Bevin, handed dictatorial powers over British labour, explains that the secret of wartime output is not using them — and that the real slackers in the munitions economy are the managements.

April 1941, with the Blitz still falling and Britain's war economy in its great expansion. Churchill had brought Bevin — general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, never before in Parliament — straight into the Cabinet in May 1940 and given him near-total power over the working population; the Essential Work Orders he speaks of here made him, by common consent, the most powerful home-front minister of the war. The speech displays exactly why the arrangement worked: a trade unionist's instinct that consent outproduces compulsion, wielded with statutory powers Hitler's economy never matched in practice. The scolding of management — delivered by the man the Tory press had expected to be labour's shop steward in government — inverted every expectation, and production vindicated him. His measures put more women into industry than any country outside Russia, and the machinery of consultation he built ran British industrial relations for a generation. The man himself went on to the Foreign Office in 1945 and the co-authorship of NATO — much of it run on the credit banked in years of afternoons like this one.

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