Post-war Great Britain: Reforms, Industry & Economy

Election Surprise

At the end of WWII, Great Britain found itself at a major crossroads. Millions of its young men were returning home from fighting on the continent and needed jobs, medical care and help returning to the normalcy of peacetime. Furthermore, parts of Britain needed to be rebuilt after having been heavily bombed during the war, especially London, where Germany dropped thousands of bombs in less than a year during the London Blitz.

Among Britons, there was a general consensus that the country's first post-war priority should be meeting these domestic needs of its citizens and cities before anything else. Historians have termed this general sense among the British public the post-war consensus. It was these motivations that led to Britain shocking the rest of world when Winston Churchill, the Conservative Prime Minister who had led Britain to victory in WWII, was defeated heavily in the July 1945 parliamentary elections. Churchill's Conservative Party lost nearly 200 seats in the government, returning a parliamentary majority for the Labour Party led by Clement Attlee.

Attlee, who had been appointed Britain's first ever Deputy Prime Minister during the war, won the election through claiming the Labour Party could rebuild Britain after the war better than the Conservative Party, whom he branded as a party fit only for wartime leadership. He was elected based on campaign promises that the Labour Party would focus on achieving and maintaining full employment in Britain, nationalize key industries and create an entirely free National Health Service.

Social and Economic Reform

Attlee's calls for improved social services and an improved standard of living for all Britons did not come out of the blue; rather Attlee was continuing the policies of several Labour and Liberal ministers and leaders of the early part of the 20th century. For example, Liberal Party Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, in partnership with his Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, introduced a variety of reforms, including unemployment insurance and old age pension for Britons 70 years of age or older without the means to care for themselves.

What was different about Attlee's plans for social reform is the overwhelming support his policies had from the public. Indeed, many of Attlee's goals were taken directly from the Beveridge Report, published in November 1942. The Beveridge Report, produced by the Keynesian economist William Beveridge, addressed the social inequalities in British society at the time. The report categorized the needs of British society into five 'great evils': squalor, want, ignorance, idleness and disease. The report also proposed large plans to combat these evils, mainly through the creation of a national social safety net to help those without the means to help themselves.

The Attlee government used the Beveridge Report as a manifesto of sorts after the 1945 election. Indeed, only a month after its election, the Attlee government passed the Family Allowance Act, which granted each family a small monthly stipend per month for each child to aid in the child's care. The following year they passed the National Insurance Act, which established an extra income tax for all workers to pay into funds they could access later in life, such as unemployment insurance and a retirement pension.

Only two years later in the summer of 1948, the Attlee government instituted its most ambitious social program yet: the National Health Service. The NHS intended to bring free healthcare and cheap prescriptions to all British citizens regardless of their socio-economic class. The NHS was incredibly popular at the outset and remains one of the cornerstones of British society for many Britons. Attlee's decisive actions built upon the work of his predecessors, and in conjunction with the post-war consensus, helped build what many have called the British welfare state.