They elected, for the first time, a Labour government by a sizable majority. A Labour administration had been in government previously in 1929 but it was a minority led administration under Ramsay MacDonald. The government of Clement Atlee was voted in by a landslide as Churchill licked his wounds. The electorate, though appreciative to Churchill for the leadership he had shown during the war were weary of his policies and feared a return to the days of the 1930s and the poverty which accompanied those days.
Labour had promised, and delivered, a nationalised health service along with the nationalisation of some major industries, rail, coal, telecommunications and a number of other large former private concerns. The miners had been campaigning for decades to have their industry nationalised. And with this nationalisation, health and safety measures which the private coal owners found too costly. After all it was only peoples, men and women’s, lives at stake!
The jewel in the Atlee Governments crown was the NHS and welfare state. The slogan ‘never again’ meaning ‘never again’ will a person’s wealth or income be the deciding factor in the quality of health care they received and there would be no more means testing for state benefits. Unemployment was very low, around 2-3% - what was called ‘frictional unemployment’, meaning people unemployed were usually between jobs. Prescriptions were free at the ‘point of need’ as were all treatments on the NHS. The Minister of Health, Aneurin “Nye” Bevan claimed the dawn of a new world for health, He was right, the NHS was a credit.
In 1951 Atlee went to the polls and was re-elected by a minority this time, he had lost his majority. Many factors were to possibly blame for this which the man or woman in the street could perhaps not understand. The war time rations were still in place, long after the defeated countries in the war had lifted theirs. Many were saying; “who won the war? Anybody would think the Germans did.” But the NHS and nationalisation programmes held firm, much to the annoyance of the USA. Britain was up to her knees in debt to the USA and received $2,7 billion dollars from the Marshal plan, a US initiative to help rebuild Europe, including the defeated powers. West Germany, as the partition between east and west Germany was complete, received a sizable chunk to help her reconstruct, around $1.5 billion and it was perhaps this factor, health ‘free at the point of need’, which upset the USA who could not care less about people’s health, unless they could afford to pay it! Britain did not finish paying off war time debts until 2006, the final payment of around £45 million.
In 1951 Atlee, much to the annoyance and disgust of Bevan, introduced prescription charges for spectacles and dentistry. So annoyed was “Nye” Bevan at this betrayal of one of the NHSs founding principles he resigned as Minister for Health. In the same year, late on, Atlee went to the country again. This time the gamble failed and Churchill was back in Number 10. However, what had built up, probably during the days of the war time coalition, was an unwritten consensus between the two main parties, Labour and Conservative. This consensus carried over into peace time and the Conservative Government did not tamper with the work the previous Labour administration had done.
In 1951 Atlee, much to the annoyance and disgust of Bevan, introduced prescription charges for spectacles and dentistry. So annoyed was “Nye” Bevan at this betrayal of one of the NHSs founding principles he resigned as Minister for Health. In the same year, late on, Atlee went to the country again. This time the gamble failed and Churchill was back in Number 10. However, what had built up, probably during the days of the war time coalition, was an unwritten consensus between the two main parties, Labour and Conservative. This consensus carried over into peace time and the Conservative Government did not tamper with the work the previous Labour administration had done.
There was no reprivatisation of the newly nationalised industries and no tampering with the welfare state and NHS, that is apart from extending prescription charges to across the board not just spectacles and dental treatment. Was this the first chink in the consensus? No, because Atlee had started this ball rolling in 1951 - the Churchill administration just extended it slightly. A charge of one shilling per prescription was levied. It may have been a chink in the parliamentary socialist programme but not the consensus. The consensus survived unhindered in any meaningful way under the premierships of Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and his conservative successor, Alec Douglass Home.
As the capitalist class, those who really run the economy, started to demand some returns, cuts in the nationalised industries began starting in 1963 towards the end of the Home Government with cuts to British Railways (which became British Rail in 1965). Richard Beeching was appointed Chairman of the railways and immediately began axing many branch lines. Altogether he cut 6,000 miles of route track, 4,000 in 1963 and a further 2,000 in 1966.
The health service too began to see the first real attacks by the Labour Government of Harold Wilson. These were perhaps the first cracks in the consensus of the post war period. The Conservatives opposed or pretended to oppose these cuts as many smaller “cottage” hospitals were closed. In 1968-69 the Wilson Government tried to take on the trade unions and lost. Barbara Castle, Minister for Transport, tried to introduce “in place of strife” which was an attempt to cut the number of ‘lightening’ strikes called by the trade unions. The pluralist system of industrial relations was still very much the accepted way of conducting affairs in industry. Lord Donovan was appointed to look into ‘in place of strife’ and came up with, for the government, the conclusion that shop stewards should be given more facility time at work. This was not the result the government wanted!
The cracks in the ‘post war political consensus’ were now appearing and as the sixties gave way to the seventies became great big gaps as opposed to cracks. Ted Heath and the Conservatives were now in power and suffered their first serious setback in 1972 when the Engineering Unions in Birmingham, assisted the National Union of Mineworkers who were on strike as Arthur Scargill, President of the Yorkshire NUM, Britain’s largest coalfield led flying pickets to Saltley Gate a large fuel storage depot just outside Birmingham. He demanded of the Amalgamated Engineering Union: “I’m not asking you come out on strike, I’m demanding you come out on strike”. The following day miners from Yorkshire picketed Saltley Gate with only about 100 men, and all looked lost. Then as if by magic 20,000 Engineering workers came over the hill and the depot was closed.
In 1974 Heath suffered the ultimate embarrassment when the NUM again were on strike, taking advantage of the Oil Crisis of that year due to the Arab/Israeli war. The Arab states were going to make Britian pay for backing Israel in the war by banging up the price of oil. This was the miners' opportunity, having had no pay rise for some time. Ted Heath went to the polls asking the one question; “who runs the country”? The country decided, ‘not him’! The election of a minority Wilson Government settled the miner’s strike giving them what they asked for in pay. This was a serious blow to what was left of the consensus politics practiced in Britain since 1945.
The cracks in the ‘post war political consensus’ were now appearing and as the sixties gave way to the seventies became great big gaps as opposed to cracks. Ted Heath and the Conservatives were now in power and suffered their first serious setback in 1972 when the Engineering Unions in Birmingham, assisted the National Union of Mineworkers who were on strike as Arthur Scargill, President of the Yorkshire NUM, Britain’s largest coalfield led flying pickets to Saltley Gate a large fuel storage depot just outside Birmingham. He demanded of the Amalgamated Engineering Union: “I’m not asking you come out on strike, I’m demanding you come out on strike”. The following day miners from Yorkshire picketed Saltley Gate with only about 100 men, and all looked lost. Then as if by magic 20,000 Engineering workers came over the hill and the depot was closed.
In 1974 Heath suffered the ultimate embarrassment when the NUM again were on strike, taking advantage of the Oil Crisis of that year due to the Arab/Israeli war. The Arab states were going to make Britian pay for backing Israel in the war by banging up the price of oil. This was the miners' opportunity, having had no pay rise for some time. Ted Heath went to the polls asking the one question; “who runs the country”? The country decided, ‘not him’! The election of a minority Wilson Government settled the miner’s strike giving them what they asked for in pay. This was a serious blow to what was left of the consensus politics practiced in Britain since 1945.
Watching all this unfold was a Tory minister, a certain Margaret Thatcher. She had been in Heath's cabinet as Minister for Education, infamous for cutting the milk allowance in schools, and was determined to have revenge, particularly on the NUM, for Heath's humiliation. She was elected as Ted's successor in 1975 and detested the very idea of consensus politics. She hated all that went with this style of politics, including the pluralist system of industrial relations, the trade union closed shop. In fact if she could get away with it, which she did not, she would have outlawed trade unions altogether. Thatcher held many far-right and fascist views privately and much as she would have liked to could not go all the way due to parliamentary ‘checks and balances’ - plus British capitalism was not ready or did not need such politics as extreme as she privately wished. She was determined to destroy what was left of the ‘post war political consensus’ and her election in 1979 spelt the end of such arrangements.
Thatcher introduced a set of economics based on the Chicago school of Milton Friedman in the USA, replacing Keynesian economics of a mixed economy which had served the country well. She hated Keynes (John Maynard Keynes was a liberal economist) and with the stroke of a pen wrote them out of history so to speak. This was to the disgust of the Labour opposition, then led by Michael Foot, a genuine Labour veteran of the old school. Foot was humiliated by the media just as 34 years later Jeremy Corbyn was to be. Thatcher’s emphasis was on private industry and the ‘free market’ economics of the Chicago school.
On the back of the Falklands/Malvinas war in 1982 Thatcher walked the 1983 general election and Foot resigned as Labour leader to be replaced by Neil Kinnock in 1983 who would continue to lead until 1992 taking the party in an unstoppable march rightwards. Thatcher had managed to pull the Labour Party in her direction as what could be described as a new right-wing consensus was born, replacing that of the post war variant. Kinnock, despite once being described as a left winger back in the seventies, routed the Militant faction of the Labour left making the party little different to the Conservatives. This trend has continued ever since.
The post war political consensus which was the main stay of British politics did not apply to the six counties where the Ulster Unionists had misruled since partition of Ireland in 1922. The UUP at that time took the Conservative whip in the House of Commons. This only ceased in 1972 when direct rule of the six counties was undertaken by Westminster, and Willie Whitelaw became the first “Secretary of State for Northern Ireland”. This meant the UUP could no longer do exactly as they pleased which pissed them off. However, this should not be misunderstood to mean the British were going to run the area any more fairly towards the Catholic minority, just a little more discretely.
In 1992 Kinnock (Pillock as many called him) resigned as Labour leader to be replaced by John Smith who unfortunately died of a heart attack very early into his leadership. He was replaced in 1994 by Tony Blair (Tory Blair) as leader of the once proud Labour Party. Blair was the man who pulled the party further to the right calling it “new Labour.” He did not want ‘new’ to begin with a capital N. Thatcher and Thatcherism had pulled the Labour Party to the right, making it little if any different to the Conservatives. Blair was a free market economic thinker as was Thatcher, and it was Thatcher herself who once boasted; “new Labour is my greatest achievement.” The differences were so insignificant they were meaningless. Blair remained in power from 1997 until 2007. He was replaced as Labour prime minister by his protégé Gordon Brown, another new consensus man who agreed with everybody else except those socialists who remained in the Labour Party.
This direction in British politics has continued and is continuing to this present day. After Tony Blair destroyed Clause IV of the party’s constitution, the guts of it, he made them indistinguishable from the Conservatives. This was what Thatcher meant by new Labour being her greatest ‘achievement.’ Her policies would be enacted broadly speaking, whether the Conservatives or Labour were/are in government.
Thatcher introduced a set of economics based on the Chicago school of Milton Friedman in the USA, replacing Keynesian economics of a mixed economy which had served the country well. She hated Keynes (John Maynard Keynes was a liberal economist) and with the stroke of a pen wrote them out of history so to speak. This was to the disgust of the Labour opposition, then led by Michael Foot, a genuine Labour veteran of the old school. Foot was humiliated by the media just as 34 years later Jeremy Corbyn was to be. Thatcher’s emphasis was on private industry and the ‘free market’ economics of the Chicago school.
On the back of the Falklands/Malvinas war in 1982 Thatcher walked the 1983 general election and Foot resigned as Labour leader to be replaced by Neil Kinnock in 1983 who would continue to lead until 1992 taking the party in an unstoppable march rightwards. Thatcher had managed to pull the Labour Party in her direction as what could be described as a new right-wing consensus was born, replacing that of the post war variant. Kinnock, despite once being described as a left winger back in the seventies, routed the Militant faction of the Labour left making the party little different to the Conservatives. This trend has continued ever since.
The post war political consensus which was the main stay of British politics did not apply to the six counties where the Ulster Unionists had misruled since partition of Ireland in 1922. The UUP at that time took the Conservative whip in the House of Commons. This only ceased in 1972 when direct rule of the six counties was undertaken by Westminster, and Willie Whitelaw became the first “Secretary of State for Northern Ireland”. This meant the UUP could no longer do exactly as they pleased which pissed them off. However, this should not be misunderstood to mean the British were going to run the area any more fairly towards the Catholic minority, just a little more discretely.
In 1992 Kinnock (Pillock as many called him) resigned as Labour leader to be replaced by John Smith who unfortunately died of a heart attack very early into his leadership. He was replaced in 1994 by Tony Blair (Tory Blair) as leader of the once proud Labour Party. Blair was the man who pulled the party further to the right calling it “new Labour.” He did not want ‘new’ to begin with a capital N. Thatcher and Thatcherism had pulled the Labour Party to the right, making it little if any different to the Conservatives. Blair was a free market economic thinker as was Thatcher, and it was Thatcher herself who once boasted; “new Labour is my greatest achievement.” The differences were so insignificant they were meaningless. Blair remained in power from 1997 until 2007. He was replaced as Labour prime minister by his protégé Gordon Brown, another new consensus man who agreed with everybody else except those socialists who remained in the Labour Party.
This direction in British politics has continued and is continuing to this present day. After Tony Blair destroyed Clause IV of the party’s constitution, the guts of it, he made them indistinguishable from the Conservatives. This was what Thatcher meant by new Labour being her greatest ‘achievement.’ Her policies would be enacted broadly speaking, whether the Conservatives or Labour were/are in government.
There was a slight interlude in these proceedings when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party and he ran the government of Theresa May a close second in 2017 cutting her working majority, too close for some in his own party, including present leader Keir Starmer. Starmer was in Corbyn's shadow cabinet and, it could be argued, was just waiting for the right-wing MPs, most of the party by now, to stab his boss in the back, which they did. Corbyn resigned and Starmer took over the reins of leadership after an election within the party, almost immediately expelling his former boss from the party.
The British Labour Party is now as entrenched in the Thatcherite right-wing consensus as their predecessors were to the post War Political Consensus, started in all probability during the war time coalition, and seriously enacted by Clement Atlee in 1945. Political principles appear to have gone out of the window. The Scottish labour leader, Anas Sarwar recently said; “I don’t care about principles, I just want to get elected.” And that appears to apply right across the spectrum in the British Labour Party and, I must say, the Conservatives also. What Sarwar was saying was I’ll enact conservative policies if it will get me elected! They lost any principled credibility the day Margaret Thatcher entered Number 10 and this disease has spread, as she intended it to, into her “greatest achievement” ‘new Labour’ though that name is seldom used today.
Nothing could epitomise the direction of the Labour Party in the new right-wing consensus more so than Tony Blair\s refusal to reverse any of the anti-trade union legislation enacted by Thatcher. With the exception of reinstating trade union recognition at GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters) all the anti-union laws brought in by Norman Tebbit remained, and still do. There was a glimmer of hope under Jeremy Corbyn but now he has gone Keir Starmer will almost certainly not reverse any of this anti-union legislation. Yet, the same Labour Party is quite happy to be bankrolled by the trade unions which, let us not forget, were a component factor in forming the party back in the early 2oth century. If anybody has read George Orwell’s Animal Farm this could only be described as a real life ‘Pig in the kitchen’ scenario!
Nothing could epitomise the direction of the Labour Party in the new right-wing consensus more so than Tony Blair\s refusal to reverse any of the anti-trade union legislation enacted by Thatcher. With the exception of reinstating trade union recognition at GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters) all the anti-union laws brought in by Norman Tebbit remained, and still do. There was a glimmer of hope under Jeremy Corbyn but now he has gone Keir Starmer will almost certainly not reverse any of this anti-union legislation. Yet, the same Labour Party is quite happy to be bankrolled by the trade unions which, let us not forget, were a component factor in forming the party back in the early 2oth century. If anybody has read George Orwell’s Animal Farm this could only be described as a real life ‘Pig in the kitchen’ scenario!
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| Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist. |
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