The Labour Party has a desperate need of myths. 1931 and the betrayal of "a few rene gades"" finds its necessary complement in rosy memories of 1945 and the "bloodless revolution", Images of Churchill's Rolls leaving the Palace to make way for Attlee's Standard 10, smiling miners chalking "people's coal" on the seams and grateful pensioners trying on their spectacles all appear to form a justification for the Labour Party-past, present and future.
It was far from certain that the Labour Party would break from the wartime National Coalition Government after the war. Attlee saw no pressing need and wrote of the coalition: "1 have very pleasant memories of working with my colleagues in the Government. It was seldom that any Party issue arose to divide us." But there were larger forces at play than the wishes of Labour leaders. The working class had been radicalised during the war and were certain that they would not have back the old Tory gang. They wanted a radical change, They thought that the Labour Party would carry through that change, This pressure was reflected in the December 1944 Annual Conference of the Labour Party when the delegates insisted on a policy of large scale nationalisation to be "democratically controlled and operated in the national interest, with representation of the workers angaged therein and of consumers." There could be no coalition and it was only Harry Pollitt and the CP that called for a government of "national unity" including representatives of all Parties supporting the decisions of the Yalta confarance.
After the election-the new era in industry? Labour won by a landslide. Large sections of the working class expected socialism, although they were a little hazy as to what that meant. Certainly some Tories thought so. The morning after the poll there was a rush on Wimbledon Post Office, in response to the victory of the Labour candidate, by frightened Tories who wished to withdraw their money before the revalution began.
It is true that the Labour MPs sang the "Red Flag", or as much as they could remember, at the first meeting of the new Parliament, but worse than that the Wimbledon Tories did not have to suffer.
British capitalism had come out of the war in a very bad state. In 1938, its foreign investments had gained a net profit of £ 175m but this had fallen to E30m by the end of the war, Invisible "earnings" had fallen from E332m to a minus quantity. Half of the pre war export trade had been lost to US imperialism. One third of the merchant navy was sunk. The coal industry. which had not been really profitable since the First World War, was in a bad state of repair and its production was down 50m tons on pre-war figures. The railways and gas industry were on their last legs. The electricity industry could only supply half of the demand. It was precisely these infra-structural sectors of the economy that had to be renovated if British capitalism was to get off the ground. Britain was, after the war, the world's largest debtor nation. A miracle was needed to preserve British capitalism, and its name was Clement Attlee.
Woodrow Wyatt was correct to point out that the Labour Government had not dealt any revolutionary blows at the capitalist class in its first period in office. But reforms were introduced in the early months; the first moves were made to repeal the 1927 Trades Disoute Act, 1o. nationalise the Mines and the Bank of England, to establish a National Health Service and national insurance scheme. The measures were not in fact substantially anti-capitalist. The 1919 Sankey report had called for nationalisation of the mines. In reality, it was essantial that such industries, that were no longer profitable, should be nationalised and subsidised if British capita lism as a whole was to recover. And, of course, there was no question of nationalisation under workers control. The nationalisations were bureaucratic and they did not in any way arode