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

stress was laid on improving but not replacing the NHS; keeping intact most of the nationalised industries; promising to ‘consult the leaders of the Trade Union movement on economic matters and discuss with them fully, and sympathetically, any proposals we or they may have for action on labour problems’; and holding fast to the previously announced target of building 300,000 houses a year. It was telling that in her Dartford election address, Margaret Roberts (about to marry Denis Thatcher) significantly toned down the right-wing fundamentalism that had characterised much of her previous election campaign, while in Barnet the instinctively more consensual – and Keynesian – Reggie Maudling declared without a qualm: ‘I do not think we shall have any serious argument with our opponents over the question of employment,’ that indeed ‘the difficulty today is not to find jobs for people, but people for jobs.’16
    Even so, there was still a far from minuscule difference between the pitches of the two main parties.
Britain Strong and Free
included a key passage about the safeguarding of ‘our traditional way of life’ as integral to ‘the Conservative purpose’: ‘A worthwhile society cannot be established by Acts of Parliament and Government planning. Adequate rewards for skill and enterprise and for the creation of wealth, belief that saving and investment are worthwhile, diffusion of property, home ownership, the rule of law, the independence of the professions, the strength of the family, personal responsibility and the rights of the individual – these are the true foundations of a free society.’ The implications were clear enough: a smaller state, fewer controls, lower taxes. ‘Queuetopia’ remained Churchill’s central metaphor for socialism in action – a term designed specifically to appeal to housewives. ‘We are for the ladder,’ he declared in his election broadcast. ‘Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait in his place till his turn comes.’
    Perhaps most symbolic of the divide was the question of identity cards. These had been introduced during the war, and the peacetime Labour government had shown no inclination to abolish them. Earlier in the year there had been a cause célèbre after Harry Willcock, a businessman who had twice stood as a Liberal parliamentary candidate, had refused to produce his after being stopped by the police for driving too fast along Ballards Lane in Finchley. Willcock eventually lost his appeal in the High Court, but the British Housewives’ League held a well-publicised protest outside Parliament, with ID cards being ceremoniously destroyed. The issue did not specifically feature in the Tory manifesto, but everyone knew that a change of government would see the unmourned end of what Sir Ernest Benn (publisher, libertarian and uncle of Tony) liked to call ‘the Englishman’s badge of servitude’.17
    As usual there was a round of election broadcasts, which overall were listened to by 36 per cent of the adult population – down two points on the previous year. ‘The “higher” the class the greater the listening,’ noted the BBC, while even among working-class listeners there was a significantly higher take-up for Conservative than Labour speakers. Churchill this time round, six years after his ‘Gestapo’ fiasco, gave a masterly broadcast, presenting himself as a national figure above the squalid political fray. ‘We shall endanger our very existence if we go on consuming our strength in bitter party or class conflicts,’ he declared. ‘We need a period of several years of solid stable administration by a government not seeking to rub party dogma into everybody else.’ As in 1950, the ‘Radio Doctor’, Charles Hill, was a star performer for the Tories. ‘He is very clever,’ commented Vere Hodgson. ‘I like his – “will Mr Attlee take the ermine and leave Bevan to deal with the vermin?” ’ But in Brixton the