Family Britain, 1951-1957 by David Kynaston Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t want a great man of war like Churchill, we want a man of peace like Attlee.’ Later that Wednesday, Aneurin Bevan was in the nearby, equally marginal Watford constituency, where he spoke at the town hall ‘filled to capacity, with people standing even at the back of the gallery’ and, at one point, a scuffle breaking out after someone shouted ‘Vermin’. Inevitably the NHS was a focal part of his speech: ‘The Service introduced a conception of ethical priorities, said Mr Bevan. “Rubbish,” shouted a heckler. “It’s no good shouting ‘Rubbish’,” rapped out Mr Bevan. “We have now converted the Tory Party to it!” ’14 The sitting MP was John Freeman, who in the spring had, with Harold Wilson, followed Bevan by resigning over the question of charges for dentures and spectacles. But even though the Labour conference at Scarborough at the start of October had seen a clear upsurge of party members’ support for what were becoming known as ‘the Bevanites’, a firm lid was successfully kept on internal differences during the campaign.
    Crucial to the Labour case was the contrast between past immiserisation and present amelioration. ‘The Last of the Sandwich-Men’ was the title of a Kenneth Allsop piece in
Picture Post
some six months before the election. ‘It’s a depth that some men still plumb, but bit by bit that depth is being levelled up,’ he wrote. ‘The process that in the past turned human beings into sandwich-men is no longer regarded as inexorable. Already the sandwich-man has the stamp of a relic, a sad survivor of an age we’ve grown out of.’ Such an assumption was fortified during the election by the publication on 15 October of
Poverty and the Welfare State
, the fruits of a recent (October 1950) survey undertaken in York of more than 2,000 families. The authors, B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, found that whereas in a comparable survey in 1936 nearly one-third of that city’s working-class population had been in poverty, now it was just one-fortieth. ‘By far the greatest part of the improvement since 1936 has been due to the welfare legislation introduced since 1945,’ Lavers declared in an accompanying newspaper article, which ended with a bold, unambiguous claim: ‘To a great extent poverty has been overcome by the Welfare State.’ Unsurprisingly, the report was, in the words of David Butler (in the first of his magisterial series of election surveys), ‘eagerly seized on by the Labour Party as impartial and irrefutable evidence of their general thesis about the benefits of their rule, and it was often quoted by their speakers, particularly in answer to hecklers’. But perhaps it was not really such good news. Not only has a recent detailed study of the Rowntree/Lavers findings significantly downgraded the sharpness of poverty reduction between 1936 and 1950 (suggesting that nearly 12 per cent of working-class households were still in poverty), but the very fact of a widespread perception that poverty was a thing of the past implied that a central part of Labour’s historic mission had been completed.15
    The exact nature of the Tory mission for the 1950s and beyond was still unclear. The day after the election was announced, Churchill’s physician Lord Moran brought him some notes on the Health Service. ‘He put them in his pocket without reading them,’ Moran recorded. ‘“We don’t want detail,” he protested impatiently. “We propose to give the people a lighthouse, not a shop window.”’ In practice, moderation and circumspection were the keynotes for Churchill and his colleagues. One rising young Tory politician, David Eccles, may have told Harold Nicolson at a
Spectator
lunch in early October that, in the face of the difficult economic situation, ‘the only cure is to “release the pound” and remove all exchange controls’, but no such ultra-free-market nostrums appeared in
Britain Strong and Free
, in effect the Tory manifesto. Instead,