The Spirit of '45 Page #2

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of what it's all about.

When we were living in the slums

off Great Homer Street,

we were the greatest empire

in the world.

We had India, Africa, Canada, Australia.

The greatest empire in the world.

We were living

in the worst slums in Europe.

My dad used to take

an orange box round to the docks

and urge the dockers

to join a union, to band together

with all the other...

"You'll never get anywhere

if you don't."

"You've got to be solid." You know.

I was quite proud to go with him.

I could hear the men saying,

"It's Johnny and the kid."

So I was quite proud

to be the kid with Johnny.

Well, I've been thinking

about the gaps between the houses.

What comes down

has to go up again, you know.

Not like it used to be, I hope.

Not with all those slums and tenements.

That's just the point.

We've got to see

that the job's done decently this time.

Ya, but how? Do you think

we can do anything about it?

Well, why not?

If we can work together now

to look after the lives

of the people here,

I don't see why we couldn't work

together afterwards to clear up the mess

and help build a better world in which

these things can't possibly happen.

I'll second that.

It's people like us that have been doing

the work of the war,

and it's people like us that are going

to do the work of the peace.

My mind goes back

to a meeting we had in a troop ship.

Then one lad got up.

He said, "In the '30s,

we had mass unemployment."

He said, "We don't have unemployment

in wartime."

He said, "if you can have

full employment killing Germans,

why can't you have full employment

building homes, building houses,

building schools, recruiting teachers,

recruiting nurses, recruiting doctors?"

And that argument registered.

We're starting something called ABCA.

We're going to have an hour's discussion

every week on current affairs.

And it's going to come out

of working time.

If there is injustice, inequality,

ifs our fault for allowing it.

Why not write to your MP about it?

Yes, that's just it.

We've got a parliament

and it's up to us to say who goes there

and to make sure they do their job

when they get there.

"I am more and more suspicious

of the way this lecturing-to and

education of the forces racket is run."

"I maintain most strongly

that any of these subjects

which tend towards politics are wrong."

"For the love of life,

do do something about it

unless you want to have the creatures

coming back all pansy pink."

The experience of the war

taught people that when the stale needs

you lo be organised collectively,

in fact, they'll force you into the army

to be organised collectively,

and you can be incredibly powerful.

You can defeat fascism.

And they came back

imbued with that spirit

of saying anything is possible.

Beveridge, a Liberal,

had been given the task

of looking at the world

after the war,

and he identified five giants.

Poverty, unemployment, illness

and so on.

Want must not be known again.

There must be no mass unemployment,

the giant evil of only yesterday.

Ignorance, said Sir William,

no democracy can nowadays afford.

The evil of disease must be overthrown.

The voluntary hospital

and the expensive nursing home

are not enough to maintain this nation

in good health.

We are not fighting to preserve slums

which breed our own diseases

just as swamps breed malaria.

No more generations

must be stunted in squalor.

The Beveridge Report shows how to begin

overthrowing the five giant evils.

It spurs us all to greater effort.

If we can produce so much for war,

much can be done for peace.

You've got to realise

there was only 21 years

between two wars.

And most of the electorate

were well aware

of the fact that after the

First World War, we had men out of work

we had men standing on street corners

in blue uniforms

with no leg or no arm,

something wrong,

and there was no jobs for them.

I don't think anybody

wanted to ever see that again.

Put Labour in.

Vote Conservative.

Socialism must win.

Vote Liberal.

I'm for Churchill.

Attlee's the man.

Posters to the right of them,

posters to the left of them,

volley and thunder. On July 5th, the...

Partly, the Tory Party

was broken in its core

because of its attachment

to appeasement.

So the coalition government,

Churchill,

who comes to head in the war,

is actually a Labour administration

at its core.

"At its core" meaning the ministries

in charge of industry and employment

and so forth are under Labour ministers.

Churchill's at the head of this.

Having come through the '30s

where there was mass unemployment,

coming through the war years

where there was, you know,

rationing and lack of food

and where the housing standard

was very poor right across the country,

people who'd fought in the war,

people who'd supported the economy

in the war effort,

they were looking for some son of

if you like, it was

like a war or peace dividend.

Those were the key things

that they were looking for.

And that's what the Labour Party

Manifesto really addresses.

I mean, people looked back

at the years of the 1930s, the 1920s,

saw the mass unemployment,

the wars, the revolutions,

the appearance of the dictators,

the misery that was caused

and said, you know, "There's something

about the system as it worked then

which was almost inescapable.

We've got to change it."

My father was not

an active trade unionist or anything.

He got a map of the world and he put it

on the table and he said, "Look."

He said, "They grow wheat here,

you get rubber from here,

you get oil from here

and you get fruit from here."

"What we're looking for

is an integrated world system

where everybody has what they need

and everything is developed

for everybody."

I thought that was absolutely amazing.

He said to me, "It's called socialism."

And, you know, as a kid of ten,

I thought it was absolutely amazing

and I still do.

All for one, one for all.

Well, ifs not greed.

No greed and selfishness.

Labour puts first things first.

Security from war, food, houses,

clothing, employment, leisure

and social security for all

must come before the claims of the few

for more rent, interest and profit.

We have shown that we can organise the

resources of the country to win the war.

We can do the same in peace.

Churchill and the Tories

went so far as to print

tens of thousands of copies

of Friedrich von Hayek's

The Road to Serfdom

which is a book that basically says

if you start off interfering

with the economy just a little bit,

if the government

just does just a little bit,

you set off down the road

towards totalitarianism.

You end up with Nazi Germany

or Stalinist Russia,

just by introducing

a little bit of welfare spending,

or maybe nationalising the odd industry.

The Tories printed this.

What a shame it would be

and what a folly to add to our load

the bitter quarrels

with which the extreme socialists

are eager to convulse and exploit

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