How the Second World War Transformed Labour

Welcome back to Origin Story season eight: The Story of Socialism. This week, we continue the tale of the UK Labour Party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer.

It’s 1940 and Clement Attlee’s Labour has joined the wartime coalition with Winston Churchill’s Tories, making it seem for the first time like a natural party of government and paving the way for its surprise 1945 landslide. Despite enormous obstacles at home and abroad, Attlee’s ageing all-stars lay the foundations of post-war Britain, from the NHS to NATO. How did they pull it off?

Losing office in 1951 kicks off the wilderness years. Civil war rages between followers of the left-wing titan Nye Bevan and the revisionist Hugh Gaitskell as Labour struggles to find a purpose in a decade of growing affluence and relative consensus. A new socialism of liberty and equality battles with the old socialism of nationalisation while fresh divisions open up over Europe and the Cold War. After 13 years, the shrewd unifier Harold Wilson leads Labour back to power and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins leads a liberalising revolution in British life. But is social democracy still socialism?

If 1970 is an unexpected defeat, then 1974 is an unexpected victory —and a very mixed blessing. Wilson and his successor James Callaghan preside over five years of crisis and precarity as the post-war consensus cracks and crumbles. The born-again socialist Tony Benn and the liberal Europhile Roy Jenkins represent two poles of an increasingly fractious party. When Margaret Thatcher sweeps to power in 1979, Labour returns to the wilderness and faces its worst identity crisis yet.

Why was the Second World War the making of the Labour Party? Who, or what, killed the post-war consensus? How did Labour governments navigate one crisis after another? How did its theory of socialism evolve to meet a changing electorate? And why does every Labour government leave the left disappointed?

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Reading list

Histories and Biographies

• Andy Beckett – When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009)

• Andy Beckett – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024)

• John Bew – Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016)

• John Campbell – Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (2015)

• Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey – Centrism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Michael Foot – Aneurin Bevan: A Biography: Volume Two: 1945-1960 (1966)

• Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022)

• Jam Tomorrow podcast, written and presented by Ros Taylor (2023-24)

• Roy Jenkins – A Life at the Centre (1992)

• David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999)

• Ben Pimlott – Harold Wilson (1993)

• Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010)

• Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson (2019)

• Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success and Failure from Butler to Corbyn (2021)

• Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (1996)

• Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party: Fourth Edition (2015)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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