Five things any right minded person SHOULD have hated about 1940s Britain.
A few days ago, the Daily Mail published an article in which it referred to Ralph Miliband, late father of Labour leader Ed, as the “man who hated Britain”.
Using a quote from 1941 in which a 17-year-old Miliband senior laments the ‘nationalism’ of England, his adopted homeland, the Mail has attempted – let’s not mince words here – to smear Ed Miliband as a politician who wishes to “achieve his father’s vision” of “uncompromising Marxism”.
Admirably, Ed Miliband has responded to the Mail’s execrable piece, and you can read his response here, which is entitled ‘Why my father loved Britain’.
Let us say for a moment, purely for the sake of argument, that Ralph Miliband really did “hate” the Britain of 1941. Wasn’t there in fact quite a lot to hate about the Britain at this time? In fact, would it not mark one down as a particularly uncaring person to have been comfortable with the status quo in 1941?
Here are five things we would (we hope) have hated about Britain in 1941.
1. Racism
In 1940s England, and in London in particular, signs were known to appear in the windows of Bed & Breakfasts and lodging houses reading ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish, or, alternatively, Irish Need Not Apply – known as ‘INNA’ signs. Black workers arriving in Britain in the 1940s also very often faced discrimination and ‘colour bars’ preventing them from entering pubs and clubs.
Racism directed at non-white Britons went on for many years. A Tory candidate in the 1964 General Election even ran on the slogan ‘if you want a ni**er for your neighbour, vote Labour’.
2. Homophobia
In the 1940s, the police enforced laws prohibiting sexual behaviour between men, and gays and lesbians were prohibited from joining the military. Gay people were often treated like child molesters, with an attitude not so much ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ as ‘don’t do, don’t be, and don’t think about it’.
3. Sexism
The stigma attached to single mothers in the 1940s was so severe that many women were forced to seek dangerous backstreet abortions or give up their babies to adoption. Women were pressured to assume roles as wives and mothers and, apart from the brief interruption caused by the War, were excluded from the world of work.
Once the war ended, the male female division of labour reasserted itself once again, with employers forcing many women being laid off and others pushed back into lower-paying ‘female jobs’.
4. Empire
In the early 1940s, Britain presided over an empire which still spanned a large area of the globe. Forced Labour was common, and the imposition of steep taxes pushed many people into low paying jobs working for white-owned companies. During this period many had started to rebel against British rule, provoking in response severe repression on the part of the colonial authorities. In just one example of repression, in 1941 student protesters in Burma were charged by the British mounted police and shots were fired into a crowd of protesters led by Buddhist monks, killing 17 people
5. Inequality
1940s Britain was a society riddled with class prejudice and inequality. In 1936, six years before publication of the Beverage Report, which laid the foundations for today’s welfare state, the income of the best-off 1 in 1,000 peaked, before gradually falling relative to average incomes until 1979. As professor Danny Dorling puts it: “In the early 1940s, the ‘nine per cent’ – the rest of the best-off ten per cent less the richest one per cent – were paid an average salary of 2.4 times average incomes, the same as in 1959, 1969 and 1973. But as inequalities rose, by 1990 this ‘nine per cent’ were paid three times average incomes and that continued until 2007.”
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21 Responses to “‘The man who hated Britain’: why there was a lot to hate about 1940s Britain”
franwhi
Now you are all full of outrage at the odious DM when the leftish Scottish Govt have been facing a barrage of hostile right wing and often spiteful and personally hateful press from this paper’s so-called journalists for 5 years or more. Wake up and align yourselves and your party to the progressive forces in UK politics instead of being Better Together with the dark side of reactionary and anti-democratic views as espoused by Dacre et al. YES Scotland and anyone else who wants to join us in creating a fairer more representative democracy …or democracies across these islands.
Evan Smith
Just a few little quibbles with an otherwise good piece. Large scale ‘black’ immigration didn’t really start until the late 1940s, so the ‘no blacks…’ signs were more a feature of the 1950s. They were technically prohibited by the Race Relations Act in 1965.
Also there origins of the ‘n****r neighbour’ slogan is not as straightforward. I have written more about it here: http://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/looking-for-origins-of-racist-tory-slogan/
henrytinsley
Thank you for that excellent contribution. Nice to get a perspective from someone who lived through these great events. You should become a regular writer for LFF!
Guest
Good piece? It’s a display of cloying smugness that the author is so much more enlightened and tolerant than people who were born, lived and died decades before he was born.
Then the double think evident in the very title. Namely that the Daily Mail was wrong to say that Miliband Père hated Britain, but even if he did he had good reason to, but… wait!… I said the Daily Mail was wrong… what? White isn’t black, and am I on a zebra crossing?
It’s not a “little quibble” that the accompanying photograph isn’t even a first-hand image but a reconstruction of events purported to have taken place a quarter of a century later, or that the cited black workers didn’t arrive for at least another decade. It fatally undermines that claim.
In early 1940s, when Miliband Père arrived and wrote that Adrian Mole type diary entry, the general population’s first mass exposure to non-white faces had been from “tan Americans”… and were far more likely to be besotted by them, and enamoured by their extreme courtesy (especially to the women) over the often abrasive and Anglophobic white counterparts… to the latter’s violent disgust.
When the latter attempted to enforce Segregation on British streets and impose color (sic) bars in the pubs, the locals were more likely to weigh-in on the side of the former: up to and including all out street brawls.
As for sexism, homophobia and intolerance, bit weak. These were different times and the rest of the world wasn’t of a 2013 Britain level of tolerance either (in fact, a lot of it was worse than 1940s Britain… continental Europe for a start, never mind the US’ treatment of blacks).
Onto Empire, it was administered and served as profit for only a tiny proportion of the British population. This had been on its way out for some years beforehand, not just from outside forces but the complete enfranchisement of the British public which reached 100% only in 1929 (and ceased to be more than 100% – double votes from the university towns – in 1948), and didn’t above 30% until 1918.
It is nonsense to hold responsible for Empire people who never set foot outside Blighty or received any of the profit, and is redolent of someone who doesn’t feel any link to that period.
There was plenty of domestic criticism of Imperial policies at the time, but the best the author can do is find a single example of 17 deaths of Buddhist monks in Burma.
Two reasons this is a hostage to fortune:
i. The current situation of the Rohingya in Burma shows Buddhists – even ethnic Buddhists – are not necessarily unerringly tolerant social democrats.
ii. Miliband Père, rightly or wrongly (I say wrongly), was a committed supporter of the USSR. To date, their death toll had been closer to 17 millions… not all Stalin’s doing, as the anti-Stalinist RM might have insisted.
~alec
Colin A
You need to learn to separate your Judean People’s Fronts from the People’s Front of Judeahs. Miliband the elder was against Stalinism and the USSR.