Socialist Historian & WW2 Tank Commander E P Thompson (1924-1993) on what VE Day meant
E P Thompson was a tank commander in the Second World War. A member of the Communist Party, he left in 1956 and went on to write the Making of the English Working Class (1963) as well as being a leader of CND and then END.
The debate about whether World War Two was a people’s war continues but Thompson’s words here underline the hopes that many had for the future when the war was won. Hope is in too short supply 80 years on
There entered here a taboo. And any claim to priority in matters affecting the chances of life was taboo most of all. It was not just the discipline of war, whether active service or being bombed and rationed, when the young, above all, gave priority to the injured, the sick, the children and the old. It was far wider than that. In that almost-democratic, half-anti-Fascist time, the chances of life were shared; in 1941-45 this island was fanned by strange airs of égalité, when the pursuit of private privilege seemed contemptible. And this most of all for the socialist young, who went to the polls in 1945 to vote Labour, Commonwealth, Communist, ILP.
The Health Service, even more than the nationalisation of the pits, expressed the spirit of that time and extended it forward into the future in institutional form. It was designed by the ablest and most socialist minister in Labour’s post-war government. And it expresses in transparent form the first of socialist egalitarian principles: to each according to his or her needs. Of course things are never as simple as that. But the lay person supposes that, in the chances of health and life, medical science is able to determine priorities according to criteria of need, and that no other consideration need enter. In this way the NHS replaced the vocabulary of class with that of citizenship
London Review of Books 7th May 1987
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