Nick Tiratsoo discusses the importance of the pro-Tory press at elections such as the 1992 general election. (4:43 min)

Working-class ambitions centred on job, family and home. The widely shared aspiration was to maintain independence and attempt a modicum of self-improvement. Fear of a descent into poverty, with its accompanying humiliations at the hands of 'the authorities', was ever present. This coexisted with a belief that something could usually be done to make life better, especially when it came to the lives of children. Many parents wanted their offspring to 'have a chance', avoid the most degrading or physically dangerous jobs, and perhaps take up whatever educational opportunities were on offer. The hope was that they would 'get on'. By comparison, views about society as a whole were more complicated and embraced several tensions. There was a widespread feeling of resentfulness towards 'them'--an elastic amalgam of those who were understood to control the system, probably for their own benefit. Strong feelings often lurked just below the surface. During the second half of the 1940s, the Labour government exhorted Britons to 'work or want' in a bid to overcome the depredations of war. Interviewing workers in a café, one social investigator touched upon the campaign, and was immediately assailed with the following tirade:

If you want an argument, you just put down 'Work or want', that's what Mr Bevin said isn't it, Well all that lot is hard on the miner isn't it, tell him work or want, well tell them to go up to London, to Oxford street and Fleet street where I've been today and see all the people walking about doing nothing, only spending money. We're working to keep them ... you can tell this Government and the whole houses of Parliament they can be blown up with an atom bomb. (Report by 'K.B.' on 'Non-membership of groups--Tottenham', 30 July 1947, Beveridge enquiry, box 2, file A, Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex.)

BLPES

Labour's early election posters focused on simple messages.

Such anger sometimes produced a consciousness of class, and a belief that all those who worked with their hands were 'in it together'. Nevertheless, these impulses were usually highly qualified by a variety of other prescriptions and prejudices. Working-class communities tended to be rather parochial, and there was a general suspicion of 'foreigners', whether they came from a neighbouring district, a different region of Britain, or overseas. Moreover, profound divisions existed between the 'rough' and the 'respectable'. Indeed, 'keeping up standards' was habitually viewed as of paramount importance, and formed the basis for evaluating workmates and neighbours. Writing of life in Shoreham-by-Sea during the 1950s, one woman recalled that her parents never spoke to the family next door. She explained: 'Just after Mum moved in, she was redding the top of her gatepost and Mrs Clough came out saying ''Are you trying to show me up, redding your gateposts?'' and after that, those two women ignored each other for over thirty years.' (Terry Jordan, Growing Up in the Fifties, 1990, p. 72). The prevailing ethos was particularly clearly apparent in attitudes towards welfare provision. Here, the Victorian distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor remained potent, despite the vigorous efforts of social reformers and politicians to cultivate more generous sentiments and a greater compassion for those in need.

These various dispositions coloured attitudes to party affiliations. Most ordinary people showed only passing interest in the electoral struggle, while knowledge about politics was inversely related to income and social position. What working-class voters wanted above all were measures that would improve their lives in practical ways. For many, this meant favouring Labour, since it was popularly believed to be the party that stood for the worker against the boss, for the poor against the rich, and for equality as opposed to privilege. Nevertheless, such support was rarely given unconditionally. The nature of popular priorities was well described by John Barron Mays, a social worker and schoolteacher who observed inner-city Liverpool during the 1950s and 1960s. As he concluded, the local population was most concerned with personal or family problems, particularly those relating to employment and accommodation, and as a result would 'flock to the doors of their city councillors' committee rooms, expecting them to use their civic influence on their behalf'. However, if the desired outcome was not forthcoming, many would simply fall back on the traditional local view that all politicians were 'racketeers'. Hence, the area as a whole was notable for its 'air of political apathy'.

Middle-class attitudes followed a somewhat similar pattern. The central consideration, once again, was with 'getting on', for example with obtaining the educational or professional qualifications that would allow a better lifestyle. Families worried about falling down the social scale, and did all they could to maintain outward respectability. However, the great fear here was not poverty but contamination by the working classes. The battle lines were drawn wherever this appeared possible, with complex rules to prevent encroachment in speech, dress, recreation and habitation. On occasion, residents of up-market estates actually connived in blocking off streets to separate themselves from nearby council tenants. The masses were seen as uncouth and ill mannered, ignorant, indolent yet spendthrift, and perhaps prone to violence. Encounters with workers could prove traumatic. The historian Richard Cobb remembered one of his friends who had left his genteel home town of Tunbridge Wells in the Second World War to become a volunteer miner. The youth had quickly reappeared, pale, drawn, and 'quite shattered' by his experiences:

It had--he said to me ... been absolutely awful: the digs, the food, something called High Tea and involving no silver and thinly cut cucumber sandwiches, getting up early in the morning ... the actual working conditions ... above all, the language and attitudes of his work-mates; they had made fun of his accent, had ribbed him incessantly, had taken him out to the pub and made him drink beer ... and they had never heard of Tunbridge Wells ('What did they make there?'). (Richard Cobb, Still Life. Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood, 1984, pp. 110-11).

The subject of party politics was rarely discussed in such circles, but many knew exactly where they stood, and were almost instinctively Conservative. Writing of his neighbours in the Surrey town of Farnham during the early 1990s, Richard Hoggart commented: 'They vote Tory because they believe--''assume'' would be more accurate--that the Conservatives are the natural party of government.' By contrast, Labour continued to be castigated as controlled by the unions, addicted to bureaucracy and regulation, and untrustworthy when it came to safeguarding Britain's interests overseas. Identification with the party was taken to be a sign of wilful malevolence. After studying mid-century Banbury, the sociologist Margaret Stacey reported: 'When the middle class do come across a member who is a Labour supporter, they are surprised and shocked. They avoid social relations with the recalcitrant.' In Farnham, according to Hoggart, to be a socialist was 'almost unthinkable'. Labour members were dismissed as 'loud-mouthed demagogues driven by rancour and envy' (Richard Hoggart, Townscape With Figures. Farnham: Portrait of an English Town, 1994, p. 170).

Of course, these well-established patterns appeared less secure in some periods than in others. Working-class solidarity grew at times of major industrial unrest, for example during the General Strike of 1926 and, to a lesser extent, when the miners confronted the government in 1974 and 1984-5. Moreover, there were one or two occasions when sizeable parts of the country as a whole flirted with radicalism. Yet these deviations were all in the end remarkably short-lived. For though socialist agitators always hoped differently, there was simply little widespread or sustained popular appetite for fundamental change. In this respect, events in the later 1940s are especially instructive.

The prosecution of a 'people's war' between 1939 and 1945 inevitably encouraged questioning of the status quo. Workers knew that they were making great sacrifices in order to secure victory, remembered the broken promises that had followed the peace in 1918, and vowed that they would not be fooled again. Some middle-class consciences were pricked when bombing and evacuation revealed the extent of poverty in Britain's inner cities. As a consequence, the mood of the country began to alter. There were demands that Britain should be re-built on more egalitarian and democratic lines, and a greater willingness to consider novel solutions, factors that obviously helped Labour win the 1945 election. But it is also notable that this upsurge dissipated much more quickly than almost anyone had expected. Many working-class voters stayed loyal to Labour, appreciating practical reforms like the welfare state and full employment, but only a tiny minority wished the government to pursue further socialist advances. Writing in 1952, the pioneering sociologist Ferdinand Zweig commented:

There is not a shred of revolutionary feeling in British socialism. The British worker believes in gradualism; he does not want to overthrow the existing social structure. As a matter of fact, he does not feel very strongly or think very often about it.

Indeed, he added, 'the average man' was 'far more interested in sport than politics'. Meanwhile, middle-class radicalism proved even less durable. The better-off disliked rationing and the administration's determination to redistribute wealth, reacting with emotions that ranged from 'hurt bewilderment' to 'white fury'. In this situation, it was not long before almost all had returned to their traditional political affiliations. Indicatively, at the 1951 election, the Conservatives won as much as 73 percent of the middle-class vote, up from 61 percent in 1945 (Ferdinand Zweig, The British Worker, 1952, p. 189).

In these circumstances, dedicated socialists usually remained isolated within their local communities, atypical figures whose interests and passions found only faint echo in the wider population. The Independent Labour Party organiser John Paton recalled of his youthful proselytising in Edwardian Aberdeen: 'Our ideas were poured out at continual open air meetings, usually at small gatherings of very casual onlookers with an appearance of having stopped to listen because they were too early for important appointments.' Socialists, he admitted, were 'in a similar category to the strange beings who tore their beards and confessed their sins in public at religious meetings'. The veteran policeman turned radical journalist C.H. Rolph made a similar point in an autobiography of the 1980s. Being an activist, he concluded, 'all too often seemed to mean shuffling about under banners, preceded by buglers or pipers, ignored by all except the ambiguous policemen marching alongside, by the absurd groups of unwelcome and uninvited camp-followers, and by the Press and television photographers concerned only to get pictures of the camp-followers' (C.H. Rolph, Further Particulars, 1988, p. 204).