Building a New Jerusalem?: Labour in Power 1945-51, Part I

Several of these changes were immense and long lasting. In little more than five years, the Labour Government managed to nationalize nearly one-fifth of the British economy in a largely "peaceful, almost uneventful, fashion," nationalization which survived virtually intact until Margaret Thatcher. [5] Alongside this achievement was the Labour Government's creation and marked expansion of the Welfare State. While some of the reforms--such as the National Insurance Act-- built directly upon wartime and pre-war initiatives, others such as the National Health Service went far beyond the scope of any wartime policies or recommendations in the Beveridge Report. [6]

Yet despite these massive changes, in the aggregate Labour's changes were a "mosaic of reform and conservatism." Education, while reformed in 1944 due to the Churchill War Government's Butler Act, for the most part still remained untouched as an institution in British society, and the class structure changed very little between 1945 and 1951. [7] Nevertheless, Morgan concludes that the Welfare State and nationalization, with all of its perhaps inevitable warts, "offered a basis for future social advance." In the end, the Labour Government offered to the British people "a new concept of citizenship, universal and comprehensive" for the first time and thus effected no less than a revolution in British society. [8]

Footnotes:

[1] Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 494.

[2] Ibid., p. 296.

[3] Ibid., p. 93.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p. 110.

[6] Ibid., pp. 154, 172.

[7] Ibid., pp. 177-8, 184.

[8] Ibid., p. 186.

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