(Jazz)
This is a tremendous moment.
The war is over.
I cry a little.
I think of my dearest friends,
of those men fighting in the services I've known.
Piccadilly was already a seething mass of people.
The hoarding around Eros was crowded with young people,
mainly from the Forces.
People were everywhere.
On shop fronts, up lamp standards, singing and shouting.
I can remember my father taking me to school one day.
There was a house absolutely ﬂat on the ﬂoor
and a woman standing outside and saying, "I only washed my windows yesterday."
The nurses' home was hit in 1940.
Then again in 1941, the whole hospital was hit
and it was completely destroyed.
The main surgeon, Mr Grey, he was killed
and quite a few of the doctors and nurses.
And two wards of maternity
with about 50 babies and mothers
and other casualties as well.
I always... Every 3rd of May, I could go over it again.
# When we go strolling in the park at night #
# All the darkness is a boon #
# Who cam if we're without a light #
# They can't black out the moon #
# I see you smiling in the cigarette glow #
# Though the picture fades too soon #
# But I see all... #
# Kiss me once Then kiss me twice #
# Then kiss me once again #
# It's been along, long time #
# Haven't felt like this, my dear #
# Since can't remember when #
# It's been along... #
Underlying our joy and thankfulness,
there is one uneasy question.
What about the future? What will happen now'?
Will we, the people who have won the war,
drive home our victory against fascism
By defeating our pre-war enemies of poverty and unemployment?
I think the expectation was,
'We are not going back to the Britain of the 1930s."
'We're..." It was "never again".
It wasn't only "never again" about war.
It was "never again“ about that kind of peace
where everything was run by rich people
for rich people.
The mood among the people that I was with
was that basically it was them and us.
The officers were on one side of the barrier
and we were on the other side of the barrier.
People were all very much afraid
that what happened after the First World War
would happen after the second, which was enormous poverty and adversity.
I mean, I worked with people in the last war who, basically between the wars,
had gone long periods without any jobs at all.
I don't think people were greedy for a lot of things those days.
They just wanted to live peaceful, have a job,
have children and have a home life.
I think just everybody wanted a good home life with their families, you know.
I was born 87 years ago in the slums of Liverpool
off Great Homer Street,
a street called Mellor Street.
I was one of eight children.
And we slept five in a bed.
In my bed there was three lads and two girls.
We got into bed of a night
with a bed full of vermin.
When I say full of vermin, I mean the bugs.
The ﬂeas were in hundreds in the beds.
And we got in the beds.
There was nothing we could do about it because they were in the building,
behind the wallpaper, in the skirting boards.
And we just got in that bed and lived with them.
And next morning when we went to school,
we would have the cane for having dirty knees.
Every Monday morning,
we were meant to take the bundles up to the pawn shops,
which were in the city area.
And I'd get on the trams
and the tram conductor would say, "Dalgleish is the next stop.“
"Browns. I'll be at Browns giving a good price today, ladies."
And when it got to the terminus, he'd say, "All away, Poverty Park
And it really was a poverty park.
The '30s for me, I can remember quite vividly, was no shoes on my feet.
Having spoonfuls of malt, this horrible malt,
when we went into school to try and stop the rickets.
And coming home from school
and you could smell some food
coming from somewhere.
Then all we used to have was a bowl of com ﬂakes or something like that.
Coming home in the evening, you'd probably have a big, big plate
full of swedes and potatoes with no meat.
They didn't have a carpet on the ﬂoor.
And when we used to visit, they'd scrubbed the ﬂoorboards.
And if they'd just scrubbed the ﬂoorboards,
they actually literally had paper down on the ﬂoor.
My grandfather's suit had to go
into the pawn shop on the Monday,
in order that they had some money not only to live,
but also for the youngest son, vino had a kidney complaint,
to pay for his doctor's fees.
Then they'd get it out again when he got his money on a Friday,
so that he could wear his suit to go to the pub.
Bread and jam was the usual thing they had.
They talk about bread and dripping.
You had to have beef to make dripping,
so the chances of having dripping were remote.
It was more often than not bread and jam.
In our house there was three children died
between the ages of...
...two and four.
Two died at the same time.
And I can recall
putting two coffins across our knees in a one-horse coach...
...and the one-horse coach taking us to the cemetery.
And as I recall,
them two coffins went on top of other coffins at the cemetery.
The other thing I can remember about the '30s
was the long periods
when, because of the militancy, they closed the pit down altogether
and we had to go picking coal off the tips.
My grandfather and my father,
when they heard the steam engine,
the steam train passing, they would come out to the back of the house
to count the number of trucks that were going up to the colliery
because with that knowledge they would know then
whether they had work for a day or two or for the week.
They used to call it the umbrella pit
because it was constantly opening and closing.
My father took me down to see the dole queue in Liverpool
and then he walked me the full length of it.
Then he walked me back so I could see all their faces.
And he said, “Now, remember that."
"Remember that and don't let it happen in your day.“
And I was ten.
We went to all the meetings in those days.
They were mostly out in parks or street corners.
And I got quite used to it,
so I was really pretty well educated as regards politics.
What really matters
is who controls industry
and the result of industry.
Hear, hear.
This rubbish about the banking system is the greatest.
Hear, hear.
You don't make money, you don't make wealth
by passing bits of paper to one another.
Close up the ranks. Fall in.
Join the great army of the children of the night
marching to the conquest of the future.
Marching to build Jerusalem
in England's green and pleasant land.
(crowd cheers)
I was 25 years of age...
...when I read my first book, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.
It just completely changed my life.
I couldn't sleep after reading The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.
I just thought, what fools everyone are.
How we've all been taken in and we're still being taken in.
We're just sucked into a false life of what it's all about.
When we were living in the slums off Great Homer Street,
we were the greatest empire in the world.
We had India, Africa, Canada, Australia.
The greatest empire in the world.
We were living in the worst slums in Europe.
My dad used to take an orange box round to the docks
and urge the dockers
to join a union, to band together with all the other...
"You'll never get anywhere if you don't."
"You've got to be solid." You know.
I was quite proud to go with him.
I could hear the men saying, "It's Johnny and the kid."
So I was quite proud to be the kid with Johnny.
Well, I've been thinking about the gaps between the houses.
What comes down has to go up again, you know.
Not like it used to be, I hope. Not with all those slums and tenements.
That's just the point.
We've got to see that the job's done decently this time.
Ya, but how? Do you think we can do anything about it?
Well, why not? If we can work together now
to look after the lives of the people here,
I don't see why we couldn't work together afterwards to clear up the mess
and help build a better world in which these things can't possibly happen.
I'll second that.
It's people like us that have been doing the work of the war,
and it's people like us that are going to do the work of the peace.
My mind goes back to a meeting we had in a troop ship.
Then one lad got up.
He said, "In the '30s, we had mass unemployment."
He said, "We don't have unemployment in wartime."
He said, "if you can have full employment killing Germans,
why can't you have full employment
building homes, building houses,
building schools, recruiting teachers,
recruiting nurses, recruiting doctors?"
And that argument registered.
We're starting something called ABCA.
We're going to have an hour's discussion every week on current affairs.
And it's going to come out of working time.
If there is injustice, inequality, ifs our fault for allowing it.
Why not write to your MP about it?
Yes, that's just it.
We've got a parliament and it's up to us to say who goes there
and to make sure they do their job when they get there.
"I am more and more suspicious
of the way this lecturing-to and education of the forces racket is run."
"I maintain most strongly
that any of these subjects which tend towards politics are wrong."
"For the love of life,
do do something about it
unless you want to have the creatures
coming back all pansy pink."
The experience of the war
taught people that when the stale needs you lo be organised collectively,
in fact, they'll force you into the army to be organised collectively,
and you can be incredibly powerful.
You can defeat fascism.
And they came back
imbued with that spirit of saying anything is possible.
Beveridge, a Liberal,
had been given the task of looking at the world
after the war,
and he identified five giants.
Poverty, unemployment, illness and so on.
Want must not be known again.
There must be no mass unemployment,
the giant evil of only yesterday.
Ignorance, said Sir William, no democracy can nowadays afford.
The evil of disease must be overthrown.
The voluntary hospital and the expensive nursing home
are not enough to maintain this nation in good health.
We are not fighting to preserve slums
which breed our own diseases just as swamps breed malaria.
No more generations must be stunted in squalor.
The Beveridge Report shows how to begin overthrowing the five giant evils.
It spurs us all to greater effort.
If we can produce so much for war, much can be done for peace.
You've got to realise
there was only 21 years between two wars.
And most of the electorate were well aware
of the fact that after the First World War, we had men out of work
we had men standing on street corners in blue uniforms
with no leg or no arm, something wrong,
and there was no jobs for them.
I don't think anybody wanted to ever see that again.
Put Labour in.
Vote Conservative.
Socialism must win.
Vote Liberal.
I'm for Churchill.
Attlee's the man.
Posters to the right of them, posters to the left of them,
volley and thunder. On July 5th, the...
Partly, the Tory Party was broken in its core
because of its attachment to appeasement.
So the coalition government, Churchill,
who comes to head in the war,
is actually a Labour administration
at its core.
"At its core" meaning the ministries in charge of industry and employment
and so forth are under Labour ministers.
Churchill's at the head of this.
Having come through the '30s
where there was mass unemployment,
coming through the war years
where there was, you know,
rationing and lack of food
and where the housing standard was very poor right across the country,
people who'd fought in the war,
people who'd supported the economy in the war effort,
they were looking for some son of
if you like, it was like a war or peace dividend.
Those were the key things that they were looking for.
And that's what the Labour Party Manifesto really addresses.
I mean, people looked back at the years of the 1930s, the 1920s,
saw the mass unemployment, the wars, the revolutions,
the appearance of the dictators, the misery that was caused
and said, you know, "There's something about the system as it worked then
which was almost inescapable. We've got to change it.“
My father was not an active trade unionist or anything.
He got a map of the world and he put it on the table and he said, "Look."
He said, "They grow wheat here, you get rubber from here,
you get oil from here and you get fruit from here."
"What we're looking for is an integrated world system
where everybody has what they need
and everything is developed for everybody.“
I thought that was absolutely amazing.
He said to me, "It's called socialism.“
And, you know, as a kid of ten,
I thought it was absolutely amazing and I still do.
All for one, one for all.
Well, ifs not greed.
No greed and selfishness.
Labour puts first things first.
Security from war, food, houses,
clothing, employment, leisure and social security for all
must come before the claims of the few
for more rent, interest and profit.
We have shown that we can organise the resources of the country to win the war.
We can do the same in peace.
Churchill and the Tories
went so far as to print tens of thousands of copies
of Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom
which is a book that basically says
if you start off interfering
with the economy just a little bit,
if the government just does just a little bit,
you set off down the road towards totalitarianism.
You end up with Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia,
just by introducing a little bit of welfare spending,
or maybe nationalising the odd industry. The Tories printed this.
What a shame it would be and what a folly to add to our load
the bitter quarrels with which the extreme socialists
are eager to convulse and exploit these critical years.
For the sake of the country and of your own happiness,
I call upon you to march with me under the banner of freedom,
towards the beacon lights of national prosperity and honour,
which must ever be our guide.
The election was fantastic. During the war,
we'd always sat and listened to Winston Churchill on the radio.
Everybody did. Everybody sat round the radio
and listened to Winston Churchill.
And as a kid, I mean, that was it to me. He was the leader.
This was, you know, incredible.
And I say this is no time to mince about,
to mince measures and fool around with weak governments.
Therefore I say, if you do not give a strong vote
to the National and Conservative government, which I...
And then suddenly,
my family started talking about something quite different.
We sat round and my father said they were going to vote Labour.
And I asked, well, what did that mean?
He explained and I said, "Why aren't you voting for Winston Churchill?"
And he said, “He got the guns out to the Tonypandy miners.“
I can only tell you that an enormous mass of work...
(crowd chants)
And we campaigned Number 10 Downing Street.
So, we went there and the whole domestic staff were turned out.
It was like Upstairs, Downstairs.
And the butler said, 'We're all Conservative in this house."
The maid at the back with the little bonnet said,
"And we'd lose our jobs if we weren't.“
(newsreel)
Labour will now have a majority
over all parties in a House of 640.
It was sensational.
Three weeks ago or more when you recorded your votes,
very few of you would have prophesied a working majority for Labour,
much less one of about 200 seats.
Newspapers carried the astonishing news to an amazed public.
Labour landslide.
On the polling day, I went to Transport House,
into the little room where we were watching the results.
On the epidiascope we saw all the Conservative seats falling.
And it was obviously a landslide.
Then the door opened.
Out of the bright sunshine into the dark room came Clem Attlee.
A BBC man said, "Will you say, Three cheers for the Prime Minister?
And I was too shy to do that.
Then that evening, I went to Central Hall, Westminster.
Attlee had just formed the government and he brought them onto the stage.
I was up in the gallery.
And so it was a very, very exciting period.
This is the first time in the history of this country
that a Labour movement with a socialist policy...
(cheering)
I have this evening accepted His Majesty's permission to form...
I ask from you all support that we shall need
to carry us through, triumphantly, through difficult years,
to the great era which is opening before us.
It was a real triumphant day.
Everybody was joyous.
We had a little street party where we were living.
It was a signal that things were going to be different.
One wasn't going to be ruled by old principles.
There used to be messages coming down on top of the empty drams
saying, “Labour seats here. We won four seats."
All of a sudden he come out and said, "Labour won a landslide victory."
And these hardened miners... And they were a hard kin.
They were rough and they were tough you know what I mean?
They would take anything that the boss ever, ever threw at them,
but the tears were coming down their cheeks, because...
I said to my miner, I said, "Well, what's the matter?"
He said, "At last. We are going to take control of our own lives," he said.
"This new government will make a change," he said.
There was no wild optimism,
at least not in the higher ranks
of the civil service and the government
because everyone knew that we faced
an almost impossible economic situation.
The country had sold all its foreign investments.
It had lost most of its ships,
it had entirely run out of dollars
and industry was about three-quarters engaged
in producing munitions of war which you no longer wanted.
The economy had to grow very, very rapidly
at the end of the Second World War.
If you could imagine that only Britain and the United States,
it was only those countries' industrial capacity that survived to any extent.
The rest had been razed to the ground or had been dismantled
by the Nazis primarily.
So the world actually needed a lot of manufactured goods to be made.
But Britain had gone through a ten-year period of depression.
So, at the end of the war, Britain had a very key role
to basically fill this gap in products around the world.
And British industry was very, very weak.
So the government decided
that the key, if you like, inputs and infrastructure that industry required
had to be nationalised on a very large scale
to be able to step up that production.
We said we would bring the pits into public ownership,
the railways into public ownership,
we would build up the National Health Service,
we would build up industry generally,
and presented it in terms of this list of objectives
you might have in wartime.
This is what you've got to do and we'll do it.
And it was credible for that reason.
Of course for the Labour Party,
the natural language
for trade unionists
and for people struggling together
is that we should own things together.
It's not, "Let's fight each other
to see who can get on top of the other one and benefit.“
The Peasants' Revolt, 1381.
You have John Ball who is a, you know, hedge priest,
a priest who's been basically expelled from the state Church
but is continuing to preach to the commonality.
He says that nothing will go well in England
until all things are held in common.
It reoccurs in the 17th century in the English Revolution
with the diggers who take over St George's Hill in Surrey
and begin to till the land as common land.
It reoccurs in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution
when the utopian socialists like Robert Owen set up factories.
He was himself a factory owner, but he sets up a kind of model community
with the idea that it will have all things held in common,
that there will be some degree of control in it.
So all the way through human history, in one guise or another,
this thought is constantly being reiterated,
suppressed, goes underground, explodes again in a different form.
In all their many jobs, they are Britain.
Public services.
Manual workers.
Cleaners.
Caterers.
Street sellers.
Government workers.
Distributive trades.
Women workers.
Miners.
Transport drivers.
Steel men.
For seven years we, the people of Britain, fought a war for mankind.
Today we fight for our own survival.
This battle also we shall win.
I can't recall properly how we got medical attention.
I think there was a place we went to, a dispensary.
It was a huge place and there was always a queue there every time you went.
A dispensary of some sort.
And you got some son of medicines there.
But obviously it wasn't working...
...because funerals were always going about.
Well, before the health service,
money was the prime mover,
or lack of it.
I think a farm worker
got six shillings a week.
He would probably pay a shilling rent on that.
That left him very, very little, and most had large families.
The money was not there, so they turned to folk remedies.
"Oh, my grandma knows what to do with that," type thing.
For instance, tonsillitis,
they'd get someone
that had got sweaty socks,
and something out of the sweat,
they'd put round their neck and that was supposed to cure them,
but quite often it resulted in ear infection.
For the working man or the working woman,
there was National Health lnsurance cover.
The panel. You got onto the doctor's list.
Your family did not.
Your family might be covered by some son of little insurance scheme:
the Hospital Saturday Fund or sixpence or a shilling a week
that you paid for each in the hope that, if anything did happen,
you'd be able to get some son of cover for care.
You had to pay. And...
My mother was quite sick at the time.
My father was having to go to work in agony, needing surgery,
but because they didn't pay sick pay...
This was before the railways were nationalised.
They didn't pay sick pay, so he was going to work in agony
to pay five shillings for the doctor to put his foot on that doormat.
That was before you got any help, you know,
advice on what was wrong with you or anything.
But the so-and-so knew my mother was dying,
so kept coming back for his five shillings.
The doctors were private people.
They used to come and visit you.
They'd charge you maybe half a crown a visit.
Then they'd probably charge you half a crown for a bottle of medicine
or something of that kind.
And very often you'd got,
say, three or four in a family
that wanted treatment at the same time,
well, the doctor would do it on credit
and then he would often double up as a credit collector.
We used to have collectors
who used to come on a Friday at half past three,
ready to get out on the streets by four o'clock.
The secret was to get the collector into the patient's home
before the insurance agent arrived,
because if they paid the insurance agent first,
there was never any money left for the doctors' collector.
So you would occasionally go to a house,
walk up to the door.
You could hear life going on
behind the door.
And as soon as you knocked at the door, dead silence.
Dead silence and you thought, "I'm sure I heard somebody."
Knock again, still dead silence.
On one occasion, a little girl eventually came to the door and said,
"My mum says she's not in.“
My mother was on her tenth child
and she sent me up to get the nurse.
I run up and get the nurse because every child had to be born at home.
She came down and I could just hear mumbling and going on up there.
I heard the baby crying.
Then the next thing, I see my mother being carried downstairs on a stretcher.
And my brothers was crying.
Optimistic, I said, "Our mam is going to be alright."
"Don't worry about Mam. Mam is good.“
And as she went past, she just squeezed my hand.
Somehow I knew things weren't right and she...
I came home from school that day and my cousin had come round to me.
He put his arm round me and he said, "Ray, Mam is dead."
And of course I cried my eyes out.
And what really set the fire going inside me
was when my father was also crying.
The doctor put his hand out and he said, "George," he said,
"Winnie died," he said, for the want of a pint of blood
And he said, 'Winnie died for a hospital bed."
He said, “Winnie died for the want of an abortion."
I ran up to the mountain with my mother's bonnet,
and I said to that God up there;
because we all went to chapel; we were strong chapel;
"if you're a decent God up there," I said,
"my mam was the most wonderful woman in the world.“
My brothers and sisters have just been dragged off to the orphanage."
"Give us our mam back. Give me my family back."
I genuinely believed when I went to bed that night
that my mam would come back the next morning.
From that point on, I was an atheist,
because I realised that the only thing,
the only persons that could improve the situation was ourselves.
This leaﬂet is coming through your letterbox one day soon,
or maybe you've already had your copy.
Read it carefully.
It tells you what the new National Health Service is
and how you can use what it offers.
Hospitals and specialist services, medicines, drugs and appliances,
care of the teeth, care of the eyes,
maternity services, home health services.
The grand ambition really
was to provide healthcare as necessary to the public at large.
It was very exciting, you know.
One knew that there wasn't very much stuff around to do it with.
We had old stock,
the hospitals,
we had very maldistributed medical services across the country.
There were some areas
which were very poorly supplied with hospital services.
Bevan was an extraordinary man.
He nationalised the whole damn lot.
Everything that claimed to be a hospital was nationalised,
which was not at all what the Labour Party had expected or voted for.
They had all expected for the hospitals to be owned and run
by local authorities, by local government.
He made a lot of enemies that way.
But you, the public,
are interested in health no less than doctors and in health services too.
We all want better health services and better health,
but in organising them,
let's make sure that your doctor doesn't become the state's doctor.
Nye Bevan was demonised,
as I'm sure you're well aware.
The British media have a way of picking on somebody
and turning them into a demon.
They were aided and abetted in that by the BNIA
who regarded him as evil incarnate.
It's obviously quite a job
sending out the BMA plebiscite to 56,000 doctors
asking them, roughly speaking, whether they approve of Mr Bevan's scheme.
Lord Moran, as president
of the Royal College of Physicians,
did the deal with Nye Bevan which brought the NHS into existence.
He managed to persuade Bevan
to drop the notion of a salaried service for general practitioners.
That sort of killed a lot of the fear amongst general practitioners.
But he also got the agreement
to allow private practice to continue for the consultants
and also for merit awards and various other things,
which, as you may recall,
enabled Nye Bevan to say shortly afterwards when asked how he'd done it,
"I stuffed their mouths with gold."
Well, this is the birth of the National Health Service.
This is Nye Bevan and the matron, Anne Dolan,
walking from the main building down towards a gate.
They said this was handing over the key of the hospital.
There wasn't a key handed over.
It was just... That was just the way they said the health service was born.
The thing that stands out,
it sounds so petty, this, but we had jam scones for tea.
Do you remember that? Each and every one of us.
Food was still rationed.
We had jam scones for tea and, oh, dear God, that was marvellous.
I never met the man myself, but I do realise that he was a visionary.
He was very, very passionate about this vision of his.
I admire anyone who can take and drive through a scheme that big,
countrywide.
People don't have to worry about being ill.
When they are ill,
they know that they will get the best possible impartial treatment,
because there's no commercial element
to the relationship between a doctor and a patient.
So if you go to your doctor
you know the advice that you get
will be based on
what's best for you clinically.
It won't be about selling you care if you can afford it
or withholding care from you if you can't afford it.
I'd been to see a family
in which there was a child that was coughing, pretty sick.
So I left a bottle of medicine, as one did in those days.
I came back the next day and the mother met me at the door.
I said, "Hows little Johnny?“
And she said, "Oh, he's fine.“
I heard a lot of coughing and spluttering at the top of the stairs.
I said, "He doesn't sound terribly good."
'Would you like me to go up and see him?"
She said, 'Well, Doctor, no,
it's not Johnny, ifs Bill, his brother."
"I've given him some of the medicine that you left for Johnny."
I said, "Well, let me go up and see him.“
She said, "I'm sorry, Doctor. We can't afford it."
And I said, "Today, July 5th, it'll cost you nothing."
And I was able to go up and I've never forgotten that moment in my life.
Dentures.
Of course, dentistry was free under the NHS initially.
It jolly well ain't now, as I know it.
But I think that was it. There was this huge surge.
People got spectacles for the first time in their lives.
I actually know one old man who carried it around with him.
It was the bottom of a bottle a glass bottle.
He used to use that as a spyglass to read with.
He got his first pair of specs when he was about 70.
Julian Tudor Hart is an extraordinary GP.
He works in a small mining village in the Welsh valleys called Glynncorrwg.
There he revolutionised the way GPs provide care for their patients.
They identified all those people
who they knew needed looking after.
The people with high blood pressure.
So they made a register and they called them in.
Instead of saying, "Come back when you feel sick,"
they said, "I'm going to see you regularly
and sort your blood pressure out."
By so doing, they reduced the deaths by complications by nearly 50 percent.
Ever since then, we've had proactive healthcare.
I think we can use the health service
as a model for socialism.
I think we can learn how to be socialist in the health service.
I think the health service, a free service where we pool the risks
so that everybody feels responsible for everybody else,
we are our brothers' keepers and our sisters' keepers.
- Hiya, Tom. - Good morning, Doc.
How are you?
I think my chest is worse than usual.
I think I caught a cold. I'm full up.
Feeling comfortable
with being your brother's and your sister's keeper
is very, very important.
It means you are a more civilised country.
I am very proud that our country produced the National Health Service.
If I were an American,
I would be ashamed that I live in such a rich country
that still can't afford to have generous ideas.
Well, there'd been a debate
going on for almost 40 years
about the benefits of nationalisation of the railways.
They saw the waste and the duplication of railway lines
and the bureaucracy of the private companies
and said that society would benefit from public ownership.
It formed a sort of unstoppable argument
to say that the railways
had to be nationalised
for the public interest
and also in order to rebuild the country.
It was a queer system of working
because we could have a train
leave Exeter Central
going, say, down to North Devon,
and he could go down the bank
and stay there 45 minutes for a pathway through Exeter St David's,
because the signalmen on the Great Western
were told to give preference to the Great Western.
You were working against each other.
The whole history of the railways in Britain
is an example of why railways are a natural monopoly.
Numerous railway lines were built,
often connecting the same cities together.
Subsequently the companies that owned them went bankrupt.
The clear lesson of that is that the railways are a natural monopoly,
in the same way that providing drinking water or providing electricity
or gas or any other utility item.
(newsreel)
In 1947, by Act of Parliament,
Britain set up the British Transport Commission.
Its task: to make all transport work as one.
Don't forget, it wasn't the nationalisation of the railways.
It was public ownership of all forms of transport,
which was road haulage, it was airways,
it was, you know, everything that... and the canals, everything.
One of the first dramatic steps
was to get rid of something in Euston called the clearing house
which was a huge office, full of about 400 clerks
whose job was to pass chitties from one to another
representing charges from one private railway company
on another private railway company
for use of their engines, their wagons, their rolling stock,
their signal boxes, whatever it might be.
So there was a sort of a paper economy
to represent the charges and the notional costs
between the different private railway companies
which employed hundreds and hundreds of clerks
in essentially a completely unnecessary task.
In 1948, with the creation of the British Railways Board,
that clearing house was abolished
and those clerks went to do other jobs,
productive, socially useful jobs in the railway industry.
The advertising department seemed to have a heyday
because they recruited more staff
and they had ladders and buckets of paste and so forth.
They were altering everything.
Wages increased under nationalisation.
Eventually, in the 1950s, it brought about
probably the most important industrial agreement in Britain
ever negotiated by trade unions,
which was an agreement
which effectively meant no compulsory redundancies for railway workers.
# Without rhythm #
# A train could never go without rhythm #
# A troop could never roll without rhythm #
# The day would never go because rhythm #
# Is the thing that makes the world go round #
# Without rhythm #
# A poet couldn't rhyme without rhythm #
# Could never tell the time without rhythm #
# Wouldn't hear the chime because rhythm #
# Isthe thing that makes the clock go round I
In the 1930s, first of all,
there was a tremendous depression in the coalface.
The mines were run by private enterprise.
They were opened and closed at the drop of a hat.
Markets determined whether miners worked or did not work
and it was a really, really bad period.
On the onset of war, obviously,
the government couldn't allow these coal owners to run the mines
in the fashion they'd run them before,
not only opening and shutting, but a lack of investment,
which showed tremendously up
the inadequacies of the industry.
The coal industry was vital during the war.
That's why the government, the National government,
had to take over the control of the coalmines.
The priority was coal. The priority was always coal.
You got paid for the number of drams, coal tubs, that you filled per day.
You didn't get paid for putting props up to keep the roof up.
And I was working with my miner and he was a lovely guy.
I was looking at the top and I could see that we hadn't got any posts up.
We should have put the posts up,
but then the horse come up with an empty tub.
They said if you can fill this quick, we'll give you another one.
So, bugger the post, bugger the props, smash into the coal.
And then all of a sudden, down came the roof. Down came the roof.
Now, I was on the far end of it and I got covered.
But when I looked up, I could see Fred. I could see Fred.
He was under this huge rock and his feet were kicking.
And I screamed and I run down.
I got the big, big wedge,
which we put in front of the drams in case it runs away.
I ran up and I was screaming, "Fred, Fred, Fred!"
I tried to knock this.
I was screaming all the time it happened
and the other miners were all coming down.
Eventually we picked it up, but Fred was dead.
And why did he die?
He died because the priority was coal.
And the least priority of all was safely.
There's only one word to describe the coal owners.
They were tyrants. They were tyrants who not only owned the mines,
they thought they owned the people who worked in the mines.
And to a degree, they did.
A man's sons had been stealing apples off a tree in the coal owner's grounds.
The man was dismissed and thrown out of his house.
That was the type of people that were running the mining industry in Durham.
Some were related to the royal family, of all people.
The Bowes-Lyons were big coal owners in Durham.
Lord Lambton was a big coal owner in Durham.
Lord Londonderry was a big coal owner in Durham.
These people were there for only one thing: profit.
They made sure they got profit
and anyone who stood in their way was treated very, very harshly.
When you look at Denaby and Cadeby, what happened there.
They evicted all the miners
for withdrawing their labour.
The miners and their families.
Threw 'em out of their homes
just because they withdrew their labour
to increase the wages.
Them sort of people are despicable.
That is the right word, isn't it?
(Newsreel)
One of the ceremonies
marking the transfer of the ownership of British coalmines
took place on the roof of Lansdowne House in London
where Lord Hyndley, the chairman, hoisted the National Coal Board ﬂag.
And so the mines passed into national ownership
on the first day of the New Year.
Though nationalisation is, of course, a long-term policy,
January 1st, 1947, was undoubtedly the day the miners had been waiting for.
We had these fantastic speeches
and the cheers were going up.
"At last we're going to have safety in the mine."
'We're going to have water infusion in the colliery."
"Safety is going to be the key priority. We have won."
And I thought, “What a wonderful day."
And everybody was cheering, laughing, crying, dancing.
Even the wives were up there as well.
At High Blantyre, Lanarkshire, is Andrew McNulty,
veteran fighter for miners' rights
and contemporary of Bob Smillie and William Small.
Above Dickson Pit where his father and grandfather,
victims of two great disasters, lie buried,
McNulty unfurls the ﬂag of the National Coal Board.
The ceremonies mark the taking over of the mines by the nation.
When I was the youngest member in 1947, they unveiled a plaque.
They just sent for us down there.
Never got nowt, like. You had to still do the same shift.
My father had to come up with us.
My father thought I'd done something wrong.
He said, "What have you been doing now?“
I says, "I haven't done owt wrong."
They took us up and unveiled the plaque.
They had the youngest member, I was the youngest member,
and the oldest member, somebody called Ford.
The atmosphere wasn't quite the same this year.
For the first time, the management was invited.
This was the first Durham rally since the pits were handed to the people.
Coal Board representatives took part in the celebrations.
The mines were now owned by the people
and run for and on behalf of the people.
The elderly miners, obviously, it was their utopia.
They'd been promised this since 1919.
The whole country is watching
to see how this great new organisation,
this new adventure, this new experiment, comes out.
The great experiment of socialism in a democracy
depends on you.
The way nationalisation was done was on a centralized system, top down.
The chairman of the National Coal Board ran all the pits
in the way the private owner used to.
I'm not saying it wasn't a better system, because it was.
But at the same time the idea that people vino worked in industry
had any say in how the industry was run was a completely foreign idea.
I got myself well annoyed I'll tell you for why.
A leopard cannot change its spots.
We had officials at this colliery that still had that in their mind,
you know, that they would not pull their weight
the same as they would under private enterprise.
In fact, at a meeting of the consultative committee,
I accused them of indirect sabotage of production
since the mines were nationalised.
And I say the best thing we could have done when the mines was nationalised,
put them into a boat with a false bottom and put them into North Sea
and let them swim back. That's what they should have done.
Now, the first humiliation I ever got was our own agent and manager.
I'm going to quote his name on this incident.
He was called Major Brookes.
He was publicly denounced as a tyrant
by our own lodge officials in the branch,
because of his attitude towards the men. A tyrant.
And yet that man was made chairman of the Regional Coal Board.
That was the first humiliation. You can understand how I felt.
Who's put him there? This was the Labour government.
Now, the second incident, I'm standing against Manny Shinwell at Durham.
He was Ministry of Fuel and Power.
He gets up and he says, "I take great pride in being the man responsible
for appointing Lord Hyndley as chairman of the National Coal Board
Lord Hyndley spoke against nationalisation, didn't believe in it.
I says, 'What sort of a nationalisation have we got?"
"The same old hand back in power."
I think the rest of the communities, the welfares,
the libraries, the reading rooms, the miners' homes,
that was improved under nationalisation.
Dramatically improved under nationalisation.
But in the pits, it was still the same old struggle.
Our safety improved tremendously. Safety committees were set up.
Investment went in, which meant safety was more important.
It must have felt like it was the beginning of a new world.
It succeeded
because you had central planning.
The capital cost of building power stations and transmission systems
across the whole of the UK,
in current-day costings, you're talking tens of billions of pounds,
so you needed central control to be able to fund such an operation.
Most of the gas, water and electricity
was part of the local authority council-run services.
There was no national structure to it.
Gas, electricity, water; they tend to form natural monopolies.
They tend to be things that can only be done efficiently
on a very, very large scale.
There's not much point building two separate distribution systems
of water in a city. You have one and everybody uses it
because it's the same stuff that comes out of the tap.
If you allow private competition to be that one supplier,
all the advantages that are claimed for private enterprise suddenly disappear.
So you take it into public ownership and that way you can set the prices,
you can set long-term investment for the utility,
you can start to control and manage how the thing's distributed.
At the end of the war, we had two problems.
We had the inherited slums from the '30s and we had the war damage.
We had millions of people coming home from the war wanting to get married,
set up home and there was an acute housing shortage.
So what the Labour government did was to authorise local authorities
to build houses for rent rather than for sale.
I think it's very hard on the young people out of the forces, newly married,
who don't stand a chance at all.
I should be really very happy when my husband comes home
and I have a house for him to come to from Singapore.
Well, I only want to say I put my application in in 1935
and I'm still waiting for a house. Why?
With repeated applications renewed...
Well, I've been married six years now.
Two children and in one room only.
One room for four. I think it's a shame.
It's about time something was done.
I used to go queue up at the council offices every Monday morning
and there'd be a queue about a mile long,
all the women grumbling, of course. Everybody trying to get in there.
One particular morning,
this lady came out in a fur coat and held up a key.
"I've got one," she said.
“L let him lock the door and have what he wanted."
So I said, “Well, if that's the way I'm going to get one, I'll go without."
Well, they told us we'd have to have another 60 points at least
before we stood a chance of having a place.
We'd always planned to have four children.
So I said to Ben, 'Well, let's have another baby.“
'We'll get a house then."
So after a lot of persuasion, we decided.
We had another baby.
We got down there and they said, 'We're very sorry, Mrs Adams,
but about 300 other couples did the same as you that night.“
And we were back to square one,
in a worse position, really, with another baby on the way
and, you know, no place to put it.
We had to find out everything
about this great city we were planning to rebuild.
Everything about its history and its geography,
its people and the way they live.
We had to find out how much of it had been totally destroyed
and how much of it was in such a bad state
that it would have to be rebuilt anyway.
And that didn't just mean the bombed buildings.
The housebuilding programme is enormous.
Target of 200-300,000 homes a year constructed after the end of the war.
This is an economy that is absolutely battered
as a result of six years of total warfare.
So the scale of the ambition of what was being achieved
is really quite unbelievable.
First, let's look at one of the neighbourhoods
and see how that's arranged.
Here, near the centre, is the junior school.
The people would live in streets or squares of terraced houses,
each with its own private garden.
So it's not an inhuman plan at all,
but one that is designed to make life better and pleasanter for all of us.
And so we started in 1945 with great expectations, with great enthusiasm,
to try and build the new London, to make good all the devastation of wartime,
to really provide a new London for the people who deserved it,
trying to give them a better kind of environment than they'd ever had before.
It was Bevan. He was the Minister for Health and Housing.
He very much saw the need for housing
in terms of the knock-on effects poor housing was having on health.
The need at the present time is to build houses for poor people.
(applause)
I am not prepared to associate myself with a policy
where well-to-do people can afford to build luxury homes
and poor people go without homes.
(applause)
His attitude was, “Nothing but the best is good enough for the working class."
'We are going to have really good houses."
And he built really good houses.
The Labour government not only housed people, they housed them well.
The broadest objective was human welfare.
Human welfare in terms of health, so that everybody could be healthy,
everybody could have a reasonable diet,
everybody could have a reasonable space to live in.
There would be no illnesses consequent on bad housing,
so obviously, housing was the most important priority.
He insisted on certain minimum standards
which many at that time
thought were probably too good
for ordinary working-class people.
I shall never forget the uproar that occurred
when he proposed to put upstairs and downstairs loos
in order that the kids didn't have to go upstairs
every time they came in from the garden.
Planning is absolutely important.
I mean, if you look at all the most successful housing developments
where there are libraries and parks and even a swimming pool
and all sorts of facilities provided as part of the development
or whether it's the new towns.
The schools were being planned alongside the housing
and the doctors' surgeries and the employment.
So it was just perfect for young families.
The new house had French windows.
We laid in this room on these mattresses.
When we woke up in the morning, there was all this light.
There were stairs and a bathroom.
You know, like that.
So, yes, it were brilliant.
Me and my dad,
we set about building a garden.
You loved to get rocks and make rockeries and do all that.
So yes, it were brilliant.
I moved into a council house not long after I got married.
It was the best thing that ever happened in my life.
To see a house with a bathroom in it and a back garden...
I was completely taken in.
And the council houses for people in them days
was the bat thing that ever happened for them.
My grandfather started to hear about the new-town proposals
after the election.
So, they applied for a council house.
He was offered work building the houses.
This arrived in April, 1947,
only a year after Stevenage was designated as a new town.
"Dear sir, I am now able to inform you
that the house will be ready for your occupation
about 19th of April, 1947."
"The rent will be, until further notice,
17 shillings and four pence per week, including rates and water charges."
"Yours faithfully, Clerk of the Council."
Ah. gosh!
And this is some photographs of him
with his workmates building various things in the new town.
That's the bandstand that he built.
You say he carried this round with him?
Yes, he carried it in his wallet for the rest of his life.
There were only a few things he carried in his wallet.
The telegram he received when he was working in the West Country
to say my mother had been born
and the letter of commendation he'd got from the Festival of Britain.
So it was up there in the sort of great events of his life, I think.
I think the achievements of that government
rank alongside the achievements of any other government that's ever been,
anywhere in the world.
I think that took British people from real, real poverty
where they didn't have any hope.
It brought full employment, it brought housing,
it brought many, many opportunities.
The people who got that through should be looked upon as working-class heroes.
They lifted us from an era when poverty was rife,
when illness was rife,
and it allowed everybody to have healthcare from the cradle to the grave.
And anybody vino tampers with that,
people should attack them in as many ways as possible.
# Life is just a bowl of cherries #
# So live and laugh at it all #
I would just like to remember some words of St Francis of Assisi
which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment.
"Where there is discord may we bring harmony.
'Where there is error, may we bring truth."
'Where there is doubt, may we bring faith."
"And where there is despair, may we bring hope.“
Along came Thatcher
and suddenly it was all about the individual.
You know, the important thing was let's get rich and it's all about me.
And the public services really suffered under this.
British industry had become uncompetitive
because of a lack of investment.
The second factor was that there was a mass overcapacity
in the world's, you know, production bases.
And suddenly it all came to a crashing halt in the mid '70s
and then again at the end of the '70s.
And Britain and the world was faced
with trying to reduce the industrial capacity.
But also in Britain in particular,
they tried to increase the rate of profit.
And there's a real intellectual assault on the ideas of Keynesianism,
of nationalisation, of state intervention
which Margaret Thatcher starts to carry through.
Buys into it wholesale.
So rather than the state being seen in its traditional reformist role,
as something which controls industry
and is a partial barrier between the working population and the free market,
it becomes something which facilitates the influence of the free market
in privatising and deregulating the economy,
and in generating the dismantling of the welfare state.
It was driven really by people like
Milton Friedman and the Chicago School
who developed a model of capitalism
which said that capitalism should be completely uncontrolled
that it should be let rip in every direction,
every form of control removed,
and that it would find its own solutions under its own momentum.
It meant actually taking on the working class
to reduce their wages,
but also, you know, for the redundancies that we saw in steel,
in shipbuilding, in the coal industry.
And it was a necessity of, if you like, the private economy.
And that means they have to break the unions.
It means they have to have the ability to hire and fire.
It means they have to have the ability to reduce wages and welfare.
These treble lines of blue
that escort the scabs through the gates,
where the pickets cannot picket.
They cannot talk to them. They cannot get to them.
They cannot get anywhere near.
Now, the police are not neutral. That is very important.
The police have been shown to the British people that they're not neutral
when the working class decided to fight for their rights.
This is the thing you want to be filming. It's a police state.
You saw yourselves. There was men just standing on the car park.
The police came in inciting, pushing men about.
If that's not police incitement, I don't know what is.
# There are slanderous tongues #
# Always ready to wrong #
# And murder the fine reputation #
# Of the lads with big feet #
# Who by pounding the beat #
#Are protecting the peace of the nation #
They got me on the ﬂoor, spread-eagled me,
a copper on each arm, one on each leg.
Then they started to hit my arms
and legs with a truncheon, methodically,
until I had no power
or grip left in my arms.
Then they just proceeded
to twist them straight up my back.
I think he wanted to take it home
for a souvenir.
Now why do police go in with such venom?
They seem to enjoy inﬂicting pain and suffering on the working man.
Why? Who tells them to go beat a picket's head?
Who tells them to inﬂict pain, try to kill him?
Because that's what they're doing.
You stand there in the push and all you feel, all of a sudden,
a fella at the side of you collapses in a pile on the ﬂoor.
'What's up with you?" He's just been kneed in the groin.
I've seen police do it.
I've no skin left on my shins where they've run their boots down your shin.
But if you look at him the wrong way, you're nicked.
I want to know, who gives them the power to do this?
Who tells them to beat me, a working man, with a stick?
Who is it? I want to know.
I think it was a betrayal of the British people
because the mines were owned since 1947 by the government,
for and on behalf of the British people.
There's no work whatsoever in these communities.
No industry is being brought in, none whatsoever.
Without work, you cannot have dignity and you cannot have respect.
At least in mining it was rough and it was tumble,
but you got the comradeship. You got discipline.
A lot of it was self-discipline that you taught yourself.
You were reliant upon each other.
You were making sure that anybody working with you
learnt how to do the job properly
because it could be your life at risk and not only theirs.
Communities are full of drugs,
they're full of problems of all sorts of types
that were never there when the mines were working.
What that government done
destroyed all them structures that you had,
all your nationalised industries,
and although they always gave her fantastic credit
for giving working men and women
ownership of their own homes,
I thought one of the biggest disasters
was the selling off of council houses.
We all lived in crofts and avenues.
Nice houses, all, you know, close to where you were working
on top of the docks in Birkenhead where I lived.
But they were good houses, good houses.
And the people there were decent people, good people, good neighbourhoods.
We're looking after the people in Liverpool now.
Everyone else has deserted us so well look after our own.
We are disgusted over it,
that that union is throwing the towel in, and we're not.
We're not going to throw the towel in yet, until we get a proper deal.
There's no such thing
as registered dockers now.
Anyone goes on them docks now,
they're just going there,
doing a job and then getting chased.
So that's it.
It's soul-destroying.
The situation we have now, you've got
maybe two generations in the family
who've never, never been in employment.
Because of the nature of the trade union Labour leadership,
they've virtually capitulated.
There's been no serious opposition.
The miners were left in isolation.
The dockers were left in isolation
when they fought their last struggle in the '90s.
And the trade union laws prevent the trade unions
organising collectively against political decisions.
Now, as far as I'm concerned,
the TUC should say, "Well, we're not interested in your laws."
"Let's organise and defeat these people." That hasn't happened.
When you start a debate,
'Will we be able to build the next stage of massive power stations?“,
I don't believe that the current companies, one, can afford it,
and have got the ability to actually coordinate and plan it.
They are all competing with each other across the whole country.
They can't sit down and actually say,
“We need one power station in Scotland,
or, "We need a supplementary power station in the east coast of Britain."
I think that's where the historical planning of one body
that was responsible for the production of electricity planning could deliver.
Within three or four years,
that had developed into an absolute farce
and then a tragedy with repeated fatalities,
large-scale loss of life in a number of different train crashes.
Effectively in 2002, the government was forced to step in
and take the infrastructure company, Railtrack, back into administration,
because it had gone bust.
There's this huge and complex web of financial debate,
argument and blame and recrimination that goes round and round and round,
every week of every year under the privatised railway in this country,
and it's a nonsense.
People were proud to be a railwayman. Very, very proud to be a railwayman.
There was a public-service ethos
which was passed on to new people who started in the industry.
Now, what happened after privatisation
is that a deliberate and concerted attempt has been made
to erase that history within the railway workers.
So, for example, somebody recruited to work on the railway today
isn't even taught to think of themselves as a railway worker.
We're losing an industry that we invented in this country
and which people love and which young people need.
I mean, we've got a million young people unemployed in Britain today.
A million young people unemployed.
They should be being employed, some of them at least,
learning how lo do railway engineering skills, railway operational skills,
to deliver the kind of services that this country needs
in order to develop a new, green public transport system.
In 2003, the market was liberalised.
Other companies could come in
and collect mail from businesses who are posting it, sort it,
then pass it on to Royal Mail to deliver. What that has done
is it's undermined Royal Mail's capacity to provide a universal service
which is subsidised by business postings.
The cost of the universal service for everybody
is no longer supported to that degree by what businesses do.
In simple terms,
people used to get their mail earlier.
Now they get it later.
They used to have two deliveries.
Now they get one per day.
The reform of the health service is, of course,
to bring it back into the marketplace
and degrade it back again into making healthcare a commodity.
So it's not reform at all.
It started when Margaret Thatcher started contracting out domestics
and porters and laundry services.
Again just the process of administering,
asking people to bid for contracts
costs money in and of itself
to write the contract for what you want
rather than just have domestics
doing the cleaning.
But then to win the contract, you have to put the cheapest bid in.
So, the ward I worked on at the time,
we had two full-time cleaners on in the morning
and a part-time cleaner on in the evening.
When I finished at the hospital,
they had a half a cleaner on in the morning
and then one between about ten wards in the evening.
It wasn't cheaper when people get MRSA and infections
which then might cost the whole of what you've saved on the contract
on one person if they're in intensive care.
I mean, there was a real feeling of ownership about the NHS when it started.
People felt they were doing it themselves,
that it was their possession.
And they've lost that.
So, the cost of running the health service,
the admin cost, was about six percent before that started.
Then they moved up to about 12 percent.
Now they're heading in the direction of American costs
for running the health service, anything between 18, 20, 25 percent.
You can see the politicians have chosen
to waste a huge amount of money on marketising the service.
I've got a big picture of Aneurin Bevan I looked at every day.
I think, “Where are the people?“ And What he says is,
"All the time the people have got the faith to fight for it."
We've been out on the streets and people said, “They'll never privatise the NHS."
'Why are you getting so up the wall? They won't do that."
And people just didn't believe they would do it.
It seems to me there's a sort of blindness
to the enormous advances that have been made in British medicine
as a result of the NHS.
I mean, there are many things that have taught the rest of the world
so far as the NHS was concerned.
This was a very inventive organisation with lots of new initiatives.
I do hope
we don't go down the American system whereby the first thing you met,
as you come in with broken legs or whatever,
is someone with a clipboard who says, "Are you insured?“
When there's money there, the private sector is happy to be there
taking the cash, thank you, and paying its shareholders.
When the money isn't there, as we saw locally after only a couple of years
of involvement in primary care, they were off.
People are ready to defend the National Health Service.
They do know about it. They do know the rewards of it.
They do know about the care and the treatment they get.
They're all going there every day. You can see it.
I can see it more than ever.
I've got a lot to be thankful for, and so has my wife,
on the National Health Service. I think it will happen.
I think they will understand the situation on the NHS.
That is the one institution from 1945
that needs to be defended.
We've lost most of the others, if not all the others,
but the National Health Service, if they attack,
the right, Tories, Lib Dems, attack the National Health Service,
if we don't understand that we've got to do everything,
up to and including breaking the law to defend the National Health Service,
then we're finished.
We were defending a ﬂawed project.
This is the worm in the apple of 1945.
This wasn't workers' control.
This wasn't popular engagement with the control.
This wasn't controlled from the base up.
There weren't committees in every locality managing the council housing.
There weren't shop stewards running the steel industry or the coal industry.
This was a set of state bureaucrats
replacing a set of corporate bureaucrats.
Whereas socialists are talking about the transformation of the economy
into a different type of economy that's not driven by the market,
but driven by the common needs of society.
I think that's the big difference that we're seeing.
If there's a need and there's no profit in it,
the need goes unanswered.
A caring capitalism.
Miliband is talking about this socially responsible capitalism.
It's a bit like the Arabian phoenix, isn't it?
Everyone's heard about it. Nobody's ever seen one.
We have to face up to the fact that, again, it's the market.
It's the system that says
that profit is the most important thing that makes the world go round
that we have to... that we have to take on.
It's a hard struggle, but this system what we live under
is absolutely rotten and corrupt as far as I'm concerned.
From top to bottom, it's rotten.
And the quicker it goes, the better.
In the face of the failure of the right, if you like,
the neo-liberals and their assault on the public services, their failure
terrible financial global failure at the moment of the market,
we still are trying to make the case
that actually we should go back to working together for the greater good.
And I think the NHS has been a terrific example of that,
as have many things in this country; education and the welfare state.
What's so shocking is the people who are dismantling this at the moment
are the people who grew up and benefited from that system.
The idea of socialism is weak in this country
and the idea of capitalism is very strong.
Capitalism itself is not strong, it's falling apart,
but the idea of capitalism is very strong.
The paradox in the situation is that the ideas which come together
and which have traditionally been called socialism
exist in a sort of atomised way right across the political spectrum.
When you see the Occupy people
say that they are anti-capitalist, anti-free market,
the corollary of that is that you're in favour of some kind of planning
even if that's not an articulated view.
They want some kind of democratic control over the economy.
Thai is the essence of the socialist idea,
whether or not you choose to call it socialist
and whatever colour you paint it.
Well, I think we were hijacked.
The working-class organisations were hijacked by the middle class.
That's my opinion. Especially the Labour Party.
The Labour Party was a working-class organisation at one time.
In no way, shape or form
can you call the Labour Party a working-class organisation any more.
The working class haven't got any big organisations
that can take the establishment on.
They don't realise that strength they've got, do they'?
They don't realise that power they've got.
The working class can change the whole history.
As quick as... as quick as that.
They just don't realise. They haven't grasped it.
One day, I think the dream that those miners had underground,
before the war, will become a reality.
We will be able to take real control of our own lives.
We will have a manufacturing industry.
The day when you see our kids walking the streets of Caerphilly
and walking the streets of Abercynon,
18 years of age and they've got their GCSEs,
and they've got their hands in their pockets and their head down
and they seem as if they've got no future and their eyes are dull,
I think those days will one day come to an end,
coming out of the dream that those miners had so many years ago.
I am absolutely convinced that the older generation,
rather than being a burden on society,
has got an absolute duty to come forward
and join with young people and talk to them and explain.
I say to pensioners, turn off the television,
take their plugs out of their ears
and start talking about what was the vision in 1945.
What did we want? How did we see it progressing?
What did it mean, "from the cradle to the grave"?
What did it mean to have common ownership
and for sharing and communities? What does it mean?
Start to rebuild that understanding of what sort of life we want.
I think we've got a real chance to do that.
Now, friends, this is the first time in the history of this country
that a Labour movement with a socialist policy...
(cheering)
I ask from you all...
...support that we shall need
to carry us through, triumphantly, through difficult years,
to the great era which is opening before us.
(cheering)
# Blue skies around the corner #
# Walk round the corner with me #
# Just round the comer you'll see #
# Those blue skies #
# Blue skies, there's nothing wanner #
# Won't you feel happy to be #
# Sharing the sunshine with me #
# Under those blue skies? #
# Trouble may come but troubles will go #
# Don't you ever worry any more #
# Look at those skies #
# They're not telling Ya #
# That's what they were put there for #
# Blue skies around the corner #
# Everything's gonna be right #
# never a cloud in those bright blue skies #
# Without rhythm #
# A train could never go without rhythm #
# A troop could never roll without rhythm #
# The day would never go because rhythm #
# Isthe thing that makes the world go round #
# Without rhythm #
# A poet couldn't rhyme without rhythm #
# Could never tell the time without rhythm #
# Wouldn't hear the chime because rhythm #
# Isthe thing that makes the clock go round #
# Without drums... #
# When we go strolling in the park at night #
# All the darkness is a boon #
# Who cam if we're without a light #
# They can't black out the moon #
# I see you smiling in the cigarette glow #
# Though the picture fades too soon #
# But I see all I want to know #
# They can't black out the moon #