Post-War Promises¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter excoriates the post-war promises of the British ruling class as a deliberate deception, drawing a direct line from the broken pledges of the First World War to the propaganda of the Second. The core argument is that the capitalist state, through Churchill’s rhetoric of “work, food and homes” and the adoption of a watered-down Beveridge Report, is preparing to repeat the betrayal of 1918, when soldiers returned to the dole, the Means Test, and mass unemployment. The text insists that the Beveridge scheme, far from being a progressive advance, is a fraud designed to patch up capitalism at the workers’ expense.
Key claims are substantiated with precise figures. The Beveridge Report proposed 24 shillings for a single unemployed worker and 48 shillings for a married man with a child, but only on condition of compulsory attendance at a ‘training’ school—a phrase the author equates with the slave camps of the pre-war era. This is contrasted with the pre-war dole of 17 shillings for a single man, plus 10 shillings for a wife and 3 shillings per child. Using The Economist of June 1944, the chapter notes that the cost of living had risen 54 per cent above 1938 levels, meaning a single worker would be worse off under Beveridge than before the war, and a married man only marginally better. The most damning evidence comes from Beveridge himself, quoted in The Times of 7 December 1943, admitting he does not know how to maintain productive employment after the war and that his scheme would collapse if unemployment exceeded one and a half million. This confession is presented as proof of the bankruptcy of capitalist planning.
The chapter draws on the historical context of the interwar period, invoking the lived experience of workers in South Wales who endured years of “social security” as poverty and degradation. The polemic is directed against two targets: the Labour leaders, who champion Beveridge as the ideal of social security while having “forgotten what it is like to live like workers,” and the capitalist politicians who offer fake schemes to gull the working class. The alternative proposed is not reform but revolutionary destruction of capitalism: nationalisation without compensation of banks, land, mines, steel works, and transport, operated under workers’ committees. The chapter concludes with a sharp class ultimatum: if capitalism cannot afford full maintenance for the unemployed, then the workers cannot afford capitalism.