Kynaston reports in 1946 a patchy start to housing construction, handicapped in part by a desire to build quality rather than quantity and marked by a significant squatter's movement, but by September 1948, 750,000 new homes had been provided. But several million more were needed, without even counting the renewed impetus in the slum clearance movement.
It's astonishing to learn that, perhaps just for a moment, there was a point in 1944, with the Fleming report, that there might have been a real push for the abolition of fee-paying schools. Yet with Attlee at the top — "the deeply middle-class (son of a City solicitor" (and graduate of Haileybury), there was scant real hope. Instead, Education Secretary Ellen Wilkinson hoped "to make the schools provided by the State so good and so varied that it will seem quite absurd to send children to these schools."
The idea for government-funded schools was a mixture of grammars, secondary moderns and secondary technical schools. Kynaston says that the last barely got off the ground, in part because of their cost (equipment for engineers and technologists did not come cheap), and Wilkinson's "instinctive opposition to narrow vocationalism." (And the limits of Britain's technical education are still a cause for much debate today.)
Industry was also starting from a different point: Britain had 52% of the world's car exports, but it was stagnating, in technology and techniques, just as the world was taking off. When Sir Stafford Cripps declared that the Standard Vanguard was not going to be a success because he couldn't sit in the back with his top hat on, he was right, if for the wrong reasons — a disastrous trail of breakdowns and lack of spare parts around the world being the real cause of its spectacular failure. Leonard Lord, dominant in the management at Longbridge, when told that his cars did not stand up to Australian roads, said they should build roads to suit.
Industry was also a cosy little closed shop. It was estimated that for 50-60% of manufacturing output in the mid-1950s the price was affected by collusion among the producing companies. One manager recalled of the steel industry: "Orders were reported first to the respective trade and association committee, and at the end of the day they would tel you what prices to quote." And managers were specifically not meant to be too managerial, and certainly not to worry about the details. The economist Alex Cairncross looked at Glasgow shipbuilding in 1951, finding that in a yard of more than 5,000 workers, below the board the organisation was in the hands of a yard superintendant, "who was distinguished from the other workmen by his bowler hat and not much else...The work was devolved to the foreman on the job, and he set about it like a foreman on any building site. Each ship was built as a one-off job." Management in the industry was "almost non-existent."
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