← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
Churchill vs Attlee: The Election That Changed Britain
00:44:15
How one of the most dramatic political upsets in British history shape the foundations of Britain’s modern welfare state?
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- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
Dan Snow
Hi folks, Dan here. I have some very very exciting news for you. To celebrate our 10th anniversary with you, we are doing a live show of Dan Snow's history. Hit the first for a very, very long time. So please join me on Friday 12th September in London town by popular demand, I'll be retelling the story of the legend, Thomas Cochrane, the goat, greatest of all time, the man who inspired the movie Master and Commander. And looking back over 10 years of making this podcast, prime ministers, Oscar winners, World War II veterans, Holocaust survivors and some of the greatest historians in the world. It's a time for me to hang out with you guys and answer any burning questions you may have. So don't miss it. It's going to be an epic party and there is no one I'd rather spend it with. All of you dedicated listeners, you can get tickets at the link in the show notes, but hurry because they are selling fast. See you then. Welcome everyone. Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. On 8 May 1945, Winston Churchill stood on a balcony in Whitehall and addressed a street crowded with people. He told them, he told Britain and the world that the war in Europe was over. This is your victory. He bellowed. And the crowd roared back, no, it's yours. And the crowd had a point. Well, they both did. Winston Churchill had certainly steered Britain to victory in the dark days of 1940. His speeches had electrified. They had rallied the country, the empire and the world. He had given people the vocabulary, so the mental map. He'd given people an understanding of just why they were fighting fascism, what that fascism was and why it was so evil. And he had also promised them victory if they stayed the course, if they put their trust in him. And now he'd kept that promise. He had delivered that victory. So in May 1945, he was hailed as a national, as an international hero. He was by far the most popular politician in the United Kingdom, his approval rating comfortably in the high 70s. The war with Japan was still raging there was more work to do. The British Empire had millions of men under arms, thousands of ships and aircraft. He was one of the most powerful warlords in the history of the world. And yet at that moment, the Labour Party surprised Churchill. The Labour Party, who had been Churchill's coalition partners from 1940 onwards, they stepped away from the coalition government. They demanded a general election. Churchill reluctantly agreed, but assumed he would win. The Conservative Party could not believe that their hero could lose. But in July 1945, 80 years ago, just 10 weeks later, after more than 62 months in office, Winston Churchill was decisively rejected by the electorate. The Labour Party, under the unassuming, uncharismatic steady Clement Attlee, won a massive 393seats in the House of Commons compared to the conservatives 197. As ever, our British electoral system, it does have the habit of amplifying, making these results a bit more one sided. Labour won twice as many seats, the Conservatives with much less than double the vote. But even if you go into the raw voting figures, the percentages, it was still a big victory for Labour. Labour got around 50% of the vote. The conservatives were on 36. So it was a crushing victory and it gave Clement Attlee a massive majority in the House of Commons, one with which he and the Labour Party did a huge amount. They implemented much of the so called Beverage Report which had been a of government investigation, a government report from 1942 within which there were all sorts of recommendations about setting up a welfare state, ideas around health care and education and training and government benefits. As a result of this government, Britain ended up with an nhs, a national health service, free at the point of delivery, which even today is an outlier in terms of its radicalism, in terms of how the state provides health care for its citizens. It was a general election result with long term consequences and very short term consequences as well. The British system is brutal. The day of the election result, the winning party leader dashes up to the Buckingham palace, he finds the sovereign, kisses the royal hand and he is now Prime Minister. There is no handover. The former occupant of Downing street packs his bags and leaves in great haste. It's amazing to think that the Potsdam Conference, the sort of post war in Europe conference in defeated and occupied Germany was going on at the time. The great powers were thrashing out the state of the post war world. Churchill left one day and then a couple of days later, I mean almost hours later, the new Labour Prime Minister Attlee arrived to the absolute consternation of US President Truman, and particularly Stalin, for whom this process crystallised the madness of allowing voters to have anything to do with picking leaders. The election shocked not just Stalin and Truman, it shocked the world. It changed Britain, although, as we'll hear in the podcast, perhaps it just cemented in the changes that had been made during the Second World War. And in this podcast, we're going to ask the question, why it happened? Why did Churchill and the Conservatives lose? And just while we're here, I must say one of my favourite bits of trivia about British political history. Winston Churchill fought three elections as leader of the Conservative Party, and in none of those elections did Churchill, the great hero of the modern Conservative movement, In none of those elections did Churchill get more votes than the Labour Party. Remarkable. Joining me on the podcast now is a great friend, David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University. He has his own wonderful podcast, Past, Present, Future, which I went on the other day talking about decisive battles. He is host of Post war. It's a 20 part series exploring the seismic 1945 general election and the creation of modern Britain on radio. You can go onto the BBC Sounds app and binge that series. I highly recommend it. And he comes on the podcast now. Talk about that election 80 years ago. What happened and why did it happen? Enjoy.
- [07:21]
David Runciman
T minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
- [07:24]
Dan Snow
God save the King.
- [07:26]
David Runciman
No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
- [07:40]
Dan Snow
David, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
- [07:42]
David Runciman
It's my pleasure.
- [07:43]
Dan Snow
Give me a snapshot. The war has ended. Britain was fundamentally bankrupt. Give me a sense of the challenges that any new government would face.
- [07:53]
David Runciman
Well, first of all, the war hadn't ended. I mean, I don't nitpick here, but one of the features of the 45 election is that it took place in the middle of a war, because VE Day had happened, but VEJ Day was still a couple of months away and many, many, many potential voters were still overseas under arms, engaged in war. So that was the first thing. And in the election, the question of who would end the war quickest was a real one. Who would bring the troops home quickest. So there was those practical questions. But as you say, the country was broke, massively in debt to the Americans. Everybody knew that Lend Lease, which had funded the war, wouldn't continue. When the war was over, though people, I think, hoped it might drag on a bit longer than it did. Britain was an exhausted nation, but unlike the rest of continental Europe. It hadn't been occupied. There wasn't bloodletting to be done with collaborators. We do also have to remember this was an island nation that was still intact. And it just is astonishing that the war not finished. It was thought the thing to do was to go to the polls. We should remember in America they have elections in wartime. They had an election in the Civil War, they had an election in the First World War and the Second World War, we didn't. In the First World War we didn't have an election. And the fact that the government was put to the people at this point is itself a remarkable testament to democracy.
- [09:20]
Dan Snow
We might come onto that decision by Labour to sort of force that election against the wishes of Churchill. It wasn't Churchill's ideal.
- [09:27]
David Runciman
Yeah, it should be said, Churchill didn't want this election, so it's not his choice.
- [09:32]
Dan Snow
Do you think that election in 1945, do you think the British people felt victorious? Do you think that we perhaps impose, we assume, how they should have been feeling in the summer of 1945? How do you think they felt? They were aware of the shambles that was their post war options, were they?
- [09:50]
David Runciman
So I don't think they were aware of just how broke the country was. I mean, I think politicians probably had seen things and understood things that the public wouldn't be fully aware of. One of the people we speak to in the series is the social historian David Kynaston, who really wants to emphasize, actually, even at this point, how unengaged most people were in questions, big questions of politics. Elections are bread and butter elections, and this was also a bread and butter election. The two central issues were demobilization and housing, how it would be paid for the housing. Secondary question, as it is in every election. In a way, that's why elections are the circus that they are. But to think that this was a point of euphoria would be a mistake. The scenes from V E Day, the crowds chanting, Churchill saying to them, this was your victory. Them saying back to him, no, this was your victory. And everyone assuming that this would feed into the election, this sort of bond between a people and their warrior prime minister who had saved them from slavery. No, I mean, that was VE Day. That wasn't the campaign. The campaign was nothing like that. The campaign was. Was overshadowed by memories of before the war, crucially the 1930s, and also crucially, the disappointed hopes in 1918. So a sense, so a preemptive sense of betrayal was there. The idea that we've seen this movie once before in 1918. There was an election in December 1918 and homes for Heroes and Landfit for.
- [11:28]
Dan Snow
Heroes and all that stuff.
- [11:30]
David Runciman
Democracy would triumph. This was the war to end war, all of that. And it was followed in fact by none of that, by boom and bust profiteering, ordinary people getting screwed, as they always do. The memory was there then through to the 30s, the Depression. Churchill was associated with that. So I wouldn't say it was a particularly forward looking moment. It was both backward and forward looking insofar as it was forward looking. It was, we're not going to do that again. But I don't think people understood the extent of the potential imminence of bankruptcy. They weren't alive to Keynes and his arguments and all of that, but they knew what they'd been through. And what they'd been through was completely draining. It was draining more than it was energizing by this point. So this was a tired country going to the polls.
- [12:22]
Dan Snow
What's going on in the 1940s? Why the long, really deep political memory of what's gone on in the 1930s, the 1920s. How do you explain that on the part of the voters?
- [12:34]
David Runciman
Yeah, it's a really good question. I think one of the things to remember about the 1945 election is it wasn't a kind of turn and turn about election. It wasn't these parties alternate. Labour had never won a majority ever in the history of the party. This was the first time Labour had been in government under Ramsay MacDonald. But it was itself a shambles. In the end it collapsed into a government in which MacDonald was there, propped up by the Conservative Party. The Labour Party was rife with stories of betrayal. But the idea that you could have a majority Labour Party in Parliament governing in its own name, not a minority government, not a coalition government, had never been tried before. So insofar as people were voting for this thing, they weren't thinking, this is politics as usual. That lot have had a go, let's let the other lot have a go. The other lot were untried, but the other lot had been in government. That's the other thing that's so crucial for understanding the 1945 election. Britain had been governed during the war by a government led by Churchill, with Attlee as his deputy, with people like Ernest Bevan playing an absolutely leading role. And the other thing that made the 1945 election different was that the Tories tried to run the pre war playbook which was these are dangerous socialists. I mean, we're not a socialist country, we don't do this, they're probably in the pay or the grip of the Soviets. That worked in the 20s and 30s, the Zinoviev letter, all of that stuff where labor were tarred with the idea that they were at the edge of a European movement which was going to sweep away private property. That argument did not work in 1945 because Attlee had fought the war alongside Churchill. Attlee was, as I almost want to say, more patriotic a figure than Winston Churchill. Churchill was flaky in all sorts of ways. Attlee was absolutely straight up and down a British patriot. Ernest Bevin was straight up and down a British patriot. So you couldn't say these people were unpatriotic. And then the other thing that conservatives couldn't say is, well, we don't do socialism in this country, because they had just done it. They had presided during the war over a wartime economy which was centralized, controlled, regulated prices, employment, labor, all of it under state control. So there was something about 1945 which is a break in that back and forth story. This lot, that lot. There was a sense, I think, that people had, that the war itself was the break in British political history. Something had had to be done in war that showed the ground had shifted. The ground of what seemed possible had shifted because war had forced the shift to a massively indebted high tax, centralized social control, but also social welfare state. And then the question was, do you want more of that or do you want to go back? Not this lot, that lot. It was almost a historical question. We've lived through this. So here are your choices. There's an open future in front of us. Your choices, in a way are go back to what you remember of the 30s and the 20s, or this weird experiment that we've done in wartime. What if we continued it in peacetime? And Attlee was the perfect person to offer that prospect of continuity, because he was no one's idea of a revolutionary.
- [15:49]
Dan Snow
Yes, that's right. We should say he went to private school, he smoked pipe, he'd fought in the First World War. He was a sort of a gentle British patriot.
- [15:56]
David Runciman
And he'd fought at Gallipoli. I mean, I think one of the most extraordinary things about the Attlee Churchill relationship is Attlee was on the beaches at Gallipoli. He was on some accounts, one of the very last officers to be evacuated. So he witnessed the bloodbath. He was invalided from that campaign and sent back, or rather went back voluntarily. Churchill was responsible for the fiasco of Gallipoli. So you'd think, well, this is going to be a problem when these two men are running the Second World War from Britain together. Attlee never blamed Churchill. He thought it was bad generalship. He thought Churchill's plan was a good one at Gallipoli, and he thought Churchill was a visionary. He was someone who could see things that other politicians couldn't and was often let down by poor generalship. And they bonded over Gallipoli. You'd think Gallipoli would be the thing that sort of put a spanner in their relationship. They bonded over the fact that Attlee was there, Churchill presided, and they both had the same view, which is that Churchill had been unfairly blamed for the disaster. I mean, that in itself, that little detail actually explains a lot about how Britain won the Second World War. These two men were able to work together because their shared memory of the First War was actually unlike most other people's, which is that Churchill had been a maligned scapegoat and Attlee and Churchill were going to prove them wrong second time round.
- [17:23]
Dan Snow
And they did work together, hand in glove, during the war. And quick, another lovely detail from your series. I learned what was the higher rate of income tax in 1945 under Winston Churchill, the man who modern conservatives all celebrate the higher rate of income tax in just before that election was what, 98%?
- [17:38]
David Runciman
Yeah, I think during the war it peaked at 99%.
- [17:41]
Dan Snow
99%.
- [17:42]
David Runciman
And then there was, in 1945, a hundred percent tax on what were called excess profits. I mean, that sounds more like Moscow than London.
- [17:51]
Dan Snow
And that's done under Winston Churchill's ministry, under his leadership, so that countries become normalized. They may have even got to like what they were experiencing on the domestic front during the war. Tell me about the campaign. So Attlee says, Churchill, I'm sorry, we're not going to wait for Japan to be defeated. I'm withdrawing the Labour Party from the coalition. By Attlee withdrawing from the coalition. There had to be an election. Did there?
- [18:10]
David Runciman
So my understanding is what happened is the Labour Party made it clear to Attlee they didn't want to continue. And Attlee had, during the war, had to keep the Labour Party under control because there were many people in it, probably symbolized by Harold Lasky, the chairman of the party, who were constantly sniping at Attlee. Far from saying, oh, isn't it amazing? You've persuaded Winston Churchill to become a socialist, they said, you've allowed Churchill.
- [18:36]
Dan Snow
You're in bed with Winston Churchill. The Arch.
- [18:38]
David Runciman
Yeah, You've really allowed what we stand for to be diluted by this alliance. We need to carve clear red water out between us and them. Pretty much from the publication of the Beveridge Report on Labour, people in Parliament and outside were saying we need to force the issue here and make it clear that we are 100% for this new social welfare state. And Churchill is clearly half hearted about it. So that pressure was the pressure that forced the election and Churchill resigned. An election was called, but then he formed, temporarily, a caretaker government, which he also called a national government, because it wasn't just Conservatives. It had some independents in it and it had some independent Liberals. The Liberal Party was split at this point, didn't have any Labour members in it, but it still had to govern and it still had to govern a country at war and take lots and lots of really important decisions, particularly about international affairs. During this period between the collapse of the wartime coalition government and the election when Churchill actually had a freer hand because he didn't have Attlee and Bevin and others next to him, he could sort of do what he wanted. Caretaker governments often can. He was so furious about what Stalin was doing in Poland that he wanted to extend the war by turning everyone around and making them.
- [19:55]
Dan Snow
Operation Unthinkable.
- [19:56]
David Runciman
Operation Unthinkable and making British and American and captured German troops fight the Soviets. It didn't go anywhere. But Churchill was Prime Minister and he was coming up with these schemes.
- [20:08]
Dan Snow
I've seen some of the documents in the National Archives. The planners simply wrote, we think this is unthinkable. So it's not only called Operation Unthinkable, the conclusion was, it is pretty much unthinkable.
- [20:16]
David Runciman
But I think it's interesting that as soon as Atlee and other Labour people were gone, Churchill started to think the unthinkable that wouldn't have even reached the National Archives if Attlee and Bevan had been there.
- [20:27]
Dan Snow
And I suppose that is a nice window into. I mean, that's so brilliantly Churchillian. The man's meant to be fighting a domestic election campaign and he's already got grandiose dreams about marching across Eurasia. I mean, if you ever want to go. Not that the public knew this, but same old Churchill. I mean, that's Churchill of the 1920s when he's trying to take Moscow with the White Russians. So is there a sense there that he is not engaging with the cut and thrust domestic politics in a way that Labour will. Were Labour running a better campaign at this point?
- [20:56]
David Runciman
So the mistake that the Conservatives made was that they thought, well, we have one asset that's going to win us this campaign, which is we are led by the most popular politician in the country, which he was by far. Attlee wasn't. Attlee was not particularly well known and there had been polling during the war when people were basically asked if Churchill fell under bus, who should be Prime Minister. And people would say, well, Anthony Eden or Stafford Cripps or Ernest Bevan. But almost no one said, the deputy Prime Minister, not that mousy man who looks like my bank manager. So the Tories assumed, we've got this in the bag because we've got Churchill. So they focused their campaign around Churchill. Labour ran a better campaign, partly because they didn't focus it around Attlee. They knew that putting Attlee up against Churchill in a kind of presidential campaign wouldn't work. This was a radio campaign. The Conservatives used Churchill as often as they could. Labour put a whole range of people on the air, so Attlee gave some election broadcasts. They had women, Ellen Wilkinson, people like Stafford Cripps, Ernest Bevan, Herbert Morrison and others. Serious people, senior people. And they sounded like a team. They sounded less like a personality cult. The Conservatives sounded a bit like a personality cult. They misjudged it. And they misjudged it because they thought, you might think understandably, that the hero of the hour, the savior of the nation, would be the person that people would vote for. But in the long history of elections, there's quite a lot of evidence that when it comes to the choice of who you want to be Prime Minister going forward, triumphs in foreign affairs don't count for that much. People are interested in domestic matters and there is a lot of evidence when people were polled, that housing was one issue. They trusted Labour more on housing. Labour had been effectively in charge of domestic policy during the war. Not entirely, but mainly. But secondly, this question of demobilization. The British people didn't know about Operation Unthinkable. It was all top secret. They didn't know that Churchill wanted to extend the war and take it to the Soviets, but they just knew in their gut that he was a man who, with an army at his disposal, was probably reluctant to bring them home, and Labour would bring them home as soon as possible. And that was probably the single most important question for most voters. It wasn't really articulated in the campaign, but it was an instinctive feeling that people had that Churchill was a wartime leader and we want the war to be done.
- [23:38]
Dan Snow
You listen to Dan Snows history, we're talking about the seismic election of 1945. More coming up.
- [23:50]
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- [24:22]
Anthony Delaney
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- [24:48]
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- [25:32]
Dan Snow
The issues. You've already said so. Demobilisation. Hugely important. Affordable housing. Half a million homes destroyed during the war, we think, give or take, everyone would have known. People living on military bases and renting and squatting and doing all sorts of other things. Was that the kind of issue that was being discussed in these radio broadcasts?
- [25:49]
David Runciman
Yes. And Labour in particular focused on the extent to which they were going to extend the kinds of wartime provisions that people not had got used to, but had come to understand, there was the possibility of greater state security. Essentially there are two things going on here. People had lived through a war where the state had got much more involved in providing for them. We have an episode in the series about health care which tells the story through the story of dentures. The state had started making people their false teeth. Now, if you remember the 1930s where that dentistry was beyond the means of the vast majority of the population who pulled out their own teeth. And then if they were lucky, bought themselves a full set. Suddenly to have the state giving you free dentures, who wouldn't want that to continue? Those kinds of provisions were clearly in issue here and there was a feeling that Churchill wasn't as committed. But the other thing that's been going on is that the state's been much more intrusive in people's lives. It's become much more of a surveillance state. It was a censorship state. He was both a liberal and a Conservative and his instincts told him that what the British people wanted was their personal freedom back, their private freedoms. And there's a lot of evidence, for instance in relation to housing that when people ask what do you want from housing? They said privacy. In war there had been a real deficit of privacy. People had been forced to live together, homes destroyed, families forced to live together, young couples forced to live together with their in laws. Being in the army was a destruction of privacy. We all know that in some ways Churchill was right, but he way overdid it, particularly in his famous disastrous first election address, the Gestapo address, where he said if you go for this social control that you think is going to give you the kind of benefits that you've had in a wartime economy, you will get a Gestapo because you can only have that kind of politics with a secret police. So he thought he was speaking to people's instinctive fear of more government interference and control. And again, the mistake was to think that this would stick to someone like Attlee. The idea people looked at the Labour Party in 1945 and saw Clement Attlee as a would be Nazi was laughable, but it was a good example of when Churchill was confronted with. So one of the historians we talked to in the series, Robert Saunders, says the thing you have to remember about Churchill is that he never knowingly avoided making the stakes cosmic. Give him any issue and he will make it a fight for civilization. That was very useful in 1940. It was disastrous election strategy in 1945.
- [28:37]
Dan Snow
Let's talk about the Gestapo speech. I know that you are a little bit iconoclastic about this, you're a bit heretical. You don't think that's changed the tone and the tide of the campaign. But, but briefly, let me just set it out for people listening. Churchill makes this first broadcast, he says that Labour will have to introduce some Gestapo. The take from historians and commodities have been this showed how completely outside the mainstream he was and people sort of woke up. It reminded people this was an anti communist, die hard, aristocratic Edwardian gent in A world that he'd now become quite unsuited to. Is there some truth to that? Did people talk about that Gestapo broadcast at the time as a turning point?
- [29:16]
David Runciman
Not, I think, as a turning point. I mean, one of the interesting things about it is that Churchill wasn't outside the mainstream of the thinking in his party. And we discuss the ways in which the speech was influenced by Friedrich Hayek and the Road to Serfdom, which was a book that had been circulating in conservative circles, making the argument that if you extend a wartime economy into peacetime, you will get with it, basically wartime threats to personal freedom. And Hayek's argument was pretty widely accepted. And there's a question about whether Churchill had read the book himself or not. But he would have been aware that these thoughts were circulating within his own party. So I think he thought he was articulating a point of view which was actually quite up to date. Hayek's book had been published in 1944. It was the latest thinking of a continental political scientist. I don't think he thought, harking back to a kind of Edwardian aristocratic politics. This was the cutting edge lesson of war, which was in America, in Germany, in the Soviet Union, in Britain, a war had required a total state. Hayek's argument was, if you offer people in peace, do you want to continue this? They'll say yes, because they'll associate it with Social Security. You have to remind them of what it meant in Nazi Germany, what it means in Soviet Russia, that kind of economy. Hayek thought, in the end, slippery slope to state control of your personal lives. Churchill thought that argument was, like I say, cutting edge. I don't think it changed the course of the campaign, not least because if you knew where to look, it was already clear where the campaign was going. One of the things it did do, and this is probably not discussed enough by historians, is it wasn't so much Churchill's broadcast, it was Attlee's response. Attlee's response was masterly because he mocked Churchill, he put Churchill in his place. Attlee came across as the grown up in this conversation by more or less saying in that famous line that Ronald Reagan used in the debate, there he goes again. Look at the old man. We all revere the old man, but look at the old man. There he goes again. And Attlee used it brilliantly then. And he used it again brilliantly when he was Prime Minister at the end of 45, I think it was, or early 46. Churchill, now leader of the Opposition, Phoning it in most of the time, but occasionally rolling up in the House of Commons to excoriate the government for being this, that and the other. And in this he called effectively a sort of vote of censure in the government, claiming that the Labour government, the new Labour government, were introducing partisanship into politics, their sort of partisan ideological politics, when what the country just needed was good, solid leadership. And Attlee just said, we all remember who introduced partisan ideological politics into the election campaign. It was you, mate. We all remember your broadcast. So in a way, it had more effect after the election than during the election. And it was remembered after the election by labor and Conservative people. Churchill had made this mistake and it gave the other side a stick to beat him with. And they used it. They used it well after the campaign was over.
- [32:25]
Dan Snow
I always struggle with the 45 election. David, help me. I mean, after studying it, do you think it is these individual issues, it's houses and bread and butter and a willingness to turn away from the conduct of this global war and focus on themselves and their kids. There's lots of children appearing on election leaflets and things. And to what extent are these big strategic political ideas in play? This is the British people turning their back on aristocratic, sort of late 19th, early 20th century stately home government. Is it a rejection of Churchill, everything he stands for, everything he represents as an entire political model? Do you think that's going on in people's minds, or is it a blend of the two? Where should we come down on the meaning of this vote in 45?
- [33:10]
David Runciman
I think when you get a landslide, it's almost always going to be a blend of the two. It's quite hard to get that sort of turning of the tide in electoral politics, just on bread and butter issues. But they have to coincide with the higher issues. They can't be at odds with the higher issues. You go into a campaign preaching the virtues of internationalism, social justice and the rest, and if it doesn't strike people in their everyday lives, you're not going to win. But if it does strike people in their everyday lives, you might win a landslide. One of the really interesting things about the 45 election is people trying to explain it afterwards in the immediate aftermath. And there are a lot of Tories who thought that there was a conspiracy at work. And the conspiracy was. It was thought to be a soldiers election. Soldiers election. Khaki elections are meant to favor the Conservatives, people in uniform, king and country. Don't we vote Tory under those conditions? There they all were, voting Labour and a Lot of conservative politicians thought it was because during the war these soldiers had been educated, that there was a conspiracy at work because there was this big education program that was run through the war trying to get soldiers, many of whom hadn't had that much education. This is before the 44 education act. So a lot of people fighting for their country had only had a limited education. So they would be educated in the army and they were given courses on empire and the economy and things like that. And conservative politicians thought this was all lefty stuff. It wasn't particularly, if you look into it, it was actually, as often with British things, pretty even handed. But there was a view that what had happened was that the war had broadened people's horizons. No question. People had traveled, people had met people from other classes both ways. A lot of soldiers had become very interested in questions of how the country should be run. This is what happens in a war. And you have an election at the end of the war and it's an opportunity for people to express that. There were a lot of soldiers, between 3 and 5 million still under arms at this point, all of whom had a vote. And the soldiers vote not universally, but overwhelmingly went labor. A lot of labor people. An experience that the young Tony Benn had when he was told to sort of give a lecture as a young man to people on his ship, tell them about the virtues of labor, and they ended up telling him about the virtues of labor because they'd gone far, much further left than he had at this point. So it was that mix. The thing about an election that happens right at the end of the war is people's experiences have been such that they could simultaneously hanker to get their old lives back, which they did. We want the men back home. We want an end of rationing. It wasn't going to happen for a long time, but that sort of thought and at the same time have been completely changed by the experience and have their horizons broadened. Any human being can simultaneously have had their horizons broadened and want their old life back. And I think in that mood, labor were very well suited to hit the mark.
- [36:13]
Dan Snow
If you listen to dance notes. History at Morgan on 1945 election coming up.
- [36:26]
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- [37:34]
Dan Snow
Let's talk about the election itself. It's not like the elections today. It was over days, wasn't it?
- [37:41]
David Runciman
So the voting and the counting, I mean, it was like elections had been to that point back in the 19th century. The harvest was the reason why this lot couldn't vote at the same time.
- [37:49]
Dan Snow
As this lot and business owners were allowed to vote in various constituencies and all that sort of thing.
- [37:53]
David Runciman
Yeah, it was nothing like sort of there's a day, then you turn on the telly or the wireless and you get the result. And among other things, the vote itself was to happen on, I think it's July 5th, but then it was going to take three weeks to count. And one of the remarkable things is it wasn't that they were going to spend three weeks counting, it was they were going to wait three weeks for all of the votes to come in from all over the world. Where people had been voting in the Far east and elsewhere on ships, these votes all had to be gathered, but they didn't count in the interim. Everything was kept under lock and key under strict secrecy. If they'd started counting. It's actually quite interesting how different history might have been if they'd started counting. It would have been absolutely clear to Churchill by the time he went to Potsdam that he was out and Attlee was in. They probably could have opened three ballot boxes and noticed Labour were doing far better than people expected. But there wasn't a whiff of it. There wasn't a whiff of it until Churchill came back from Potsdam for the result. All accounting was done in one day and overnight. And then the results were announced the next day in the morning. And from the very first results, people thought, uh, oh, or hooray.
- [39:03]
Dan Snow
And it came out of a clear blue sky for Churchill. Are you convinced?
- [39:06]
David Runciman
Ish, his wife Clementine, at various election rallies said to him, they're really not feeling it, Winston. She noticed, I think you have to have someone standing alongside you, looking at the crowd. They respect you, they admire you, some of them revere you. Doesn't mean they want you to be their next prime minister. But the view is that he was pretty confident. Most people are confident. Attlee didn't, as far as we know, didn't believe he was going to win. He thought he would. If Churchill won, it would be with a small majority, but the idea he was going to with a landslide was way beyond the bounds of possibility. They went to Potsdam together. They came back from Potsdam together, almost. My favorite story is Churchill went with his daughter Mary as his private secretary to the Potsdam conference, and she left all her clothes there because there was no point bringing them back because we're just coming back the next day, and they had to be shipped back because the people who came back were Attlee and the rest, and Churchill was done. But it's not just with hindsight. The signs were there, not least in the polling. So one of the things that's really interesting about this election is that there was opinion polling, and at that point, it was terrible by the standards of objective polling. What newspapers tended to do was ask their readers how they were going to vote. Well, that's not going to tell you anything, because it'll just tell you what the people who like your newspaper think. And most newspapers were conservative, and so their readers said they would vote Conservative. But there was this new professional American organization called Gallup. And one newspaper, now defunct, called the News Chronicle, hired Gallup to do its polling for it. And Gallup polled once a month from 43 to 45. So after the publication of the Beverage Report, they started just at the time that the Beveridge Report was becoming a political issue, because Labour people were agitating for what they called beverage. Now, let's not wait for the end of the war, let's get on with it. And Churchill and the Tories were like, no, no, no, no, we can't do it now. And also, there may not be enough money for this. Gallup polled people, and every month, without fail, for 24 months until the election, Labour were between 8 and maybe 18 points ahead. And everyone went, well, that's obviously wrong. What do these Americans know? What does the News Chronicle know? That's not how you do polling. You ask your readers what they think and so prove that if you do polling, right? And so the idea that this was a campaign that changed people's minds, or there was a sudden shift against Churchill, or the war ended and people thought, now we know what we've got to do. We've got to work out what we think in the middle of the war. And maybe earlier people had decided, when the war ends, we want more of this kind of politics and economy that we are starting to see is possible in this country. The education, the healthcare, the provision, full employment which existed during the war, the high taxation and the election was their opportunity to express that view. The campaign didn't create it.
- [42:12]
Dan Snow
What does 1945 mean and how does it change the way that we think about the trajectory of British history?
- [42:19]
David Runciman
It's a very difficult question to answer because I think there's more than one thing going on here. Some European observers, seeing that Britain had elected an avowedly socialist party into government with a majority in a parliament, where if you have a majority, effectively we know a majority in the British House of Commons is a kind of dictatorship, thought this was the beginning of a kind of European shift to communism. I mean, the Pope thought this was the first domino to fall in the march of the communist Antichrist. But it was Clement Attlee. It wasn't the march of the communist Antichrist. Clement Attlee hated and mistrusted Stalin in some ways more than Churchill did. Churchill had slightly fallen for Stalin during the war. Attlee never did because he'd spent his life fighting communists. The Labour Party had fought communist infiltration throughout Attlee's professional life. Attlee was a patriot. Attlee knew that he needed American money, so he would have to do some of the things the Americans wanted. When Attlee and Bevan learned about the bomb, they resolved that Britain would have to have its own bomb. Attlee had no intention of presiding over the end of the British Empire. India would get its independence, and Attlee had to preside over that. And he thought it was the most significant thing that happened during his premiership. But he didn't bring British troops home from around the world. So this was socialism that was also clinging onto the British Empire, trying to build a special relationship with the United States there at the founding of NATO, building a bomb. So that part of the story, there's continuity from Churchill through this period. And Churchill comes back and he inherits. It's an international situation that he can live with and a domestic situation that he has to live with. But that domestic situation, the nhs, the nationalization of industry, the nationalization of the bank of England, this is a socialist government. They nationalized the bank of England, which had been a private corporation to this point. These two things happen. Simultaneously. And I think one of the reasons why it gets a bit lost is in the sequence. It's followed by a long period of Tory rule, including for four years under Churchill. So if Churchill never came back, he thought, on election results day, 1945, he was done. He said goodbye to the Cabinet Office with a tear in his eye. He would never return there. He came back. He sat there as Prime Minister for four more years. So it feels like there's continuity, because there is a lot of continuity, but underneath that, the shift, which is the shift that didn't happen in 45, it happened during the war to a new kind of country. We became a different country during the war, a country that would have seemed impossible even to Labour politicians. If you said to Labour politicians in the summer of 1939, in six years we'll have 99% income tax, they would say, you can't do that in Britain. So all of those changes that happened during the war were cemented 45 and beyond, but it didn't include a dismantling of institutions. So Labour built a lot of new institutions, from the NHS to the arts, council council housing, building schools, building enough schools so that everyone under the age of 15 could go to school, girls as well as boys, changing the social fabric of the country by what they created and what they built. They didn't tear things down. They weren't Bolsheviks. Right. They didn't come in and immediately abolish the Church of England, the monarchy, or the monarchy or even the public schools. Attlee, a product of Haileybury. He wasn't going to abolish Haileybury. I think he had a soft spot for Haileybury, which was the school that educated the men who would run the empire. That was its purpose. They didn't abolish the House of Lords, never mind the monarchy, they didn't even reform the House of Lords. So it was still the old country. It was the old country, the country that, during the war, as the old country, had adopted these socialist measures. These socialist measures then were enacted through Parliament and became established and institutionalized, but they coexisted with all of the old institutions. So in British history, it's not like Germany or Japan or the defeated countries, where you have a break point where you become a different country after the war. Germany and Japan became different countries, not just different polities, but different nations with some continuity. But even that had to be sort of discussed in a whisper. It feels like British history is sort of continuous through this period, partly because it is. So one of the things that people say about elections is is it a change election or a continuity election? That's the choice that politicians and voters have to face. So of 1945, I don't think you can answer that question because it was a continuity election. People wanted more of what they'd experienced during the war that the state could do for them. And it was a change election because in getting that they thought we need a completely different party in charge. So I think the way it folds in to British history, the reason we can think nothing too dramatic happened in 45 is that nothing too dramatic did happen at the same time as the fact that the country that had been reinvented in the war was cemented in peace.
- [47:22]
Dan Snow
I love that. What a lovely thought to end on that. Britain didn't abolish any institutions, but just added lots more. David, thank you very much for that wonderful tour de force taking us through one of the most important elections in British history. How can people listen to your fantastic show?
- [47:36]
David Runciman
It's available as a podcast. It's called Post War and get it where you get your podcasts.
- [47:41]
Dan Snow
It's really good. Everyone go and listen to it. Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History It. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure if you want to keep it going, that is to hit follow in your podcast player right now. You'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically. By the power of tech, you can listen anywhere you get your pods, Apple, Spotify, even BBC sounds. Imagine a world. Just imagine. Will you never miss an episode of this podcast? I mean it's there. The technology makes that possible. That could be your reality right now if you hit follow. See you next time.
- [48:26]
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