British History 1945-1951
B R I T I S H H I S T O R Y 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 5 1
July 26th 1945. The war still raged in the Pacific, where thousands of British soldiers were still fighting the Japanese army. In Britain, now freed from the dangers of bombings and air raids, a nation had been to the polls. Churchill had broken off talks with the American and Russian leaders at the Potsdam Conference to return to Britain. The results of this General Election surprised the whole nation, not in the least Clement Attlee, the modest leader of the Labour party and now in his way to Buckingham Palace to receive instructions from the King to form a new government. The people of Britain had always gathered behind Winston Churchill as wartime leader, who, in those dark years, mobilised and encouraged an entire nation. He was still considered a war hero by many and this landslide victory by the Labour party came as a shock, not only to Churchill himself, who at the last moment claimed to have had a foreboding feeling of dread, but to Attlee, to most of the people of Britain, and indeed to international leaders such as the American president Truman and the Russian dictator Stalin. Less than 3 months earlier the crowds had poured onto the streets of London to cheer their wartime leader.
The main reasons why now many people had voted for Labour’s Clement Attlee, and not for war hero Winston Churchill, were the promises by the Labour party of implementing the Beveridge Report and its plans to create a welfare state. The Beveridge Report aimed to bring down the 5 giant evils of idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want. The report recommended the establishment of a National Health Service, National Insurance and assistance, family allowances, and stressed the importance of full-employment. All these created the welfare state, the core of which we still have today.
After the General Election clement Attlee busied himself to implement the Beveridge Report, but there were...
Please login to view the full essay...