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")
for scientists, the colleges for technologists. An arcane and very British dispute over whether the awards should be a degree (BTech) or a diploma (Dip. Tech.) held up into the 1950s even the real progress Percy did offer, the universities jealously guarding their right to award degrees while the professional institutions, the mechanicals, electricals and others, fought to protect their position as the awarders of professional qualifications.30 As the Times Educational Supplement was later to put it, the outcome was ‘the universities taking the high road and the technical colleges the low’.31
The case for expanding higher education was strengthened a year later, however, when the Barlow committee on scientific manpower, set up by Labour, recommended a doubling of science graduates. The invention of radar for the Battle of Britain had helped save the country at the beginning of the war. Penicillin had saved lives in the middle and was coming into civilian use. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had produced a cataclysmic conclusion, and the scientists were now promising unlimited cheap power from ‘atoms for peace’. A faith in science had been triggered that was not to peak until after Wilson had turned its promise into the election-winning ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ in 1963. ‘Never before has the importance of science been so widely recognised,’ the Barlow committee stated, ‘or so many hopes of future progress and welfare founded upon the scientist.’32
Intelligence tests that had been used to argue for restrictions in the number of grammar school places were now used to argue for more scientists. Only 1 per cent of the age group went to university, Barlow argued, but 5 per cent were bright enough. Numbers could be doubled and standards raised.33
The committee reported the universities split over expansion – Oxford and Cambridge resisting, the others in favour – and recommended the creation of ‘at least one new university’.34 Given that Morrison had cleverly chosen Sir Alan Barlow, the second secretary to the Treasury, to chair the committee, the normal Treasury defences were breached and the report rapidly accepted. In what John Carswell, slightly tongue in cheek, has called ‘a quiet measure of nationalisation’, the University Grants Committee was enlarged, given a full-time chairman and told by Dalton to become a positive agent for change. Since 1919 the UGC had been an almost independent and ‘highly respectable backwater’ of the Treasury, dishing out small sums to the universities. Now it was told to ‘assist … in such plans for the development of the universities as may from time to time be required to ensure that they are fully adequate to national needs’. Its staff rose rapidly from five to twenty-two, and government’s relationship with the universities began to change fundamentally. Carswell records that from 1946 on, government grant became ‘not only indispensable to the universities, it constituted the greater part of their income’.35 State scholarships for students expanded, and the University College of North Staffordshire opened at Keele in 1950. University student numbers jumped from 52,000 in 1945 to 84,000 in 1951, finally reaching 100,000 in 1958. Much of this expansion, however, proved to be in the universities’ traditional world of the arts, less of it in the sciences which Barlow had been set up to promote, although even Barlow had said expansion in the humanities should not be ‘sacrificed’ to the need for more scientists and technologists.36 By 1950 the proportion on pure science courses had risen from 15 to 20 per cent, but applied science students numbered only 1 in 100.37
Despite the expansion, Labour’s educational achievements in 1945–51 are judged harshly by historians. Kenneth Morgan, in his great assessment of that government, concludes: ‘It is hard to avoid the view that education was an area where the Labour government failed to provide any new ideas or inspiration’, although the new investment, the new impetus at elementary level, and the large increase in the school population did ‘pave the way for the educational boom of the fifties and sixties’.38
Brian Simon, key champion of comprehensives, has been harsher. ‘No serious challenge, indeed, no challenge of any kind, had been launched at the citadels of power in the world of education.’39 By 1951 the numbers still in the old ‘all-age’ elementary schools had been cut from well over a million of the 6.5 million schoolchildren – but only to 800,000. In a few areas of population growth, such as Essex, children were excluded from school for lack of facilities.40 The grammar, direct grant and public schools went on largely untouched. The secondary moderns failed to achieve parity of esteem. And overcrowding in primary schools saw a rapid growth of private, often poorly staffed, preparatory schools for younger pupils in converted houses and mansions.41 Yet most of this apparent failure merely reflected the scale of what was needed to get the baby-boom generation into school and to keep the fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds there. And set against shortages of buildings, teachers, materials and money which dominated the early post-war agenda it seems harsh to complain that Labour failed to launch a comprehensive reorganisation for which there was no consensus even within Labour’s own ranks.
If education had suffered from the two great economic crises Labour faced in 1947 and 1949, each of which brought cuts in planned spending, the 1949 sterling crisis also hit the health service in its first year.
The NHS proved spectacularly more expensive than expected. The original estimate for the first nine months had been £132 million. Actual spending, at £208 million, proved two-thirds higher. The first full year, 1949–50, required another 70 per cent rise to £358 million, although the following year the rate of increase fell to a mere 10 per cent.42 Bevan did a far better job than Tomlinson of defending his corner, but in 1949 even he had to agree with Cripps on legislation which allowed a prescription charge to be included in the amending Act he had promised the doctors. He nevertheless staved off its actual introduction. Morrison could be heard muttering that ‘Nye is getting away with murder’ when other programmes including housing were being cut.43
In February 1950, Labour was returned to power but with its mighty majority slashed to six. The hunt for economy in the NHS resumed, Bevan having to agree to a Cabinet committee to monitor expenditure. Then in June came the Korean War. Over the next six months what became a £4.7 billion three-year rearmament programme was devised. It was to cripple the increasingly successful export drive, slash non-military industrial investment, and again squeeze social spending. In January 1951, Bevan was moved to the Ministry of Labour, resentful at having been passed over both as Chancellor on Cripps’s resignation and as Foreign Secretary when Morrison replaced the ailing Bevin.44
By April, Hugh Gaitskell, the new Chancellor, was adamant that charges for dental treatment (chiefly dentures) and spectacles would be introduced. Bevan had fought and fought against the proposal, and on 21 April he resigned. He damned the rearmament programme as ‘physically unattainable without grave extravagance in its spending’45 (a view which proved right, Churchill’s government rapidly scaling it down).46 When rearmament was costing billions, the charges would raise a mere £13 million, and £30 million in a full year.47 It was, Bevan told the Commons, ‘the arithmetic of bedlam’.48 Harold Wilson and John Freeman went with him, and Labour was plunged into almost a decade of internecine warfare between the Bevanite left and Gaitskellite right that was to play no small part in sustaining the Conservatives in power for thirteen years, and in erecting shibboleths about the definitions of socialism which scarred Labour for many years thereafter.
Within three years of its birth, the completely comprehensive and free health service had ceased to be. Peter Hennessy has summed up the clash: ‘Bevan regarded charging for teeth and spectacles as a betrayal of the fundamental principle of a free NHS. Gaitskell saw it as both common sense and an aid to good housekeeping.’49 That battle was to be fought both within Labour ranks and between Labour and the Conservatives for years to come. In October 1951 the exhausted Labour Government, with Bevin dead, Cripps out of office and dying, Dalton largely a spent force, and Bevan back in his old role of back-bench rebel, went to the polls. The Conservatives were returned with a majority of seventeen. Churchill was again prime minister. A 1s. od. (5p) prescription charge, made possible by Labour’s legislation, was introduced in 1952 with a flat-rate charge for all dental treatment added to Labour’s charge for dentures. The welfare state had completed its founding period.