Top Photo: Clement Attlee, Labour Party leader, with King George VI, July 26, 1945, the day Attlee became prime minister of the United Kingdom. Courtesy Imperial War Museum, HU 49586. 

In late July 1945, as World War II entered its final days, news coming out of the United Kingdom stunned the world: After more than 62 months in office, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Conservatives had been voted out of office. Churchill, the figure who had seemingly embodied the British will to defy and defeat Hitler, had bowed to the will of the people. Swept in by a decidedly leftward turn in popular sentiment, the Labour Party now clasped the reins of power in London.

The words “landslide” and “mandate” easily apply to Labour’s resounding victory. Held on July 5, 1945, the general election was the first in the United Kingdom since 1935. It took three weeks to tally all the votes streaming in from the far-flung British armed forces engaged in winning the war—the surrender of Imperial Japan was still weeks away. About 73 percent of the electorate participated. On July 26, the results were released to the public. Two days later, the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, replaced Churchill at the Potsdam talks. While many voters wondered if it was wise to do such with Japan still in the war, the election demonstrated the resilience and robustness of representative democracy at the end of a worldwide conflict against fascism and militarism.

Britain’s Prime Minister Clement Attlee greets US President Harry Truman at the Potsdam Conference, July 28, 1945, two days after Attlee became prime minister. Seated near them is Ernest Bevan, Labour Party politician and the new foreign secretary of Britain. Credit: British official photo U.S.I.S., Rome, gift of Dylan Utley, from the Collection of The National WWII Museum, 2012.019.575.

Labour’s triumph at the polls surprised no one more, perhaps, than Attlee. Going into July 5, he had clung to a modest hope of reducing the Conservative majority in Parliament. Instead, he presided that month over a party experiencing a profoundly historic moment. A new era of social democracy had begun in the United Kingdom.

In Britain’s multiparty system, just under 12 million women and men cast a ballot for Labour (as opposed to nine million for the Conservatives), meaning the party claimed more than 48 percent of the vote. Because of the country’s quite distinctive system for apportioning representation in Parliament, this translated into 393 seats, or 61 percent of the total seats in that ancient body. By contrast, the Conservatives only won 197. It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of Labour’s success at the polls. Donald Sassoon, a historian of socialism, described the party’s win as the “first time in European history that a socialist party was elected to power with an absolute parliamentary majority.” Thus, Attlee could claim that most precious prize—a mandate for change—as he moved into 10 Downing Street.  

How was this even possible? Churchill then and now enjoyed enormous stature for his leadership, oratory, sense of humor, and appreciation of cigars, Champagne, and whiskey. If his ultra-controversial views on race and empire are no longer so overlooked as they once were, his popularity was undeniable. It would be a huge mistake, though, to read the July 1945 election as an egregious case of ingratitude on the part of British citizens. 

Since its emergence as a crucial force in British politics around the time of World War I, the Labour Party had had two opportunities to exercise power. There had been the short-lived (in no small measure because of the release of the likely fraudulent “Zinoviev Letter”) minority government in 1924. From 1929 to 1931, again under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, Labour governed. In neither case did it exactly inspire: The cut in employment benefits under MacDonald, two years into the economic downturn, embittered many workers, the backbone of Labour’s constituency. Voters administered a devastating defeat to Labour in 1931, though MacDonald remained at the helm as prime minister in Conservative governments for four more years. Some of the party’s left wing split to form the Independent Labour Party in 1932. Consequently, the party expended much effort in winning people back. Its strength continued to be in the industrial northern England, in coal, iron and steel, and shipbuilding. That changed in 1934 when Labour broke through in London. 

The following year, Attlee took over from George Lansbury as leader of the Labour Party. For a country still mired in the Depression, Attlee defended a vision of democratic socialism (recent research has noted his admiration for 19th-century English socialists such as John Ruskin and William Morris). In foreign affairs, he spoke out against notions of national rearmament at a time when Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany posed new threats to the international order. Haunted by the memory of World War I, Labour under Attlee, himself a veteran of that terrible conflict, advocated strong international legal, political, and economic institutions to keep the peace and maintain stability. From 1937 forward, however, Attlee reversed himself and came out strongly against policies of Appeasement, policies pursued by MacDonald, then by Conservative Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. During the disgraceful settlement of the Sudetenland affair with Hitler in the fall of 1938—infamously pushed through by Chamberlain—Attlee condemned the British government’s action as the betrayal of a fellow democracy.  

Though the Conservatives continued to hold power, Attlee’s criticism of Chamberlain set the stage for cooperation during World War II with Churchill, the Tories’ most vocal opponent of Appeasement. After he became prime minister in May 1940, Churchill invited the Labour Party to join a unity government with the Conservatives. In 1942, after serving in a number of posts, including Lord Privy Seal, Attlee became Deputy Prime Minister, the first to ever hold that position. Other Labour politicians entered the Churchill-led government. As Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevan organized much of Britain’s home front and extolled unions and collective bargaining, while he also clamped down on strikes and pushes for higher wages and enjoined trade-unionists to embrace patriotism. The Special Operations Executive (SOE), charged by Churchill in 1940 with the mission to “set Europe ablaze” with resistance activity, operated under the supervision of Hugh Dalton’s Ministry of Economic Warfare (Dalton, an economist, moved to the Board of Trade, in 1942). These are just a few examples.

Labour certainly reaped substantial political gains from its time as a junior partner to the Tories. For a growing portion of middle-class voters, the party demonstrated that it could be trusted at a moment of existential crisis for the nation. This was a blessing of the most mixed variety, however. Perry Anderson, the Marxist writer and key intellectual behind the British journal New Left Review, put it very sharply in 1987: “The five years of wartime administration that followed [from Churchill bringing Labour into a coalition government] were Labour’s real baptism in office. Cocooned within a nationalist concert, it acquired credentials of safety and reliability it had hitherto never possessed, however moderate its policies.” The trust Labour, an avowedly socialist, mass working-class party, won during World War II from a significant number of Britain’s bourgeoisie and ruling establishment it repaid with interest in the years thereafter.    

At the same time—and this cannot be emphasized enough—Labour in 1945 tapped an all-too-real readiness for change in Britain. This had been evident at least since the publication of “Social Insurance and Allied Services,” better known as the Beveridge Report. Named for its author, the respected economist and Liberal Party politician Sir William Beveridge, this document, more than 300 pages in length, outlined an ambitious vision for transforming British society. Beveridge presented “Social Insurance and Allied Services” to Parliament in the fall of 1942, and it eventually sold more than 800,000 copies. He proposed that after the war, the government should pursue the elimination of five ills plaguing the country: want, squalor, ignorance, idleness, and disease. This material and moral transformation of the lives of Britons would require a system of social insurance that would cover people “from cradle to the grave” (a phrase that would become part of general parlance after 1945). Two years later, Beveridge produced a report envisioning how the state could create a situation of all but full employment. The focus on plentiful jobs was no minor concern in the United Kingdom, where unemployment during the Great Depression had risen to 25 percent in 1933. In addition, in 1944, a committee set up by the Ministry of Fuel and Power, chaired by Geoffrey Heyworth, recommended the nationalization of gas and electricity. Public interest in these high-level discussions indicated widespread aspirations for a postwar order defined by stability and security for the many, not just for the few. 

Trying to stay ahead of this shift, Churchill and the Conservatives in 1943 assented to some future nationalization of industries, a commitment to full employment, and some kind of national insurance plans. During the war, the British government expanded programs of free meals for children at school and free milk for households. The proverbial handwriting on the wall could be seen by all.

Sixteen years of economic hardship, war, and sacrifice had ushered in these demands for socioeconomic change in the birthplace of industrial capitalism. The people of Britain had persevered while Nazi Germany’s forces overran much of the European continent. Repulsed in Norway, driven out of France, and defeated in Greece in 1940–41, the British had, under the leadership of Churchill and the national unity government, first refused to accept Hitler’s peace terms and then outlasted the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. 

The National Service Act of September 1939 had enacted conscription for all men between the ages of 18 and 41 (with exceptions for those deemed medically unfit and for farmers, engineers, and physicians, and procedures were put into place for conscientious objectors). At the behest of Secretary of State for War Anthony Eden, more than a million men volunteered for the Home Guard, a formation akin to a popular militia, between 1940 and 1944. Similar opportunities for women volunteers came in 1941. That same year, a second National Service Act followed, which extended national service for men to the age of 60 (military service was prioritized for men under 51) and conscripted unmarried women between 20 and 30 for civil-defense tasks and policing (later this expanded to include married women). Too often neglected in recollections of Britain during World War II is the fact that more than 7,000,000 women were laboring in war-related industries by 1944. Munitions workers, railway workers, dockworkers, and shipyard workers, many of them steady supporters of Labour and members of one of the constituent unions in the Trades Union Congress, performed incredible feats. 

In spite of the Blitz, the German submarine blockade, and V-1 and V-2 attacks, Britons exhibited great resolve and willingness to sacrifice. Rationing (which affected the range of foods that could be included in free school meals) meant they had to endure shortages of meat, cheese, and eggs.  Americans stationed in the United Kingdom often reported on the hospitality and gratitude they encountered from their hosts on the British Isles. 

With plenty of help from Commonwealth forces and from its far-flung empire, British servicemembers fought on. Eventually, more than three million served in the UK armed forces. Joined by the Soviet Union and the United States in 1941, British ground, air, and naval forces contributed significantly to the defeat of the Axis lands. All the while, the country as a world power quite visibly fell behind the Americans and Soviets. 

Although the numbers, thankfully, did not match those from World War I, World War II exacted a high toll on the United Kingdom in blood and treasure. Combat losses totaled some 384,000 killed. Another 70,000 civilians perished, primarily during the Blitz, and later from V-1 and V-2 attacks. Financially, by war’s end, Britain was practically bankrupt. 

Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives campaigned on Churchill’s record as a wartime leader and his popularity. They tried to keep the public’s focus on the Pacific war and the British military’s role in the forthcoming Operation Downfall, the proposed invasion and occupation of Japan. Domestically, the Conservatives did not back away from laissez-faire ideology, a perspective definitely at odds with a mass outlook in Britain steadily moving closer to certain socialistic ideas. Churchill outraged many when he stated a Gestapo would be required to fulfill some of Labour’s program. Voters, however, repudiated such reprehensible comments as well as the extreme paranoia promoted by Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian-born economist and professor at the London School of Economics. In his book The Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek, a hardened defender of laissez-faire, had contended that socialism shared many commonalities with fascism, rejected democratic socialism as unachievable, and predicted that a victorious socialist Left in Britain would mean a new form of tyranny. 

Some 12 million voters in Britain thought otherwise. Rejecting the fear-mongering of Churchill and Hayek and seemingly unconcerned about Attlee’s clear absence of personal charisma, they placed their confidence in the Labour Party. Against laissez-faire, these men and women wanted a state intervening on their behalf in socioeconomic life. And Labour sought to broaden its constituency on the basis of its own record of shared governance during World War II. In the run-up to the election, one of their leaflets showed a sailor, soldier, and airman together: “Help Them Finish Their Jobs! Give Them Homes and Work!” The party would not cede those who had done the fighting and dying to the Conservatives.

Labour Party leaflet directed at British servicemembers, 1945. Courtesy of historyofparliamentonline.org.

One of the most astute observers of the July 1945 election was Eric Arthur Blair, familiar to the  world under his pen name, George Orwell. Part of a transatlantic anti-Stalinist Left, Orwell had done a few years of work for the BBC during the war and enjoyed the great success of his satire, Animal Farm. He penned a fascinating analysis of the election for a November 1945 issue of the American journal, Commentary, that is still very much worth reading. 

In the article, Orwell clarified that domestic issues, not the war or foreign policy, dominated the contest between the Tories and Labour. “The questions on which the election turned,” he asserted, “were nationalization of industry, social security, demobilization, housing, old age pensions, continuation of wartime controls and also of wartime facilities such as day nurseries, and the raising of the school-leaving age.” He emphasized that “the general drift in England is leftward” and that “in spite of the general apathy and ignorance, there is a gathering discontent which cannot be fitted into any ‘ism’ but which springs from a desire for more dignity and decency in everyday life, more opportunities for the young, and, above all, more security.” Orwell recognized that Labour had seized a moment of opportunity it did not create, but one it had nurtured. Four months after the election, he also held few illusions about how far left Labour would move, even with the wind at its back. 

Labour had run a campaign promising to implement the Beveridge Report—and do far more. Let Us Face the Future, its manifesto, boldly proclaimed, “The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain—free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organized in the service of the British people.” Radical in passages like this, the manifesto at the same time evinced a vocabulary of common sense, practicality, responsibility, efficiency, and modernization. Moving toward socialism would not be a quick affair but a gradual, steady process of democratization of all spheres of life. Capital’s “freedom” to exploit workers and exert excessive influence on the state would be curtailed.

The manifesto promised an increase of taxes on the wealthy. Lack of housing (“one of the greatest and one of the earliest tests of a Government's real determination to put the nation first”) would be overcome through a state-directed program of town and land planning, pooling of building materials, and, if necessary, price controls. Education, replete with an array of cultural programs, would become more accessible and secondary education made free. Especially intriguing was how Let’s Face the Future highlighted a program of “Jobs for All,” “associated with a policy of general economic expansion and efficiency,” that would make the mass unemployment of the Great Depression a thing of the past. This would require careful, socially conscious management of the economy. If planning acquired a negative connotation, tainted by the Stalinist Five-Year Plans with their inhuman quotas and worship of heavy industry, the Labour Party here presented a conception of planning bound up with rationality and meeting human needs.  

Looking back to the 1930s, Let Us Face the Future blamed the Depression on the “concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men,” solely self-interested men bereft of responsibility to the country, who comprised “totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State.” To guarantee that the nightmarish economic downturn did not repeat itself as British society transitioned to peacetime, the Labour Party proposed and implemented a wave of nationalizations between 1945 and 1949. Ian Mikardo, elected Labour member of Parliament for Reading in 1945, had pushed fervently for nationalization measures. “Socialized industries,” according to the manifesto, were “to be taken over on a basis of fair compensation, to be conducted efficiently in the interests of consumers, coupled with proper status and conditions for the workers employed in them.” Coal, gas, and electricity, as well as iron and steel, were folded into this, making these industries state property. The Attlee government also extended public ownership to transportation (civil aviation, the railways, and some trucking), telecommunications, and to finance—the Bank of England. Indeed, this was on paper a fundamental transformation of Britain’s socioeconomic system. Although the owners were compensated, it seemed that the economy and infrastructure would serve the masses, not least the nation’s working class, and avoid systemic crisis. 

Yet several leftist critics subsequently assailed Labour for the nationalizing endeavors. Geoff Eley has criticized the Attlee government in his history of the European Left for the “absurdly high” amount of money paid to business owners. Notions of workers’ control or industrial democracy, which could have countered tendencies toward bureaucratization, did not find a place within these takeovers. Stereotypes aside, nationalization did not automatically translate into socialism. Finally—and this not only applies to the Labour Party—there was no questioning in the immediate postwar years of the impact of industries like coal (the profitability of which had weakened greatly by the war’s end) on the environment. More ecologically oriented critiques of capitalism did not really develop in Britain or elsewhere until the 1960s.   

Keeping its promise to voters to honor the goals of the Beveridge Report, the Labour government pushed through the National Insurance Act in 1946. Funded through a tripartite scheme (workers, employers, and the government), this legislation entailed comprehensive coverage for citizens of the United Kingdom. The act encompassed sickness, maternity, unemployment, as well as pension benefits. Following it in 1948 was the creation of the National Health Service for England and Wales (separate legislation was required for Scotland and Northern Ireland), the Labour Party’s landmark achievement from these years. Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan was the chief architect of the NHS. Bevan envisioned a government program that would supply health services free of charge, including free diagnosis and treatment of illnesses at home or in a hospital. Staff at hospitals became salaried government employees.  A Central Health Services Council was also erected with standing Advisory Committees. By de-commodifying health care to a degree, the founding of the NHS did tremendous good for the UK working class and poor. Money—having it or not having it—would not decide whether human beings received necessary medical treatment.

Aneurin Bevan, Britain’s Minister of Health, with a patient at a hospital in Davyhulme, England, July 5, 1948, the day the National Health Service opened.

This list of programs and policies, hopefully, throws some light on what the Labour Party undertook domestically with its big victory in 1945. For the people of the United Kingdom, this represented a real break with the past, a break oriented to the welfare and security of the masses after passing “through the horrors of unemployment and insecurity,” in the words of Let Us Face the Future, during the previous 15 years. Yet, it must be said, Labour under Attlee never moved from occupying a space on the left wing of capitalist politics in Britain. Nationalization of the Bank of England did not lead to a transformation of banking practices in the country. It was the Communists in 1946 who demanded and supported militant action (takeovers of former military camps and abandoned bases) on the dreadful housing situation. How much more could have been done to preserve and expand upon the economic independence many women had attained during the war? Attlee and his ministers never seemed particularly concerned about the status of the monarchy or targeting the remnants of aristocratic privilege (as Orwell hoped they would). What resulted from their socioeconomic policies was a more just, equitable, and less crisis-prone capitalism. 

To quote Perry Anderson once more, Labour between 1945 and 1951 (when it lost to the Conservatives):

proved unable, not just to pose any fundamental challenge to capitalism in the United Kingdom, as always in the past, but to constitute any incisive alternative stewardship of it either. The post-war Labour government, commanding a huge parliamentary majority and a loyal trade-union movement, thought only of bettering the condition of the working-class within a social order taken as given and an imperial heritage it strove to preserve, by reliance on American protection.

The comment about “American protection” opens onto a final point. With colonies spread around the planet, Let Us Face the Future devoted, shockingly, a single paragraph to India (to which it only promised “responsible self-government”). How would it honor the promises of the Atlantic Charter and the Charter of the United Nations as peoples in colonized and semi-colonized countries clamored for independence? While affirming a “common bond with the working peoples of all countries, who have achieved a new dignity and influence through their long struggles against Nazi tyranny,” what would it do about EAM/ELAS in Greece, embroiled in fighting with the British just months before the election? What of Palestine? Of Malaya? Of Kenya? 
How would the Attlee government deal with the Stalin regime? What would become of the alliance with the United States? Britain, under the Attlee government, now entered a world where the US and USSR were the two “superpowers.” 

Labour’s stress on domestic concerns held until 1947 at the latest. The onset of the Cold War, as Geoff Eley reminds us, undercut the commitment to the full provisioning of the welfare state laid out in 1945 and pulled the Labour Party rightward, to anticommunism and Atlanticism as the foundations for Britain’s place in a new international system where many colonies of the British Crown had to fight fierce, prolonged struggles to have their wishes for freedom recognized.