Unhappy Anniversary (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

 

The end of the second world slaughter was characterised by a belief that the future would be one of peace, jobs, good homes and free, best available health care for everyone and that unemployment. poverty and want were going to be eradicated forever through state control of resources . . . 

Waiting for the unimaginable to happen, we were in a state of eerie suspense for a short time before VE-Day. Of course we had had time to prepare for the end of the war, as the stress factors were eliminated one-by-one. With the Luftwaffe beaten out of existence the air raids stopped and the blackout was lifted. We had endured the flying bombs and the rockets more easily because we knew they were Germany's last gasp. But then it seemed that all there was to do was to wait, wondering whether there was still enough military fanaticism smouldering in Germany to burst into flame again. So when the date was announced it had some elements of an anti-climax In fact this was partly due to an official bungle; originally May 9 was to be the day, with a dramatically-staged ceremony in Berlin, but the plan was upset by a leaked news report.

A couple of nights later we had our street party, when we fêted the street’s one war hero—a man who had landed at Arnhem but who had then, from his own account, rapidly sought out some Germans to surrender to. At the cross-roads we lit a huge bonfire and another soldier—who had been the local milkman—played an accordion and the grown-ups danced. Well not all the grown-ups actually because the ex-milkman got involved in a dispute with a man whose job as a builder had exempted him from conscription. In the light of the bonfire, the argument expanded into a scuffle and then a fight. The next night each of the men lit their own bonfire with its music and dancing and shouting. I was not best placed because I needed my sleep, to get up early for my paper round which was symbolic because after the war and the celebrations there was still the matter of being on time for work even for fourteen-year-olds.

Never again

When the fires died down and the milkman and the builder shook hands and I went out to deliver the papers we faced the post-war world. The Daily Mirror published a Zec cartoon of a wounded soldier holding out a wreath labelled Peace And Victory in Europe and saying “Here you are: don't lose it again.” There were gaps in the houses and shops where bombs had fallen and gaps in families where people had been killed. A local greengrocer’s son had been caught in a burst of shrapnel from an anti-aircraft shell which had failed to explode in the air and landed in front of him in the street, the butcher’s boy had gone down in a troopship torpedoed in the seas around Borneo; an old boy of my school, we were told one morning in assembly, had been killed in a bombing raid on Germany—a couple of days after he had visited the school to show off the navigator’s wing he had just been awarded.

But as we faced the future we were quite certain that things would be different—better—from now on and that it was up to us to make sure of this. “Never again” was an overworked phrase. Never again unemployment, poverty, racism, slums, malnourished and ill-educated children, never again people denied proper medical treatment because they couldn’t afford it. Never again politicians who promised a land fit for heroes to live in, or those who did deals with dictators while the world slid into war.

The energising of a political will to build a better world from the ruins of the war began some time before VE-Day. In August 1940 Duff Cooper, who was Minister of Information (a job title about as valid as Gcorge Orwell’s Minister of Truth) persuaded the Cabinet to set up a committee on war aims, among them “to consider means of perpetuating the national unity achieved in this country during the war through a social and economic structure designed to serve equality of opportunity and service among all classes of the community”. Duff Cooper in his ministry was not the only one to think on these lines. In January 1941 the magazine Picture Post gave up an entire issue to its feature A Plan For Britain, which included “a job for every able-bodied man . . . a state managed company to make community investment . . . a minimum wage for all able-bodied adults . . . everybody to live in cheerful, healthy conditions . .. " and so on "through medical care, education, agriculture. . . ’’ This Plan, said an editorial: “ . . . is not something outside the war, or something after the war It is an essential part of our war aims. It is, indeed, our most positive war aim.”

State influence

The timing of this was significant because in 1940 and 1941 about the only war aim which would have seemed relevant was survival. But one thing the tenaciously surviving British ruling class had learned from 1914-18 was that in wartime the workers, when they are needed to fight and kill and die and suffer, must be encouraged with promises of a rewarding future. When Ernest Bevin, the wartime Minister of Labour, went with Churchill to visit troops embarking in Portsmouth for the D-Day landings he was asked whether “when we have done this job for you, are we going back on the dole?” Both Bevin and Churchill replied "No, you are not.” Well, they would, wouldn’t they? What else could they have said to those men, whose first worry was not about facing the channel in those boats and then the German forces wailing for them on the beaches, but about going back on the dole? Coming from the extremities of poverty, those soldiers asked little more than employment—exploitation by a ruling class and in return they were willing to fight and die for that class.

It was not surprising that there should be a popular assumption that the management of the economy to provide for full employment could not be left to private interests. Such things had to be the concern of the state, which during the war had come to be seen as a benign manipulator of our lives. In order to organise British industry and working power for victory the state had taken massive and widespread powers, for example to direct anyone to work at any job anywhere in conditions and at a pay prescribed by the state. Most imported goods were bought through the state, which controlled about half of consumer spending. In other fields the government laid down regulations about the rate of extraction in the flour and in our bread, it supplied children and pregnant women with free orange juice and cod liver oil, it set up the beginnings of a national health service.

Benefits for Labour

The case for state control was given an added impetus by the course of the war in Russia. The fact that that country had survived such an unspeakable ordeal was taken as evidence that the total organisation of a country's resources for a common aim had to be the responsibility of the state. There was not much publicity, then (socialists were among the very few who were consistently giving out the facts) about the famines, the gulags, the show trials and the rest of the Stalinist terror which had wiped out millions of people. In 1944 George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which satirised the Stalinist regime, was rejected by Faber and Faber—by T.S. Eliot—on the grounds that it did not put “the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time”. In June 1942, celebrating the anniversary (yes, celebrating) of Russia’s entering (even if it had been forced on them) the war, the Bishop of Chelmsford prayed “May God bless Russia.” This was asking rather a lot of God, who would surely have remembered what Stalin had done to organised religion in Russia even if the bishop had forgotten it.

This conception of the state as an all-powerful, benevolent parent who could magic away unemployment and poverty while bringing in good health care and community spirit worked against the Conservative Party, who were in any case widely considered to have helped bring the war about. The Tories were in any case in some disarray, after having been forced to accept as their leader a man they had hated so much so recently. Churchill’s assumption of power had more-or-less deposed the established Conservative oligarchy, intensely professional election winners, and replaced them with his own, rather eccentric cronies like Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken. One Tory MP was so gloomy about his party 's situation that he wrote to the chairman of the 1922 Committee, after a meeting in 1942, that "throughout the country the Conservative Party has become a cheap joke: the press and the BBC treat us with the contempt that we have earned and deserved”. In contrast the Labour leadership had remained intact and had grown in political strength, partly by their role in making Churchill prime minister and partly by their disproportionate power in the coalition government. A series of wartime by- elections had measured how unpopular were the Tories, with swings against them as much as 28 percent. In the general election of 1945, in which the Conservative persisted in nominating some strikingly incompetent candidates, the Labour Party’s victory signalled how anxious the voters were to have made VE-Day the beginning of the end of a discredited party.

Atomic Bomb

We had been told about the heavy water plant in Norway where the Germans were working on an atomic bomb and we were relieved that the plant had been put out of action in a commando raid. That, we thought, was the end of that nightmare, "our” side was much too civilised and humane to use terrible a weapon on warm, living human beings. When we learned otherwise it was among the first in a history of disappointed hopes and discredited visions which have characterised the past fifty years.

If we had been told them that on this anniversary of the end of the war there would be millions in this country in the deepest poverty, tens of millions elsewhere dying of starvation, millions homeless and life a noxious cocktail of drug abuse, crime and despair, we would have called it a betrayal. The thing we cannot say on 8 May 1995 is Happy Anniversary.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

The illustration on the front cover of the May 1995 Socialist Standard was by longtime Socialist Party of Great Britain member, George Meddemmen. For more information about George — and, ironically enough, his wartime experiences — you can check out this recording of him being interviewed at the Imperial War Museum where "he discusses his life, artwork and 2nd World War experiences serving in the Royal Artillery in Africa and Italy".