In his introduction to Age of Hope: Labour, 1945, and the Birth of Modern Britain (accept all Amazon cookies to go directly to the book; we receive a commission; Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr), the historian Richard Toye writes that the Attlee government needs to be understood not only in its immediate context but in the long sweep of Labour’s history. The aim of his book is to show how, in the face of adversity, Labour succeeded — according to Richard Toye — in building both a credible policy programme and an atmosphere of popular optimism, yet also to show how that mood of hope dissipated, with consequences through to the present day.
The Exeter historian argues that ordinary people were often more interested in concrete, everyday improvements than in abstractions such as socialism. At the same time, Labour needed a framing device to persuade the masses that it was the party best placed to deliver – especially given that its rivals were promising social reform as well. As Richard Toye’s grandmother had written in an article back in the day of the 1945 election, it was ultimately a choice of public versus private control. She had underlined that the Conservatives thought that industry should be in private ownership and run for profit, Labour that basic industries and public services should be owned and administered by the state.
Richard Toye argues that Labour was right, that it was sound economics to emphasize the monopolistic and anti-competitive behaviour of many influential firms. Therefore, in the historian’s eyes, Labour did not turn itself into an opponent of free enterprise. Rather, it suggested that the very existence of free enterprise was a myth. Opponents of state control condemned all public regulation as ‘government interference’ while simultaneously demanding subsidies, protective duties, and other measures that would benefit their private interests.
At the same time, Richard Toye writes that, although the Labour diagnosis was broadly right, the party’s ideas about economic planning were vague and ill-thought-through. Labour assumed that large-scale nationalisation would in itself give the government the tools it needed to make a reality of public control. He notes that, in recent decades, Labour’s left and right agreed that the Attlee government’s extension of public ownership is not something to be emulated. Right-wingers now prefer free market solutions, whereas left-wingers feel that the wrong model of nationalisation was adopted – top-down and bureaucratic rather than participatory and liberating.
Richard Toye thinks that some rehabilitation of the record is required. He notes that there were significant failures, such as the takeover of the railways. Yet even in that case, he thinks that the accompanying nationalisation of some passenger shipping was a success, as was public ownership of the gas industry.
The historian underlines that the government ran out of steam in the late 1940s partly because there was little agreement on what, if anything, to nationalize next. At the same time, he points out to the wider problem that Labour had not found a way to renew and refresh its formerly effective theme of public versus private control. In addition, rationing and other restrictions on personal freedom — considered necessary in the aftermath of the war by the author — were naturally unpopular with many.
Richard Toye quotes the historical economist Thomas Piketty who, according to him, has shown that the enormous destruction of capital in the First and Second World Wars laid the foundations for a fairer distribution of income: ‘the reduction of inequality that took place in most developed countries between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war’.
Richard Toye underlines that this is not to negate the importance of ideology or political will, but the tough times were congenial to the pursuit of economic justice. The historian concludes that this helps explain why the six years Attlee was in Downing Street were a foundational moment in the formation of modern Britain.
Richard Toye underlines that the Attlee government has long departed this world, but it has passed on some of its DNA, notably the National Health Service (NHS), regarded as the 1945 government’s crowning achievement, albeit in now severely weakened form, according to the author.
Richard Toye writes that the Attlee govnment delivered economic reform, improved living standards and a decent measure of social security. This was only possible because it had mobilized the language of optimism and inspired hope for the future.
As an explanation why the optimism faded, Richard Toye stresses less Labour’s internal contradictions and weaknesses and more the break out of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The historian states that, in the light of today’s events in Ukraine, we should give more credit to the players on both sides of the iron curtain for the fact that things did not turn out even worse than they did.
Richard Toye notes that Clement Attlee has always been something of an enigma. He mentions the well known gibes – ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’ as well as ‘an empty taxi drew up in Downing Street and Mr. Attlee got out’. He stresses that they have long been debunked, though aspects of the myth persist.
The historian also notes that, strikingly, there was no account of Clement Attlee’s life published between the appearance of Roy Jenkins’ Mr. Attlee: An Interim Biography in 1948 (Amazon.co.uk) and Kenneth Harris’s Attlee in 1982 (Amazon.co.uk). Richard Toye mentions that most Labour MPs of the 1945 generation did not leave diaries, memoirs or papers, let alone have their life stories written. He adds that it has long been a cliché (of diminishing accuracy) that Attlee has been underrated. The historian mentions three outstanding accounts of the Attlee government: Kenneth O. Morgan’s Labour in Power 1945-1951 (1984; Amazon.co.uk) for its authority and clarity, Peter Hennessy’s Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (1992; Amazon.co.uk) for its verve and humour, and David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain 1945-51 (2007; Amazon.co.uk) for its interweaving of high politics with the lives of ordinary Britons.
Already in his “Introduction” to Age of Hope: Labour, 1945, and the Birth of Modern Britain (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr), Richard Toye points out to the fact that, over the last several decades, much of the sheen has come off some of the government’s achievements. He mentions the self-congratulatory approach towards Indian independence that ministers were retrospectively prone to take. A forced retreat was dressed up as an act of generosity; colonial exploitation continued elsewhere, while careful attention was paid to revising imperial terminology to make the system sound progressive and benign.
Richard Toye underlines that some Labour politicians held appalling racial attitudes. In 1950, when offered the Colonial Office, Hugh Dalton turned it down, afflicted by ‘a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased n—– communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run, andwho, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful’.
Richard Toye writes that Labour was formally committed to battling racial prejudice and imperialism. But it failed, by quite some distance, to transcend the white supremacist assumptions and structures of the time. He adds that the development of the welfare state was wrapped up with these phenomena too.
The historian stresses that Labour was both visionary and pedantically pragmatic, genuinely internationalist and subject to Cold War paranoia, socially radical in some respects, petit bourgeois and conventional in others. He mentions that Clement Attlee himself encapsulated many of the tensions. When asked why he sent his children to private schools rather than state ones, Clement Attlee replied that ‘the man who lives in the world as if it were already the world he hopes to achieve – is a crank’.
Richard Toye mentions that although many Labour MPs, including leading memembers of the government, were secularists, a good number of this generation of socialists were influenced by esoteric belief systems such as Theosophy and Spiritualism. He mentions George Rogers who liked to consult dead politicians via his wife’s mediumship, and claimed they always told him accurately what his majority at each election would be. One could add that in other countries, we have seen and witness even today similar phenomena, including the wifes of several U.S. presidents who brought occult practices to the White House, including Nancy Reagan, a strong believer in astrology, or present-day German Green Party members who believe in homepathic “Globuli”.
Richard Toye started investigating the Attlee government when studying for his University of Cambridge PhD thesis (which was turned into a 2003 book called The Labour Party and the Planned Economy, 1931-1951; Amazon.co.uk), over twenty-five years ago. In this new book, although focusing on the Attlee government, the historian begins with the 1880s, when ‘The Red Flag’ and ‘England Arise!’ (another key socialist hymn) were both written and Labour’s Big Five – Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton and Stafford Cripps – were all born. The study ends with some remarks about and advice for Labour in the 2020s.
In his chapter entitled “Arguing About Attlee”, Richard Toye mentions that Margaret Thatcher, as leader of the opposition and prime minister, made no special habit of assaulting Attlee’s record. From the Thatcherite perspective, his government’s role in the foundation of NATO, and the birth of the British nuclear weapons programme, was positively commendable. According to the historian, it was convenient for Margaret Thatcher to portray Clement Attlee as a representative of Labour’s comparatively virtuous past, from which, by the 1980s, it had supposedly gone astray.
In the same chapter, Richard Toye notes that Tony Blair, whom he describes as a fresh-faced modernizer who seemed to have blasted in from another planet, radically revamped the party under the New Labour banner, inaugurated voter-friendly policies and replaced the infamous Clause IV, which called for common ownership of industry. In addition, Tony Blair initiated a new phase of discussion of Labour’s traditions, in which debates concerning the Attlee government took a prominent place. Richard Toye stresses that Tony Blair’s own arguments did contain significant references to serious historical works, though left-wing critics like to describe him as ignorant of Labour’s history. What they really meant, according to Richard Toye, was that Tony Blair did not share their interpretation of it, or, more importantly still, their broader values.
Tony Blair asserted that the ideas of Keynes and Beveridge were the cornerstone of reform. By playing up the contribution of famous Liberals, and subtly downplaying that of Attlee and Bevan, Blair sought to vindicate his present ambition – the building of a ‘big tent’ left-of-centre coalition freed from what he regarded as the inconvenient baggage of the past.
In his “Conclusion”, Richard Toye writes that, faced with choosing between the free market and socialism, most people will opt for the former. But for the historian the choice is a false one. As the economist James K. Galbraith has pointed out, we do not actually live under the benign sovereignty of the free market. Instead we live in an economy dominated by price-fixing and cartels and, increasingly, one of cronyism and corruption.
I agree that monopolies and oligopolies, cartels and more are omnipresent. But that does not mean that the free market does not exist. Ordoliberals in Germany and others realized already in the 1930s that the market needs regulation, that companies have to play by the rules. Nationalisation offers no solution although some privatisations (of state monopolies) in the UK and elsewhere went terribly wrong (you cannot turn a public into a private monopoly and expect great results).
I can agree with Richard Toye when he remarks that intelligent state regulation is needed to secure the very advantages that belong to the free market, as the history of the EU single market demonstrates.
These are, as always, just a few details regarding a substantial book.
Richard Toye: Age of Hope: Labour, 1945, and the Birth of Modern Britain, Bloomsbury Continuum, October 2023, 336 pages. Accept all cookies to go directly to the Amazon page of the book (we earn a commission). Book, Audiobook or Kindle eBook from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book review have not been put between quotation marks.
Book review added on December 1, 2023 at 20:56 German time.
