World War Two is meant to be ‘the people’s war’ in which ordinary people rose up, saved the nation and swept the Labour party to victory in 1945. That story is at best misleading and at worst untrue, says Kit Kowol
The Second World War was the Tories War. Other than describing a love of deer stalking or hatred of hummus, there are few comments more calculated to horrify those in the Labour Party and on the British Left than this. This is because it goes against almost everything we are supposed to know about Britain during the Second World War.
After all, WWII is meant to be the ‘people’s war’. One in which ordinary people rose up and saved the nation; a time when a desire for equality and the reality of ‘fair shares’ – the democracy of the ration book – swept the nation; when Labour, who joined Winston Churchill’s coalition in 1940, controlled the ‘home front’ and used their power to build the welfare state. Rather than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is a story that concludes with Labour’s landslide victory at the 1945 General Election.
This ‘peoples war’ story is told in a thousand books, speeches and magazine articles, not to mention millions of ‘keep calm and carry on’ mugs. Most of all it is encapsulated in the images of those civilian ‘little ships’ braving the Channel to rescue the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from the beaches of Dunkirk. The problem is, it is at best misleading and at worst untrue. For example, while there were indeed yachts and pleasure-steamers at Dunkirk they often got in the way of the Royal Navy on whose destroyers most of the BEF were disembarked.
The myth of the ‘people’s war’
The same is true of the political elements of the people’s war story. Britain was not united during the war. The black market thrived, crime rates increased and licentious city dwelling evacuees were looked down upon by their middle-class hosts. Likewise, rationing was introduced not through a desire for equality – or even to increase the nation’s health – but to reduce the demand on shipping space. You could eat lobster at the Savoy every night, if you had the money.
Nor was the welfare state ‘created’ during the Second World War. Britain had one of the most developed welfare states in the world in 1939, providing unemployment insurance, widows pensions and access to a raft of voluntary hospitals among much else besides. In fact, the parts of the welfare state not directly linked to the war effort were run down in the war. It was a ‘warrior welfare state’ with those in uniform treated consistently better than civilians.
The most implausible elements of the people’s war account, however, relates to the idea that Labour ran the ‘home front’. While both Labour and the trade unions played a vital role when it came to manpower and production, Conservatives and their allies were responsible for finance, food, education, pensions, reconstruction and for long periods, health and trade too. More important, it was Conservatives who controlled the ‘battle front’ and decided what weapons should be produced and for whom.
The things that Conservatives really cared about – the empire, the army, the established church, the hereditary monarchy, the unreformed parliament, Oxbridge, private schools – were still there in 1945, much as they had been in 1939
Churchill, as Minister of Defence, decided wartime strategy and used it to preserve the British Empire and the Britain class-system. This was why – much to the annoyance of those like the author and Spanish Civil War veteran, George Orwell – the home guard was not turned into a radical proletarian army ready to support liberated colonists, but a small force where communists were weeded out and Lords Lieutenant put in charge. The big money was instead spent on tanks and bombers for the elite ‘samurai of the sky’ as they were known. Altogether, as one writer for the left-wing Tribune magazine put it at the time, though Labour ministers ‘put petrol in the car’ through their link to the unions, Conservatives were at the wheel.
Indeed, it is because of the control they exercised as the dominant players in the wartime coalition that it is possible to argue perhaps an even more heretical point: that Conservative actually ‘won’ the Second World War, if not the peace that came after it.
You could eat lobster at the Savoy every night, if you had the money
This is because the things that Conservatives really cared about – the empire, the army, the established church, the hereditary monarchy, the unreformed parliament, Oxbridge, private schools – were still there in 1945, much as they had been in 1939. Even shareholders’ rate of return among Britain’s largest companies dipped by less than one per cent over the course of the war.
Neither the globalist liberalism of Liberals’ desires nor the socialist commonwealth of Labour’s dreams were established. This was the reason that so many socialists were thrilled at the result of the 1945 general election, because it allowed them to do the things – like nationalising coal and reforming the House of Lords – that they had wanted to do during the war but couldn’t.
A different possible future
The future could also have been radically different. Far from being unimaginative blimps, Conservatives between 1939 and 1945 were highly ambitious, articulate and intellectual; keen to develop their own bold plans for the post-war world.
For some, this involved looking back to Britain’s past and recreating the imagined merrie England of the pre-industrial world with factory workers going ‘back-to-the-land’ in order that the country might grow food free of machines, chemicals, and cosmopolitans (read jews) – ideas which would, to the shock of today’s foodies, inform the postwar organic farming movement.
For others, like the self-styled ‘progressive Conservative’ and wartime president of the Board of Education, RA Butler, it included creating a ‘new Christian State’. Here, British liberties would be reconciled with totalitarian efficiency through the creation of a new Christian political elite and a common Christian education. Butler even achieved much of what he wanted through the Education Act (1944), which promoted grammar schools and ensured every child began the day with a collective act of worship. Theresa May was, in many ways, the Butler’s daughter.
Indeed, wherever one looks, wartime Tories can be found dreaming and scheming about how to create their own Blue, rather than new, Jerusalem in England’s pleasant land. It’s a story that’s actually far more interesting than the people’s war.
Kit Kowol formerly taught Modern British History at King’s College London. His book Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill and the Second World War is published with Oxford University Press.