The Spirit of '45 Page #3

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and help build a better world in which

these things can't possibly happen.

I'll second that.

It's people like us that have been doing

the work of the war,

and it's people like us that are going

to do the work of the peace.

My mind goes back

to a meeting we had in a troop ship.

Then one lad got up.

He said, "In the '30s,

we had mass unemployment."

He said, "We don't have unemployment

in wartime."

He said, "if you can have

full employment killing Germans,

why can't you have full employment

building homes, building houses,

building schools, recruiting teachers,

recruiting nurses, recruiting doctors?"

And that argument registered.

We're starting something called ABCA.

We're going to have an hour's discussion

every week on current affairs.

And it's going to come out

of working time.

If there is injustice, inequality,

ifs our fault for allowing it.

Why not write to your MP about it?

Yes, that's just it.

We've got a parliament

and it's up to us to say who goes there

and to make sure they do their job

when they get there.

"I am more and more suspicious

of the way this lecturing-to and

education of the forces racket is run."

"I maintain most strongly

that any of these subjects

which tend towards politics are wrong."

"For the love of life,

do do something about it

unless you want to have the creatures

coming back all pansy pink."

The experience of the war

taught people that when the stale needs

you lo be organised collectively,

in fact, they'll force you into the army

to be organised collectively,

and you can be incredibly powerful.

You can defeat fascism.

And they came back

imbued with that spirit

of saying anything is possible.

Beveridge, a Liberal,

had been given the task

of looking at the world

after the war,

and he identified five giants.

Poverty, unemployment, illness

and so on.

Want must not be known again.

There must be no mass unemployment,

the giant evil of only yesterday.

Ignorance, said Sir William,

no democracy can nowadays afford.

The evil of disease must be overthrown.

The voluntary hospital

and the expensive nursing home

are not enough to maintain this nation

in good health.

We are not fighting to preserve slums

which breed our own diseases

just as swamps breed malaria.

No more generations

must be stunted in squalor.

The Beveridge Report shows how to begin

overthrowing the five giant evils.

It spurs us all to greater effort.

If we can produce so much for war,

much can be done for peace.

You've got to realise

there was only 21 years

between two wars.

And most of the electorate

were well aware

of the fact that after the

First World War, we had men out of work

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