New Jerusalem to Blue Jerusalem: radical visions of Britain’s postwar future

The last verse of William Blake’s epic poem written in 1804 reads:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Based on the theme of the Book of Revelations and its description of the Second Coming, it asks whether Jesus ever visited England and thus, for a brief moment, created Heaven on earth, while also imploring its readers to create an ideal society today.

Set to music by Sir Herbert Parry in 1916 as the hymn “Jerusalem”, today it is associated with a conventional, even establishment, idea of Englishness—hence being belted out at weddings, England cricket matches, and the last night of the proms. Yet, for much of the twentieth century, the hymn was the great anthem of British socialists in general and the Labour Party in particular. Blake’s revolutionary call to build a new City of God (Jerusalem) was an inspiration and rallying cry for generations of activists who dreamed of a more humane, equal, and cooperative commonwealth rising out of the wreckages of capitalism and the industrial revolution (these ‘dark satanic mills’).

Arguably, no one is more closely linked to this vision, than wartime Labour leader and Prime Minister between 1945 and 1951, Clement Attlee—who insisted “Jerusalem” be sung at his funeral. Winston Churchill’s deputy during the Second World War, Attlee and the Labour Party romped to victory at the postwar 1945 General Election promising to turn Blake’s vision into a reality and build a New Jerusalem out of the rubble of war. Some of Labour’s iconography at the Election literally depicted a new ‘city on a hill’ which Labour would build.

This vision of a New Britain—where the chaos of capitalism would be replaced with socialist economic planning, the fear of ill-health and unemployment with a universal welfare state, slums with new towns, Empire with Commonwealth, competition with amity—was what Labour sought to create during its 6 years in power after war. While, of course, the Attlee governments never lived up to their utopian promise, many of the institutions that they put in place—such as the National Health Service—and the changes they made to Britain’s position in the world—such as Indian independence and the formation of NATO—arguably set the scene for much of the rest of Britain’s postwar history. Not for nothing did Attlee introduce his Party’s manifesto at the 1951 General Election by telling his activists that they were ‘a great crusading body armed with a fervent spirit for the reign of righteous­ness on earth’ and that they should continue to ‘go forward in this fight in the spirit of William Blake’.

Yet, Labour were not the only radical thinkers and planners during the Second World War. Nor was the future that Attlee built for Britain the only one available. Rather, during the war, Conservatives developed their own set of radical, even utopian, ideas for the future of Britain and the postwar world. From dreams of world government to visions of workers going ‘back-to-the-land’ via their preference for developing a ‘warrior welfare state’ designed to properly reward those in uniform, Conservatives had their own dreams of a ‘Blue Jerusalem’—blue here a reference to the colour most usually associated with the Conservative Party. Equally, Labour activists and politicians were not alone in basing their plans on the creation of a more Christ-like polity and society—something sometimes forgotten in today’s largely secularised political parties. Conservatives too sought to use the Second World War to build their own vision of a new Christian Civilization. The most significant element of the Conservative Board of Education President R. A. Butler’s Education Act (1944) was not the raising of the school-age or even the formalisation of Britain’s tri-partite education system, but the fact that for the first time in British history, State compelled Christian religious education.

Conservatives were not at all happy about the kind of Britain that Labour was pledged to build in 1945—something which, contrary to much of the literature, did not emerge out of the way Britain was governed during the war but which was radically different to it. Instead, a wave of depression swept over much of the Conservative Party in 1945—the other type of ‘blue’ in Blue Jerusalem. Revealed in the thousands of letters sent to Winston Churchill after his defeat in in 1945, these writers described in often acute detail how the removal of Churchill and the election of a Labour government left them ‘depressed’, ‘despairing’, and ‘grieving’ for a Britain and a British Empire that they believed the Conservative Party had built up during the war and which Labour was intent on destroying; one vision of a new society giving way to an altogether different one.

_{Featured image by Levan Ramishvili via Flickr. Public domain.}