Back

In 1945 the democratic socialist Clement Attlee swept to power. A landslide against war leader Winston Churchill, who contrary to today's far-right mythology was widely hated by the working classes and armed forces, and expected to be a disaster for peacetime domestic policy. Attlee's government embarked on a radical programme of social reforms to safeguard all citizens, "from the cradle to the grave". There began two decades of year-on-year economic growth, the longest in the UK's history.

2/4

Thanks to British socialism, made possible by elite terror at the prospect of revolt, every citizen now enjoys financial protection in the event of unemployment or sickness, a state pension when they retire, standardised minimal living and working conditions, universal free healthcare and education, financial help with funerals...the list goes on and on. Attlee's bold achievements in improving people's lives caused a surge in upward mobility that led to the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

3/4

So don't let anyone tell you CEOs in America having to beef up their personal security, while feeling increasingly nervous and unsafe in their luxury hotels, gentrified blocks and gated communities can ever be a bad thing. That should just be the price of extreme wealth and power, and as the British post-war experience shows, and recent events in South Korea further highlight, all that's needed for concrete change is enough people refusing to accept less.

Then no more shots need be fired.

4/4

@ApostateEnglishman I think in the deleted version of this post that I briefly saw, you mentioned something about illusion, and helping people see through the illusion of prestige is key to its undoing.

@corbden Thanks for noticing! This is a new account and I'm still struggling to condense complex ideas down into 500 character chunks, with each installment shareable on its own.

It's quite an artform!

@ApostateEnglishman I used to do it with 140 characters before Twitter had a threading feature People said that was an ineffective way to communicate but it allowed ideas to spread quickly in massive conversations that included millions of people.

@Janeishly Indeed. There's *only* society, but of course individualism benefits those who wish to destroy any prospect of collective action against them. "That woman", whose name shall not be uttered, also said the government has no money other than what's paid to it in taxes, words echoed by another woman, Theresa May, who said "there's no magic money tree".

There is indeed a Magic Money Tree, and it's called the Bank of England. And it's *our* money not theirs, released by parliamentary vote.

@secretbatcave @ApostateEnglishman @hacks4pancakes

There are many such reports published today (look at the New Economics Foundation or the Joseph Rowntree Foundation).
The question is, why did the Beveridge report have such a big impact at the time (IIRC physical copies sold out at bookshops).

I suspect our media environment today tries to stop such trains from ever leaving the station…

@baoigheallain @ApostateEnglishman

It's interesting to view it also in the context of what was happening across Europe, and to some extent in the US, etc (including the Keynesian 'Bretton Woods' international settlement).

A good example is the French Programme d'action de la Résistance - actually a more radical plan than the UK's, including the nationalisation not only of physical infrastructure and utilities, but also of banks, etc - "l'instauration d'une véritable démocratie économique et sociale, impliquant l'éviction des
grandes féodalités économiques et financières de la direction de l'économie" - as well as building a welfare state, protecting trade unions, human rights, democracy, etc, etc...

A key insight is that because the left had played a leading role in fighting fascism, and in the French Resistance, centrists had no choice but to recognise that the left had been right in both its analysis and stand against fascism - and of course the right, which had collaborated with the Nazis, was now discredited and silent.

This was the basis of the consensus 1945-75 - until the neoliberals were able to forge an alternative centre-and-right consensus around all that small-state-free-market nonsense - because the centrists had by then forgotten the left's analysis (that unregulated capitalism leads to unsustainable inequality, social breakdown, war, fascism. holocaust).

However, a possible reading of this history is that the centre will only get the message, and join with the left/green, once that social breakdown has actually consumed society.