The Spirit of '45 Page #3

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these critical years.

For the sake of the country

and of your own happiness,

I call upon you to march with me

under the banner of freedom,

towards the beacon lights

of national prosperity and honour,

which must ever be our guide.

The election was fantastic.

During the war,

we'd always sat and listened

to Winston Churchill on the radio.

Everybody did.

Everybody sat round the radio

and listened to Winston Churchill.

And as a kid, I mean, that was it to me.

He was the leader.

This was, you know, incredible.

And I say this is no time

to mince about,

to mince measures and fool around

with weak governments.

Therefore I say,

if you do not give a strong vote

to the National and Conservative

government, which I...

And then suddenly,

my family started talking

about something quite different.

We sat round and my father said

they were going to vote Labour.

And I asked, well, what did that mean?

He explained and I said, "Why aren't

you voting for Winston Churchill?"

And he said, "He got the guns out

to the Tonypandy miners."

I can only tell you

that an enormous mass of work...

(CROWD CHANTS)

And we campaigned

Number 10 Downing Street.

So, we went there and the whole

domestic staff were turned out.

It was like Upstairs, Downstairs.

And the butler said,

'We're all Conservative in this house."

The maid at the back

with the little bonnet said,

"And we'd lose our jobs if we weren't."

(NEWSREEL)

Labour will now have a majority

over all parties in a House of 640.

It was sensational.

Three weeks ago or more

when you recorded your votes,

very few of you would have prophesied

a working majority for Labour,

much less one of about 200 seats.

Newspapers carried the astonishing news

to an amazed public.

Labour landslide.

On the polling day,

I went to Transport House,

into the little room where

we were watching the results.

On the epidiascope we saw

all the Conservative seats falling.

And it was obviously a landslide.

Then the door opened.

Out of the bright sunshine

into the dark room came Clem Attlee.

A BBC man said, "Will you say,

Three cheers for the Prime Minister?

And I was too shy to do that.

Then that evening, I went

to Central Hall, Westminster.

Attlee had just formed the government

and he brought them onto the stage.

I was up in the gallery.

And so it was

a very, very exciting period.

This is the first time

in the history of this country

that a Labour movement

with a socialist policy...

(CHEERING)

I have this evening accepted

His Majesty's permission to form...

I ask from you all

support that we shall need

to carry us through, triumphantly,

through difficult years,

to the great era

which is opening before us.

It was a real triumphant day.

Everybody was joyous.

We had a little street party

where we were living.

It was a signal that things

were going to be different.

One wasn't going to be ruled

by old principles.

There used to be messages coming down

on top of the empty drams

saying, "Labour seats here.

We won four seats."

All of a sudden he come out and said,

"Labour won a landslide victory."

And these hardened miners...

And they were a hard kin.

They were rough and they were tough

you know what I mean?

They would take anything

that the boss ever, ever threw at them,

but the tears were coming

down their cheeks, because...

I said to my miner,

I said, "Well, what's the matter?"

He said, "At last. We are going to

take control of our own lives," he said.

"This new government

will make a change," he said.

There was no wild optimism,

at least not in the higher ranks

of the civil service and the government

because everyone knew that we faced

an almost impossible economic situation.

The country had sold

all its foreign investments.

It had lost most of its ships,

it had entirely run out of dollars

and industry was

about three-quarters engaged

in producing munitions of war

which you no longer wanted.

The economy had to grow

very, very rapidly

at the end of the Second World War.

If you could imagine

that only Britain and the United States,

it was only those countries' industrial

capacity that survived to any extent.

The rest had been razed to the ground

or had been dismantled

by the Nazis primarily.

So the world actually needed

a lot of manufactured goods to be made.

But Britain had gone through

a ten-year period of depression.

So, at the end of the war,

Britain had a very key role

to basically fill this gap

in products around the world.

And British industry

was very, very weak.

So the government decided

that the key, if you like, inputs and

infrastructure that industry required

had to be nationalised

on a very large scale

to be able to step up that production.

We said we would bring the pits

into public ownership,

the railways into public ownership,

we would build up

the National Health Service,

we would build up industry generally,

and presented it in terms

of this list of objectives

you might have in wartime.

This is what you've got to do

and we'll do it.

And it was credible for that reason.

Of course for the Labour Party,

the natural language

for trade unionists

and for people struggling together

is that we should own things together.

It's not, "Let's fight each other

to see who can get on top

of the other one and benefit."

The Peasants' Revolt, 1381.

You have John Ball

who is a, you know, hedge priest,

a priest who's been basically

expelled from the state Church

but is continuing to preach

to the commonality.

He says that nothing

will go well in England

until all things are held in common.

It reoccurs in the 17th century

in the English Revolution

with the diggers who take over

St George's Hill in Surrey

and begin to till the land

as common land.

It reoccurs in the early stages

of the Industrial Revolution

when the utopian socialists

like Robert Owen set up factories.

He was himself a factory owner,

but he sets up a kind of model community

with the idea that it will have

all things held in common,

that there will be some degree

of control in it.

So all the way through human history,

in one guise or another,

this thought is

constantly being reiterated,

suppressed, goes underground,

explodes again in a different form.

In all their many jobs,

they are Britain.

Public services.

Manual workers.

Cleaners.

Caterers.

Street sellers.

Government workers.

Distributive trades.

Women workers.

Miners.

Transport drivers.

Steel men.

For seven years we, the people

of Britain, fought a war for mankind.

Today we fight for our own survival.

This battle also we shall win.

I can't recall properly

how we got medical attention.

I think there was a place we went to,

a dispensary.

It was a huge place and there was always

a queue there every time you went.

A dispensary of some sort.

And you got

some son of medicines there.

But obviously it wasn't working...

...because funerals

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