Apologies, Pip. I missed your edit yesterday (looking at the timing we may have crossed each other…).
It was good obviously, even if it did induce a few flashbacks to rural living (once an hour buses in particular).
In my case this was a bit of 'write what you know'. The bus in my village is about once every 75-90 minutes, and obviously every day it toddles about with something like three people on it, so a mere once an hour was my way of painting the Commonwealth as a land of milk and honey.
Hints at the growing problem of inflation, which is what you would expect, but there is at least food around so clearly the initial changes after the revolution didn't do that much damage, or more likely were rapidly changed again.
I hinted that I had written a more monography text on this subject before scrapping it in favour of the slice-of-life vignette, so I'll give a little detail on what I think happened to farming just for the record.
After 1929 the CPGB appropriated the land from all of the big landowners, most of whom had fled to Canada or the like in any case. The requisitioned land was parcelled out to farm workers who were invited (I'll let you decide what 'invited' means) to carry on farming as smallholders organised into co-operatives. Food production and distribution is regionalised, with local co-ops as far as possible feeding their wider communities. As hinted above, new worker housing being built also comes (again, as far as possible) with allotment access and maybe space for a pig or something. So in the years after the revolution there's a shift towards self-sufficiency to accompany something like the old commons being revived.
(Incidentally, the pig example in the update is true. Wales is very bad for farming pretty much anything except sheep, so a lot of people got quite resourceful until well into the second half of the 20th century.)
This is all basically fine for a few years, but then in 1934 Mosley seizes power. He doesn't immediately do anything to change the situation, but because he is Oswald Mosley he doesn't like the idea of Britain having anything except a centralised system of food production and distribution. In the years of the Anti-Fascist Wars (1936–44), which aren't total wars but give Mosley cover to expand his government's powers, he gradually seeks to bring things under the control of a new Bureau of Food – naturally within the Office for Economic Planning, which he heads unchallenged between 1929 and 1945. In cases where smallholders get fed up of smallholding, the BoF comes in to take over the land. This is the beginning of a 'mixed' system, characteristic of Mosley's economy more broadly at the time, supporting collective and dirigiste operations in parallel. As Mosley sinks his claws in further and further, things progress more and more to the dirigiste side: the smallholdings are consolidated and Britain's food network is taken more and more into state control.
The major trigger for a mass change is the winter of 1946/7, or more accurately the following spring. There is an update about this period, and the effect it had on industrial relations more broadly, which you can read if you wish. (It's actually in two parts,
here and
here.) The long and short of it is that devastating floods in spring 1947 wipe out a load of Britain's agricultural productive power (as they did historically), leading among other things to a reliance on French and Spanish imports to stave off food poverty in the final years of the 1940s. Mosley decides that this is proof that agriculture must be run by the state (ie him) and he presses ahead with centralising measures in order to bring Britain back to self-sufficiency on a national level.
(Mosley being Mosley, this may or may not also involve the systemic appropriation of food from the
colonies. Putting that 70 per-cent white ownership of land in Kenya to good use, for example…)
The 1940s and '50s also see mechanisation efforts along OTL lines, which obviously entails a further consolidation of land where eg smallholdings are too small for combine harvesters.
This is pretty much still the system by the 1960s: probably some of the original co-ops surviving, maybe in more isolated areas, but otherwise a return to a system of larger farms managed by a state organ, and distribution standardised so that available produce is more or less even across the country. The one innovation of the Bevan era is that exciting food now comes over from the Continent thanks to Eurosyn agreements, but it is expensive.
I strongly foresee this being reformed again post-Bevan. Maybe in the Seventies more people will also get their own fridge-freezers.
My congratulations to Wynford on managing to even get within 2 years of claiming a coal miners pension, a rare achievement indeed. It is a testament to how dangerous and unhealthy the job is that the Miners Pension Scheme continues to have a healthy surplus to this day, almost entirely because so few have survived to claim it and those rare claimants tend to die earlier than average as well. The attachment of mining communities to such a brutal and unrewarding way of earning a living remains baffling to me.
Thanks to the phenomenal power of the Miners' Federation, in the Commonwealth the miners take their pension at 57, so it is perhaps not quite as grand a feat as one might think, but still undoubtedly a fine achievement.
As for the attachment of the communities to a brutal and unrewarding way of earning a living… I suppose the post-Thatcher answer is that there is really very little else to be attached to in many cases (particularly in Wales). But even before then mining has a very long and Romantic popular history. There is a great Richard Burton interview where he talks about how he never wanted to be an actor, he wanted to be a miner (he actually calls them 'the aristocrats of the working class'). I guess some of it is probably for the very reason that it is so horrible: in a perverse way, there is a pride in doing that sort of work.
Minor historic point of amusement, one of the last surviving coal mines in Wales is near Ystradgynlais. Last year the owners applied for an extension to the mining activity, they got a Coal Authority licence, local planning permission agreed, financing lined up and mitigation bond to fund restoring the site was in place. All good to go, then the Welsh Government vetoed it. The Labour Party intervening to get mines shut and miners sacked always makes me chuckle. I don't even disagree with the decision, but given their history it is darkly amusing to me.
I picked Ystradgynlais because it's where my family lived for hundreds of years before my grandparents moved to Cardiff, so that is indeed an amusing historical coincidence.
Welsh Labour have not exactly been known for their political acumen in recent years, so this news does not surprise me too greatly. But then it should also be recalled that Wilson closed more mines than Thatcher (iirc), so the decision ironic perhaps only in the popular imagination.
We will be getting into mine closures soon, btw.
