Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
David Vincent, Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in Twentieth Century Britain, (New York and London: Longman, 1991).
The cheerful assessment found in Kenneth Morgan's study is not agreed upon by the others. One of its chief critics is David Vincent, who sees the Labour Government as a disappointing failure rather than one that "offered a basis for future social advance." [1] When the Government offered so much promise in the way of genuine social reform, in the end little was changed. Income distribution remained almost the same before the war as after and class divisions remained as defined as before. [2] While the Government placed into public ownership nearly one-fifth of the economy, workers in these nationalized industries had no more authority than when the industries were privately owned. [3] In the end, despite all the "improvements" in the average standard of living that the Labour Government implemented, Vincent asserts that the middle and upper classes benefited much more than the working classes. [4]
Yet while Vincent attacks the Attlee Government from a left-wing perspective that measures the aims of the Government against what it actually achieved, right-wing historian Corelli Barnett argues that these achievements, no matter how limited they were, should never have been implemented. In 1945, the Labour Government faced two stark choices: either it could have halted the builing of a "New Jerusalem" and concentrated instead on reviving the war-damaged British economy, or it could have pushed ahead with the construction of this new society with no concern for the costs involved. Impetuously, the Labour Government opted for the latter, implementing an extensive Welfare State that was akin to "declaring a dividend on the Golden Age before it had been earned in fact." [5]
Yet while this was bad, the massive housing programs implemented by Aneurin Bevan [the Minister of Health--and founder of the National Health Service as well....] and others caused even more problems. Whereas the National Health Service and other programs on the new Welfare State only spent "dividends", the housing programs diverted workers and materials from modernization efforts that were essential if the "dividend" were to be earned at all. [6] All in all, the total burden placed upon the British economy by the Labour Government's policies amounted to over 11 percent of 1948-1949 GNP, a burden which severely hampered British industry's efforts to modernize so that Britain could compete with the rest of the world. [7] While the rest of Europe and the world was booming in the 1950s, Britain was growing at a much slower rate, and much of the blame for this, Barnett feels, had to be laid directly at the feet of "romantic fantasizers" of Attlee's Government. [8]
