D.N.Pritt is an author of undisputed three-fold eminence – as lawyer, politician and writer. During the years in office of the post-war Labour Government he was an Independent M.P.; he here records and analyses the Government’s acts and policies, session by session, in the various fields of foreign affairs, colonial policy, economic policy and industrial relations, and the social services.’ This is how the dust jacket introduces the author and his book. To add: Wikipedia tells us he joined the Labour Party in 1918 and was elected as Labour Member of Parliament for Hammersmith North in 1935. He was expelled from the Labour Party in 1940 for, as Wikipedia puts it, ‘defending the Soviet invasion of Finland’. Thereafter he sat as a member of the Independent Group of Labour MPs, and at the 1945 general election was re-elected as such in Hammersmith North, gaining a 63 per cent share of the vote. He lost his seat in the 1950 general election. In 1954 he received the International Stalin Peace Prize and in 1965 the Star of People’s Friendship of the German Democratic Republic.

The book is valuable because Pritt was a participant in that post-war parliament and refers to many contemporary sources, both progressive and not. At the same time, he has had time to collect his thoughts and present them in coherent form, and in the light of subsequent events. There is a comprehensive index which makes it useful as a reference book. Although it is out of print, second hand copies are available at reasonable prices online. I bought mine recently for £3 at a Marx Memorial Library book sale – very good value!

Pritt’s chief argument is that the particular political situation at the end of the Second World War gave the Labour Government the opportunity to re-orientate Britain towards a progressive future, laying the basis for building socialism. This opportunity was squandered because the leaders of the Labour Government, particularly Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, and Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, were blinded by anti-communism and anti-Sovietism and by slavish support for the USA.

Britain had signed an Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship in 1942 and the conferences at Yalta and Potsdam had laid the basis for a Europe of peace and cooperation. The People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe were starting to construct such a future, but instead, the Labour Government chose the Marshall Plan and NATO. Pritt demonstrates how this foreign policy interfered with the implementation of many good policies laid down in Labour’s 1945 election manifesto.

He starts by painting a contrast between the mood of the British people and the ‘more important’ Labour leaders. During the war, the people of Britain had in the main ‘behaved magnificently’ and shown ‘courage, patience, endurance, honesty and adaptability’. ‘Through all the propaganda they saw the horrors and hardships of war, they recollected too the horrors and hardships that peace-time life in the slumps of the thirties had given many of them. They had shaken off much of their indifference to politics, and had decided that they…would get themselves a different kind of government to shape their future…[which] in the context of those days meant inevitably a Labour government.’ If this mood was strong among the civilian population, it was even stronger among the armed forces.

On the other hand, ‘the more important leaders [of Labour] had been members of the Coalition Government for five years, sharing in its activities, decisions and responsibilities, and to a great extent absorbing its atmosphere…in the main anti-Nazi and genuinely set on winning the war…But it was nevertheless so anti-Soviet that it was scheming until a very late stage to “slant” the main strategy of the war so as to make the USSR emerge from the war as weak as possible, and thus have no effective say in the shaping of the post-war world, which that government hoped to make as capitalist and as anti-socialist as possible.’ Churchill, leader of the Coalition Government, in a memorandum of October 1942, five months after the signature of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, he wrote: “It would be a measureless disaster if Russian Barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe.” He hoped for a ‘Council of Europe’ which, as Pritt puts it ‘plainly included Germany, Spain and Mussolini’s Italy, but excluded the USSR’. He adds: ‘Attlee, Bevin, Cripps and other Labour leaders had lived and worked under Churchill all through the war years. Exactly how much of the anti-Soviet atmosphere they absorbed can be gauged by their subsequent conduct.’

The Labour Party pamphlet, ‘Let Us Face the Future’ issued in April 1945, and endorsed by the Labour Party Conference in May, was in effect the election manifesto. Pritt describes it as ‘a remarkable manifesto’ with ‘much...to inspire the millions’ and gives extensive quotations. Here are a few: ‘The freedom of Trade Unions, denied by the Trade Disputes Act 1927, must be restored’; ‘The whole of our national resources, land, material and labour, must be fully employed’; ‘high and constant purchasing power must be maintained through good wages, social services and insurance, and taxation bearing less on lower income groups…rents and prices of necessities will be controlled’; public ownership of the Bank of England, fuel and power industries, inland transport, iron and steel; Labour ‘will proceed with a housing programme with the maximum practical speed till every family has a good standard of accommodation’; ‘in the new National Health Service there should be health centres providing the best that science can offer, more and better hospitals, proper conditions for doctors and nurses’; ‘the Labour Government will press on rapidly with legislation extending social insurance over the necessary wide field to all.’

However, Pritt adds that it was ‘in reality no more than an ambiguous and carefully drawn reformist document, not socialist at all.’ He also notes that even in ‘Let Us Face the Future’, ‘there was a hint of what was soon to become…Labour Party policy: namely that efficient industries should be left to go on running under private management for private profit, whilst inefficient ones should be nationalised, to the concealed delight of the owners and the relative disadvantage of the community, which would gradually become a sort of hospital for sick industries.’

The section of ‘Let Us Face the Future’ on foreign policy began: ‘We must make sure that Germany and Japan are deprived of the power to make war again. We must consolidate in peace the great war-time association of the British Commonwealth with the USA and the USSR. Let it not be forgotten that in the years leading up to the war the Tories were so scared of Russia that they missed the chance to establish a partnership which might well have prevented the war.’

It is worth noting here that at the Labour Party Conference which endorsed the manifesto, a motion for unity with the Communist Party was defeated by only 1,219,000 to 1,134,000 votes. This gives an indication of the mood at the time in the Labour Party.

Pritt adds: ‘...the manifesto, in spite of its defects, was amply sufficient to encourage the electorate to believe that the Labour Party was offering what it wanted; and it accepted it. It had in fact already largely made up its mind to vote Labour.’

The election was held on Thursday 5 July 1945. Labour won 392 seats and its overall majority was 180. The Conservatives ended up with 189 seats. Pritt notes that all the Conservative attempts at ‘scares’ to frighten the electorate off voting Labour failed. He adds: ‘Several [Labour leaders] told me privately that they expected to lose…Winston Churchill himself thought the Tories would win by between 30 and 80. For myself…I never doubted that Labour would win with a working majority; but I did not expect so large a majority as actually emerged.’

Considering ‘Why Labour Won’ Pritt says: ‘The electorate had made up its mind what it wanted…the great popularity of the Soviet people…led many electors to vote Labour in the belief…that the Labour Party would abide by the policy of friendship for the USSR, and thus advance peace and progress in the world…[From 1940] a new popular radicalism developed under war conditions…the high degree of social and economic planning…helped forward the socialist cause by showing that such planning could work well…’

The Labour Government did carry out most of its programme, but full implementation – for example, the plan for health centres - was hindered by the decision to join the Marshall Plan, the unequal trade ties to the USA, the refusal to trade to any great extent with the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, which, unlike the USA and Western Europe, were not affected by the destructive economic crises of capitalism. Also by the enormous ‘defence’ bills which it justified by its claims of warlike intentions of the Soviet Union, a policy which culminated in Britain becoming a founder member of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation).

The Government supported the US Truman Doctrine, revealed in Truman’s speech to US Congress on 12 March 1947, which meant ensuring, by force of arms where necessary, that Greece and Turkey would remain part of the western bloc. The Government colluded with the USA and France in setting up Bizonia and then Trizonia, collaborations between the US, British and French occupation zones of Germany, issuing a separate currency (printed in advance in the USA) and finally setting up the Federal Republic of Germany, thus ensuring the division of Germany in defiance of the Potsdam Agreement. They also denied the Soviet Union reparations from the western, most industrial zones, in particular from the British occupied Ruhr, which, it quickly became clear, was to be the base for the reconstruction of Germany’s economic and military power. At Yalta reparations of £2,500 million had been agreed, towards the £32,000 million worth of damage done by the Nazis in the Soviet Union.

Pritt gives a picture of the composition of the Labour MPs: the new members were ‘mostly to the left of their leaders in political thought’. They expected to regularly attend Parliament: ‘they sat for most of the time in serried ranks in the Chamber. They soon discovered that the Chamber only has seats for about half its members.’ Attlee did not propose to change this. Pritt goes on: ‘…the gradual reshaping…to which their leaders subjected them in order to turn them into well-disciplined, anti-Soviet, anti-communist, and non-socialist lobby-fodder, was one of the saddest things I watched in the following four and a half years.’

The Labour Government should have realised what being a US ally meant very soon after the election, when the US suddenly and abruptly ceased Lend-Lease on September 20, 1945. Pritt explains: ‘Lend-Lease was an arrangement made during the war under which Britain (and other belligerents) drew their necessary supplies of many commodities from the USA on credit, the question as to how and when they were to pay for them being left until after the war…The cancellation was a crushing financial blow at a moment when Britain’s position was not equal to any serious shock’ as a result of the war.

The Marshall Plan, well explained by Pritt, was introduced to the public in a speech made by General Marshall, the US Secretary of State, at Harvard University on 5th June 1947. Beforehand, according to the Times of 7th June 1947, there had been “unofficial and informal exchanges of view between members of the British Embassy and members of the State Department and other administrative departments.” In Bevin’s House of Commons speech of 19th June, he declared: “When the Marshall proposals were announced, I grabbed them with both hands.”

The Plan’s purpose was to tie Europe to the USA in such a way that moves towards socialism were impossible and the USA gained the maximum economic benefit, but under the guise of helping Europe, suffering from the effects of the Second World War, into recovery. On 27th June Molotov, representing the Soviet Union at a conference in Paris, was presented with proposals which had already been worked out. These would include ‘an assessment of Europe’s needs for heavy equipment and agricultural engineering to be bought from the USA with dollar credits; the creation of an organisation charged with the responsibility of allocation…to the various countries in accordance with their needs’. A series of “international expert committees” would draw up a balance sheet of resources and needs of each country for four fields: iron and steel; coal; transport; and agriculture. There would be a “steering committee” to “regulate and coordinate” the procedure of the expert committees.

Pritt explains that the intention was the restoration of Europe before the war, ‘in which the western countries – Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Italy – were industrialised countries with colonial empires, and the countries of Eastern Europe were backward, impoverished, agrarian countries entirely dependent upon the stronger Powers, and a prey to political reaction in its worst form. Further, the British and French Governments let it be known that the restoration of German industrial resources was also part of the scheme. Dean Acheson, US Foreign Minister, had already declared that one of the main aims of US foreign policy must be: “To push ahead with the reconstruction of those two great workshops of Europe and Asia – Germany and Japan.”

Pritt continues: ‘The whole basis and object of the Anglo-French-American plans put forward at Paris were to break down the socialist framework of planned industrial and agricultural development which the countries [in Eastern Europe] were developing…American and British spokesmen made it clear that they would get no aid if they did not abandon “totalitarian (i.e. socialist) methods of running their countries and accept a more characteristically European pattern”. (“European” means “capitalist” of course).’

Molotov objected to the Plan on three grounds: that it was an interference in the internal affairs of the European nations; that there should be a distinction between former allied, neutral and enemy states; and that the German problem was an entirely separate matter to be dealt with by the Council of Foreign Ministers alone. Molotov proposed an alternative, where the European countries would draw up their own estimates of what they required from the US; a summary would be drawn up, bearing in mind particularly the needs of those countries which suffered from German aggression; and a committee of the three Powers, with some other European states, would then ascertain from the USA what they could grant. Of course this was not accepted, and the meeting came to a negative end on the 2nd July.

The sixteen countries which did sign up for Marshall Aid soon found out the strings attached. Each country had to discuss its needs with a particular US official who might or might not agree, money was allocated only a year at a time, and could be withdrawn at any time if the country did anything the US didn’t like.

Military expenditure distorted the British economy throughout the period. A White Paper proposed that in March 1948 we should still have armed forces of 1,087,000, more than double the mid-1939 figure of 480,000. As Pritt says, this was ‘part and parcel of our increasingly close links with the USA against the USSR.’ A National Service Bill proposed conscription of 18 months. This provoked a rebellion by Labour MPs. Eighty of them backed an amendment to the Bill calling for its rejection, and 72 of them voted against the Bill when it came to the vote.

The Government reduced the period of conscription to 12 months, only to extend it to 18 months again before 1 January 1949 and it passed in Parliament without much opposition this time.

One of the Government’s policies that looks particularly good in the light of our current crisis is housing. About a third of Britain’s thirteen million homes had been damaged in the war, including 475,000 rendered completely uninhabitable. There was a shortage of labour and building materials. The Government applied a limitation on private building of a maximum of one privately-built dwelling to four built by local authorities, and provided cheap finance. Up to the end of 1950, 821,518 new permanent dwellings had been built, 663,342 of them built by local authorities to rent. During this period local authorities built far more homes annually than in any year before the war. However, even here, expenditure had to be reduced to fund the military budget, and the amount built fell far short of needs.

Pritt deals in detail with the Labour Government’s policy on Malaya, Palestine, India and the British colonies. He also writes about trade union activity and several major strikes. This review can only give a taster of all the important matters the book covers.

Labour was defeated in the 1st October 1951 election. As Pritt says: ‘It was bound to be a curious election in a good many ways. The Labour leadership and the Tories were agreed on every major issue… The more politically conscious working-class voters, angry as they were with the Labour leadership, were quite clear that the only way to fight their class enemies, the Tories, was to support Labour.’ The turnout was 82.5 per cent of the electorate. The Labour vote was actually higher than the Tories’, 48.8 per cent to 48 per cent, but the Tories won 321 seats and Labour 295. Pritt is of the opinion that Labour would have won if they had supported a genuine peace policy.

In his ‘Conclusions’ Pritt says, ‘One lesson to be drawn is, I think, that right-wing Social Democracy can never do more than govern a “welfare” capitalist state with moderate efficiency.’ He asks why this right-wing leadership clung on for the entire six and a half years, and suggests some causes. ‘Probably the most powerful and enduring [cause] was the loyalty of the rank and file. The working class, through their trade union movement, had created the Labour Party; it was their political weapon; they were proud of it, and were unwilling to lightly condemn it or to conclude that the leaders were wrong… And very many of them were affected by the incessant anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda, developed not only by their leaders but by the delighted capitalists in every newspaper they read (except the “Daily Worker”), and on the radio and television.’

‘There were other causes. In Parliament, and among those who hoped to get into Parliament, a contributory cause was the “stick and carrot” technique of the management – perhaps I should call it “sweets and blackmail” – of which many left-wing Members complained bitterly to me in private. It was easy to tell Members that if they opposed the Government they could give up all hope of promotion to office; that, if they went a little further, steps would be taken to see that they were not nominated by their constituencies to stand at the next General Election; and that, if they went a little further still, they would be expelled from the Party.’