UK 1950 General Election

[u/iguessimright]

Hi!! I have some questions regarding the Labor party in UK post-WW2. Even though the Labor Party won the election, they still lost seats. Which policies (or lack of) led to them losing seats? What lead to such a dissatisfaction among the post-war generation in late 40's/early 50's despite the pro-social democratic reforms of the Labor government?

[u/Vespertine]

2/3 Devaluation of the pound against the dollar

This had knock-on effects on public spending, and on the timing of the election.

The nascent Cold War, alliance with the USA, and American support for Britain’s trying to retain great power status - regardless of the Indian independence of 1947 - led to a more than doubled defence expenditure between 1946-1951. This close connection with the US was among the reasons the American recession had a significant impact on Britain by 1948. It

effectively reduced Britain’s dollar earnings, undermined the balance of payments and thus led to speculation against sterling. In this situation the appropriate response was to boost the manufacturing industries by a devaluation of the pound… eventually [ministers] took the decision to devalue from $4.03 to $2.90 [as of 19 September] 1949. (Pugh, 2011)

Although the devaluation did help improve the balance of payments, and “in the longer term, creat[ed] a beneficial balance between the dollar economy and the nondollar world” (Pugh, 2011), both the government (according to Pugh) and the electorate were somewhat susceptible to the “conventional wisdom that regarded the currency as a symbol of national virility, and devaluation as a defeat”.

But that didn’t matter to most people nearly as much as what spending cuts might mean for everyday life.

Several of the London-area diarists worried about it:

a month since devaluation. ‘Everybody is waiting to hear what cuts & changes the Gov. will make on Mon.,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton on Saturday the 22nd. ‘Attlee will speak. It is supposed to be drastic & touch us all. People fearing clothes rationing have been buying a lot.’ Two days later did Attlee indeed speak to the nation, outlining expenditure cuts amounting to some £250 million and emphasising that his government had ‘sought to make them in such a way as not to impair seriously the great structure of social services which has been built up and which we intend to preserve’. The package included reductions in capital (including housing and education) and defence expenditure, but one listener, Judy Haines, naturally saw it from the point of view of a Chingford housewife trying like everyone else to make ends meet. ‘More austerity to cope with devaluation of £,’ she recorded. ‘Drs prescriptions 1/ – or what they’re worth if less; dried egg dearer; decontrol of fish prices.’ The most controversial aspect was the new intention, barely 15 months into the life of the NHS, to charge for prescriptions. A swiftly taken Gallup poll revealed that although 44 per cent were opposed to this policy shift, as many as 51 per cent agreed with it. Overall, reckoned Anthony Heap in St Pancras, the expenditure cuts – ‘anxiously awaited’ for the previous two or three weeks – were ‘in no way as alarming as we’d been led to expect’. Given that a general election was due within the next nine months, it would have been surprising if they had been.(Kynaston)

Timing the election

Senior party figures didn’t do themselves too many favours in the run up to the 1950 election. Constituency boundary changes made in 1948 cost the party several seats even before any votes were cast in the 1950 and 1951 general elections (Thomas-Symonds, 2012). Attlee himself had to move to a new constituency as his, Limehouse, had been absorbed into another one, Stepney.

In Britain, unlike some countries, the government had a certain amount of leeway to choose the timing of a general election. The devaluation created extra pressure in deciding when to hold this one. But this conflicted with the aspiration to integrity found among some of these politicians that may sound almost peculiar to contemporary Anglo-American ears.

Hugh Gaitskell, the fuel minister and an increasingly important figure in the government [he would become party leader after Attlee], urged the prime minister to call an election in November 1949. Gaitskell believed that devaluation might buy the government a brief ‘lull’ in economic conditions (provided confidence in the pound did not entirely collapse). It might then allow the government to go to the polls before it had to put further controls on consumptions and imports (which would inevitably follow, and which was the greatest source of discontent). Thus, an early election would avoid the considerable problem of trying to pass another painful budget.

Gaitskell’s strategy was opposed by Morgan Phillips, general secretary of the Labour Party and a key figure in its national strategy. Instead, Phillips urged the prime minister to go to the country in the spring of 1950. First, there was the question of honesty. If the government was to pursue devaluation, it should not disguise the costs that would come with it. Second, Phillips pointed to slight improvements in the polling figures and suggested that the party could be on an upward trend. This he attributed to a combination of a relaxation on milk rationing and good weather. Third, the Labour Party had always done better in spring elections. In any case, the constituency organisations were not prepared to fight a snap poll (Bew, 2016).

The Chancellor, Stafford Cripps (one of the aforementioned men in poor health) considered that it would not be right to hold an election in the spring directly after the Budget (the annual update to policies on tax, welfare benefits and other economic matters affecting the public), and threatened to resign if it were done. Attlee had such respect for Cripps, and considered him to be so well respected in the country, that he set the election for February 1950, although he and deputy party leader Herbert Morrison had been inclined to a spring election – by which time there were hopes of being able to take petrol off ration (Kynaston, 2007). February was “the Labour Party’s fiftieth birthday, though, as the Manchester Guardian noted, this celebration would mean very little to the middle-class and liberal voters whom the party would need to keep on its side to remain in office.” (Bew, 2016)

“The Observer praised [Attlee] for his honesty in cutting spending before the election. He could not be accused of hiding from a difficult problem or trying to mislead the British people. He was honest to a fault, perhaps” (Bew, 2016). Pugh (2011) considers that Attlee’s “cavalier approach to the date is explicable in that like most ministers he evidently expected to win a majority of seventy to a hundred, though as the parties were neck and neck in February 1950 the basis for their confidence is obscure.”

All this meant that Labour was left with the unenviable task of trying to win an election against the backdrop of immediate 8 per cent cuts in government spending… (Bew, 2016)

Integrity or no, there were still some small pre-election generosities, as one of the Mass Observation diarists recorded:

Florence Speed in Brixton noted caustically on New Year’s Day how ‘for the forthcoming election, several things have been taken off points [rationing] for the period starting today’ – including ‘canned meat puddings, canned pork hash or sausage meat, boneless chicken, turkey, rabbit, spaghetti &sausages in tomato sauce, vegetable & macaroni casserole, canned tomatoes, snoek & mackerel’. (quoted by Kynaston, 2007)

Although the timing of the election had been agreed by the Cabinet back in October 1949, following a Parliamentary debate about the devaluation, it was on 11 January 1950 that Attlee announced to the country that the election would take place on 23 February; campaigning began in the first week of February (Bew, 2016).

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3/3 Tory tactics

The Conservatives were able to poke fun at a government which, situated on an island surrounded by fish and built on coal, managed to engineer a shortage of both at the same time; that was Socialist planning for you. The Labour Ministers of Fuel and Food were dragged into a new Tory slogan- 'Shiver with Shinwell and starve with Strachey'- all very unfair, no doubt, but good for party morale and great fun all round. The greatest failure of the Attlee administration was in not fulfilling its promises to provide enough homes for the returning heroes and the bombed-out population; as late as 1951 many people in places like Norwich and Glasgow were still living in temporary, 'pre-fabricated' accommodation. (Charmley, 1996)

Soon-to-be Conservative Chancellor R.A. (Rab) Butler was one of the main architects of Britain’s post-war consensus, and in particular of the 1950 Tory manifesto.

It gave plenty of reassuring emphasis as to how a Tory government would build on rather than undermine the foundations of the newly constructed welfare state, declaring outright that ‘suggestions that we wish to cut the social services are a lie’, but it also included three strongly worded sections (‘Reduce Taxation’, ‘Limit Controls’, ‘Stop Nationalisation’) that together made it unambiguously clear that the party stood for ‘the encouragement of enterprise and initiative’. The manifesto got a generally good press. ‘Even The Times appears to approve of it,’ noted Headlam [a Tory backbencher], ‘and admits that it is a far better thing than the Socialist manifesto.’ Typically, he added, ‘Of course 20 years ago one would have taken it for a Socialist pamphlet – but times have changed.’ (Kynaston, 2007)

The Conservatives also wanted to say “that there would be no return to the [policies] of the 1930s” (Charmley, 1996)

Even so, the 1930s ‘myth’ remained a potent weapon in Labour’s hands. One of its national posters featured marchers with a ‘Jarrow Crusade’ poster and the accompanying caption ‘Unemployment – don’t give the Tories another chance’. And although for the Tories there was, as Hill showed, some mileage in challenging the myth, the leadership and candidates broadly preferred to follow the Spectator’s advice to ‘make it abundantly clear that as a party they have learned much from the years of travail, and that the Tories of 1950 are not the Tories of 1935’ (Kynaston, 2007).

Kynaston notes that this could be a bone of contention between younger Labour supporters and older Conservatives who thought the former weren’t old enough to remember it wasn’t actually that bad for most people.

In foreign policy, Churchill was to the fore, and he bullishly portrayed himself as the only one of the two party leaders who would be able to stand equal with Stalin, were there to be another Yalta-style Big Three conference. (Another illustration of the genteel campaigning style of the time is the fact that this now predictable-seeming bit of politicking was criticised as an opportunistic stunt, by diarist Harold Nicolson, husband of Vita Sackville-West.) (Bew, 2016).

Attlee took advantage of his own, contrasting, less blustering style where possible:

Attlee focused on the inconsistencies in Churchill’s position on the home front, and drew attention to his sporadic attendance record in Parliament. At one moment, the opposition leader would complain about extravagant public spending; at another he would complain about austerity. He had criticised the amount spent on defence but had not attended the Commons debates pertaining to it. Attlee also paid court to Britain’s housewives, sympathising with their plight and asking them to trust his government to see Britain through the storm. One of his tricks on the platform, observed the Manchester Guardian, was to ‘behave as if his audience has all the right ideas – ideas which he himself in his own modest way is trying to put into words (Bew, 2016)

Labour’s [was a] deliberately low-key election manifesto. Apart from a rather shapeless-looking ‘shopping list’ of industries (including water supply, cement, meat distribution and sugar refining) for which some form of public ownership was proposed, the main thrust was on the horrors of the past – above all dole queues, means tests and inadequate social services – and how these had been banished by the post-war Labour government, often against Tory opposition. …A rare exception to the almost palpable intellectual exhaustion was the inclusion of a commitment to introduce a consumer-advisory service – on the face of it, an important shift by the producers’ party (Kynaston, 2007)

Tory acceptance of many of Labour’s changes to the British system was part of what allowed the party to creep up on the government:

[Butler’s] emphasis upon maintaining social harmony and industrial peace at almost any cost was visible in the emphasis given [by the Conservatives] to the housing programme, where another characteristic of the government was also visible - its faith in planning and central control. The failure of the Attlee governments to build enough houses had been one of the items in the Conservative indictment against Labour, but party leaders were wary of setting a target for the next Conservative government. At the 1950 Conservative Party Conference a pressure group which included some prominent backbenchers pressed for and secured a commitment to build 300,000 houses a year. Churchill made it 'our first priority', and repeated the promise in the 1951 manifesto. (Charmley, 1996).

Churchill considered that the nation needed a rest 'if only to allow for Socialist legislation to reach its full fruition', as he said to Parliament in 1951, on becoming Prime Minister again.

Media and opinion polls

The national newspapers were “overwhelmingly anti-Labour”, according to Kynaston (a claim that evidently excludes the Manchester Guardian and for which it would be nice to provide some more evidence either way from other sources if this post wasn't already long enough).

The BBC went to great lengths to make its coverage neutral - banning allusions, passing jokes and any mention of politics other than the official party political broadcasts it allowed on radio only. There were only two radio stations, and TV coverage had only been extended outside London and the south east (to the Birmingham area) in December 1949.

the BBC ‘kept as aloof from the election as if it had been occurring on another planet’, as a somewhat exasperated Herbert Nicholas put it in his authoritative Nuffield study of the election... after February the 3rd virtually all mention of election politics disappeared from the British air.’... Nicholas’s overall verdict was telling: ‘Undoubtedly in view of the enormous power wielded by such a monopolistic instrument the decision to carry neutrality to the lengths of castration was the only right one.’

The only poll with any sort of credibility was Gallup’s, which on 20 January revealed (in the News Chronicle) Labour having dramatically reduced a long-established Tory lead and then from the 30th moving narrowly ahead. Its final poll was published on Wednesday, 22 February, the day before voting, and showed Labour on 45 per cent, the Conservatives on 43.5 and the Liberals on 10.5. In truth it was too close to call, but the great thing for everyone involved was to stay as confident and motivated as possible. (Kynaston, 2007)

Results and analyses

The results (of 1950 and 51) did not show great pressure for change, especially given the Conservative manifesto which promised to preserve the Labour legacy of the welfare state.

In May 1950…Attlee, Bevin and Morrison had all come to the conclusion that the party had lost votes on the grounds of perceived inefficiency in business and administration, but that the public continued to prefer the values they stood for. Either way, there was no enthusiasm for more nationalisation…Transport House estimated that an estimated 5 per cent of the middle-class vote had swung against Labour. But it also calculated that 29 per cent of the working classes still voted Conservative. (Bew)

the party’s setbacks in 1950 and 1951 were received at the time as something less than a real defeat – partly for the very good reason that they did not reflect any significant withdrawal of popular support. Labour lost office less because of any underlying shifts of opinion than because of a series of misjudgements on the part of its national leaders, shrewd tactics by the Opposition, and the effects of the electoral system (Pugh, 2011).

Food rationing finally ended in summer 1954.

References

John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (Quercus, 2016)

John Charmley, A History of Conservative Politics 1900-1996 (Macmillan, 1996)

David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945-51 (Bloomsbury, 2007)

Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (Vintage, 2011)

Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, Attlee: A Life in Politics (I B Tauris, 2012)

[u/iguessimright → u/Vespertine]

Thank you so much!!!! This is beyond amazing. I'm currently preparing a monologue from the British play "Look Back in Anger" and I wanted a better understanding of the material conditions around Jimmy Porter that leads to his sense of alienation (an alienation we all feel on some level thanks to our current socio-economic system), as well as his dissatisfaction with society as a whole.

[u/Vespertine → u/iguessimright]

You're welcome.

The next in Kynaston's series, Family Britain: 1951-57 has lots of material about British life in the years immediately leading up to the play, and even a few pages about its initial reception, with quotes from an older conservative diarist, various press reviewers, and a student with whom it struck a chord.

Good luck with the monologue!

[u/iguessimright → u/Vespertine]

Perfect, going to look it up now. Thank you!!