The modernisers of postwar Britain forgot one vital ingredient

The ninepenny wash and brush-up at Waverley station in Edinburgh was the best I have ever had. A wash and brush-up was where you got to half-strip in a bathroom and got in a good clean, with razors for shaving to add to the sense of cleanliness. Going into J Sainsbury pre-supermarket – when it was an old-fashioned Victorian-looking place – to buy a halfpenny’s worth of broken biscuits was a joy. 

The above are two simple examples of some of the things you could do in the last 80 years in Britain. In 1968 and in 1952. Getting into a train in which there was no corridor in 1960, was another of the myriad things that were as old as the hills about the last 80 years. Antiquity seemed to rub shoulders with things like converting bombsites in cities into car parks; a modern manifestation of the coming consumerism that would wash over us like a tidal wave, drowning the old and multiplying the new.

Parking meters and parking wardens happened in the mid 1950s and Great Britain seemed intent on finally catching up with the US economy that brought goods and services, and motor cars to people irrespective of their class. In the UK new towns in fresh fields and kindly designed houses arrived! With your own lavatory, so you didn’t have to share as you did in earlier times if you were working class. Or pop to the bottom of the garden to a shed open to all weathers.

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A general sense that we were on a permanent updating of facilities and opportunities characterised the early postwar years that I lived through. From slums to council flats. From radio to TV. From boiled beef and carrots to hamburger and chips. 

Viewing the celebrations last week of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, taking another four months in Japan, threw up many images of my postwar life. For I was conceived in the closing days of the war and those 80 years were the nursery of my development.

Antiquity rubbed shoulders with innovation of the townscape and the airwaves. But also in the continuous insistence that Great Britain was still an important imperial power that ruled the waves of the world. Of course, that government-sponsored belief got shot down after the Suez crisis in 1956 when America told Britain to stop behaving like a Victorian relic of a bygone time.

Slowly, a concept of a collapsed and decayed Britain crept in. And clever middle-class children developed satire in the 1960s to learn to laugh at that antique posturing. 

Posturing, though, was not the greatest crime. What Britain kept intact from Victorian times was its class system. What you might call an aerated version of it, walls with holes in them so that some could escape. Actors, photographers, hairdressers and pop stars were among the first who braved this brave new world of getting out from labour; from limited chances, poor education and poor prospects. 

The problem is that Britain did not cash in on the inherited talents, skills and abilities of the oldest proletariat in the world – where within its bones was the inherited trauma of being the first industrial nation who were beaten down as humans as they became machines for profit. Shortened, unhealthy, obsessed with the manual labour that was their lot; trodden into the ground to ensure the better classes had enough armchairs and sofas in their living rooms, enough parasols to keep off the sun in their adventures at holiday resorts. 

The welfare state did not puncture that class system because it was created by a government who still kowtowed to the division of labour. That workers were workers, and the brightest were creamed off to help run the show. Industrial workers were kept in bankrupt industries to keep up the appearance of a vital nation. Trade unions did their best to halt the creation of a new class of highly skilled, educated and healthy workers who could rise above the life-threatening labours inherited from the Industrial Revolution. Trade unions opposed innovation because it would mean layoffs and the dole queue.

Everyone in power throughout those early postwar governments was looking backward. To a failed empire and now a failed industrialism. The undereducated manual labourers became the forgotten and lost when Thatcher came along and trod over those industrial communities that were kept going by state benefits. 

What the last 80 years has not produced is an understanding of that decline; and the need to embolden working people to move beyond demeaning labour and rise through education into a post-industrial UK, hence our enormous use of social security to act as a plaster over the sufferings brought on with a lack of investment in turning working people into a skill-rich and educated workforce. 

An underclass who are condemned to live in poverty because in their early nurturing they could not break their inheritance of poverty. A poverty that is often centuries old. No, the largely middle-class decision-makers in the Labour Party could not break free from their patronising belief that a worker is a worker, except when he is bright enough to escape.

Not recognising that brightness among the working classes existed in buckets. And, understandably, the trade union movement was intent on not going back to the hungry 30s and mass unemployment. A recipe for keeping workers down that echoes now in our poorly served social security recipients.

Governments changed the appearance but not the thinking.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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