Why I look back with

pride to a time of

national self-confidence

 

Alison Prince

 

Jill Stephenson's thoughtful piece (30 November) asked why there was 'that miraculous period of full employment after the war'. She avers that it 'was not a matter of a particular party being in power' – but here I disagree.
     Being old enough to remember those years clearly, I can state with certainty that the moves initiated by the post-war Labour government were extraordinarily formative. William Beveridge had in 1942 drawn up a radical report in which he identified the five enemies to reconstruction as Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. He wasted no time on vapid talk of a 'big society' but proposed a comprehensive social service and set the contributions required from each person.
     The wording of the Beveridge Report is in no way a watered-down communist manifesto, but more akin to a business plan for a large-scale social enterprise. The state, it said, 'should not stifle incentive, opportunity or responsibility'. Its task was to establish a national minimum standard, but 'must leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family'. His proposals came to fruition in the National Insurance Act of 1949.
     The situation in 1945 was similar to the crisis that faces us today. Britain was perilously close to bankruptcy. From the impoverished Depression years of the 1930s, it had gone into a ruinously expensive war, and was now deeply in debt to America as well as being bomb-damaged, short of food and back to square one in terms of exports. Quantitative easing was not an option, as banks had not yet dreamed of the global value-juggling that now holds us hostage.
     At that post-war time, the only resource the nation could call on was manpower, driven by intense need. We had to rebuild cities and docks and factories. We had to start up manufacturing of things other than armaments. Most urgently, we had to expand the education system at great speed in order to cope with the huge numbers of post-war children. Unemployment was unthinkable. Everyone who could push a pen or lift a sack was working long hours.
     Jill correctly points out that for many people, the war had come in 1939 as a salvation rather than as a disaster. It had provided an abundance of paid work, either in the armed services or in essential civilian occupations. The economic depression melted away like an icicle in that urgent need for defence, and the war bred a determination that we would not see a return to the previous state of frozen helplessness. The Army Education Corps improved literacy and encouraged learning and debate, fostering the idea that every discharged serviceman or woman had a right, and indeed a duty, to be involved in shaping the post-war world.

 

     Despite the continued shortages and deprivation, it was a time of exciting self-confidence. Democracy, at that point, actually seemed to mean something. The National Health Service, pushed through by Aneurin Bevan against fierce opposition from the BMA, was a big boost to national self-esteem as well as being the envy of the world. In my pre-war childhood, doctors charged their poorest patients sixpence a week to be eligible for a free visit when needed, but families like my own, debarred by middle-class pretensions from being 'panel patients' dreaded illness because of the cost – a situation to which we are rapidly returning.
     The twin forces that drove post-war employment were confidence and necessity. We were in a crisis that was real and physical as well as economic. The need to clear bomb sites and rebuild houses and offices and hospitals was so pressing that there could be no argument. We owed billions to America – a fact that has long underlain the so-called special relationship – but the presence of that debt was not allowed to overshadow the inspiration of what we'd set out to do. We had been through six years of war, sustained by the assumption that when it was over, we would never go back to the humiliation of being meek prisoners in an economic system that embroiled us in its own failure. For a few wonderful years, we were in charge.
     Until the present century, war recurred in every British generation, acting like heather-burning on the hill to maim and destroy, but also to strip back to essentials. In the last 50 years of peace and abundance, we have enjoyed an easy self-indulgence never previously known to common people, brought about by a vast assault on the globe's fossil fuel resources and by the profitable juggling of money. In this extraordinary shared fantasy of opulence, employment has dwindled to a small item in the strategy of politicians. It is no longer seen as a necessity, let alone a human right.
     The obsession with economic negotiations that use human distress as their proposed cure means that the current situation will not get better until it worsens to crisis point. Perhaps fortunately, the silliness of the current Westminster administration is leading to this quite fast. As a war child accustomed to conflict, I looked with hopeful anticipation at the Occupy movement and last week's demonstrations. Things have to change quite dramatically before we can get back to work.

 

Alison Prince is an author and editor in Arran