Commanding Heights: The Battle For The World Economy

Labour created a mixed economy in which newly nationalized industries coexisted with private enterprise.
Now government-owned industries like coal, rail and steel, no longer enriched owners and shareholders, but worked for the common good.
BPenn: So it was an act of regeneration, of renewal.
That was the hope.
And it was a hope that gave us the Welfare State, gave us the National Health Service, gave us full employment, gave us trade union rights, really rebuilt the country from the bottom up.
Choir: ? ...built Jerusalem... ?
Narrator: The welfare state provided care free of charge "from womb to tomb."
Nobody, rich or poor, would need to fear poverty, ignorance, unemployment, ill health or old age.

BPenn: And people said, "This is better "than allowing a lot of gamblers to run the world, where they're not interested in us, but only in profit." Narrator: Russia ended the war as a military and industrial giant.
With the Red Army and the secret police, Stalin imposed his economic system on half of Europe.
The planned economy of Lenin and Stalin had defeated fascism.
Scientific socialism seemed to be in the ascendancy.
Narrator: Socialism was on the march.
Capitalism and free markets were on the retreat.
So about one-third of the world adopted socialism- sometimes through internal revolution, sometimes through brutal imposition by the Red Army.
Narrator: The world was divided.
The cold war had begun.

Commanding Heights: The Battle For The World Economy - The Battle of Ideas (18 of 48)