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talkpolitics"We buried Socialism", said Thatcher, during her third term of office.
Today, some young people may argue that Britain is not, and and maybe never was a socialist country. Or, that if it was many years ago, that it certainly isn't now.
I would argue though, that Socialism has been weakened, but not destroyed. It was derided and yet is not fully discredited as a political ideology. But mostly, I would argue that Thatcher herself can claim little or no credit for the decline of Socialism's popularity with the British working class.
It was the working class themselves who abandoned and neglected Socialism. Socialism is like Freedom and Democracy - unless we tend it, cherish it and actively preserve it, it will wither away and dissappear, just like Freedom and Democracy will if we do not guard and preserve them.
Let me take up the tale where we left off. we shall see that it was not Thatcher, it was just plain greed and selfishness on the part of the British people that buried Socialism, not Margeret Thatcher.
The winter of '47-'48 brought a stinging rebuke from Churchill - that Briain was an island, built upon coal bearing rock and surrounded by seas teeming with fish - and it must have taken a miracle of economic planning to produce a shortage of both commodities in peacetime!
And it has to be admitted that in Socialist Britain, that the Socialist government, having only recently come to power, was having to ration coal - in peacetime. And that the nation was short of fish!
Yet, what had brought this about?
Well, for a start, the winter of that year was the worst on record. Temperatures dropped lower than in living memory, and snowfall was also unprecedented. And in the face of this, what had the government done? Who was responsible for keeping briish industry functioning?
The answer was that Emmanuel Shinwell was. He was responsible for liasing with the TUC on behalf of the National Coal Board. Now, the Unions had given him the figures on how much coal they expected to produce. Shinwell looked at them and thought that he would be quite ok, even if the winter weather was worse than usual. in actual fact is was far worse than usual - but the TUC figures for coall production were big on promises and short on delivery. I cannot quote you exact figures, but I understand from people who were living through that time hat this was indeed the case.
The problem was that the rate of absenteeism in the mines was double the national average.
Under Socialism, the miners were entitled to sick pay - and a lot of the miners went off sick, and coal production fell below expected levels as a result. Manny Shinwell was scapegoated, but to many modern commentators - including me - it was the miners who let England down, not him. This was to become a reccurent feature of the years to come - that people who had won the war simply refused to pull their weight any longer, and the peace was lost.
It was not just the mine workers who were guilty, though. The upper classes, seeing Socialism at work, refused to back it. Whereas they were quite happy to invest in domestic production before the war, they now took money out of the country and invested it abroad instead. The country was being starved of investment funds. When I was a child, the government had even passed a law saying that nobody could take more than £150 with them if they went on holiday abroad. Harold Wilson was forced to go cap in hand to the IMF to finance his social reforms, because the bankers, investors, and the financiers refused to help him, and the IMF laid terms and conditions that made his reforms less comlete than what he wanted, ideally.
But, in spite of a poor and shaky start, life in Britain did get better for many people. The young Princess Elizabeth came to the throne in 1952, and the young Queen seemed to symbolise this new, post war era.It was a workers paradise, it really was. jobs were easy to get, there was optimism in the air as the work of rebuilding the nation began in earnest. Prefabricated housing went up everywhere - this was intended to be temporary accomadation until brick built homes could be constructed. there was work a plenty. Soldiers , sailors and airmen who had been demobilised found government assistance in getting work, with training programmes for the veterans of WW2 in many fields a lot of chaps who had fought in the war became teachers. I was privileged in that I went to school in an era that still had a sense of the old fashioned ideas on discipline and hard work ,as well as more enlighted attitudes on education.
The new factories being built turned out radios and TV sets, there were gramaphone records, there were inexpensive cameras and other goods like fridges and toasters. These were the boom times, make no mistake. the world that I was expected to grow up in was going to be a far better place. Ii was immunised as a baby against diptheria, small pox, polio and many other childhood diseases. Children were given free milk at school - and very poor children also got free meals.
And yet, as mterial prosperity rose, church going fell. I remember as a child of about 8, that when you went to the cinema, the national anthem was played at the end of the film. And on TV , there was a playing of the national anthem before the TV station shut down. yet , as the years went by, there was a decline in patriotism, as well as a turning away from belief in God.
Perhaps if the C of e had been as radical as the methodists and the Fre churches, this would not have happened, I don't know. but people seemed to turn against formalism and formality. And this was not always a good thing to do, I feel.
There were more televisions, more fridges and electrical appliances of every kind in the home-
but a crass amterialism seemed to pervade social life. Money began to seem to be all that people cared about.The more people got, the more they seemed to want.
Another thing was that people turned against the old order and were deliberately iconoclastic.
if you were a bright child, there was a chance that you would go to Grammar School in the 1960s.
that was a fast track to university. And an awful lot of really brigh kids from ordinary working class homes were selected, purely on merit, to go to Grammer, and became the first child in their family to go to University. I was not that bright, to be honest - but for those who were, this was a golden opportunity.
Yet, for the politicians, this was 'elitist' - they wanted to close the grammar schools down, and took away the best chance that many youngsters ever had. it never helped me, but there were so many iit did help - and they would be helped no longer. that was a big mistake that Socialists made on their own account.
But, if Britsh kids were getting the best healthcare and education they had ever got in history - were they all going to become factory workers and street cleaners at the end of it?
Oh, no !
So who was going to do the dirty jobs that the white man did not want? Well, immigrants, of course! The ship 'Windrush' brought workers from the Carribean to Britain. These people were promised work as bus drivers and such. they spoke english , they were decent, hard working, Protestants and cricket lovers. They were like we used to be before the war started.
But the war was over. They were Christians in a country that was cynical about religion, they were patriotic subjects of the Queen in an era where monarchy was being derided. And they were black in a white country that was prepared to make use of them, but did not like to see them as equals. they worked hard in a country where white people, quite honestly, were getting lazy.
The British working class began to show itself to be racist and sexist in its attitudes. They stopped reading the Daily Mirror, with it's columns by kieth waterhouse and cassandra, and began to read The Sun instead. the Sun was more like ' Fox News' in print.
As the sixties gave way to the seventies, it was the rich kids who took to smoking pot and wearing jeans first, but soon everyone was doing it. Scruffy was the new smart. Cynicism took root. the money from the post war boom started to run out and the prefabs started to look shabby. people like T Dan Smith came to be noted more for political scandal and corruption than avant guard achitecture and public service. the whole country seemed to be on the skids by the end of the sixties. Even the peaceful, but vacant hippies were replaced by vicious thugs who called themselves ' skinheads'. they didn't do love ins and peace marches - they were into having fights against rival gangs at football matches.
In the workplace, the union came to be less about social political and economic theory and more about just getting another 5% payrise out of the management. Ok, the Unions had won real concessiions - they got the 40 hr week and the 8 hr day - a safer workplace and even equal pay for women. but people began to see money as the be all and end all of their lives - like nothing else mattered.
Harold Wilsonwas replaced by Ted heath, the Conservative PM. Unions were beginning to favour the skilled worker over the unskilled. nobody cared about the working class any more it was all about looking after number one. heath wanted to reform the Unions and make them more accountable to the members. It was the power workers who went on strike in protest. there were black outs - hospitals had generators parked outside with troops on guard and surgeons did open heart surgery by candle light when even these failed to deliver enough power.
Most factories in Britain could only operate for three days a week. itwas a constituional crisis and the Heath government fell. now, Jim Callaghan, the next Socialist PM , he tried to work with the unions , and not against them, but they just didn't get it that the country could not pay people more and more every year unless they were putting more and more in. The Unions wanted more pay for doing less work, basically, and Callaghan tried to get them to see sense.
Matters came to a head when Callaghan tried to impement a pay freeze. there could be no more pay rises for anyone unless a rise in productivity could be demonstrated, the government declared. Some bosses in some companies were willing to shell out extra money and put workers through training courses. we were then told that because we had been able to demonstrate real workplace skills that we had not had before, we were entitled to the pay rise the company gave us. pay rises in the private sector were modest, but some public secor workers, especially the municipal workers like refuse collectors and sewage workers, wanted the big increases thatother workers used to get. There followed what became known as ' The Winter of Discontent'. Rubbish piled up in the streets, even the dead were unburied - because cremations and funerals were usually done at the council crematorium and cemetary now, not the local churchyard.
This time, it was a Labour government that fell as a result of Trade Union action.
Maggie Thatcher and the Conservatives came to power, promising to return England to it's former greatness, and tame the Unions. I will talk about her era in my next OP. This time, I shall not be depending on my parents and grandparents recollections - I was only 22 when Mrs Thatcher took office. I remember it well.
Today, some young people may argue that Britain is not, and and maybe never was a socialist country. Or, that if it was many years ago, that it certainly isn't now.
I would argue though, that Socialism has been weakened, but not destroyed. It was derided and yet is not fully discredited as a political ideology. But mostly, I would argue that Thatcher herself can claim little or no credit for the decline of Socialism's popularity with the British working class.
It was the working class themselves who abandoned and neglected Socialism. Socialism is like Freedom and Democracy - unless we tend it, cherish it and actively preserve it, it will wither away and dissappear, just like Freedom and Democracy will if we do not guard and preserve them.
Let me take up the tale where we left off. we shall see that it was not Thatcher, it was just plain greed and selfishness on the part of the British people that buried Socialism, not Margeret Thatcher.
The winter of '47-'48 brought a stinging rebuke from Churchill - that Briain was an island, built upon coal bearing rock and surrounded by seas teeming with fish - and it must have taken a miracle of economic planning to produce a shortage of both commodities in peacetime!
And it has to be admitted that in Socialist Britain, that the Socialist government, having only recently come to power, was having to ration coal - in peacetime. And that the nation was short of fish!
Yet, what had brought this about?
Well, for a start, the winter of that year was the worst on record. Temperatures dropped lower than in living memory, and snowfall was also unprecedented. And in the face of this, what had the government done? Who was responsible for keeping briish industry functioning?
The answer was that Emmanuel Shinwell was. He was responsible for liasing with the TUC on behalf of the National Coal Board. Now, the Unions had given him the figures on how much coal they expected to produce. Shinwell looked at them and thought that he would be quite ok, even if the winter weather was worse than usual. in actual fact is was far worse than usual - but the TUC figures for coall production were big on promises and short on delivery. I cannot quote you exact figures, but I understand from people who were living through that time hat this was indeed the case.
The problem was that the rate of absenteeism in the mines was double the national average.
Under Socialism, the miners were entitled to sick pay - and a lot of the miners went off sick, and coal production fell below expected levels as a result. Manny Shinwell was scapegoated, but to many modern commentators - including me - it was the miners who let England down, not him. This was to become a reccurent feature of the years to come - that people who had won the war simply refused to pull their weight any longer, and the peace was lost.
It was not just the mine workers who were guilty, though. The upper classes, seeing Socialism at work, refused to back it. Whereas they were quite happy to invest in domestic production before the war, they now took money out of the country and invested it abroad instead. The country was being starved of investment funds. When I was a child, the government had even passed a law saying that nobody could take more than £150 with them if they went on holiday abroad. Harold Wilson was forced to go cap in hand to the IMF to finance his social reforms, because the bankers, investors, and the financiers refused to help him, and the IMF laid terms and conditions that made his reforms less comlete than what he wanted, ideally.
But, in spite of a poor and shaky start, life in Britain did get better for many people. The young Princess Elizabeth came to the throne in 1952, and the young Queen seemed to symbolise this new, post war era.It was a workers paradise, it really was. jobs were easy to get, there was optimism in the air as the work of rebuilding the nation began in earnest. Prefabricated housing went up everywhere - this was intended to be temporary accomadation until brick built homes could be constructed. there was work a plenty. Soldiers , sailors and airmen who had been demobilised found government assistance in getting work, with training programmes for the veterans of WW2 in many fields a lot of chaps who had fought in the war became teachers. I was privileged in that I went to school in an era that still had a sense of the old fashioned ideas on discipline and hard work ,as well as more enlighted attitudes on education.
The new factories being built turned out radios and TV sets, there were gramaphone records, there were inexpensive cameras and other goods like fridges and toasters. These were the boom times, make no mistake. the world that I was expected to grow up in was going to be a far better place. Ii was immunised as a baby against diptheria, small pox, polio and many other childhood diseases. Children were given free milk at school - and very poor children also got free meals.
And yet, as mterial prosperity rose, church going fell. I remember as a child of about 8, that when you went to the cinema, the national anthem was played at the end of the film. And on TV , there was a playing of the national anthem before the TV station shut down. yet , as the years went by, there was a decline in patriotism, as well as a turning away from belief in God.
Perhaps if the C of e had been as radical as the methodists and the Fre churches, this would not have happened, I don't know. but people seemed to turn against formalism and formality. And this was not always a good thing to do, I feel.
There were more televisions, more fridges and electrical appliances of every kind in the home-
but a crass amterialism seemed to pervade social life. Money began to seem to be all that people cared about.The more people got, the more they seemed to want.
Another thing was that people turned against the old order and were deliberately iconoclastic.
if you were a bright child, there was a chance that you would go to Grammar School in the 1960s.
that was a fast track to university. And an awful lot of really brigh kids from ordinary working class homes were selected, purely on merit, to go to Grammer, and became the first child in their family to go to University. I was not that bright, to be honest - but for those who were, this was a golden opportunity.
Yet, for the politicians, this was 'elitist' - they wanted to close the grammar schools down, and took away the best chance that many youngsters ever had. it never helped me, but there were so many iit did help - and they would be helped no longer. that was a big mistake that Socialists made on their own account.
But, if Britsh kids were getting the best healthcare and education they had ever got in history - were they all going to become factory workers and street cleaners at the end of it?
Oh, no !
So who was going to do the dirty jobs that the white man did not want? Well, immigrants, of course! The ship 'Windrush' brought workers from the Carribean to Britain. These people were promised work as bus drivers and such. they spoke english , they were decent, hard working, Protestants and cricket lovers. They were like we used to be before the war started.
But the war was over. They were Christians in a country that was cynical about religion, they were patriotic subjects of the Queen in an era where monarchy was being derided. And they were black in a white country that was prepared to make use of them, but did not like to see them as equals. they worked hard in a country where white people, quite honestly, were getting lazy.
The British working class began to show itself to be racist and sexist in its attitudes. They stopped reading the Daily Mirror, with it's columns by kieth waterhouse and cassandra, and began to read The Sun instead. the Sun was more like ' Fox News' in print.
As the sixties gave way to the seventies, it was the rich kids who took to smoking pot and wearing jeans first, but soon everyone was doing it. Scruffy was the new smart. Cynicism took root. the money from the post war boom started to run out and the prefabs started to look shabby. people like T Dan Smith came to be noted more for political scandal and corruption than avant guard achitecture and public service. the whole country seemed to be on the skids by the end of the sixties. Even the peaceful, but vacant hippies were replaced by vicious thugs who called themselves ' skinheads'. they didn't do love ins and peace marches - they were into having fights against rival gangs at football matches.
In the workplace, the union came to be less about social political and economic theory and more about just getting another 5% payrise out of the management. Ok, the Unions had won real concessiions - they got the 40 hr week and the 8 hr day - a safer workplace and even equal pay for women. but people began to see money as the be all and end all of their lives - like nothing else mattered.
Harold Wilsonwas replaced by Ted heath, the Conservative PM. Unions were beginning to favour the skilled worker over the unskilled. nobody cared about the working class any more it was all about looking after number one. heath wanted to reform the Unions and make them more accountable to the members. It was the power workers who went on strike in protest. there were black outs - hospitals had generators parked outside with troops on guard and surgeons did open heart surgery by candle light when even these failed to deliver enough power.
Most factories in Britain could only operate for three days a week. itwas a constituional crisis and the Heath government fell. now, Jim Callaghan, the next Socialist PM , he tried to work with the unions , and not against them, but they just didn't get it that the country could not pay people more and more every year unless they were putting more and more in. The Unions wanted more pay for doing less work, basically, and Callaghan tried to get them to see sense.
Matters came to a head when Callaghan tried to impement a pay freeze. there could be no more pay rises for anyone unless a rise in productivity could be demonstrated, the government declared. Some bosses in some companies were willing to shell out extra money and put workers through training courses. we were then told that because we had been able to demonstrate real workplace skills that we had not had before, we were entitled to the pay rise the company gave us. pay rises in the private sector were modest, but some public secor workers, especially the municipal workers like refuse collectors and sewage workers, wanted the big increases thatother workers used to get. There followed what became known as ' The Winter of Discontent'. Rubbish piled up in the streets, even the dead were unburied - because cremations and funerals were usually done at the council crematorium and cemetary now, not the local churchyard.
This time, it was a Labour government that fell as a result of Trade Union action.
Maggie Thatcher and the Conservatives came to power, promising to return England to it's former greatness, and tame the Unions. I will talk about her era in my next OP. This time, I shall not be depending on my parents and grandparents recollections - I was only 22 when Mrs Thatcher took office. I remember it well.
(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 14:10 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 18:32 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 18:50 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 22:11 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 20/8/10 00:20 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 19:18 (UTC)Also, I suppose using the prefabricated houses would have been a little traumatic given the British love for traditional, sturdy ones ;)
Look forward to your next post.
(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 19:57 (UTC)Communism is a revolutionary movement that advocates a central planning state to be achieved by any and all means necessary. Socialists are more liberal democrats in keeping with the rest of civilized society.
(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 22:08 (UTC)Communism is a revolutionary movement that advocates a central planning state to be achieved by any and all means necessary. Socialists are more liberal democrats in keeping with the rest of civilized society.
Thank you.
If I do nothing more than convice a decent slice of the American public - or at least the guys wh read this forum - that Communism =/= Socialism , I shall die a happy man ! :)
(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 22:15 (UTC)the thought that all Brits live in Stately Homes or semis in suburbia is a beguiling image. however, most brits lived in tenemants in the 50s and 60s, i think. seemed to be so at the time, anyways.
The prefabricated house, or 'prefab ' was a part of the landscape - bit like the blue police boxes you see on Dr Who.
Both have dissappeared, but you still see the occassional one that time seems to have forgotten.
people loved the prefab when it first appeared, but their life was only supposed to be about 10 yrs - many got pressed into much longer service and began to deteriorate.
(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 21:05 (UTC)If only it was that easy...
(no subject)
Date: 19/8/10 22:20 (UTC)And by ' them' I mean politicians - even 'Socialist' politicians will sell out and betray the very principles they were elected on , given sufficient incentive.
But Socialism , like Freedom and Democracy, seem to be deeply embedded in the nation's soul. My nation's soul, anyway, thank God.
(no subject)
Date: 20/8/10 00:03 (UTC)