AS WE hurtle towards the general election on May 7, two things are certain. One is that millions of people are anxious or angry or both about their worsening situations in recent times.

A second certainty is that the Conservative Party’s rich and rich-representing leadership is savagely bent on making things much worse for working people (aided and abetted by Lib Dem and Ukip varieties of hocus-pocus).

How far the Tories and Lib Dems will be punished at the election for their misdeeds — and how far Ukip will be rewarded for its man-in-the-pub Thatcherism — remains to be seen.

Seventy years ago in the early summer of 1945, another general election beckoned.

Though few contemporaneous commentators forecast a Labour Party victory, the strength of popular radicalism was such that the Tories were in fact on the back foot and even against the ropes. The contrast between their election promises and those of Labour was dramatic.

At that moment the horrors of WWII were coming to an end, though militarist Japan was still unsubdued. Britain’s armed forces had played an important part in defeating Mussolini’s fascist Italy.

Hitler’s Germany had now surrendered, crushed primarily and at enormous human cost by the Soviet Union’s armies, but also by British and US forces. Labour leader Clement Attlee had been an effective deputy prime minister in the wartime coalition government, but it was then prime minister Winston Churchill, a Conservative imperialist who had shown that he could also be determinedly anti-fascist, whose claim to be a successful war leader was obviously much stronger.

So would a peacetime leadership by Churchill be voted into power?

Yes, said the Tory millionaire press barons. No, said millions of ordinary people backed by the Daily Herald, the Daily Mirror and this paper’s predecessor, the Daily Worker. Labour under Attlee was promising major change.

The miserable conditions of life for so many during the 1930s had been followed by the sacrifices and sufferings of wartime, and this had produced in the minds of war survivors a refusal to accept anything less than a new and fairer deal.

This state of mind fed into the Labour Party conference of late 1944 when, against the pessimism of leaders, a motion from young leftwinger and MP-to-be Ian Mikardo was passed calling for a broad extension of public ownership.

Then in May 1945, the war in Europe was over and another Labour Party conference confirmed that “socialisation” would be carried out by a Labour government “according to the merits of each case and according to their suitability and urgency.”

Wartime home secretary Herbert Morrison, soon to be in charge of implementing Labour’s radical programme, sketched out the manifesto Let Us Face the Future, then declared that it necessitated control of economic and industrial affairs. “You cannot,” he said, “get a quart of socialist policy out of a miserable capitalist pint pot.”

A vital part of Labour strategy was a massive home-building programme, requiring, said Morrison, control of the land, prices and materials, the bulk manufacture of housing components and an efficient building industry.
Just before this May conference began, Attlee (pressurised by Morrison and by others including leftwinger and future health minister Aneurin Bevan) notified Churchill that Labour would not remain in the coalition beyond October, when the election should take place. The result was a snap election on July 5. Meanwhile Churchill stayed prime minister.

Campaigning began, with mass interest. Meetings drew great crowds. There had been no general election since 1935, when a Communist MP, the redoubtable Willie Gallacher, had been elected for West Fife.

The House of Commons contained, as the Communist Party’s general secretary Harry Pollitt wrote in Labour Monthly a few weeks later, “401 reactionaries, 193 Labour and Progressive (and) 21 independent.” Whether this parliamentary picture would become very different was the subject of much speculation.

The Tories’ strongest card was, they believed, Churchill’s leadership — the first point listed in their policy statement. Churchill rallied to his own cause by speaking on the radio on June 4, attacking socialism, which “struck not only at property in all its forms, but at liberty in all its forms.”

He reinforced this argument with the assertion that “no socialist system can be established without a political police … some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.” Even, he threw in, the smallest “nest egg” accumulated by “thrift or toil” could “shrivel” before the eyes of its owner. Those whose labour had created nest eggs large and small for others should, it seemed, carry on creating them just as before.

Attlee’s radio response the next evening was typically low-key, and he was ready to agree that individual freedom was vital. But there was a limit:

“There was a time when employers were free to work little children 16 hours a day … There was a time when people were free to neglect sanitation so that thousands died of preventable disease … It was in fact freedom for the rich and slavery for the poor.”

Churchill’s highly partisan initial broadcast had not gone down well with many voters, and on June 13 his second effort repeated his earlier anti-Labour accusation on the freedom front, while now promising a few specific welfare provisions.

Broadcasting for Labour on June 18, former miner James Griffiths (soon to be Minister for National Insurance) said: “I would like to tell Mr. Churchill that we are not frightened by his phantom Gestapo. What we are afraid of are the real terrors we cannot forget — unemployment, the dole and the means test.”

On June 30, the Daily Worker reported Herbert Morrison’s latest words. The election was “about whether a great national plan can win the peace as it won the war, or whether the speculators, the buccaneer barons of Fleet Street, the sluggish leaders of big business monopolies and cartels are to sit comfortably — on our backs — for another shameful period of national decline. ”

To accommodate counting of the votes of servicemen abroad the election results were not declared until July 25. Labour won a startling 393 seats compared with 154 a decade previously. Labour’s majority over the Conservatives was almost 200, and the Liberals were down to 12 seats. Two Communists were elected — Willie Gallacher again for West Fife plus Phil Piratin for the Mile End area of Stepney.

Almost 12 million people (more than 48 per cent of voters) were for Labour, and under 40 per cent for the Tories.

More than a hundred thousand voted for one of the 21 Communist Party candidates. As for the Tories’ reliance on Winston Churchill’s credentials as war leader, the words of Ralph Miliband in his book Parliamentary Socialism are to the point: “The war leader was easily distinguished from the Conservative politician.”

The new government meant what it had said. In January 1946 the coal nationalisation Bill reached its second reading, and before long electricity, gas, railways and much more followed coal into public ownership. A fifth of British industry was socialised and revitalised. Alongside this process house-building and the creation of the National Health Service went forward under the passionate ministerial direction of Aneurin Bevan.

The 1945-51 Attlee government’s objective was not a fully fledged socialist democracy. There was too much belief in the continuance of capitalism and of empire (though India’s demand for independence was unstoppable), and in alliance with a United States set on world imperial leadership and guided by hatred of the Soviet Union.

The generous terms of compensation to the owners of industries nationalised (nest-eggs galore) were a sign of what was to come. But there is no denying that the majority of British people benefited enormously from the house-building programme, from the better standards applied in the enlarged public sector, from a comprehensive NHS for which users paid through taxes, from close-to-full employment and from a huge advance in the quality of social security.

This record supplies us with a massive, relevant and inspiring precedent for our progress towards a juster society — and for an anti-Tories-of-all-stripes vote on May 7.