In many ways, Labour’s election campaign of 1945 was intended to be a paradigmatic expression of the way in which the Party intended to govern. The rousing image of a New Jerusalem, emerging out of the smoky rubble, exemplified the quasi-religious
(even millennial) expectations of socialists throughout the war. Labour’s Manifesto Let Us Face the Future was saturated with a kind of eschatological urgency that defied the material austerity the Party would undoubtedly inherit should it win the contest. Yet, despite such obstacles, Labour politicians were clear. Their party was in the business of changing Britain through a citizenry radicalised by the threat of invasion. Labour’s pitch to the electorate was nothing less than the Socialist Commonwealth of
Great Britain, a society in which free-market dogma and avoidable human suffering would be left far behind. Yet, five years later, Labour’s vision of British socialism seemed less than dynamic. True, Labour had nationalised 20% of the British
economy 44 and introduced a raft of social security measures. Yet it had not built the kind of worker-led common ownership structures which its own rhetoric of Democratic Socialism seemed to mandate. In the case of larger industries like coal, Labour’s rally-cry of industry ‘working for the nation’ meant little more than consolidating smaller private firms into semi-autonomous public corporations. 45 There was no direct input from the ordinary workers who risked their lives at the
coal-face. Moreover, many of the private owners who had been blamed for running down the industry in the 1930s were handsomely compensated in the wake of nationalisation. 46 Some even sat on the new governing boards to oversee this grand adventure in ‘socialist’ planning. An excellent summary of Labour abject failure in this area comes from an unusual quarter, the Radical Tory Harold Macmillan.
Speaking in the debate on the Coal Industry Nationalisation Bill, Macmillan observed
(with more than a hint of mischief): This Bill vests the ownership of all the colliery undertakings in a board of nine
men—nine men not elected by, or even containing a single elected representative
of, the mining community. It is not nationalisation in the old sense of the word ... This is not Socialism; it is State capitalism. There is not too much participation by
the mineworkers in the affairs of the industry; there is far too little. There is not too
much syndicalism; there is none at all. 47
This tentativeness on the part of the Labour Party sits in contrast to the hopes of
many miners, with whom Macmillan’s words probably struck a chord. If we judge
Labour’s commitment to socialism on the record of its top-down nationalisation
programme, we must conclude that its dedication to the ideal of common-ownership
was shaky at best.
