I thunk you put too much emphasis on wealth as wellbeing, GDP is a good measure of the development of a country but it puts everyone in one group, the fact that the post-war labour party created the NHS is of vital importance to the wellbeing of the country which shouldn't be forgotten, also there are other non-economic factors such as the creation of nacional parks which are in Atlee's favour
Good summary. As you hint though all the blame should not go to Attlee, the post war Conservatives were almost as bad, and certainly didn’t try very hard to rectify much of what the Attlee Government did until Thatcher. The Conservatives were mostly responsible for the various attempts to maintain the value of the pound against the dollar, a totally vanity project concerned not with the welfare of citizens but the prestige of politicians and high ranking establishment. This caused endless harm to UK industry and was responsible for a lot of industrial unrest. The decision of Mrs Thatcher to float the pound was probably her most important act, ranking with privatisation and council house sales, in terms of egalitarianism and improving the economic well-being of UK.
Finally I must mention the most stupid act of the Attlee Government which was the decision of Stafford Cripps to give the Nene jet engine design to the Russians. Stalin could believe they would do this saying "What fool will sell us his secrets?". The possession of developed jet engine technology meant that MiG 15 was able to outclass all western aircraft in the Korean war leading to the partition of Korea and the millions of dead as a result.
I know this is rather old now, but wrt housing couldn't you equally put the blame at Thatcher's feet given that, while privately built housing did decline because of TCPA, public house building was still progressing at quite a rate, whereas following right-to-buy etc., the lack of privately built housing was now compounded by the lack of public housing? Also, while I'm not going to defend nationalisation of coal etc., stop-go surely has to get some of the blame for low post-war growth. I mean, poor growth in the 1960s, for instance, was largely a product of the currency crises which had been created by more than a decade of stop-go and a resulting disastrous balance of trade deficit. I mean the growth situation was hardly any better under the post-Attlee Conservatives, despite the denationalisation of steel etc. and cuts to direct taxation, so much so that growth and stop-go was practically the central issue of the 1964 and 1966 elections.
Thanks for your comment, you raise some good points. You're right that numbers of public housing increased under Attlee and declined under Thatcher, but this doesn't get to the brunt of the problem. Before WW2 we were building much greater numbers of housing than we did after it thanks to the planning restrictions implimented by the Labour Government. Their idea was to make it that all housing was done by the state as part of their socialist agenda. This almost all but eliminated the private housebuilding industry for a time and resulted in a net fall in housebuilding by a large quantity. For example, if you look at a City like London around 80,000 homes were built most years during the 1930s; in the 1950s this was just around 30,000 despite public housing supply increasing by some margin. We did, and can, have a thriving private industry of housebuilding but when this is constrained by excessive regulations it is simply impossible.
Stop-go also did create a lot of problems, but I'm not convinced these issues were greater than the general decline in total factor productivity that we can observe over this period. Also, I'm not a partisan on this - the Tories were crap during this time period as well. The reason I chose to blame Attlee is, in my opinion, someone who creates a bad institution has done a greater evil than someone who merely fails to get rid of it.
Yes I do agree that the TCPA was a dreadful piece of legislation and that private housing will always be needed as an important part of keeping up housebuilding. However, I think there is evidence to suggest that the pursuit of contractionary economic policies was more of an impediment to housebuilding overall.
For instance, take this from an internal Treasury document in 1957;
'The best place for a big disinflationary blow on capital investment is housing… A cut in housing investment gives rise immediately to economies in other local authorities’ investment – schools, roads, water and sewerage etc… Most of the growth in local authorities’ investment in recent years is related to the growth of housing (private housing just as much as council housing).'
I think it sort of misses the point to say that the TCPA 'restricted' housebuilding, when, crucially, for many years the Conservatives actively pursued a reduction in housebuilding during the 'stop' phases of the 1950s and 1960s. In accordance with that strategy a target for restricting house-building under 125,000 (all together, public and private) was set for 1958, and by 1961 house-building was down to 77,000. In light of this I think the post-Attlee Conservatives are far more to blame; even if they could have ensured more houses were built in the private sector without TCPA they didn't want to anyway.
I'm writing this while Boris is in front of Parliament lol.
I thunk you put too much emphasis on wealth as wellbeing, GDP is a good measure of the development of a country but it puts everyone in one group, the fact that the post-war labour party created the NHS is of vital importance to the wellbeing of the country which shouldn't be forgotten, also there are other non-economic factors such as the creation of nacional parks which are in Atlee's favour
Good summary. As you hint though all the blame should not go to Attlee, the post war Conservatives were almost as bad, and certainly didn’t try very hard to rectify much of what the Attlee Government did until Thatcher. The Conservatives were mostly responsible for the various attempts to maintain the value of the pound against the dollar, a totally vanity project concerned not with the welfare of citizens but the prestige of politicians and high ranking establishment. This caused endless harm to UK industry and was responsible for a lot of industrial unrest. The decision of Mrs Thatcher to float the pound was probably her most important act, ranking with privatisation and council house sales, in terms of egalitarianism and improving the economic well-being of UK.
Finally I must mention the most stupid act of the Attlee Government which was the decision of Stafford Cripps to give the Nene jet engine design to the Russians. Stalin could believe they would do this saying "What fool will sell us his secrets?". The possession of developed jet engine technology meant that MiG 15 was able to outclass all western aircraft in the Korean war leading to the partition of Korea and the millions of dead as a result.
I know this is rather old now, but wrt housing couldn't you equally put the blame at Thatcher's feet given that, while privately built housing did decline because of TCPA, public house building was still progressing at quite a rate, whereas following right-to-buy etc., the lack of privately built housing was now compounded by the lack of public housing? Also, while I'm not going to defend nationalisation of coal etc., stop-go surely has to get some of the blame for low post-war growth. I mean, poor growth in the 1960s, for instance, was largely a product of the currency crises which had been created by more than a decade of stop-go and a resulting disastrous balance of trade deficit. I mean the growth situation was hardly any better under the post-Attlee Conservatives, despite the denationalisation of steel etc. and cuts to direct taxation, so much so that growth and stop-go was practically the central issue of the 1964 and 1966 elections.
Thanks for your comment, you raise some good points. You're right that numbers of public housing increased under Attlee and declined under Thatcher, but this doesn't get to the brunt of the problem. Before WW2 we were building much greater numbers of housing than we did after it thanks to the planning restrictions implimented by the Labour Government. Their idea was to make it that all housing was done by the state as part of their socialist agenda. This almost all but eliminated the private housebuilding industry for a time and resulted in a net fall in housebuilding by a large quantity. For example, if you look at a City like London around 80,000 homes were built most years during the 1930s; in the 1950s this was just around 30,000 despite public housing supply increasing by some margin. We did, and can, have a thriving private industry of housebuilding but when this is constrained by excessive regulations it is simply impossible.
Stop-go also did create a lot of problems, but I'm not convinced these issues were greater than the general decline in total factor productivity that we can observe over this period. Also, I'm not a partisan on this - the Tories were crap during this time period as well. The reason I chose to blame Attlee is, in my opinion, someone who creates a bad institution has done a greater evil than someone who merely fails to get rid of it.
Yes I do agree that the TCPA was a dreadful piece of legislation and that private housing will always be needed as an important part of keeping up housebuilding. However, I think there is evidence to suggest that the pursuit of contractionary economic policies was more of an impediment to housebuilding overall.
For instance, take this from an internal Treasury document in 1957;
'The best place for a big disinflationary blow on capital investment is housing… A cut in housing investment gives rise immediately to economies in other local authorities’ investment – schools, roads, water and sewerage etc… Most of the growth in local authorities’ investment in recent years is related to the growth of housing (private housing just as much as council housing).'
I think it sort of misses the point to say that the TCPA 'restricted' housebuilding, when, crucially, for many years the Conservatives actively pursued a reduction in housebuilding during the 'stop' phases of the 1950s and 1960s. In accordance with that strategy a target for restricting house-building under 125,000 (all together, public and private) was set for 1958, and by 1961 house-building was down to 77,000. In light of this I think the post-Attlee Conservatives are far more to blame; even if they could have ensured more houses were built in the private sector without TCPA they didn't want to anyway.
I'm writing this while Boris is in front of Parliament lol.
freak
Fantastic post, thank you.