1. What party was elected after the war?

2. What was the home policy of the Labour Party?

3. What happened to the British Empire after the war?

After victory in Europe, Churchill suggested continuing the coalition government until Japan was defeated. Many of his Labour colleagues favoured this, fearing that an immediate election would give the Conservatives a majority on the strength of Churchill's prestige as war leader. At the Labour Party's annual conference, however, the temper of the delegates was so resolute for change that the most Attlee could offer Churchill was a continuance of the partnership until an October election. Churchill refused such a compromise and resigned.

In an electioneering broadcast, Churchill warned, in the same tones he had used to denounce the Nazis, of the dangers of a socialist Gestapo. His speech caused more laughter than alarm. When the results came through, Labour had 393 seats, the Conservatives 213, Liberals 12 and Independents 22. It was generally accepted that the armed services' vote had been influential in bringing Labour to office.

The basis of Labour's reforming plan was public ownership, with the nationalisation of key industries and sources of supply. This time there must be none of the post-1918 betrayals: this time there must be fair shares for all. The Bank of England, railways and mines were nationalised, fuel and power came under the state — known, derisively by some, as the Welfare State because of its introduction of a National Health Service, a more comprehensive National Insurance, and the National Assistance Act.

Although Labour persevered with its social legislation, it found that the account book could not be lightly disregarded. Factories had to be reconverted to peacetime use and compete once more in world markets. American Lend-Lease, generously granted throughout the conflict, was abruptly cut off. Without some kind of loan, the country would go bankrupt.

A team under Lord Keynes, the economist, negotiated a loan of £937,500,000 from the USA, with the proviso that sterling should be made fully convertible against other currencies by mid-1947.

Although the money was needed primarily for re-equipment of industry, the Americans pressed for a large part of it to be spent buying their films and tobacco. Matters were not helped by the 1946-47 winter, one of the worst in living memory, which brought people and machines to a halt for days on end.

Exports must come first, home expansion last. Britain had won a war; she now had to win the peace.

End of Empire

In March 1947 Lord Mountbatten was sent to India as viceroy to effect a smooth transition from British rule to that of the Indians themselves, for which both Hindus and Muslims had long been clamouring. It was not going to be easy, for, as the Muslim leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah pointed out: 'Hindus and Muslims have two different religious philosophies, social customs, literature.... The Muslims are not a minority as the word is commonly understood. Muslims are a nation.' Gandhi, leader of the Indian National Congress, which was largely Hindu, had always deplored any pro­posed split in the country as a 'vivisection of Mother India'; but in the end there had to be a partition of the main communities into India and Pakistan.

From many other regions there came demands for British withdrawal. Burma became independent. Newfoundland voted to join Canada. Egypt appealed to the United Nations to enforce withdrawal of British troops, and although no formal recommendation was made, Britain left Egypt in 1947.

Anti-British feeling in Arab countries was inflamed by Britain's part in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. At the same time the Jews were angered by British restrictions on the expansion of this state. After the First World War a League of Nations mandate had enjoined the British administration to 'place the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, while at the same time safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine'. Hitler's anti-Semitism had driven many refugees to seek a new life in this national home, but British quota restrictions denied many of them access. Immediately after the Second World War, outbreaks of terrorist activity marked the emergence of fervently nationalist groups. A United Nations special commission recommended partition between Jewish and Arab communities. In May 1948 Britain withdrew, and the state of Israel was born, to become at once the target of Arab attacks. Opposing states refused to acknowledge the intrinsic existence of Israel or to trade with her. Egypt denied Israel the use of the Suez canal, despite obligations to allow free passage to all shipping in peace and war.

In succeeding years what Harold Macmillan, prime minister between January 1957 and October 1963, called 'the wind of change' began to blow through Africa, Malaya and the West Indies. More colonies and protectorates demanded freedom, though few wished to sever all ties with the UK. The word 'Empire' faded from normal usage in favour of the concept of a Commonwealth of voluntarily associated states. The 900 million people still linked in this way belong to the following countries. (Where names have altered substantially, the earlier version is given in brackets.)

The United Kingdom Malaysia (Malaya, North

Canada Borneo—renamed Sahab—

Australia and Sarawak)

New Zealand Malta

Barbados Mauritius

Botswana (Bechuanaland) Nauru

Cyprus Nigeria

Fiji Pakistan (once part of India)

Gambia Sierra Leone

Ghana (Gold Coast) Singapore

Guyana (British Guiana) Sri Lanka (Ceylon)

India Swaziland

Jamaica Tanzania (Tanganyika)

Kenya Trinidad & Tobago

Lesotho (Basutoland) Uganda

Malawi (Nyasaland) Tonga

Western Samoa

Zambia (Northern Rhodesia)

Among those who once belonged to the Commonwealth but have left are Eire (1949), the Sudan (1956) and British Somaliland, which in 1960 became part of the Somali Democratic Republic. The republican Union of South Africa left in 1961. Rhodesia, known as Southern Rhodesia until the creation of Zambia, made a unilateral declaration of independence (U.D.I.) in 1965. The Crown colony of Aden, once a key base on the route to India, was relinquished to the People's Republic of Yemen in 1967.

Festival

Task 33. Answer the questions:

1. What was Britain commemorating in 1951?

2. What was the attitude of some people towards the idea of organizing a Festival? Why?

3. Was the Festival a success after all?

4. What branches of industry and business developed in post war Britain?

Post-war austerity, personified for many in the bleak features and policies of Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1947 and 1950, began to ease as a new decade approached. By early 1950 Britain had a balance of payments surplus, and exports were up 175 per cent on the pre-war figure. It was time for a modicum of rejoicing.

Cripps himself, when president of the Board of Trade in 1945, had given a favourable response to a suggestion that the centenary of Prince Albert's Great Exhibition should be worthily celebrated in 1951. A Government committee recommended an international exhibition 'to demonstrate to the world the recovery of the United Kingdom from the effects of war in the moral, cultural, spiritual, and material fields'. When a Festival Council got down to work, however, it discovered that there was neither money nor space to mount a spectacle of such size, and it was decided to concentrate on a purely national exhibition near the site of a new concert hall south of the Thames.

Newspapers made fun of the whole notion, the Government was attacked for squandering money, the planners found it difficult to get supplies of the right materials, and the pleasure gardens which had simultaneously been devised for Battersea Park suffered from one strike after another.

Yet when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth attended a service of dedication at St Paul's on 3rd May 1951, there was a festive mood in the air. Just as with the Great Exhibition of 1851, the scoffers remained to cheer. Britain suddenly discovered brilliant young designers of furniture, fabrics and ceramics in her midst. Eight and a half million people visited the festival before it closed in September, and were exhilarated by the achievements of which the country showed itself still capable.

The Second World War, like the first, had accelerated the rate of technical development. As far back as 1930 Frank Whittle had taken out a patent for a jet engine, but little official interest was shown until 1937. In 1941 he produced a successful engine for military aircraft. After the war Britain produced one of its most reliable commercial aircraft, the Vickers Viscount, in which a gas turbine powered a propeller; and in the 1950s, after some tragic disasters, the Comet was the first pure jet to go into commercial service.

While work on a hydrogen bomb, even more destructive than the A-bomb, brought a new threat to the world and gave rise to protest marches and demonstrations, Britain led the world in the peaceful use of atomic energy. In the autumn of 1956 Queen Elizabeth opened the first nuclear power station at Calder Hall in Cumberland.

British films during and immediately after the war set new stan­dards ; but the film business was menaced by a newcomer far more powerful than sound radio had ever been. In the 1920s John Logie Baird had experimented, first in Hastings and later in a house in Soho, London, with transmission of images by radio waves. In 1926 he demonstrated television transmission to the Royal Institute, and early in the war showed colour signals. The BBC inaugurated a limited service from Alexandra Palace in 1936, suspended it during the war, and started again in 1946.

An Independent Television Authority (ITA) was given Parliamentary sanction in 1954 to provide a service financed from advertising revenue, though advertisers were not allowed to influence programme content or introduce slogans into the actual programme as in the USA.

Series, serials and quiz shows kept people at home and resulted in the closure of many cinemas or their conversion into 'bingo' halls. Film companies refused at first to sell their old films to television, but succumbed in the end. Today a large proportion of the remaining studios' output is designed specifically for television. (Burke)

Part 6. From the Fall of The British Empire to The United Europe

Elizabeth II (1952 – present time)

Task 34. Find answers to the following questions: