ABSTRACT
The war had been won by the British people acting in rare unison. Traditional class differences were softened by the wartime experience of common danger and loss. But in all essentials the class structure survived and was to impede Britain’s post-war progress. It survived above all in education, so denying equal opportunities to talented children from the lower classes. Social mobility improved, but far too slowly. The first post-war Labour government, though not revolutionary, did move the country in new directions, taking a gradualist road to impose more state control and planning on private industry, and to provide through social legislation a society that would care for the basic needs of all. Labour’s social policies were more successful than its industrial ones. Britain’s wealth was more equitably shared but it was created at a slower rate than the more successful European economies achieved after the war. The Labour government of 1945-50 enacted the measures that laid the basis of the post-war welfare state. It also set up the National Health Service and nationalised the coal and steel industries and the railways. The enactment of such a large and radical legislative programme required many compromises, and these, together with the avoidance of direct state control, ensured that Britain did not experience the kind of socialist revolution imposed on the communist states of Eastern Europe.
