From Free Life, Issue 27, September 1997
ISSN: 0260 5112

What difference did the Second World War make to Britain? Was it a mere touch upon the accelerator, hastening the maturing of otherwise inevitable trends or did it mark a fork in the road? This book ducks the question, worthwhile though some of its essays are. Valid but narrow specialisms (such as youth culture and Anglo-Czech relations) are indulged at the expense of broader themes. The very selection of authors suggests a desire to sidestep real controversy. Peter Hennesy and Eric Hobsbawm hardly box the political compass. Truly "alternative" perspectives such as Corelli Barnett's or John Charmley's are unrepresented and an all-too brief commentary from Enoch Powell alone suggests the stimulating compendium of views that might have been.

The 1930s foreshadowed most major post-war movements. Southern England was giving birth to the consumer society. Conservative-dominated governments nationalised electricity and air transport and continued to build the welfare state. The India Act confirmed that imperial power had passed its zenith. Yet our national situation would have been markedly different had change in Berlin removed the need for war. Trends were accelerated with an intensity that constituted a difference in kind rather than degree; and attitudes mutated radically under the pressure of the struggle.

Britain's global position was fatally undermined by 1939-45. Conflict not only called forth America's latent power - which overshadowed ours with disorienting speed - it diverted great resources from peaceful ends. Over a quarter of the nation's wealth was sold off to pay for the War, including most of our overseas investments. By its end almost a fifth of the working population were either in uniform or employed in supplying those who were. Our foreign debts were immense. Some four hundred thousand Britons, including a disproportionate number of the boldest spirits, had lost their lives. Others were drained of intellectual and moral vitality by what they had given and endured. Such immense losses markedly diminished not only the material but the psychic basis for the nation's freedom of action.

The War greatly hastened the transfer of power in Britain's overseas possessions with serious consequences for national self-esteem. The Empire was indeed in decline before 1939 yet retreat was only envisaged in India and that not speedily. The armies of the Rising Sun overthrew every timetable. Our colonies witnessed the loss of one imperial province after another to a non-white race and, as Nicholas Owen makes clear in his outstanding essay on "War and Britain's political crisis in India", the Raj was obliged to issue post-dated cheques to nationalism which made swift evacuation, and virtual civil war, inevitable. The impact on British Africa was probably even more marked though it took until the early 1950's for Whitehall to accept that the game was up. The ensuing speed of withdrawal cut the metropolis's losses but did no favours for our former subjects.

Many readers of Free Life may be indifferent to national glory and real or alleged international obligations. But the events described above had an elemental impact on domestic attitudes. World war created a fixation with international blocs which our rulers saw as a means of rejoining the game of nations. This led first to a sometimes slavish dependence on the United States and, by the 1990's, to the brink of absorption within a European union. Yet the power to thwart Hitler and speed his destruction came not from empire but within these islands. Britain entered the peace diminished but not intrinsically weak. An obsessive desire to re-join the first division blinded us to the reality of our status as a significant power of the second rank with world-wide connections. Transition to such a perspective would have proved difficult in any event but was rendered impossible by the presumed lessons of the War.

The sense of national inferiority might have been overcome by economic achievements comparable to those of our former enemies. The disappointments which followed also had their roots in wartime experience. The Second World War completed the legitimisation of collectivism, the use of the state to solve the riddles of prosperity as it had met the demands of survival. State intervention and budget deficits were now as British as roast beef and the visions of 1930's intellectuals became the consensus of 1945. Malcolm Smith's essay points out that the War clothed the intrusive state with benevolence, and not only in economic terms. It "had formerly shown little concern, and had even less influence, upon nutritional standards, household amenities, the care of children and the elderly, contraception or personal hygiene. All these matters and many more became subject to intervention or advice during the Second World War....The nation had fused with the state". The contributors show no interest in party politics and miss the clues it offers. In 1935 Labour had barely recovered the votes it had forfeited to the National Government and was still well behind in seats. An election in 1940 would have left it little further up the beach. Labour lacked intellectual confidence and was hemmed in by a consensus that placed a low priority on welfare and a high one on restraining tax and spending. As Paul Addison put it in his ground breaking book The Road to 1945 by the War's end "resistance in Whitehall had been largely overcome, the civil service galvanised into a programme of amelioration on a wider scale than Labour had planned before 1939, [and] the consent of the Conservative Party over much of the field secured in advance".

The Second World War created an unparalleled common field of social experience. Food rationing, evacuation, conscription, bombardment, propaganda and direction of labour threw the classes into closer daily contact, eroding more prejudices than it confirmed. Some material changes proved transient, those in perception more enduring. Upon hearing of the malnutrition of many child evacuees Chamberlain spoke for many of his background. "I never knew such conditions existed and I feel ashamed of having been so ignorant of my neighbours". Similar hopes had been expressed in 1918. This time the working classes were wise enough to recognise that patriotism, though vital, was indeed "not enough". There would be no going back on the promises of wartime. Both world wars, and the Second above all, were transactions between the classes and the workers seized their opportunity to ensure greater security and dignity of life. Their goal was achieved with relative ease because the more prosperous classes had passed through the school of national solidarity.

Profound shifts in a society's mental foundations find no full expression until the coming of age of a generation that has been continuously exposed, and so fully formed, by ideas first accepted in its parents' day. Most of the older generation cannot but remain prisoners of its own formation. The West's culture of restraint, which in Britain had reached its apogee through an emphasis on internal rather than imposed discipline, was destined to be challenged. But the War completed the great sapping begun in 1914. The tide of nihilistic revolt in which we have floundered since the sixties sprang from the generation whose upbringing had resonated with a progressivism sanctified by the war years. A contempt for past and nation, an almost religious trust in the state, a disdain for social disciplines, an obsession with equality - all had been in the womb of time but the speed, violence and thus the sheer impact of their coming was a fruit of the Second World War.

It is a little strange, even for one born long afterwards, to discuss the question "What difference did the War make?" without reference to the implications of refusing Hitler's challenge, let alone his victory. The War had many evil legacies but its greatest bequest was and is an entirely positive one, the free society in which we live. The dictatorships of the 1930's are more than an episode in history, they were a future that might have been but for Britain's will to fight. Where did that will come from? What maintained British men and women in the day when "our shoulders held the sky suspended"? Not the culture of regulation or hedonism, nor the assumptions of welfarism or European integration. Older instincts kept them to their posts through days of grief and fear, the customs of a people shaped by freedom. We still await the historians who will reach down into the embers of Britain's war to rediscover the influences which helped her save a civilisation. We may yet be thankful for the lesson.

Simon Pearce