History of England 1-6

Whether the Teddy boy was as great a source of societal pollution as many believed is doubtful; it was more significant that pollution as a whole had become an urgent matter of public health. When the mist of the Thames met the murk of the chimneys in a fog of eerie green, silence and blindness fell. For years, Londoners had told visitors not to trouble themselves about it, but any such insouciance lost its charm in 1952. In that year, the ‘London Smog’ claimed 4,000 lives. The gay, gaudy city that Monet had painted less than a century before was obliged to clear its lungs. On 5 July 1955, the Clean Air Act was passed, a somewhat delayed response to the smog that had struck in the coronation year.

A simple trade agreement between France and Germany in the late Forties was now taking root as the European Communities began to cohere. The cabinet’s Economic Policy Committee remained unconvinced on Europe. It was ‘against the interests of the United Kingdom to join the Common Market’, it asserted in November 1955. This was understandable. There was a confidence that England, supported by the Commonwealth and with her mighty transatlantic ally beside her, could retain her former stance.

In 1956, the island received a double irruption from East and West. Khrushchev and Bulganin arrived from the Soviet Union to begin an official visit to the UK. Little came of it in practical terms, but its symbolic significance was enough. Bullish, brash but shrewd, Khrushchev had nothing in common with Eden, who on this occasion offered little but a blustering assurance that Britain would go to war to guard her oil reserves. The visit was further marred by the mysterious loss of a British soldier around the wreck of a Russian submarine. The other irruption was the showing of Rock Around the Clock, a short American film about nothing in particular. Its significance was to be far more than symbolic, since it was the first rock-and-roll musical extravaganza.

The first signs could be felt of a fraying in the post-war consensus. On 1 June 1956, Macmillan warned Eden of financial collapse. Inflation would continue if Britain continued to live beyond its means. The promise of full employment had been central to the Attlee settlement, but, coupled with defence spending and overseas commitments, it was proving hard to sustain. From the disenchanted and disenfranchised Left came a new approach. In that year, Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism was published. Crosland remains an ambiguous figure in the annals of the Labour movement, and this in part reflects the ambiguity of his thought. His book was well regarded at the time, but it is little remembered now. The oversight is easily explained: his ideas were taken up, almost forty years later, by a politician far more ambitious and considerably more accommodating.

Crosland argued that the post-war consensus was in danger of failing its own goals. Nationalization had become an empty shibboleth. Socialists were in danger of mistaking means for ends. They must remember that their primary mission was to abolish poverty, not inequality. He wrote: ‘We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places.’ There had been too much flattening in the socialist vision; it was time for humanity to be lifted. In one respect, Crosland’s insights were tacitly acknowledged to be unanswerable. Nationalization needed nourishment, after all. The trope ‘while stocks last’ increasingly applied not just to necessities in the home, but to those that fed and fired the household. How long could coal, gas or electricity last?

Perhaps Calder Hall, now known as Sellafield, was named by someone with a sense of historical irony. No hall of the fading nobility needed to be demolished for this nuclear power station to replace it. Thus, on 17 October 1956, it became Britain’s first nuclear power station. The young queen opened it ‘with pride’. England was ready, in principle, to have her firesides warmed and her streets made safe by what Oppenheimer, the inventor of the Bomb, called ‘the destroyer of worlds’.

In 1956, England was to be weighed and found wanting. Far away, in a protectorate that had grown tired of being protected, a man had seized power – with cunning, bullets and a brilliant smile as his weapons. Gamal Abdel Nasser had plans for Egypt, and indeed for the whole Arab world. In what was proclaimed as a simple assertion of sovereignty, on 26 July 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal. This was taken badly in Westminster.