Labour learns history lesson from 1950 election pamphlet

The pocket-sized pamphlet urges Labour activists to fight the election campaign on a platform of protecting the NHS, raising living standards and taxing the rich.

It even provides quotes from senior Conservatives that campaigners can use to undermine their opponents if the fight gets dirty. The election in question, however, is not 2015 but 1950. And the 65-year-old pamphlet, printed in bold lettering, was discovered by a Labour campaigner after laying buried for decades in his grandmother's attic.

The leaflet, entitled "Fifty election points for Labour", and seen by the Financial Times, lists the successes of the pioneering postwar Attlee government, and statistics to be used by activists on the doorstep.

The document provides an in-depth insight into how in just five years the Labour administration established the health service and the beginnings of the modern welfare system.

The foreword, written by the editor of the Labour-supporting Daily Herald, which published the leaflet, explains: "Our aim is that everybody who possesses this book shall the better be able to counter the misrepresentations in which Labour's enemies will indulge during the election campaign . . . they will be forced to rely on the same negative tactics up until polling day."

In a message that could be used by Labour supporters today, activists were told to remind voters: "The Tories voted against the National Health Service, and they say Labour has 'tried to do too much too quickly'."

With the health policy modestly referred to as a "scheme" and taking up just one page in the 64-page document, it suggests even Labour did not understand what an achievement setting up the health service was.

As Britain came out of the strictures of wartime, a big focus of the campaign was improving living standards. The pamphlet tells campaigners to focus on the cost of living, reminding voters that: "Increased social benefits and food subsidies enable the working class to spend more on comforts and pleasures."

And it makes a virtue of Labour's plans to raise taxes on the rich, boasting that: "Labour is redistributing the nation's wealth. The rich have been taxed more heavily than ever before."

The unabashed leftwing offer worked, but only just. Labour returned to power, but with a much-reduced five-seat majority. The party lost a second election just a year later.

Some issues remain as hotly debated now as they were then. The lack of housing was a significant problem and Labour promised: "Overcrowding will be alleviated by the new towns." The "new towns", now rebranded as "garden cities" are one of the current government's key proposals to end today's housing crisis.

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But the pamphlet also gives a glimpse into how much politics has changed in the intervening years. Not even the most leftwing Labour MP now, for example, is likely to promise, as Labour did in 1950, to put the state in permanent control of food distribution, or to nationalise the cement industry.

And another difference; while the Labour party in 1950 could rely on the unflinching support of the Daily Herald, which published the pamphlet, it is unlikely to receive such enthusiastic backing from its modern day incarnation - The Sun.

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