LABOUR IN POWER 1945-1951 Kenneth O. Morgan is Principal of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. From 1966 to 1989 he was Fellow and Praelector of The Queen’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Wales in British Politics (1963), The Age of Lloyd George (1971), Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist (1975), Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980 (Oxford Paperback, 1982), Consensus and Disunity: the Lloyd George Coalition Government, 1918-1922 (Oxford Paperback, 1986), and Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenantsy Hardie to Kinnock (1987), and editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain (Oxford Paper­ back, 1986). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983. LABOUR IN POWER 1945—1951 KENNETH O. MORGAN Oxford New York OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press, Walton Stmt, Oxford 0x2 6dp Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling fqya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press © Kenneth O. Morgan 1984 First published 1986 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1985 Reprinted 1987, 1989 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in assy form or try assy means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Morgan, Kenneth 0. Labour in power 1946-1951 .—(Oxford paperbacks) 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—1945-1964 1. Title 354.41’0009 JN234 ISBN 0-19-285150-0 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Morgan, Kenneth 0. Labour in power 1945-1951. Bibliography: p. includes index. 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—1945-1964 2. Great Britain—Economic polity—1945- . 3. Great Britain—Social policy. 4. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1945- . 5. Labour Party (Great Britain—History. 6. Attlee, C. R. (Clement Richard), 1883-1967. 1. TitU. [DA588.M637 1985] 941.085.4 85-3003 ISBN 0-19-285150-0 (pbk.) Printed in Great Britain by The Guernsey Press Co. Ltd. Guernsey, Channel Islands For Jane— again Preface The Labour government of 1945-51 was, by any test, one of the most crucial in British history. Its impact upon the development of modern Britain, at home and overseas, was immense in almost every aspect. Like the governments of Peel, Disraeli, Asquith, and Lloyd George, and perhaps Gladstone’s first term in office, the Attlee government wrenched the course of British history into significant new directions. The consequences were profound for Europe, the North Atlantic community, and the developing world, no less than for the political, social, and economic evolution of Britain itself. For perhaps the last time in the experience of the British people, a government was able to place its imprint upon external circumstances, rather than have to respond, passively or helplessly, to them. This may never happen again. My interest in writing a general study of this important government has flowed naturally from my previous historical research and writing. Since publishing a biography of Keir Hardie some years ago, I have been fascinated by the history of the British labour movement, of which the Attlee govern­ ment in many ways formed the climax. A book on the Lloyd George coalition of 1918-22 naturally led to an interest in comparing the very different consequences of the second world war for Britain after 1945. A survey of the history of Wales over the hundred years from 1880, including the growth of new regional policies after 1945, furthered my interest in wider social and economic changes in Britain as a whole during that period. Writing a history of the Attlee government has, then, long been an ambition of mine. The availability now of nearly all the public records for these six years, together with many other manuscript and printed sources, makes this an appropriate time at which to make the attempt. My purposes in writing this book have been wholly schol­ arly. It is intended to provide a self-contained survey of a unique phase of British political and social history. The events viii Preface described took place over thirty years ago, long before my undergraduate pupils were bom. The Attlee years are as remote to them as are the equally contentious subjects of the Norman conquest or the English civil wars, which is how they should be. I have not written this work with any intention of passing judgement on the troubled history of the labour movement in Britain in the 1980s, any more than my book on the Lloyd George ministry of 1918-22 was intended to offer an argument on behalf of coalition or centrist govern­ ment. In a future book, I may reflect on some aspects of the contrasts between the British left after 1945 and its successors today, between the socialism of Aneurin Bevan and of Tony Benn. But that is not my intention here. Nor, I trust, do I write from any conscious spirit of political partisanship. What, however, I do openly declare at the outset is a commitment, even an enthusiasm, for the business of politics as such. I would endorse, both in general and in particular, the main lines of arguments in Bernard Crick’s delightful essay, In Defence of Politics. For it seems to me that academics, especially in their learned journals (one of which I have the honour to edit), sometimes write about politics in a cloistered, negative, hyper-intellectual fashion that tends to distort the nature of political experience and activity. Histor­ ians are committed by instinct and professional habit to exalt the canons of rationality, continuity, and consensus. We tend to write, all too often, as if political life were, in reality, a prolonged tutorial or seminar, in which politicians are given good or bad marks by their intellectual superiors for the philosophic soundness or adequacy of their arguments. In this process, of course, the inherent value-judgements of the academic himself or herself are commonly ignored. Political life, in fact, is just not like that. My own involvement in constituency politics and political journalism on occasions in the past has, above all, confirmed for me that political truth possesses an intrinsically different quality from academic truth (which does not make it necessarily inferior), that poli­ tical decisions are taken, often from instinct, in a confused turmoil of pressures and conflicts, with always the need to reconcile, to extract the basis of a working agreement, to relate the ideal to the practical realities, and to harmonize the Preface ix desired end with the available, limiting means. Political judge­ ments and decisions are not the product of relaxed, abstract speculation undertaken, almost for intellectual recreation, in a timeless continuum. They need to be understood in their own context and in their own terms. This book is the first I have written in which the period is entirely one that I have lived through myself. I hope, how­ ever, that that has not led to any great distortion or substitu­ tion of personal, selective reminiscence for hard historical fact. I was, indeed, well below voting age when the Labour government fell from office in October 1951. As a child, 1 took a growing interest in political issues in the newspapers or on the radio. 1 was intrigued to notice that Wood Green, the North London suburb where we lived, was transformed overnight by redistribution from a rock-solid Conservative seat in 1945 to an equally secure Labour stronghold in 1950. But 1 had no record of political activity at that time. Nor had my parents, though 1 suspect that I provide a good illustra­ tion of the Butler-Stokes thesis on the generational factor in determining political sympathies. So far as my recollections of the 1945-51 period go, they provide, for what they are worth, confirmation of what a cousin of mine once wrote in another context: Those years were not a return, but a revelation. They were lit by surprises; between 1945 and 1951 we saw not only the first pineapples and bananas of our lives, but the first washing-machine, the first foun­ tain, the first television set. The world opening before us was not a pale imitation of one we had lost, but a lucky dip of extraordinary things we had never seen before.1 This was precisely my reaction, too, as a young schoolboy, brought up in a home of no particular affluence, initially in a village in mid-Wales, subsequently in a London suburb. Indeed, I would add professional football matches, test matches, and Christmas pantomimes and circuses to the new delights of the post-war years. For me as a child, the years 1945-51 were happy and fulfilling in every way. However, the historical records tell us that these were a time of auster­ ity, constant crisis, and general gloom. As an historian, 1 have 1 Susan Cooper, in Michael Sissons and Philip French (eds.), Age of Austerity, 1945-1951 (Penguin edn., Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 57. x Preface come to follow their view, although not without some reluc­ tance and perhaps regret. I have been exceptionally fortunate in all those who have helped me in the preparation of this book. I have benefited from the personal recollections of Lord Franks, Sir Harold Wilson, the Rt. Hon. Michael Foot, MP and Jill Craigie, Mr Sam Silkin, Mr Emrys Roberts, Mr Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, Mr John Parker, Sir Alec Caimcross, the late Rt. Hon. James Griffiths, and some civil servants of the Attlee years who prefer to remain anonymous. Among the many custodians of the valuable archives that I have been privileged to use, I must give pride of place to the ever-cheerful assistants at the Public Record Office at Kew, itself one of the technological wonders of the world and a monument to public enterprise. Stephen Bird, the archivist of the Labour Party, was an expert and immensely helpful guide through the riches of Walworth Road. I have also received kind assistance from Mr Donald Knapp and Miss Joan West of the Conservative Political Centre; Mr Gwyn Jenkins of the manuscript depart­ ment of the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; Mr Richard Storey of the Modem Records Centre, University of Warwick; Miss Marion Stewart of Churchill College, Cam­ bridge; and my colleague, John Kaye, archivist of The Queen’s College. Among the many academic colleagues who have been most helpful I must mention Dr Henry Pelling of St. John’s College, Cambridge, himself a titan amongst labour historians and my very distinguished predecessor here, for advice on sources; Lord Bullock for very generously allowing me to read the manuscript of his magnificent third volume on Ernest Bevin prior to publication; Philip Williams of Nuffield College for much help over the Gaitskell Papers; Sir Alec Caimcross for allowing me to read two important papers of his on the convertibility crisis and devaluation; Lord Blake, Provost of The Queen’s College, for advice on Conservative Party sources; and Dr Deian Hop kin of University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, for information on Welsh sources. My old friend, Sir Henry Phelps Brown, generously read through the entire work in manuscript and added greatly to the per­ ceptions of the book. Eva and Alan Taylor kindly commented on sections on foreign affairs, while Roger Louis notably