After Winston Churchill led Britain through World War II, the victory left England not only with the loss of hundreds of thousands of young men, but also the devastation of wide areas of London and elsewhere and destruction to its economic system and financial resources.
Despite that for the last 60 years the British polls have always named Churchill as the greatest Prime Minister of the 20th Century, the British electorate voted him out of office as soon as the war ended. In his place Clement Attlee and the Labour Party took over and turned Britain into a Welfare State.
The Labour Party imposed heavy inheritance taxes to the point that great fortunes had to be liquidated and many noble estates had to be turned over to the National Trust, all because of lack of funds to pay the taxes. Art treasures and rare books had to be sold to libraries both in England and America to raise money for the tax man.
The Labour Party pledged itself to public (government) ownership of essential industries, a continuance of wartime financial controls and rationing, an active housing program and a new system of national insurance and health benefits. It was one of the greatest transfers of wealth and income in the 20th Century.
The result of these extended social benefits along with limited financial credit required the British people as a whole to suffered a life style only marginally better than what they had endured during the war. They just were not being bombed.
They had had enough by 1951 and reelected Winston Churchill to come to their rescue. And even though the Conservatives controlled Parliament for the next 13 years, the damage had been done. The Brits discovered that it is very easy to become socialists, but very difficult to reverse that course.. Even 21 years of Margaret Thatcher and John Majors could do little to remedy the socialist quagmire they got themselves into.
The road to socialism is not a two-way street.
Comments
Outstanding observations, sir.
Mr. Kantenberger,
The actions of the British Labour Party post-WWII stand as some of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century. Out of the violent ashes of the war, they built a society based in great part on the kind of solidarity sorely lacking in 21st century America. If the Labour Party of that period is guilty of anything, it is of not having gone far enough. They might have nationalized and turned over to self-management large sectors of national industry. They might have organized participatory structures of political decision making. They might, in foreign policy, have broken more fully from the Anglo-American alliance.
More books in public libraries? Health care for everyone? A broader welfare state? Kudos to the Labourites of that era. Humanity deserves even more than what they offered.
Billy Wharton
Editor, The Socialist and Socialist WebZine
socialistzine(at)gmail.com
Thank you Mr.Wharton for your comments. With massive re-distribution of wealth and income, you are going to have winners and losers. Your comments speak for themselves; socialism was the big winner, but it was somebody else's money that paid for it.
Was it Thatcher who said "socialism works fine till you run out of other people's money?"
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