1/3 The basic narrative is that people were simply tired. The public was tired of the continued rationing that made post-war life drab. And several senior Labour politicians were ailing and burnt out. However, Labour still won the largest share of the popular vote (as it did the following year when it lost the 1951 general election).

This summary from John Charmley in a history of the Conservatives (1996) is typical of the accounts of public fatigue:

the sheer size of the problems confronting the government, and the great expectations they had raised at the 1945 Election, were bound to lead to voters being disillusioned. Victory in the war was all very well, but when the population of Great Britain was being asked to eat 'snoek' (a kind of whale meat [cheap tinned fish] with a vile smell and an oily consistency [imported from South Africa]) three years afterwards, and bread was rationed, it was too much to expect the voters not to begin to have their doubts.

The government had actually been doing rather well in setting up its landmark social institutions, but those weren’t really the decisive factors during the election:

the cost of the welfare state was not excessive – spending on social services rose from 34 per cent of central expenditure in 1937 to 40 per cent by 1950. Dalton, Cripps and Gaitskell kept a very tight rein on expenditure and, in any case, Beveridge had based the whole idea on the assumption that the scheme would be viable provided that unemployment did not exceed 8 per cent; in effect the beneficiaries to a large extent paid for their own benefits through income tax and National Insurance. By 1947 unemployment was a mere 1.6 per cent and rarely exceeded 2 per cent in the post-war era. Government controls and food subsidies helped to keep inflation down to 3.3 per cent until 1948 and only 2 per cent from 1949. This enabled ministers to exercise enough moral-political influence to restrain demands for higher wages which rose by only 2.8 per cent annually up to 1949. In this way Attlee’s ministers achieved a politically and economically viable combination of full employment, low inflation, modest wage settlements, welfare benefits and a limited redistribution of resources, until, that is, they were derailed by miscalculations resulting from external events (Pugh, 2011)

A July 1949 survey, quoted in David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, found a polarised electorate:

‘Among all electors, except Conservative supporters, substantial minorities were convinced that a Conservative victory in the next general election would mean mass unemployment, the dismantlement of the Welfare State, more industrial disputes, and an abrupt extension of private enterprise’; at the same time, ‘all but Labour supporters feared that another Labour victory would lead to a much wider application of nationalisation, the neglect of national material prosperity, and excessive class-oriented legislation’, with a third of all Conservatives asserting that ‘in its four years of power the Labour government had done nothing that was worthy of approval’. Much would depend on whether Labour could hold on to the significant degree of non-working-class support that it had attracted in 1945. (Kynaston, 2007)

And in the eyes of some on the left, the Attlee government hadn’t been doing enough:

In education, it failed to take the opportunity to abolish private schools, and cemented into place the division in state education between grammar and secondary modern schools. It allowed a wholly hereditary House of Lords to remain in existence. Capital and corporal punishment (at least in prisons) were retained. The government’s actions during this period also created difficulty. It built houses, but not enough to satisfy demand, and proceeded with the deeply controversial and unpopular nationalization of the iron and steel industry (Thomas-Symonds, 2012)

Kynaston gives a detailed look at the run-up to the election, and throughout, his book is brimming with first-person diary accounts, many taken from the Mass Observation Project, though not all:

The greyness wasn’t only in the eyes of the residents:

on 8 December [1949], a young Czech woman arrived in England, staying in the capital for a few days before travelling north:

'There were still bombed-out ruins all over London, and the post-war drabness was far worse than that in Prague. The English women I saw walking about London seemed to me sloppily dressed, with scarves tied round their heads and cigarettes hanging from their lips. The shops, too, were a great disappotment to me. I had expected wonderful shops, but most of what I saw in London shop windows seemed to me to be shoddy stuff, with little attempt to display it elegantly'.

This was Olga Cannon, recently married to... Les Cannon, Lancashire’s representative on the executive of the Electrical Trades Union and still a fully committed Communist. (Kynaston, 2007)

Middle class malaise

Class divisions were a significant part of national consciousness, politically and socially, although Pugh (2011) qualifies this:

in the 1950s and 1960s historians and political scientists regarded social class as the key to political loyalty and all else as peripheral. Today we are much more sceptical and recognise the 1950s as more like an aberration than the norm. As a result of the apparent disintegration of class-based loyalties since the 1970s academics have become critical of sociologically based explanations that appear to make political loyalty too schematic

What today’s pundits would call a middle-class swing vote was key to the elections of 1945, 1950 and 51.

In summer 1948

a memo from the Conservative Party’s research department set out what it hoped would be the next election’s battleground: ‘The floating vote is mainly middle class (incomes £700–£1,200 per annum). These people are now finding it impossible to live. The chief fear of the middle-class voter is being submerged by a more prosperous working class. Our whole appeal must be in this direction.’ (Kynaston, 2007)

Not all Labour politicians cared to actively battle for the votes of this group, but in a 1948 New Statesman article, Maurice Edelman MP explained that some middle-class occupations should certainly be the province of Labour - whilst others were a bit of a lost cause:

Among the middle class the description ‘useful’ applies from the white-collar clerk to the working director; it includes Civil Servants, teachers, working shopkeepers, technicians, managers, doctors, journalists and farmers . . .The useful middle classes are an integral part of the Movement.

But there are others among the middle classes whose prosperity and advancement is tied up with a laissez-faire economy. Every measure of a planned economy is to them a poisoned draught. Often they owe their careers, started in the working class or the lower middle class, to the competitive nature of business, which has given their commercial aptitude opportunity, and their aggressiveness scope. They include company secretaries, commercial travellers, sales managers and small business men. These, then, are the irreconcilables among the middle classes. Labour’s victory is, by definition, their defeat. (quoted in Kynaston, 2007)

Middle-class diarists in the late 1940s were aware of a country re-orientating around concerns that were not entirely theirs:

Gladys Langford. ‘It is very noticeable that nowadays the well-fed, well-clad, sweetly smiling bourgeoisie male & female have disappeared from poster and advertisement,’ she reflected in May 1947. ‘It is the broadly grinning and obviously unwashed “worker” who appears in more than life size on our hoardings and Tube stations.’…

Frances Partridge (translator, diarist and member of the Bloomsbury Group) went on:
When the pressure was on us all, it had seemed as though the relation between master and man, for instance, was suffering a sea-change, and it was a common sight to see a Colonel in a good but worn suit almost cringing to a waitress as he pleadingly enquired ‘Do you think I might have a little water?’…

A well-off 37 year old housewife contributing to the Mass Observation panel explained in August 1949 why she wouldn’t be voting Labour in 1950, although she had in 1945:

‘Like many ‘upper class’ socialists, I thought with security of employment and adequate pay, as well as a Government of their own, workers would act as we should act in similar circumstances, i.e. work with a will, and enjoy doing so. In the event, it seems that we have been wrong and that removing the threats of unemployment, starvation, etc has only made the workers more discontented, which also seems to apply to nationalisation which certainly is a failure up till now. I think it will be possible to make it work in the case of railways, etc (it had better be) but I do not think that this is the time for more similar experiments . . .
‘The other reason is more intangible, it is a matter of atmosphere. Somehow, a Labour Government has managed to take a lot of the joy and the interest out of the atmosphere. I feel that it is not so much ‘austerity’ – I can eat like a king if I have the money, and now also dress well, so it wouldn’t be that – but the general discontent, the lack of eagerness to serve among the people accompanied by a lack of eagerness to play, to have any social life, to do anything at all.
‘The atmosphere is one of lassitude,’ she concluded. ‘Perhaps by taking so much of the fight out of life, it gets less interesting, less worth while.’ (Kynaston)