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Renovating Britain after World War II
In the early 1960’s, my suburban Chicago 5th grade (very progressive!) male teacher was exchanged with a male teacher from suburban London UK, who taught me in the 6th grade. The exchange included their families, with my older brother becoming good friends with the British teacher’s eldest son. I heard many stories about life in England, including men having one good wool suit worn each day to work, unlike my father who had many suits. Their car engine was so small that it seldom went faster than 30 MPH. The British son was amazed while going down a country hill with the engine struggling to get to 45 MPH. At that time in America, most highway traffic was about 65 MPH, and even Germany rebuilt and significantly added to the unlimited speed Autobahn in the 1950’s.
So why was Britain so slow in renovating after the war, compared to the devastation in Germany and Japan? Some say that the 1948 Marshall Plan helped the other countries, but Britain received the most (26%) aid, followed by France (18%) and West Germany (11%). Most British industry was intact, with major destruction centered on housing around London, due to the night aerial bombing and V1 / V2 weapons near the war’s end. Rebuilding housing is not trivial, but simpler than most other infrastructure. But the key reason occurred in July 1945, even before World War II was over.
Winston Churchill, voted the Greatest Briton of all time, decided to hold a general election in 1945. During the war, the major parties (Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal) had a coalition government. Churchill was an enormously popular war leader, but the people wanted change – a “peace dividend.” The Labour party’s slogan was “Socialist and proud of it,” depicting Capitalism as evil. Labour won nearly twice as many seats (393) as the Conservatives (197), selecting Clement Attlee as the new Prime Minister. Labour’s plans included nationalizing major industries (mining, power, transport, iron and steel) along with the Bank of England. King George VI offered Churchill the Order of the Garter, to which he commented “Why should I accept from my sovereign the Order of the Garter when his subjects have just given me the Order of the Boot?
Along with America and Canada having intact post-war manufacturing facilities, Britain was still a major world producer of ships and the leading European producer of coal, steel, cars and textiles. British scientists developed key technologies, including the cavity magnetron for Radar and jet engines, with the famous General Electric J47 developed from the Frank Whittle design. Britain produced the first passenger Jet (Comet) and even Rolls Royce still produces jet engines today. Labour policies started the British “Brain Drain” of the 1950-1960’s, and even today Britain continues to lose 10% of its educated workforce, being replaced by “low skilled migrants”
As previously discussed, post-war housing was a major problem. During the war, the Greater London Pla
n (1944) was a blueprint for reconstruction and relocating Londoners and their jobs to new towns around the capital and other parts of England. Before the war, many lived in housing without running water. Labour prolonged the problem by tearing down slum housing while building urban council flats. The New Towns Act (1946) gave rise to eight towns outside the metropolis. The Town and Country planning Acts (1947, 1968) gave authorities control over land purchase and development in London. Even bombed out areas of London were not developed until after the 1960’s, unlike with Germany and France.
Besides the housing debacle of post-war Britain, the Labour party greatly reduced British living standards by continuing war-time rationing. Before the war, the British were better off than the Continent. Rationing continued into the early 1950s, ending around Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 Coronation. People continued to plant food in small gardens and allotments established during the war. Britain did not starve, but tasty items (sugar, milk/butter, eggs, and meat) were hard to get. Tea and coal were still being rationed in 1950. Even clothing was also rationed, giving Princess Elizabeth trouble with her 1947 Wedding Dress! Rationing became a continuation of the wartime ‘make-do-and-mend’ culture. *
As suggested by Ricochet member @seawriter in a comment, renovation of Britain didn’t occur until 1979 with Margret Thatcher. Even with Lady Thatcher’s reforms, it is less prosperous than Germany and about equal to Japan. The post war British experience with Socialism should be a warning to all who are seduced by its charm.
* The austerity and bureaucracy of the British post-war culture permeates George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nevil Shute novels, and Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil.
Published in Group Writing
It was an issue in the United States, too. There was a faction that wanted to keep all the wartime controls in place.
“I thing you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
– President Reagan Aug. 12, 1986
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under January’s theme: Renovation. There are plenty of dates still available. Have a great home renovation story? Maybe with photos? Have a terrible home renovation story? How about furniture, or an instrument, a plane, a train or an automobile? Are you your renovation project, or someone else’s? Do you have criticism or praise for some public renovation, accomplished or desperately needed? Are you a big fan, or not so much, of home renovation shows? Unleash your inner fan or critic. We have some wonderful photo essays on Ricochet; perhaps you have a story with before and after photos, or reflections on the current state of a long project. The possibilities are endless! Why not start a conversation? Our schedule and sign-up sheet awaits.
The February 2019 Theme Writing: How Do You Make That? Is up. Thanks for the great suggestions. I’ll likely use some of the others in March and April.
Germany has had national health insurance since Bismarck’s time. And national health insurance will be the biggest welfare cost if it is delivered.
Britain had to pay its war debts. Germany didn’t. Britain’s last payment for World War 2 was in 2006.
Britain had large expenses from running an empire. Germany didn’t.
Britain had large expenses from its military commitments to Nato. Germany didn’t.
Britain nationalized its industries and utilities. Germany had nationalized utilities and kept them, but did not nationalize industry. Also, the industries Britain nationalized were losing money before they were nationalized.
Germany did not tax overtime pay.
Britain’s industry was old and dilapidated prior to World War 2.
Yes it was an issue in the US. Politicians wanting to keep in control.
Thanks, Mark. You’re right, I did misinterpret it.
The intellectuals in Britain were driving, but they did have to keep the masses in the car. When an elitist ideology can be marketed using only populist techniques of mass communication, it isn’t hard to do that, and they did it.
That’s my understanding of the political history of the period, anyway. I’m no expert on the subject, really never was a pert to begin with.
I did chuckle at this too. If you read Gold Finger, I believe, James Bond is driving a sports car he gets from the secret service car pool and indulges the reader about how powerful it was because it would do 85 or 90 MPH (don’t quote me) or something that just seems ridiculously slow by American V-8 standards of the time. That was in the early 50’s era. If you read some of the other early Bond books you do get some sense of the conditions of Great Britain and how, eh, backwards it was — or Ian Fleming was.
Oh, yes. I live in a very nice condo development with some very nice apartment complexes across the street. The city made a small portion of the apartments Section 8 — no big deal. Then about 2 years ago they doubled or tripled the Section 8 allotment and it has turned our area into a semi-ghetto: shopping carts everywhere, trash at the bus stops, break-ins in our condos, homeless living in the empty fields, beggars on several street corners, occasional police raids and car loads of teenage boys driving around our gated community while we had an electric gate under repair. Thanks Liberals!
Another issue is that major German cities were close to bombed flat. If 80% of buildings are destroyed, it is easy to build many new big things to replace them.
In a UK city it might be more like 10% of buildings destroyed, 15% damaged beyond repair, 30% damaged and repairable… That takes a lot of effort to address. And having to work around 75% undamaged or repairable buildings, you do not end up substantially improving infrastructure.
I dunno. 85 percent of Warsaw was destroyed, and in the older part of the city a lot was rebuilt on the same old foundations.
Building around the remaining 15 or 20 percent isn’t easy. Building around zero percent of them would be easier, and I understand that option was considered in Warsaw.
There’s certainly “magic dirt” thinking in how we treat the poor. “These slum houses are terrible for the poor; lets build nice apartment towers for them.” “These housing projects are terrible for the poor; lets give them vouchers to live anywhere in the city.” As if the type of housing is what makes the poor live in squalor and crime.
But I think conservatives are often as guilty of the underlying premise that poor people are just middle class people without money. “If we just give them better housing and food (liberals) or better jobs (conservatives) they’d be like us.” It’s a lovely thought, but it’s just not true. Being poor isn’t a matter of income but of lifestyle, and the choices that lifestyle rewards are the same ones that keep one stuck in it.
The town I lived in near Pittsburgh had 12,000 people it was very large area. It was very rural. One small section had public housing built during the war to house coal miners. There were about 100 units. Our chief of police decided to do a study. He found that 90% of police calls involved the public housing. We had 12 police on the force at that time. A push was made to empty the place but it took more than 10 years. It was finally leveled with the last remaining people going to section 8 where they destroyed that neighborhood. I have no answers.
The decision to hold the 1945 UK election was driven by Labour.
Churchill put together a coalition government including all 3 major parties when he became PM in May 1940. The Labour guys did great work in the coalition, including their leader Attlee (eventually the Deputy PM) and Bevin.
Churchill wanted to keep the coalition government together until the defeat of Japan, but Attlee demurred. If I recall correctly, Labour wanted a slightly longer delay before the election, but Churchill set an earlier date, believing that this would be better for the Conservatives politically. He may well have been right about this, as it is certainly possible that the Labour victory would have been even bigger in, say, September 1945 than it was in July 1945.
Remember that, at the time, it was generally believed that the war against Japan would last well into 1946. The UK general election was on July 5, while the Trinity atomic test was on July 16.
If you have ever seen the movie 84 Charing Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft, they deal with the issue of post war rationing and I think you get a nice feel for the difference between Britain its neighbors. Bancroft’s character mails Anthony Hopkins parcels of food which apparently they just could not get otherwise and I think they take great care in dividing the precious items in a way we Americans would not believe.
And the Potsdam Conference was going on. Churchill started the conference, lost the election, and Attlee was there at the end of the conference.
Terry Gilliam has said Brazil is a movie about the madness of trying to get a movie made in Hollywood.
Ah, the Broken Windows economy. Bastiat was wrong, it’s all about ‘that which is seen’.
To improve standards of living as fast as the Germans did, then, the British should have demolished enough of the buildings that the German bombers missed to equal 80% of total destruction. Easier to work around all those darn buildings and improve the infrastructure.
But looking back, if having the Nazis to complete the demo phase of the infrastructure investment* created wealth in 1943 or so, how much better it would have been if the British government had simply bombed their own buildings years earlier. They could have evacuated the buildings in an orderly way, which would save workers. Of course, that isn’t necessarily good, because the government’s job is to boost wages, and allowing workers to live depresses them.
*though you make the point that they would have done even better if they hadn’t shot down so much of the Luftwaffe, which was just trying to help)
This is not the broken windows fallacy. Quite the opposite.
Had each been left to rebuild on their own, the Germans would have taken decades longer to catch up with the Brits. With US aid, the Germans did not have to finance the rebuilding of Krappensburg from the industrial output of the 5% of the town still standing. Thus, in a relatively short time (thanks to US aid) they had a superior infrastructure to the patched-up UK infrastructure.
By the end of the war, some factories we didn’t bomb because the Nazis were using POW’s, Jews and others, in the production lines — human shields.
Agreed, not the broken windows fallacy.
Merely a comment about the difference in efficiency between “greenfield” building and having to work around existing structures. Anyone who’s ever remodeled an existing older house, and also built a new house from scratch, can understand the difference.
I stand corrected. The claim that the Germans were economically better off because more of their economic assets were destroyed against their preferences and the British worse off because fewer of theirs were similarly destroyed is fallacious reasoning, but not quite the same as the Broken Windows fallacy.