When Mr Attlee ad- dressed an eve-of-poll meeting at Leicester in 1950 he was greeted with cries in upper-class accents of 'What about the vermin!'

Professor Laski, an expert if ever there was one in the art of dropping electoral bricks, maintained that the 'vermin' speech cost two million votes at the next election. This seems unlikely, but the episode certainly did Labour no good. What is more, it was symbolic of a real change of allegiance. If there is one conclusion that does emerge from the electoral statistics of 1950 it is the markedly bigger pro-Tory swing in the suburban areas of the large towns, especially London, compared with the rest of the country. I am sure that long before 1950 there had grown up in that class a real detestation of the Labour government. It has to be remembered that the middle and upper-middle classes, the professional men, lawyers, civil servants, doctors, were going through a particularly thin time just then. They were very heavily taxed. Their incomes did not rise with the cost of living to anything like- the degree that wages did. Later this lag was made up, but not in the 'forties.

Moreover, these years can be seen in retro- spect as a sort of twilight period between the era of cheap servants and the era of cheap washing-machines. The disappearance of ser- vants brought about a revolution in the middle-class way of life far more drastic than anything that followed the First World War; and the effects were more acutely felt at this time than later when prosperity re- turned, labour-saving devices became the norm and people had \ recognised the need to adjust themselves to a change which, they UM saw, would never be reversed. One cannot doubt that, however illogically, this state of affairs greatly conduced to middle-class disenchant- ment with Labour.

To catch the flavour of that aspect of opinion we cannot do better than glance at some of the novels of Angela Thirkell. It is true that they deal with the country rather than the town and with a class that could not be described as disenchanted with Labour, for they had never been enchanted. Rather, it was dis- enchantment with postwar England as sym- bolised by controls, petty bureaucracy, red tape, racketeers, government extravagance, politicians' complacency—`the Gentleman in Whitehall really does know best.' Her novels, such as Peace Breaks Out (1946), in itself a significant title, Private. Enterprise (1947), Love among the Ruins (1948), are in some ways ex- cruciating and they set one's teeth on edge for all sorts of reasons; but they were best-sellers in their day, and they have their value as social documents reflecting something—though no doubt in extreme form—of the bitterness with which the Labour government was regarded by an influential section of the community.

In his book, The General Election of 1880, Mr Trevor Lloyd, disclaiming any originality, advances the theory that elections are usually - conducted on two levels. The bulk of the elec- torate is cautious, uninterested, slow to move. It tends to vote defensively and in support of its material standards and its economic in- terests—or what it deems those to be. But the party enthusiasts, the minority who are pre- pared to work in order to get out the vote,

to knock on doors, put election addresses in envelopes, and attend to the postal vote, require something more—an ideal to admire or an ideology to hate. They can be stirred by non- material considerations at home and by ques- tions of policy abroad which have little direct effect on the prosperity of the ordinary voter. The great turnovers of seats occur when at both these levels one party has the advantage over the other.

This does not purport to be an exhaustive theory of elections, but it does contribute something. In 1880 the Liberals gained 'from `hard times'—the economic depression—and also from the moral enthusiasm inspired by Midlothian. In 1906 they gained from the fear of higher prices and the anxieties of the trade unionists, reinforced by the enthusiasm of party workers enraged by the Education Act of 1902 and scandalised by 'Chinese slavery.' In 1931 it was the Conservatives who had the defensive sentiment aroused by the Labour Cabinet's 'running away' from the crisis and breaking up in disorder.

If we apply these criteria to the post-Second World War elections we can see why Labour won in 1945. The mass of the electorate was voting in defence of full employment and against a reversion to the economic depression of the 1930s. To this sentiment was added the impetus of socialist utopianism inspired by the anti-capitalist writings of a whole intellectual generation. On neither level could the Con- servatives bring anything like such strength to bear. In 1950 the defensive argument was still a very strong Labour asset. Indeed, full employment was one of the party's main themes, and by far the smallest pro-Conserva- tive swing occurred in the areas of high pre- war unemployment. But even on the defensive level the advantage did, not lie wholly with Labour. Cripps's devaluation of the pound operated in the opposite sense for obvious reasons. And on the positive level of party en- thusiasm the Conservatives undoubtedly had the edge over Labour. The various conflicting forces virtually cancelled each other out in 1950.

Eighteen months later, with a swing of 1 per cent, the Conservatives just managed to get in. No one can say why. Perhaps the fears of unemployment had become that much less. Perhaps the increased emphasis on Tory free- dom operating after another year and a half made just the difference. 'Set the people free' was an effective slogan. Combined with the 'Industrial Charter' it gave the Conservatives a distinctive colour that was neither reactionary on the one hand nor a half-hearted copy of Labour's on the other. True, Labour had itself by now gone in for 'a bonfire of controls.' But it is never a good sign when a government starts adopting opposition policies, witness the abrupt conversion of the Conservatives in 1963-64 to planning and 'modernisation.'

Another factor may have been 'patriotism,' and much play was made by Churchill of the alleged failure of the Government's African and Middle Eastern policies—he enumerated three great disasters in characteristic style, 'Sudan, Abadan, Bevan: Nor should we forget the divisions in the Labour party caused by the Korean War and openly proclaimed by the resignations of Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman. Whatever the reason for the swing, it made all the difference. In office the Conservatives were able to reassure the defen- sive vote, profit from prosperity and exploit growing Labour dissension. Thirteen years of Tory rule had begun.