SOCIALISM AND COLD WAR
705
ning, in the strict sense of that word,
i.e.
the settling of social priori–
ties in terms of a long-term plan. True, they transferred to public
ownership a number of basic industries and services and this enabled
them to control investment in the newly created public sector. But,
so far as over-all planning is concerned, all the Attlee Government
did was to retain the cumbersome system of wartime controls and
apply it- not unsuccessfully-to the increase of exports, the pre–
vention of a post-war collapse of agriculture, the stimulation of pri–
vate investment and the maintenance of full employment. Inevitably,
as the war receded into the past, these wartime controls became
more and more unpopular; even worse, they became more and more
irrelevant as wartime shortages disappeared and the terms of trade
unexpectedly improved.
Already by 1950 the Attlee Government
was uncertain whether to liberalize the economy or to substitute a
new system of Socialist peace-time planning for the war economy it
had taken over in 1945.
The irrelevance of wartime controls, however, was not fully
realized until after the Tories just scraped home in 1951 and pro–
ceeded to "set the people free." In the 1951 election, the Labour
Party piled up the biggest popular vote in its history, largely as the
result of predicting that the return of the Tories would lead not only
to war but also to mass unemployment, and it was the falsification
of these predictions that made the British electorate react so violent–
ly against nationalization. And so when the Election came in 1955,
British public opinion had swung from a fatuous pessimism about
the prospects of Western capitalism into an equally fatuous com-
I
placency.
Throughout the 1950's that mood persisted. Less than a de–
cade of expanding prosperity has been sufficient to erase from the
voter's mind the doubts and anxieties about Western free enterprise
which were still so powerful when the war finished; and to engender
a complacent optimism which dismisses nationalization as an ob–
solete concept, with no relevance to the second half of the twen–
tieth century.
It
is worth noticing, however, that these bland as–
sumptions are challenged as soon as one leaves the North Atlantic
area. Whatever doctrinal differences there may be between the
Communists of Russia and of China, of Poland and of .Czechoslo–
vakia, they all agree on the premise that, outside agriculture, old-
