Winning the Peace
KENT BARKER urges Labour to adopt manifesto policies from the party’s famous 1945 victory
Keir Starmer’s task on 4 July is being widely compared to Tony Blair’s in 1997, but a more apposite parallel might be with Clement Atlee’s battle in July 1945. Then Churchill had been in power for five years, heading first the coalition War Ministry, and for a few months afterwards a caretaker administration.
However bad things are today, there’s no doubt they were far worse almost 80 years ago, following six years of fighting. Food was still rationed, Britain had spent close to £7 billion, or a quarter of its overall wealth, on the war effort. The national debt had risen by nearly £3 billion and there was a desperate need for housing. Yet a Labour leader took his party into a general election with a really radical agenda and won a landslide 145 seat majority . So perhaps Keir Starmer should re-read what his predecessor promised the nation in the 1945 manifesto.
To begin with the document, with a large red V emblazoned on the cover, outlined the scale of the task ahead: ‘The nation needs a tremendous overhaul, a great programme of modernisation and re-equipment of its homes, its factories and machinery, its schools, its social services.’ The 2024 manifesto could import that sentiment wholesale. Atlee’s Labour party recognised that, as today, there simply wasn’t going to be enough money to pay for all their aspirations straight away and so proposed a National Investment Board to determine ‘social priorities and promote better timing in … investment in essential industries and on houses, schools, hospitals and civic centres.’ This would be a useful concept to revive. Rather than policy being subject to immediate political expediency, Labour could allow the Investment Board to determine priorities – and to regulate private investment.
This, though, was but a preamble to radical proposals that were to follow: ‘There are basic industries ripe and over-ripe for public ownership and management in the direct service of the nation. Public ownership of the fuel and power industries … gas and electricity … will lower charges (and) prevent competitive waste.’
Given the price cap that even a Conservative government has been forced to impose on fuel bills, this doesn’t look too radical. Nor, indeed, would the next commitment: ‘Public ownership of iron and steel.’ Yes, re-nationalise Britain’s steel industry. Only last year the Tories handed private steelmaker Tata £500 million in what they said was ‘one of the largest UK Government support packages in history’. Rather than give the money away, let’s invest in our own steel-making capacity. It’s never likely to be profitable, but would save millions on foreign imports.
Housing was at the centre of the 1945 Labour manifesto, proposing the ‘centralising and pooling of building materials and components by the State, together with price control’. But that didn’t then, and wouldn’t today, guarantee enough available land. And thus came the really radical proposal: ‘Labour believes in land nationalisation and will work towards it, but as a first step the State and the local authorities must have wider and speedier powers to acquire land for public purposes wherever the public interest so requires.’
This policy was not just to free up building land, but to regulate agriculture to increase food self-sufficiency in food production. Although it never happened, it’s another policy that could gain traction today.
Finally, a proposal that wasn’t in the post-war manifesto but one that could certainly help Labour win now: a national programme to fill in potholes and resurface our crumbling roads! In 1945 Labour wasn’t afraid of radical proposals and believed state ownership was nothing to be ashamed or scared of. Would that Starmer might grasp that nettle.
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