Welsh Journals

and not even elites without roots can perpetuate themselves by the arts of expediency. B. K. MURRAY University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg THE ROAD TO 1945: British Politics and the Second World War. By Paul Addison. Jonathan Cape, 1975. Pp. 334. £ 6.50. In the general election of 1931 the Labour Party suffered a crushing, indeed traumatic, defeat; it was left demoralised, almost leaderless in parliament, fewer than fifty strong in the Commons. The recovery from that debacle was painfully slow: a hundred seats were regained in the 1935 election, but the main verdict was still a massive vote of no confidence in Labour. And the signs are that the party would have made only a modest further advance had there been an election in 1939. Yet, six years later, Labour won a landslide victory. How had this remarkable transformation come about? It was an immensely complicated process which is brilliantly dissected in this first-rate book. It is clear that the election of 1945 registered important changes at a number of different levels. It marked, for example, at what one might call the ethereal level, the triumph of the politics of optimism over the dispiriting pessimism that had dominated the pre-war decade exemplified in a fatalistic acceptance of mass unemployment, and a foreign policy inspired by a gloomy conviction in high places that diffi- culties were almost beyond management. The 1945 result indicated that there had been a substantial change in that conventional wisdom of the educated that extends or limits the range of action possible for any government. What had been dismissed out of hand as mad-hatter nonsence in 1931 had become, substantially as a result of the activity of Keynes and Beveridge, the respectable common-places of informed political discussion by 1945. Beginning in the thirties, the transformation was accelerated by the special circumstances of war. Necessity prodded slowly burgeoning con- viction into action and the Coalition government (in which Labour leaders got their chance to demonstrate their capacity and their reassuring moder- ation) became, almost incidentally, 'the greatest reforming ministry since 1906'. By 1943 the agenda for possible future action included social security for all, educational reform, a national health service, full employ- ment and Keynesian budgets. These changes at the top in politics were matched by a very considerable movement of popular opinion below. The onset of war, for which the country was materially so ill-prepared, and the disasters and perils of 1940 and subsequently profoundly moved the public mind. Mass-Observation estimated that between 1939 and 1942 two out of five people had changed their political outlook. 'We're actually changing from the property view to the sense of community', exulted J. B. Priestley, the popular guru of the moderate Left. The 1945 election, of course, was lost as well as won. Increasingly after 1939 the Conservatives were thrown on the defensive. The National