Kate Patrick 1 of 5 MT21W4 Tutorial Essay
(i) Could socialists claim an electoral mandate in 1945?
This essay will argue that socialists could in fact claim a mandate in 1945. I will rstly seek to
establish, arguing against Addison’s claims that Labour represented ‘Mr Attlee’s consensus’, that
the Labour Party was in fact committed to socialism in 1945, and thus a Labour mandate collapses
into a socialist mandate. I will then turn to Fielding’s suggestion that the public were voting on
grounds other than Labour’s socialism (namely, that of a distrust of the Conservatives), and
consider how this might weaken a socialist claim to a mandate. I will conclude that, although the
public were not voting due to strictly socialist motivations, the public were radicalised in such a
manner that was compatible with socialism, and thus socialists could claim mandate in 1945.
An electoral mandate is de ned as the transfer of authority to a group to perform a set of actions on
the behalf of the electorate. It follows that there are two reasons why the question may fail to be
answered in the af rmative. Firstly, the Labour Party were not socialists, so a Labour mandate was
not a socialist mandate. This relies on a conventional de nition of an electoral mandate in a rst
past the post parliamentary system: a majority of seats is suf cient. Given Labour’s landslide
victory in 1945 with a majority of 145 seats, it seems clear that the Labour Party had a mandate in
1945, so the relevant question is whether Labour were socialists. Secondly, even if Labour could be
considered socialist, the public may have been motivated to vote by reasons that were not a support
for socialism. This may push us to consider whether the conventional de nition is stringent enough,
or whether the electorate need to be motivated to vote by the right reasons, to legitimately transfer
authority. As such, socialists may have failed to secure a mandate, despite winning a landslide
election.
Firstly, I will consider Addison’s (1992) argument that Labour’s 1945 manifesto Let Us Face the
Future did not represent a radical socialist departure from the war coalition, but rather was a
commitment to the new consensus that had formed during the war for ‘politically neutral’ economic
planning, reconstruction, and the welfare state. If so, the Labour landslide did not signify that
socialists had a mandate. The fact that in 1940, the right had been forced by the necessity of war to
recruit the left into government, with the TUC forming ‘virtually a department’ in government, and
Keynes having his own room in the Treasury, the environment was ripe for the formation of a
‘middle way’. For instance, the commitment to full employment in Assumption C of Beveridge
report spurred a debate in the War Cabinet Reconstruction Committee 1944 that was 'a masterpiece
in compromise’, with both right and left converging to support Keynesian style policies (Addison,
1992: 242). By 1945, Labour’s 'absolute priority' was bettering the material conditions of the
working class, adopting a pragmatic and ‘essentially conservative strategy’, rather than ideological
approach to campaigning, as shown by the manifesto claim to being ‘practical minded’.
Not only was Labour’s pragmatism a sign of consensus, but so was the Conservative’s response.
The progressive Tories were leading the way with reconstruction in the education sector, even
before the publication of the popular Beveridge report made it electorally advantageous to do so,
evidencing the extent to which consensus permeated Whitehall. Moreover, after 1945 the Tories
offered only ‘token opposition’ to the nationalisation of the Bank of England, coal mines, electricity,
gas, and railways, evidencing the continuation of consensus after the war. This was possible
because nationalisation was justi ed on the grounds of ef ciency and demand management,
particularly by Cripps and Morrison, rather than on socialist principles that would have been
unacceptable to the Conservatives. Thus, as Rubinstein corroborates, 1945-51 was not the start of
socialism, but rather the culmination of a 'long struggle’ for a welfare state, implying that, while the
Labour Party could claim an electoral mandate in 1945, that socialists could not (1979).
Having set out Addison’s case, I will argue that the ‘consensus’ argument unfairly relegates to the
role of socialist rhetoric to the ‘realm of symbolism’, ceasing to acknowledge the genuine
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, Kate Patrick 2 of 5 MT21W4 Tutorial Essay
ideological commitments to socialism within the party (Howell, 1977). While Addison (1992)
emphasises the continuity of the Labour Party from the war coalition into the late 1940s, when a
longer timeframe is adopted, it seems clear that the real continuity was manifest in the sustained
socialist message that had been spelled out in the 1930s. Brooke (1992) contests that the victory of
1945 ‘vindicated the message Labour had been advocating since 1939’, namely that a new world
was to be constructed using socialist measures like public ownership and the expansion of worker
participation in industry. For instance, when Attlee told the conference of British and Dominion
Labour Parties in 1944 that 'our economic objectives can be realised only by the application of
Socialist principles and policies’ this was consistent with Attlee’s 1937 The Labour Party in
Perspective (Brook, 1992: 311).
Moreover, it cannot be ignored that Let Us Face The Future explicitly stated that 'The Labour Party
is a Socialist Party and proud of it’, and this commitment was re ected in the speci c policies that it
laid out, in particular the primacy of public ownership. While Addison is correct that the Labour
was not unique in its advocation for nationalisation, the ‘uncompromising tone’ and ‘extensive list
of industries’ is evidence that Labour was motivated by ideological (ie a socialist dedication to the
redistribution of power) factors rather than the ef ciency justi cations the progressive
Conservatives and Keynesians were able to get behind (Francis, 1997). Moreover, the
nationalisation of iron and steel, as well as the attempt to nationalise sugar and societies, which
could not be justi ed on ef ciency grounds, came up against more than just ‘token opposition’,
evidencing how Labour’s commitment to public ownership went beyond that which one should
expect given a consensus hypothesis. Thus, the 1945 manifesto was 'more than just a rhetorical
ornament’, meaning that the ideological division between Labour and Tories, namely on the
distinction between public versus private ownership, was key and the election was not simply an
exercise in pragmatism (Francis, 1997).
Perhaps a quali cation must be made at this stage. While the leadership and majority of the Labour
Party was committed to socialism in 1945, there was a substantial portion of non-socialist trade
union leaders that were in fact only committed to the betterment of the working classes’ material
conditions, thus restricting how socialist Labour could be. Importantly, however, by 1945 for the
rst time trade union leaders made up less than half of the party’s MPs, with the ascendancy of the
professional middle class who tended to be more intellectually minded and ideologically motivated.
Moreover, my argument that the Labour Party was committed to socialism must not be construed as
an argument that each member held the same socialist philosophies. Far from it, as Francis (1997)
has detailed, there existed at least four over-lapping strands of socialist thought within the party
(Marxist, Fabianist, economic planning, and ethical socialist) that individuals subscribed to, that
meant Labour’s socialism was ‘ uid and unstable’ (1997: 16). Yet, the fact that Let Us Face the
Future, and Labour Believes in Britain, succeeded in attracting united support within the party
evidences the fact that the ideological strands were in general agreement over what socialism
entailed1. As such, I will follow Francis in suggesting that the Labour Party is best thought of as a
'federal alliance' of socialists, yet for this essay’s purposes this is suf ciently strong to support that
claim that the Party was socialist (1997:7).
Having established that the 1945 Labour Party can be considered socialist, I turn to whether the
landslide victory of 1945 was suf cient to constitute an electoral mandate. Fielding’s assertion that
the public were voting negatively against the Conservatives in 1945 implies that Labour’s majority
lacked substance and was not representative of an enthusiastic endorsement of socialism (1992). In
1945 the nation was 'weary of war’, a mood vocalised by Sydney Silverman who told the Labour
1 These principles were: equality of opportunity, income, and property; public ownership and central
planning to place economic power in hands of people; unlocking efficiency; the extension of democracy
(Francis, 1997).
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