British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Britain in the 50s: Consensus or Conflict? (Part Two)
Published below is Professor Ross McKibbin's opening contribution to the discussion evening held at the British Academy on 19 February 2008, followed by some remarks from the meeting's Chairman, Professor Andrew Gamble.
Ross McKibbin:
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to say that I also agree there was a consensus. So what I will try to do is think up different reasons for why there might have been a consensus from the ones that Peter has given us, though in fact, I also agree with most of those as well.
There are a couple of small points before I begin where I do not wholly agree with Peter. One is the question of the 1930s and the extent to which the Conservatives in some way anticipate the Welfare State. That can easily be exaggerated. I am not a great believer in the view that the Conservative government of the 1930s was in some sense a precursor of the Attlee government. Nor do I believe that the swing to the Left takes place over the war as a kind of slow process and that the Beveridge Report plays some part in this. In my view, the swing to the Left happens extremely suddenly indeed, in 1940 - my guess is that Labour would have won an election by July 1940 - and that the rise of Labour is co-terminus with the rise of Churchill. Churchill's government was viable only so long as the Labour Party was in it, and he knew that.
I have just been thinking about this and came across a very curious reference. Churchill wound up for the government the famous debate - 7 and 8 May, 1940 - in defence of the Chamberlain government as First Lord and he said, talking about the Norway Campaign: 'Many people have asked me this question' (about whether there was a debacle or not) and then he said, 'A very important person, not a member of this House, has also raised this issue, Mr Ernest Bevin, who is doing much for the public good, a good friend of mine. And he says' - so- and-so. Most people missed the significance of this comment but it seems pretty clear that even though he had not been asked to form a government when he was making this speech, he had in fact decided to make Ernest Bevin the Minister of Labour. So what happens after 1940 happens very fast and Churchill's government is viable only because the Labour Party is in it. The Beveridge Report does not really convert anybody. The Beveridge Report gave opinion something around which it could organise itself and edit its details. But what people do when those 600,000 copies are purchased, as Peter mentioned, is buying something that confirms what they think rather than something that changes their minds about anything at all.
One other point that Peter made about Europe is absolutely right. The parties are divided amongst themselves, but if one compares the pre-1914 Labour Party with the post-1940 Labour Party, the pre-1914 party is very conscious of its position within international socialism and very conscious of the relationship between the British working class and the international working class. MacDonald, for example, knew much more about German socialism, French socialism than any of his successors ever did and one of the unfortunate things that happens after 1940, particularly, is the assumption within the Labour Party that, because it survived intact and all the other socialist parties did not, it has a kind of political and moral virtue which is not available to the Continental parties; and, by its semi withdrawal from the international socialist movement, its semi withdrawal is also from Europe. On the whole, that is a regrettable development and one that has determined Labour Party policy to the present day.
Getting down then to the question of consensus: it does not really matter whether you think people believed in the policies or whether you think consensus was forced. You can take the view that the Conservatives believe in the policies that they inherited from the Attlee government because they think they are right, or you can take the view that they believe in those policies because they think that if you do not, you lose the next election. It does not seem to matter all that much which of the two is correct. It matters, I suspect, for the later 1950s and early 60s but not very much for the late 1940s and early 50s. My own view is that on the whole, the Tories believed in those policies to a considerable extent but in any case, thought that if they did not, they would lose the next election. We can now look at the programme of the Attlee government between 1945 and 1951 and see what is acceptable and what is unacceptable to the Conservatives.
The first thing about it is this question of coercion. They were well aware of the fact that in 1950 they had polled considerably fewer votes than Labour - if the votes were the other way around, the Tories would have had a majority of 50; in fact, Labour had a majority of six and that was partly again because of the curious political passivity of Attlee and the Labour leadership by then - but they were aware also that they had polled fewer votes in 1951. It required only the tiniest of swings under the British political system to put them out again and there was little doubt within that government - and the debates over Robot are driven by this - that anything that raised the possibility of significant unemployment, or looked as though it was significantly going to undermine what the previous Labour government had done, was electorally much too risky and they were probably right to do so.
Thus, it does not matter very much whether they believed in the policies or believed that they had to believe in them; they felt that they had to. That is the first reason - electoral pressure which they believe is irresistible. In addition, if one looks at what is happening at Central Office, the Conservatives were making much more use of polling evidence than the Labour Party were and the opinion polls seem to be pretty clear that the first phase of the Attlee government's programme - including the earliest nationalisations - was popular. There seems no reason to think that the electorate was in any sense hostile of the first phase of public ownership, let alone the NHS. The surveys of the 1950 election, when people are looking quite seriously at what the electorate thinks, seem to establish fairly clearly that the two ideological relationships between the electorate in 1950 and the Labour Party are first of all, the NHS and secondly, full employment. The Conservative Party's opinion polling confirms that; thus anything that looks as though it is going to interfere with either full employment or the NHS is simply unacceptable.
The question the Tories have to make up their minds about is the point at which it becomes safe to oppose the policies of the Attlee government. When can you abandon caution and become more confident? And that is really only towards the very end. They feel fairly safe about things like the nationalisation of iron and steel, because the Labour Party itself and the union movement are very divided over it. They feel reasonably confident about attacking certain aspects of austerity and rationing but again, the opinion polling in 1950 and the survey work suggested that, certainly in working class constituencies, rationing was not particularly unpopular. It was not such a serious issue. It is unpopular in middle class seats, but not in working class seats and that suggests that you had to be rather careful about how far you pushed anti-rationing.
So they are using opinion polling. They have come to the conclusion that the first phase of the Attlee government's policy is popular and probably irreversible. They are not going to go to the barricades in defence of the coal owners or the railway shareholders - both had almost been nationalised in 1918/19. If Lloyd George had not lost his nerve, probably both would have been. Churchill was in favour of nationalisation of the railway system in 1919 and the Conservatives do not seem to have regarded that phase of public ownership as being a battle worth the candle. There does not seem to be any reason to believe, therefore, that they are going to make a serious attempt to resist that kind of public ownership.
Nor was something like the nationalisation of the Bank of England in any way unpopular with the Conservatives. We know that looking back on his life, Churchill came to the conclusion in retrospect that one of the worst things he ever did in his career was going back to gold in 1925 at par and he was inclined to blame the Bank of England for that. He himself had very little respect for the behaviour of the Bank of England. He also knew that the Bank of England was the last private central bank in Europe and it did not worry him that it was nationalised, especially since it made no difference, as it turned out.
They could live with the NHS. It was not how they would have designed it but nor was it all that different, especially after Aneurin Bevan's concessions to the doctors, and to the consultants in particular. The NHS was perfectly bearable to the Conservatives. In any case, they knew that it was so popular that any serious interference with it was likely to be electorally disastrous. They also took the view, as most people seemed to do at the time, that any significant rise in unemployment would be electorally unacceptable. Peter might know that there was a famous algorithm by a well-known political scientist which suggests that for every time unemployment rises by, say, 100,000, you lose, say three per cent of the vote, by which time Mrs Thatcher should have had minus about eighty seats in the first election after 1979. That view seems to have been widely held, that there was an automatic relationship between full employment and doing well electorally; doing badly electorally and raised unemployment. So they think it is too risky to do anything that will interfere with full employment.
It is also worth noting - Peter may disagree - that if you look at the Tory leadership after 1940 and go to 1979, with the exception of Douglas Home, all of them are dissidents in one way or another in the 1930s. Churchill notoriously is a dissident over foreign affairs but in 1932 he is still a free trader and he makes a very strong attack in the House of Commons on Chamberlain, for Chamberlain's argument that we are going to have to live with one million unemployed more or less indefinitely. He considers this to be quite unacceptable. With the exception of Douglas Home, all of them more or less believe this and definitely Heath did; the U-turn has to be seen in those terms. At the top of the Tory party, therefore, whatever is happening elsewhere, the party is led by people who in one way or another disputed the kind of Toryism which was dominant in the 1930s. Thus, there is really very little in Tory policies in the 1950s that departs much from the popular bits of Attlee's programme and, where they do depart, it is the unpopular bits over which the Attlee government were themselves very divided.
Peter hinted that where there seems to be an absence of consensus within the parties in fact. On the whole, the leadership of both parties in the 1950s pretty much agreed on the way in which the British economy and British politics should go. But that is not true, say, with the left of the Labour Party and certain elements - though there are not many remaining in fact - on the right of the Conservative Party. So the quarrel in the 1950s is not really between the leadership of the Labour and Conservative parties but within the parties and notably, within the Labour Party. Moreover, within the Labour Party, the question was always where to go from Attlee, because Attlee had left a very ambiguous inheritance and a very unclear one, which is what the dispute is about. Though the Tories on several occasions privately came close to asking that question - what is the nature of the inheritance? - it is not one that they were going to pose publicly, whereas there were lots of people in the Labour Party who were more than happy to pose that kind of question publicly.
The Labour Party's problem is when public ownership ceases to be something upon which one could agree; when it becomes clear that the electorate accepts the first phase of public ownership and that is it - they do not want any more. The one thing, however, that holds together the Labour Party, in a sense ideologically, is an agreed definition of public ownership; and that is socialism. Once that agreed definition breaks down, there is no further agreement about socialism; so much of the dispute of the 1950s is in effect about how to redefine socialism, given that we no longer really believe in the efficacy of public ownership. The revisionists devise a kind of programme which is a critique of both the Tories and the Labour left. By emphasising modernisation, egalitarianism and so forth they hope they can do it in both ways. The disagreement, the absence of consensus, is within the parties, not between them.
By the late 1950s and early 60s, Labour unity is re-established on the basis of a critique of the Conservatives which centres on modernisation and inefficiency - immobile class structure, bad management and so on. They develop then a new case for state intervention and formal corporatism - different, to some extent, from the argument of the 1940s - and the new case is about modernisation of the economy, which seems to require new forms of social and class mobility. By the late 1950s and early 60s, the Tories themselves adopt much of this programme. I came to England in 1964, just before the election of that year and, though there was a lot of excitement and a lot of the people I knew said that if the Tories got back, it would be a total disaster, it was in fact very difficult for an outsider to see much difference between the parties at all. The programmes were very alike, which is probably because the Conservatives were forced to adopt a programme which was identified first with Gaitskell and then with Wilson.
This raises one last question before I finish. It is this question of political generations. It does seem to be arguable that within a generation there are certain boundaries on which everyone agrees. Thus, in the 1940s and 50s, loosely speaking, it is a kind of Keynesian welfarism that most people agree is what politics should be about and on the whole, the centre, the leadership of the two parties, does not depart greatly from this. The same has been true since 1979: that basically, the leaderships of the two parties have essentially agreed on what the substance, the content, of politics is. That is generational in a way and if you believe, as I think I do, that generations do exist in politics, then the presence of a consensus is not so surprising. Indeed, an absence of consensus is something that we might find more surprising.
At that point, I will leave it. [Applause]
Andrew Gamble (Chairman):
Thank you very much, Ross. Those were two very interesting presentations.
It is probably incumbent on me to strike a note of dissent about the consensus, although I have to say that there are many points upon which I am in agreement.
One thing, however, to consider about this period of consensus is that looking at it from our standpoint now, we are in another period of consensus and have been in it probably since the early 1990s. In some ways, the consensus this time is even more far reaching between the front benches than was the previous one. The reason we are so interested in the earlier period of consensus is because it was succeeded by this period of really quite sharp polarisation in our politics in the 1970s and 80s. Many of the politicians that Peter was quoting, looking back to when the consensus ended and so on, were all active participants in the period of the 1970s and 80s, when it was quite apparent that a lot of the understandings that had existed between the parties had broken down.
Looking back on that earlier period of consensus, the question is how secure its foundations really were and why it was not in fact able to sustain itself, why it broke down and why we have had to have a refounding of a different kind of consensus since that time. Both speakers have pointed to the effect of the war and it is hard to under estimate the way in which the wartime experiences had both a very great effect on the political class and particularly perhaps on the Conservative Party, in persuading a lot of the younger leaders of that party that there needed to be a different dispensation in Britain after the war. That carried things forward for quite a long time in reality.
The hugely important point that Ross made, however, is that the consensus of the 1950s was very much between sets of political leaders. There was probably a lot more disquiet in both political parties than either speaker has talked about. Peregrine Worsthorne wrote a piece in the 1950s called The Stalemate State, and a lot of Conservatives felt like that. They felt that it was quite satisfactory that there was no longer any advance towards socialism. On the other hand, there were many features of post-war Britain that they did not like. Ross may well be right, that they did not want to talk about this openly, for one thing, was for electoral reasons. Yet there were a number of episodes - like Operation Robot to which Peter referred; like the resignations of Thorneycroft and Powell in 1958 over a decision to raise public expenditure by £50 million, which does not seem a great deal of money right now and which Macmillan described as 'little local difficulties' - and already signs within the Conservative Party of a deeper unease and a willingness to think about changing the basis of the settlement.
In addition, on the Labour left there was that same feeling that there was dissatisfaction in the 1950s that things had only reached this point and they wanted to see the next stage. The fact that the Labour leadership was no longer talking about the next stage was deeply dismaying to a lot of people in the Labour Party. There was a consensus, therefore, but was it rather more of a stalemate than a really positive agreement? There is no doubt of the existence, as both Ross and Peter have said, of some very big differences in the language of politicians - particularly Conservative politicians - in the 1950s. Rab Butler, at one of the Conservative Party conferences - in 1954 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and there were people agitating for unemployment to be allowed to rise a bit in order to contain inflationary pressures - said that, 'Those who talk about creating pools of unemployment should be thrown into them and made to swim!' Not a sentence that would be uttered by Tory Chancellors of the Exchequer in the 1980s.
Thus, although there was that consensus, I wonder whether it was the fact that a stalemate had been reached, which neither of the party leaderships was disposed to challenge or to alter in a fundamental way at that time. Moreover, there was no real agreement on how to extend the consensus in new directions. It was when those challenges came throughout the 1960s and 1970s, that these weak foundations of the consensus were perhaps exposed.
That is enough from me.