British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Britain in the 50s: Consensus or Conflict?

There is currently a lively public interest in the political, economic, and cultural history of Britain in the 1950s. In a discussion evening held at the British Academy on 19 February 2008, Professor Peter Hennessy FBA (Queen Mary, University of London) and Professor Ross McKibbin FBA (University of Oxford) addressed rival interpretations of the decade in terms of conflicts (or their absence) - not only of class, but also of generation, ethnicity, gender, and religion and region. The meeting was chaired by Professor Andrew Gamble FBA (University of Cambridge).

The following is a transcript of the opening statements.

Peter Hennessy:

Good evening - lovely to be here. I can see one or two 1950s veterans, one or two - always reassuring! I've got as close as I can to 1950s drapery, to make one feel at home.

The post-war consensus. Very rarely does a scholarly debate penetrate the highest office in the land - just occasionally. And in the 1980s, when younger scholars took on the near consensus that there had been a consensus in the historical profession, the debate erupted in Number 10 in Mrs Thatcher's time. The cause of it was an old friend of mine, Sir Anthony Parsons, who was her Foreign Affairs Adviser, who was not a Thatcherite at all. He made the strategic error one day of saying, 'Prime Minister, I've always believed in striving for consensus.' 'There is no consensus,' she said, 'There is no consensus. I have a name for them. I call them Quislings and traitors!' However, she did believe there had been a consensus - and I will come back to that in a minute - and she was determined to finish off what remained of it in 1979, though I do not think she did so entirely (which we might talk about later).

Indeed, this is the great debate - the post-war settlement debate - that swirls through any treatment of the first ten years after the war, and in many ways the first thirty after the war. Historians look for patterns, and then put labels on to them which encapsulate, and this evening's subject is a classic example of this. What was the post-war settlement? For the purposes of shorthand, one can probably call it the 'never again' impulse converted into policy. Never again 1930s, never again slump, social deprivation, plus a desire on the part of many, although not all, to put right permanently, if you could, the inequalities, injustices and deprivations bequeathed by the Industrial Revolution over the 180 years or so before the early post-war period.

Much of the thinking had been done by the late 1930s but it took the impact of an all-in, total war, in which the entire British people were in the front line, to make it happen so swiftly and comprehensively. Its intellectual high priests and architects were neither Conservative nor Labour but Liberal, as everybody remembers (it is a standard feature of every essay on the subject) - John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge - and extended state intervention was its primary instrument. A great debate has ensued amongst both politicians and scholars about its cumulative impact and the degree to which there was or was not a consensus about its essentials across the political parties, not just during the wartime coalition government between 1940 and 1945, when many of the settlement's 'blueprints from above', as Paul Addison called them, were developed, but over the first post-war decade and more.

You need to know where I stand on this debate; in fact, you probably do already from what I have just said. There was an incomplete but unusually high level of consensus across the three mainstream political parties in that period, certainly in the first decade after 1945, and the ingredients of this post-war settlement amounted to what I call a 'British new deal'. For me, the relative consensus embraced not just a high and sustained level of welfare provision and the maintenance of a high and sustained level of employment - the 'no more 1930s' aspect of the settlement - it went further. It embraced foreign and defence policies, certainly once the Cold War was seriously under way by 1947/48 and Britain's constitutional and governing practices, of which more later.

Other scholars see a higher level of discord than I and Paul Addison - who wrote the classic Road to 1945 in the early 1970s, which delineated the debate in its early days so well - between the party approaches to economic and welfare policy. Some, like Corelli Barnett, see the whole business as immensely harmful to Britain's economic prospects and the nature of its society and what he calls his 'Pride and Fall Sequence' was very highly read. Indeed, when my friend Michael Heseltine became Deputy Prime Minister, he sent free copies - he bought them himself - of Corelli Barnett's books to every Cabinet minister, to the mirth of some and to the bafflement of several.

Younger scholars who came to their formation in the late 1970s and 80s, when many, though not all, of the key elements of the settlement were falling apart, under pressure of high inflation, low productivity and considerable trade union power, look back and see either the seeds of the settlement's later destruction in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, or argue that there was far less of a consensus than the older generation - in which I would include myself - made out, especially amongst the party's activists in the early post-war years. It is, in short, ladies and gentlemen, a very British debate - a family row, if you like. Like all good debates, as Paul Addison has said, neither side has landed a knock out blow on the other, nor are they likely to and it is not a matter of two historical tribes going to war. There are many shades and subtleties in the spectrum of the Great Consensus Debate.

That is the big picture; now briefly back to the beginning. If, in 1931, as the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald crumbled, battered by a huge economic and financial crisis, you had waved a magic wand and said, 'Look at the 1951 election' a mere 20 years on and the level of agreement between the two big Labour and Conservative contenders on economic policy - putting public ownership and nationalisation on one side, admittedly - and welfare policy, they would have thought that you were wishful thinking inside a fantasy land, as opposed to living in the Britain about to pass from Clement Attlee's hands to Winston Churchill's. Yet, even amidst the stresses and strains of the early 1930s, factors were in play, and had been for some time, that were crucial to the eventual making of the post-war settlement.

The progress of the Industrial Revolution itself - in Michael Young's phrase, the 'shift it produced from castes to classes' and to what Harold Perkin called 'the viable class structure'; some of you, again, who have done essays on this will remember - was very much part of the making of it, over the longer period. Organised Labour goes the constitutional route from the late 1890s. Attlee's pleasure in this constitutional accommodation was very much in evidence in the private papers he wrote during the wartime coalition for various Cabinet committees thinking about post-war reconstruction and indeed, in a letter he wrote to Nehru, very privately, saying:

'It's a great thing, a monarchy, you know. I know you want to be a republic but if you go to a presidential system - I would never have won in 1945 if it had been a presidential contest. There are disadvantages, you know.'

Attlee was a complete believer in the beauties of the British Constitution - or near complete.

Garry Runciman, who sadly cannot be with us this evening, would if he were here, I am sure, point us back to the crucial period in World War I when trade union membership surged from two million (in 1912) to 6.5 million (in 1919) - the male franchise was completed - and afterwards, the gradual extension of National Insurance in the 1920. John Ramsden's work on Neville Chamberlain and the filling out of the Liberal reforms in the early part of the twentieth century would point to the beginnings of, not a universalist, Beveridge-type system, but certainly the models for that, the practices that could be extended across the piece if a future government so desired. State intervention in peace time industry; cartels; the building of industrial estates; the public ownership of the British Overseas Airways Corporation and so on in the national government; Macmillan in the late 1930s, publishing his 'Middle Way' and its plea for the State to be the organiser and guarantor of what he called the 'essentials of life' - these were many of the ingredients.

But the wartime coalition and the aftermath of the Dunkirk and Battle of Britain summer switches these questions from slow, to medium, to fast pulse politics - to use Braudel's distinction. Ross has written eloquently about the wartime effect, the 'redistribution of esteem'. It did not really knock the British class system for six, but there certainly was, in Ross's phrase - and I agree with this most strongly - a redistribution of esteem, perhaps temporarily within and between the classes. Also, in the Cabinet Room, Ernest Bevin is the incarnation of organised Labour, and if the Nazis had managed to get a toe-hold, the three ministers who would have gone to the last redoubt were Churchill, Ernie Bevin and Beaverbrook (to do the press releases).

Post-war planning - so-called 'War Socialism' - was dominated in many ways by the Beveridgite/Keynesian thinking, Beveridge's extraordinary report of November 1942. Bevin wanted him out of the Ministry of Labour, could not stand him. So he said, 'Let him do something that will mop him up and we'll never hear from him again. Let him tidy up National Insurance'. And he, Beveridge, turned it into this great paean of reform, with the 'five giants on the Road to Reconstruction', in capital letters: WANT, DISEASE, IGNORANCE, SQUALOR and IDLENESS. We owe that to his wife-to-be, Jessie Mair, who said, 'If you keep this draft, nobody will read it. Strike a Cromwellian tone' - and he did. If anybody wrote a White Paper on Social Security now, with words like that in capitals, they would be sectioned, wouldn't they? It sold 960,000 copies - those were the days - plus the 1944 Employment White Paper, the two of them together.

Also, the core of it was - Rodney Lowe is here and he is the expert on this, not me - what Anne Digby called the 'Classic Welfare State':

• Full employment - without that it was not sustainable in terms of state revenues, that was one of the key things, certainly crucial to it;
• Social Security - the acceptance of state responsibility to provide for all citizens at times of unemployment, disability or loss of income for whatever reason. In other words, the universalist principle: stretching the 'new Liberal reforms' right across and improving them;
• Healthcare: the National Health Service, taxpayer funded, free at the point of delivery;
• Free secondary education;
• Extended state provision of housing;
• Personal social services.

Some of you may think I overdo the 'New Deal' as a label for this. Noel Annan's Our Age - which was a wonderful book, the way it was written, though highly criticised by many people - talks in these terms, of the shameless New Jerusalemer. The New Jerusalem was the butt of Corelli Barnett's scorn. Attlee, who was not given to extravagant language, would occasionally let rip and refer to 'this great social experiment' which was about as close as he got to putting a label on it. Moreover, the notion of the New Deal, which Noel wrote about and which I share very largely, was the attempt to establish a virtuous cycle. It was very highly ambitious, to break the class and industrial antagonisms of the past, to put right, to catch up and then to surpass previous welfare provision.

The trouble was that there were too many moving parts. It was a brave try. There had been nothing like it before or since. The real weakness is what Robert Skidelsky calls 'Keynes's unfinished masterpiece' - the general theory and all that - and Keynes's last strictures to the Treasury and indeed the younger economists who grew up in his shadow, were about the problem of wage inflation in a full employment economy. He knew what the weak point was but, as Robert put it very eloquently, he died in 1946 and his book remained, but he did not. So he is often pilloried too crudely as being quite out of kilter with the realities of Britain's political economy for the bulk of the post-war period.

I was talking to Michael Young, the draughtsman of the Labour Manifesto of 1945, for a television series on Channel 4 in the 1990s, and I asked what the key was to that Manifesto. He said, 'Beveridge, plus Keynes, plus Socialism' - Socialism being the nationalisations. That was the bit where the parties' strife really existed. But Michael also said, 'Isn't it interesting how, although that Manifesto was the full Beveridge Manifesto, it was silent on one huge and overwhelmingly important group - women?' They were seen as appendages to the male householder, the male earner. And shortly afterwards, immigrants - immigration on a large scale.

Attlee, as you know, was very surprised to win, so was the King. The famous meeting just across the Park there on the evening of 26 July 1945, both very shy men - as Paul Addison said, 'Mr Pooter speaking unto Mr Pooter' or not speaking unto Mr Pooter - looking at their highly polished shoes and Attlee could stand it no more and said, 'I've won the Election'. And the King said, 'I know, I've heard it on the Six O'Clock News' - and they went quiet again!

But the Coalition had done much of the R&D for all of this and indeed, it had begun to implement it with family allowances before it fell. It passed the 1944 Education Act - the famous Butler Act - one of the basics, one of the five giants. It took Michael Young to make me think of this, though it was quite obvious the moment he said it: the one problem was public ownership, because there was not agreement on that between the wartime Coalition partners, Whitehall had done no R&D on it at all - absolutely hopeless. The implementation of the Welfare State in three years, remember: the Health Service came into being on 5 July 1948, to be the very day of the third anniversary of the 1945 General Election. The nationalisations were messy, spatchcocked, in some cases, absurd, and there had been no R&D done on them. This is not a guarantee that it would have worked that much better, let's be honest, if the Ministry of Fuel and Power had been allowed to do it in the war, or the Treasury, but it is an interesting point. It is a very stark contrast between the welfare reforms on the road to 1948 and the public ownerships.

The consensus debate has tended to ignore the external factors. Through gritted teeth Churchill accepted the demolition of the Indian Empire. There was a row about the pace of subsequent reform between the parties but, by and large, there was a consensus that as soon as possible the British Empire had to be disposed of with maximum dignity, with one or two exceptions - like Henry Hopkinson saying, 'Never will Cyprus have its independence' in 1954, which must rank in utterances from the 1950s with the widespread view that 'atomic energy would produce electricity that was too cheap to meter'! That is the other one that stands out from the consensus between the parties that was pure nonsense really.

The Cold War was surely a consensual factor too. It is interesting, when you see the Minutes of Churchill talking to Eisenhower just after Eisenhower had become President of the United States, about how fortunate he, Churchill, was to have Morrison and Attlee as the senior Labour figures, 'They're terribly sound on Communism, you know. They'll have nothing to do with the Communist Party of Great Britain, which is continually trying to penetrate the Labour Party. They're very decent'. This was Churchill's way of saying, 'Would you kindly hose down Senator McCarthy?' That consensus was very strong, very tight. Until the late 1950s, there was a consensus on the bomb. The press took no notice - or hardly any notice - when a planted Parliamentary question in May 1948 revealed that we were making atomic weapons and not until after the Defence White Paper of 1957 did we have a really serious anti-nuclear movement in this country. Fifty years ago last weekend it came into being.

It often did not sound like consensus though. There were tremendous fights over food rationing, great partisanship over nationalisation, especially iron and steel. It gets very fractious when Attlee comes back with a very small majority in 1950 and just hangs on. The two big tribes mobilise in those elections in 1950/51. In the 1951 election there was a huge turnout - 80 per cent, just over - and the Conservatives took 48 per cent and Labour 48.8 per cent, but Labour had slightly fewer seats, you remember. The two main parties took 96.8 per cent of the votes cast. The turnout, to be accurate, was 82.5 per cent - a huge clash, parties with big, genuine memberships, not like these phantoms that they now put forward as their membership. Tremendous rows about public ownership: some of you might remember the row about whether cement should be nationalised, or mutual insurers - bonkers really! At the same time, as Denis Healey and Quintin Hailsham quite independently said, they really agreed about 80 per cent of policy, which is in relative terms, very high, but the partisanship - it is always in the interests of parties to buff up their differences.

When you think about it now, both parties are committed - John Major has talked publicly about this, but very few others - to spending year-on-year 40 per cent of our national wealth on public purposes, give or take two per cent either way, and that is the consensus that dare not speak its name, because it is not in anybody's interest to pretend that there is a consensus. If you are an active politician, you get out of bed in the morning to mobilise prejudice, not reason - sweet reason and light. Political classes are always a displacement activity for the disturbed, very largely, though of course, they are indispensable. We need them! Rationing is another example of partisanship. I did not really think, however, until preparing my 1950s book, how we would not be having this discussion had the Cabinet gone the other way on what was going to be the centrepiece of the 1952 Budget - the first formal Budget after they came back. They considered implementing Plan Robot and it was fought out over three very fractious Cabinet meetings - it did not leak at all, though these days you can hardly believe it - to do a dirty float of the currency and to slough off at least a good part of the sterling balances and to let the currency float (it was £2.80 to the dollar) in a band between £2.40 and £3.20 - 15 per cent either way they were going to let it float. The reason they did not was that the Treasury said unemployment would likely go up from 400,000 for a while, to be between 700,000 and 900,000 which was then thought politically to be quite unacceptable. You would have to have deep, as opposed to the very shallow, social service cuts the Conservatives introduced when they came back. The ambition housing programme that Harold Macmillan was presiding over - 300,000 a year - would have gone, and how! And it would have polarised the parties. We would not be here this evening having a consensus debate, if Robot had gone ahead. The post-war settlement would have had a great smash by about Autumn of 1952. Gaitskell and Co could not believe Robot when it began to seep out. They had no idea that this was on the cards, and it very nearly was the main feature of the 1952 Budget.

The consensus debate has also neglected the beauty of the British Constitution. They all thought it was the bees' knees - both parties - and spent a great deal of energy exporting it to various colonies and dominions. They could see nothing wrong with it. Dick Crossman would go eulogistic about it. There were one or two people who got irritated about it but extremely few. The consensus on the constitution did not really begin to crumble until the 1960s and 70s. Churchill wanted Liberals in his Cabinet in 1951, so he was going to offer them a Select Committee on proportional representation but Lord Woolton (Conservative Party Chairman) talked him out of that. That was the nearest things came to the merest whiff of possible constitutional reform.

Furthermore, though we did not know this at the time, the Queen is a great enthusiast for consensus. I managed to get Martin Charteris, her very jolly Private Secretary, to talk to me about this for this television series on the early post-war. 'You might say', he said, 'that the Queen prefers a sort of consensus politics rather than a polarised one. If you are in the Queen's position, then the less squabbling that goes on in the country, obviously the more comfortable you feel. Therefore, politics which are very polarised are very uncomfortable to the Sovereign'. So I thought you would like to know that the Queen has a position on the consensus debate: she thinks it exists, and she is all for it!

In 1955, the Conservatives get quite a tidy majority of 60 and a bit, but they still do not unravel, do they? In the late 1950s, when Peter Thorneycroft and the Treasury team - Nigel Birch and Enoch Powell - wanted to hold the estimates to the 1957 level for the coming year, they lost. The rest of the Cabinet could not contemplate it. There would have to be cuts in family allowance. The New Deal held. Suez disrupted British politics and there was not a consensus on that, and so did CND in terms of the bomb, from the late 1950s onwards. But Paul Addison, who sadly could not be with us this evening, said in a lecture not long ago that, 'In the late 1950s, we were living in a kind of ramshackle social democracy, which I rather liked' - and I have to say, so did I.

When did it end? There is a great debate about that. I think it went to resign with Ted Heath, on 4 March 1974. I will finish though with something I wish I had thought of. A young man called Simon Forshaw, who was taught by my friend Bernard Black at a very good school in Southsea, was going to do his History A-level project on this. He wrote to all the big party figures and said, 'Was there a consensus? And when did it end?' Without exception, they all wrote back and said there was one but they disagreed when it ended. Mrs T thought it ended in 1970, Ted Heath thought it ended in 1979 and Roy Jenkins and Jim Callaghan - they all contributed. They all wrote back to him and all said it certainly existed. It is very interesting that the political class behave as if there most certainly was a consensus and some of them could not bear it, of course, and could not wait to see it go. But they all believe in relative terms that there was one.

It was very high in the debate about the 1980s - remember? Nigel Lawson did a very interesting lecture in 1988 in which he talked about the Attlee Settlement and what he thought the ingredients of Margaret Thatcher's one would be. Like all good things in life, however, the consensus debate comes back like a burp to haunt us - our rows about the Health Service are an extension of the consensus debate and so is the remarkable consensus on the levels of public expenditure for the foreseeable future.

But one thing that consensus could not handle, because this theme has driven otherwise rational Brits quite crazy since 1950, is Europe. It has never been able to handle the question of Europe, because it is a fissure within the parties, not between them. That is another aspect of the consensus debate which always has to be put in. There again though, it is not left and right, wet and dry. It is something more personal and that is a debate which will never end. We are doomed to be what Quebec is to the Canadian Federation: we are going to be the awkward member of the EU forever.

Indeed, Mr Attlee - into whose lap, as Paul Addison wrote, 'The consensus fell like a branch of ripe plums in 1945' - said something about this in his last speech ever, which Douglas Jay relayed to me in 1967, just before he died. Douglas had just been sacked for being unkeen about Europe when Harold was about to apply again and he helped Clem up on to the platform, and even by his standards it was a short speech: 'The Common Market, the so-called Common Market of Six Nations - know them all well. Very recently, this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of them from the other two' - and he sat down. [Laughter] No consensus there! [Applause]

Proceed to Ross McKibbin's opening statement