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Anyone with knowlege about the UK food shortages post WWII. The rationing was almost 10 years in peacetime. It is absurd. How did this clusterfuck happened?
My dad's knowledge of it is limited to preferring horse over whale meat.
The key point is that it wasn't actually necessary, but the labor party thought that the war economy was a path to socialism, so they kept it going in peacetime. Rationing was just another tool, not an emergency measure.
Remember, they had total control over television and radio*, began nationalising every industry, and started other "economic rationalisations" that were going to bring them closer to the Soviet role model.
It's hard to find a history of it. One of those things everyone who writes the history books doesn't want to talk about, outside of some niche monographs I can't find scans of. People laugh at 1984 without realizing how close to reality Orwell's model already was.
/* banning all non-government broadcast media was an official labor party policy until the 80s. The conservatives finally managed to allow a single private channel managed by a semi-government agency in 1955.
The next conservative government in 1970 even managed to allow a non-government radio station, after labour had made themselves unpopular jamming the pirate radio stations people actually wanted to listen to, soviet-style.
(I still remember coming to America and being shocked they had fourteen tv channels rather than 4. When someone told me about cable and satellite I thought they were lying)
Churchill and the Tories were re-elected in 1951, long before the end of rationing. It’s true that there were plenty of actual socialists in Atlee’s party, even some communists, but he was only one of them to a limited extent. Many bold actual commie plans, like bank nationalization, never really happened. Others, like bus and haulage nationalization, were quickly reversed when the Tories came back to power.
The problem with repealing rationing, which they did want to do, was that the situation was pretty dire. Food produced had been steady or in decline since the 1870s despite a doubling of the population, while the livestock sector relied on feed from devastated areas or those now in the Soviet bloc. Imports were expensive as Britain paid its war debts. The truth is the country was just much poorer than it had been.
I mean, they ended rationing over the course of 3 years after getting into power. Tea in '52, and finally meat in '54. That's pretty good for disassembling an entrenched government program!
AFAIK the main reason the Tories won in 1951 was because Labour were very visibly not making an end to food rationing a priority. The Tories said they would, and did.
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