The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
![The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State - Nicholas Timmins](limg_read341088.jpg "The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State - Nicholas Timmins")
was Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the nineteenth century.31 Howard’s vision of ‘slumless, smokeless cities’ was realised in the greenfield private development sites of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, which began building in 1903 and 1919 respectively. Letchworth was designed by Raymond Unwin, the architect also of New Earswick, the model village commissioned by Joseph Rowntree near his cocoa works in York. Unwin’s work heavily influenced the more human-scale and village-like developments of local authorities both before and after the Second World War. It was this legacy which the Town and Country Planning movement took over, bitterly resisting the ribbon development of the thirties, and combining it with a more right-wing plea for green belt legislation in order to protect the countryside from the repulsive encroachment of the lower middle classes and from the unplanned loss of good agricultural land.32
In 1946, despite ‘no whisper of the new towns in the Labour manifesto’,33 the New Towns Act appeared. There were eventually to be twenty-five of them, housing two million people. Of the first fourteen, eight were built around London, surrounded by green belt to keep them free of the city: an extension to Welwyn, plus the new Crawley, Bracknell, Hemel Hempstead, Hatfield, Stevenage, Harlow, and Basildon (later to become the home of Essex man). Six more went to regional development areas: Corby in Northamptonshire, Cwmbran in what is now Gwent, East Kilbride and Glenrothes in central Scotland and Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee in Durham. Beveridge was appointed chairman of the last two and threw himself into the job with characteristic vigour; but he found their limited social mix of chiefly young skilled working class wearing. ‘The people are nice and the troops of children are lovely, but there’s no conversation,’ he was to complain. Macmillan eventually fired him in 1952 for being ‘too old’, earning Beveridge’s opinion that he was ‘a pompous ass’ with ‘no manners’.34
Although the New Towns were mostly built on greenfield sites, in those that had village centres Silkin found himself pilloried by Home Counties residents with no more desire than the people of Hampshire in the 1980s and 1990s to allow even the skilled working-class decanted from the great city on to their patch. At Stevenage, Silkin was greeted with howls of ‘Gestapo’ and ‘Dictator’ and had sand put into the petrol tank of his car. Protesters later changed the signs at the railway station to ‘Silkingrad’.35
The New Towns were to be one of the greater successes of post-war planning, but by the time Labour left office in 1951 most were still largely building sites, in part because just as the housing situation started to improve Labour faced its darkest hour. For the catastrophic winter of 1947 was followed by the convertibility crisis which shook the triumphant Labour Government to its core. As a condition of the $3.5 billion post-war loan, the United States had insisted that sterling held around the world should become convertible to dollars. That day was due on 15 July 1947. The big freeze had already crippled exports, the balance of payments deficit was soaring, and as convertibility bit millions of dollars from the loan drained away as investors swapped their pounds for dollars, rushing the country towards bankruptcy. In one month $700 million went, until in August the Americans agreed to convertibility being suspended – as it turned out, for eleven years.36 The final £25 million of the loan was drawn down in March 1948. Only the simultaneous promise of help from the Marshall Aid plan, conceived in the early summer of 1947 by the former United States general and finally agreed in April 1948, bailed Britain out, in part by funding European economic revival and thus stimulating a better market for British exports. The price of the crisis at home was spending cuts, implemented first by Dalton and then by the austere Stafford Cripps.
Bevan had to agree to plans that were calculated to slash housing completions in 1949 to 140,000.37 The lead-time in reducing capital spending meant that 1948 still saw 227,000 permanent houses completed – almost 90,000 up on the previous year – and the easing of economic conditions that year in fact led to 197,000 completions in 1949, not the cut to 140,000 originally planned. But under Labour the figures were not again to climb above 200,000, sticking at 198,000 and 194,000 in 1950 and 1951.38 Housing was forced to take its place in the economic priorities, something Bevan found himself cornered into accepting in part because he did such a brilliant job of defending the burgeoning NHS budget. Sir John Wrigley gloomily told Bevan in 1947: ‘If we build more than 200,000 houses, I’ll be sacked by the Chancellor, and if I build less I will be sacked by you.’39
Although the criticism of Bevan’s record on housing became less ferocious with the big rise in completions in 1948, Labour remained on the defensive. Even at the Labour Party conference, of which he was a darling, Bevan faced criticism. In 1949, in Blackpool, he argued that despite the huge waiting lists, swollen by demographic pressures, he had not only made good all the wartime destruction but had, by then, provided Britain with more houses per head of population than ever before. There remained, he pleaded defensively, great timber shortages. Had the timber been there ‘what would you take the building workers from to build more houses – schools … hospitals … mental homes … nurses’ hostels … the factory programme?’ Yet again, he rehearsed his refusal to cut the standard or size of homes. ‘We will not build houses today which in a few years’ time will be slums.’40
Traditionally, housing has been branded the welfare state failure of Bevan and the 1945 Labour Government, chiefly on the grounds that too few houses were built. Certainly disillusion with the housing shortage contributed to Labour’s defeat. Between them, however, Bevan and Dalton provided more than a million good quality homes between 1945 and 1951, homes that were to be popular when the tenants gained the right to buy them in the 1980s. They also set the pattern of local authority building for rent that was to be followed for a generation by both Tories and Labour until, at its peak in 1979, a third of the stock was council housing. Given the way that preference for public over private turned out, it may be that rather than numbers which is the more questionable part of the record. Bevan and Dalton, however, cannot be blamed for the quality and style of housing that their successors adopted.
By the time Labour left office in 1951 it had succeeded in presiding over a massive expansion of secondary schooling which in practice confirmed the distinctions in an already divided educational system.
Roy Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years, 1988, p. 53
[In the late 1940s] The award of a grammar school place at the age of eleven was equivalent to more than doubling the resources devoted to that child if it had gone to a modern school.
John Vaizey, The Costs of Education, 1958, p. 102
I wondered why I felt deep down angry having read the draft. Then I realised that Mr Squeers had given me a quizzical look across the years.
Ellen Wilkinson, on reading the proposed secondary modern school curriculum, 1946 in Vernon, Ellen Wilkinson, 1982, p. 222
There was a terrible shortage of teachers. The first ten years was all hands on deck to get schools built and more teachers in them.
Sir Toby Weaver, Deputy Secretary, Department of Education and Science, 1946–73
In its final form, as it emerged in 1948, the NHS represented the victory of the values of rationality, efficiency and equity … But there are other values … a view which stressed responsiveness rather than efficiency, differentiation rather than uniformity, self-government rather than national equity.
Rudolf Klein, The Politics of the NHS, 1983, p. 28
BEFORE BEVAN’s health and housing programmes took off, before Griffiths’s social security Acts, but with the reality of full employment, it fell to Ellen Wilkinson, the fiery flame-haired heroine of Jarrow, ‘five foot of dynamite’ (she was actually 4ft 10in) and ‘the pocket pasionaria’,1 to start implementing Butler’s Education Act.
By the time Labour took power in July there had been