BRITAIN AFTER WWII

Britain after WWII



Britain after WWII

Introduction

From 1929 to 1939, the years of the Great Depression, a liberal young Labour Party member of Parliament, Winston Churchill, the son of Parliament veteran Randolph Churchill, turned conservative, voicing opposition to self-government for India, making no secret his distrust of Hitler, and energetically urging Britain to prepare for eventual war. When Poland was invaded by the Nazis, a mutual protection treaty pulled Britain into the war in 1939 on the side of the Poles. Churchill was exonerated and public opinion supported his succession of the disgraced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister in 1940 (McLean, 1996).

Discussion

The darkest days of World War II followed. The British Army was almost lost when the Nazi advance across France pushed the Allies into the sea, forcing the dramatic evacuation of British forces at Dunkirk. The fall of France followed, then the Battle of Britain in the air, basically an aerial terrorist campaign against predominantly civilian targets designed to destroy the morale of the nation. Churchill's pugnacity and rousing speeches rallied the British to “never, never give up,” urging his compatriots to fight on the beaches, to fight in the streets, to fight in the countryside, refusing to surrender so that, “if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'” (Giles, 2001)

Churchill was able to secure military aid and moral support from the United States. After the Soviet Union and the United States entered the war in 1941, Churchill established close ties with leaders of what he called the “Grand Alliance.” Traveling ceaselessly throughout the war, he did much to coordinate military strategy and to ensure Hitler's defeat. His conferences with Roosevelt and Stalin also shaped postwar Europe (Quintin, 1947).

However, after the war, he was unresponsive to popular demands for social change and was defeated in the 1945 elections. As opposition leader, Churchill criticized the “welfare state” reforms of Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee and warned of the dangers of Soviet ambitions in his famous 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, which declared that “an Iron Curtain” had fallen across Europe (Eric, 2006).

But what followed were difficult days in terms of conservative power and ideology. Anthony Eden succeeded Churchill in April 1955, but retired after Britain was humiliated internationally in Egypt's seizure of the Suez Canal and Britain's failed invasion of the canal zone in January 1957. The aristocratic Sir Alec DouglasHome and Harold Macmillan led the conservatives next, but into a period of economic stagnation. In 1970, conservative Edward Heath, who was from a lowermiddle-class background, became prime minister. By then, British conservatives had accepted a variety of policies that ran counter to conservative tradition, such as the emergence of the welfare state, government acquisition of key industries, socialist intervention in economic affairs, and partnership in industry between trade unions and employers. Such compromises enabled the Conservative Party to regain power in 1951 and then to remain in office until 1964, but little differentiated them from the ...