There were occasional infelicities of language, the pile-up of dead bodies with no apparent consequence was barely credible and the appearance of the House of Lords chamber (the temporary home for the Commons in 1945) has come into question, but Channel 4's Traitors captured in its first episode the mixed emotions in England of the end of the war in Europe. There was the spirit of optimism for the future on the part of those welcoming a reforming Labour government, the sense of betrayal on the part of Conservatives at the rejection of Winston Churchill at the ballot-box and the American suspicion of the new order in Britain. All that and rationing, too.
To those who queried whether celebrating Labour party activists would really sing The Red Flag in public, it should be pointed out that the anthem was regularly sung at the close of Labour conferences with no embarrassment (and probably with little thought to its violent implications) from the time of the party's foundation until the Red Rose revolution. (With the eclipse of New Labour, the anthem has regained its prominence.) In parliament, the speech by the newly-elected middle-class socialist looking forward to a revolution in public services and to better housing for all rang true. Screenwriter Bash Doran no doubt mined actual Labour addresses put on record at the time. The series is clearly intended for distribution in the US and it will do no harm for our cousins to understand the desire for a better life, after a devastating war, which drove the Labour vote. That mood will surely not be lost on those young Americans who nearly got Bernie Sanders onto the Democrat ballot in 2016. As a former general secretary of the party, Morgan Phillips, once said in an epigram taken up by Harold Wilson, "The British Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism".
The welfare revolution of 1945-50 also owed something to liberals with a large and small L. Liberal William Beveridge wrote the blueprint in a report commissioned by the wartime coalition government under Winston Churchill. Churchill was a former Liberal who gave a liberal-minded Conservative education minister, R.A. Butler, a free hand in reforming secondary education. It is probable therefore that Liberals as well as Conservatives keenly felt the loss of Churchill, especially as the Liberal party election strategy carefully avoided attacking him personally. The US of course saw only the rejection of a great war leader.
In 1946 (a year after the period in which Traitors opens) Churchill, a life-long anti-Communist, was to give his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri. It was to fall on fertile ground. Churchill who had worked with leading Labour figures in coalition was able to distinguish between the democratic socialists of the UK and the "Marxist-Leninist" (i.e. Stalinist) state socialists in the USSR, but such fine distinctions would have been lost on Americans exemplified in Traitors by the OSS operative Rowe (a compelling performance by Michael Stuhlbarg). I was hardly old enough to appreciate such things in those days, but I do recall the scornful newspaper report (probably in the Express) that a congressman had been alarmed by Mr Attlee opening a Labour conference with the greeting: "Comrades!". With the release of government papers later, we were to learn that the Americans felt that we were an unreliable ally and therefore refused to continue the war-time cooperation over the development of nuclear weapons.
In her introduction to the series in Radio Times, Bash Doran quotes executive producer Eleanor Moran as thinking that "there was a decent show to be set in the British civil service after the Second World War. It was an incredible time in our history and it had mostly been overlooked." As someone who joined the civil service in 1960 when there were still colleagues in the office who had been there pre-war, I agree.
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