Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

107 victory and now we must plan for a worthwhile peace. A people inured to the Collectivist habits and practices of three generations took the more easily to both the demands of total war and then post-war regeneration. The distinguished historian Ian Kershaw recently wrote ‘Britain was quite possibly a society more united during the war than it had ever been before or would be again. 2 The ‘fair shares for all’ mantra, like the expectation that everyone would ‘do his or her bit’, makes for a succinct descriptor of this mood. Rationing was popularly welcomed, even demanded. Careful nutritional standards were well managed and extreme shortages avoided. Interestingly, the sales of bacon and butter soared because before joblessness fell and wages rose, these had been luxuries for many families, while government subsidies kept down the price of essential foodstuffs. The Briton out-caloried the German by 2400 calories a day to 2000; indeed, that British total was higher than the average pre-war intake. Furthermore, the consumption of calories and proteins levelled out between the working and middle classes, adding culinary to cultural integration. And rationing, of course, was maintained throughout the decade and into the early 1950s. The Welfare State itself, far from being in the fevered political minds of the late 20 th century either the crimson glory of Socialism or what its acidic critic F.A. Hayek called ‘the Road to Serfdom’, had a quite benign derivation. 3 The phrase the Welfare State was coined by an Oxford academic Alfred Zimmern in 1934 and popularised by William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury; it was a counterweight to the ‘Warfare State’ at a time when both Fascist and Soviet totalitarian regimes were mocking parliamentary government for its feebleness in coping with the great depression. The amount of social care and medical service increased manifold during the war building on the reforms of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, with the formulation of a uniform system, with the National Health Service pivotal, more a consolidation than a reformation. Its progenitor William Beveridge saw it all in patriotic terms, believing that the universalism of welfare was, in the words of his biographer Jose Harris, ‘desirable to foster social solidarity and feelings of identification.’ 4 This sentiment of a unified people joining as one to fight a military enemy abroad and then a social enemy at home was a strong and durable one. 5 Fiscally, the crisis of war and the needs of peace alike resulted in high taxation, with usually a standard income tax rate of 50% and a top rate of 97.5% plus very high Purchase Tax on luxury goods. Throughout the 1940s the tax system was intently redistributive, with a high threshold before tax began and heavy subsidies of staple foods and social care. The nation was more egalitarian than at any time before or since. By 1951 the top rich 1% had watched aghast as its share of national wealth had fallen from 22% in 1914 to 10%. There were only 60 people in the country with more than £6000 a year to spend out of income. 6 What has been perhaps underrated in past studies has been the 1940s continuum in terms of domestic governance. While Winston Churchill Cricket and Society in the 1940s