RETREATING 75 years from the present day takes us back to the summer of 1950, which one-man history industry David Kynaston conjures up for readers with flow and flavour in his Austerity Britain 1945–51.  

If his book’s title suggests to us that this immediately post-war phase of Britain’s history has something in common with more recent living conditions and government policies, other features of the summer 1950 landscape look familiar too — notably an increased distaste on the part of the Clement Attlee-led government for encroaching on the licence of capitalism to do things its own way, and an eagerness for participation in war as Washington’s yes-man, coupled with a commitment to sharply raised “defence” (ie war) expenditure.  

Journalist Harold Wincott contemplated the Attlee regime harshly enough in the Financial Times on July 11 1950. Defining capitalism as being “in a parlous state,” he declared that some Labour ministers “realise the mischief they have done” (ie through nationalising a fifth of Britain’s economy, including gas, electricity, public transport and coal mines). “Mischief?”  

A general election on February 23 1950 had transformed the parliamentary situation to Conservative advantage. Labour’s mild election manifesto had, on the whole, focused on “the horrors of the past” inflicted by Conservative regimes. The Conservative manifesto, by contrast, had denied any intention to “cut the social services,” but, standing for “freedom for private enterprise,” called for reduced taxation and ending nationalisation.  

One voter, responding to a survey by Mass-Observation, took a no-nonsense view of the contest between Labour and the Tories, while giving the impression of walking off the page of a Jane Austen novel into the mid-20th century: “There isn’t a single gentleman in the Labour Party — with the exception of Attlee, and he’s too much of a gentleman to manage that crowd.”  

A radio broadcast (TV versions were for the future) by wartime premier and ongoing Conservative leader Sir Winston Churchill promised that he would, if once more Prime Minister, aim to achieve a better understanding with the USSR, avoiding “the hatreds of the cold war.” (Hatreds which he had nourished, despite being “a gentleman,” in his spring 1947 “Iron Curtain” Fulton, Missouri speech, when he claimed that although the USSR did not desire war, it had to be faced with Western military strength.)  

The election’s outcome was a narrow overall majority for Labour, with many of its 1945 election’s seats lost, but still ahead with 46.1 per cent of the votes compared with 43.5 per cent for the Tories. Both Communist Party MPs, Willie Gallacher for West Fife and Phil Piratin for Stepney, were now out.  

Public ownership of industries had been achieved with payouts to the owners (£164.6 million in the case of coal), compensation which, Ralph Miliband was to write, “could scarcely have been more generous,” freeing them up to own and invest elsewhere. Labour’s leaders being mostly something less than socialists, it was not surprising that the government’s position was now meek in relation to the issue of future public ownership — and the entitlement of Britain’s capitalists.  

In late June, a simmering civil war in Korea expanded dramatically. The impression was put out endlessly through Western media that the North had struck all along the border with the South against a surprised enemy. Among omissions from BBC radio and mainstream contemporary newspaper accounts were the nine months of border battles during 1949.  

Korea was a country divided arbitrarily into two at the 38th Parallel in August 1945 by US officers as Japan, at the Pacific war’s end, ceased to rule the country, which had been its colony for several decades.  

Soviet forces in the North were then supporting a revolutionary communist government under Kim Il Sung, which gained much community support from land reform at the expense of major landlords, while US forces were backing the landlord regime in the South. The South’s dictator, Syngman Rhee (a long-term US resident, flown back to the South in October 1945), was keen to provoke war with the north.  

The work of US historian Bruce Cumings offers a full and fair understanding of what went before June 25 1950, and what came later. While US combat forces had exited the South in 1949, financial support continued, and many US advisers, shadowing the South’s military, stayed closely involved.  

Soviet troops had left the North earlier, though ties between the Kim Il Sung government and both the USSR and mainland China stayed close. In the background was the Red Army’s full liberation of China by October 1949, and the escape of the conservative Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and his forces to the island of Taiwan.  

Cumings explains that the sudden escalation began in the Western Ongjin peninsula, and some hours later spread eastward. He does not rule out the possibility that the Ongjin fighting was initiated by the forces of the South. Civil wars, he comments, “have no single author.”  

As early as June 26, US intervention to support the Rhee regime was resolved. This was ratified two days later by the West-oriented UN security council, assisted by the absence of the Soviet representative and the presence of the Taiwan (“legitimate China”) representative. The government promptly put the British Pacific fleet under US orders, and 55,000 British troops were to be sent, of whom almost 700 were to die.  

On July 9, US military commander General MacArthur sent a confidential message home, causing the Joint Chiefs of Staff “to consider whether or not A-bombs should be made available” to him.  

In Britain, minority voices were raised against Western intervention. In mid-July, some Labour MPs on the left, led by Sydney Silverman, put down a Commons motion calling for a withdrawal of US forces, China’s admission to the UN security council and UN mediation of the conflict.  

Late that month, ex-MP Gallacher’s vehement article submitted to the Daily Express*, the News Chronicle and the Daily Herald (the last of these still moderately left-leaning) was refused by all three. His piece had begun: “Why should the British people, with all their great traditions, be drawn into a new world war by Yankified Labour and Tory leaders, on behalf of the big multi-millionaires of America?” (Striking a chord today, at least if “multi-millionaires” are replaced by “billionaires.”)  

In August, the three-year estimate for “defence” expenditure was lifted from £2.3m to £3.6m, a figure to be raised further to £4.7m in January 1951. An overload for Britain’s economy (with the pound sterling under long-term threat), and a reminder of today’s crudely belligerent military outlay plans.  

Within weeks of the escalation, the North’s army, pushing southwards, captured Seoul, but soon was pushed back across the 38th Parallel on October 1. It was at this moment that the Chinese government ordered support for the North, causing large Chinese forces to cross the Yalu River.  

At November’s end, President Truman inferred publicly that the use of nuclear weapons was not ruled out by stating that the field commander could use whatever weapons he thought fit. The threat caused “gentleman” Attlee to fly to Washington to plead for caution.

Privately, he argued, as his biographer John Bew tells us, that it would be disastrous to be caught up in a major war against China, whose government could be recognised (in place of Taiwan) as a way forward (an event deferred until 1971). It was announced that nuclear weapons would not be used without both British and US agreement.  

By spring 1951, after a second capture of Seoul by the North’s forces, and a subsequent retreat, the front had stabilised around the 38th Parallel, a position unchanged when a ceasefire but no peace settlement was achieved two years later.  

The North, meanwhile, was the victim of the most devastating, genocidal bombing campaign imaginable, in which valleys were flooded, napalm was a monstrous new weapon, and from which exceeding two million North Korean civilians are estimated to have died. (This summer, another genocide is being answered by a much broader international campaign than that levelled against the Korean intervention.)