Post War Consensus

7 Key excerpts on "Post War Consensus"

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  New Labour and Thatcherism

  Political Change in Britain

  • R. Heffernan(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Understanding consensus politics The debate on the post-war consensus (or, as some commentators would have it, the non-consensus) embraces both contemporary history and political science. Paul Addison's path-finding work, The Road to 1945, first published in 1975 (and issued in a second edition in 1994), credits the post-1940 Keynesian revolution and the experience of the Labour/ Conservative Wartime Coalition under Churchill with the emergence of a `social democratic consensus', eventually set in concrete by the actions of the 1945±51 Labour government (wartime measures included the 1941 Budget; the Beveridge Report of 1942; the 1944 Education Act; the 1944 Full Employment White Paper). 7 Arguing that consensus `was an exercise in containment', a process committing both Conservatives and Labour to common principles of post-war policy, Addison suggests that after 1945 `whichever party was in office, the Whigs were in power. Party conflicts were compromised, and ideology relegated to the mar- gins of government, by countervailing factors which impelled all administrations toward the middle ground'. 8 This middle ground less reflected the absence of ideology than the dominant predilections which governed the actions of political actors as evidenced in their 142 New Labour and Thatcherism selection of policy and their identification of objectives. Essentially, all major parties co-existed in a social democratic universe in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result this post-war consensus reflected the reality that `whether ministers were Labour or Conservative, they were borne along by a belief in the state as a modernising instrument'. 9 The notion of consensus has as many detractors as it has advocates (indeed, at present it is more fashionable to number yourself among the first rather than the second).

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  The IMF Crisis of 1976 and British Politics

  • Kevin Hickson(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 THE POSTWAR CONSENSUS Introduction The terms 'postwar consensus' and 'social democratic consensus' have been widely used as shorthand terms to cover the period from the election of the Attlee Government in 1945 to the election of the first Thatcher Government in 1979. In a similar way, the term 'Keynesian economics' has been used to describe the conduct of economic policy over the same period. In more recent literature, however, the terms 'postwar consensus' and 'Keynesian consensus' have been criticised and in some cases even rejected. The central objective of this chapter is therefore to outline the arguments made by those on both sides of the debate, and to ask if it is still possible to talk in terms of a postwar consensus incorporating a shared commitment to Keynesian economics. This is necessary since we need to understand the dominant political values and frameworks prior to 1976 in order to understand exactly what, if anything, changed with the IMF Crisis. The first section traces the origins of the postwar consensus thesis, and is then subjected to a critique. I then discuss what, if anything, can be salvaged from that critique. The final section examines postwar economic policy. The debates over Keynesianism and the postwar consensus are broadly similar, but for purposes of clarity, I intend to examine each separately. The Origins of the Postwar Consensus Thesis By common consent the postwar consensus thesis has only recently been developed. The core text is suggested to have been Paul Addison's 1975 book The Road to 1945.l Several critics of the postwar consensus thesis maintain this view. For example, Peter Kerr, in a recent publication, emphasises this 18 THE IMF CRISIS OF 1976 AND BRITISH POLITICS point, which was also made by earlier writers.2 For reasons that I will set out below, this is an important part of the postwar consensus thesis, which critics regard as a weakness. For other reasons, I think that this view is incorrect.

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  Introducing Social Policy

  • Cliff Alcock, Guy Daly, Edwin Griggs(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Jones and Novak, 1980 ). The welfare state itself became regarded as a creature of consensus politics which, irrespective of their objective success or failure in meeting social need, was to be fostered, defended and extended as the mark of a civilised society. We shall, in the rest of this chapter, aim to untangle the conflicting arguments about the existence, nature and scope of the post-war British consensus.

  The consensus, so it was said, evolved from the aping, by the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Butler, of the economic policies of his Labour predecessor, Hugh Gaitskell. So clear was the belief in the consensus that it acquired its own identity in the phrase ‘Butskellism’. That the consensus existed appears to be in little doubt, since we are told that from the early 1970s it came under increasing strain in the austere economic climate of the day. Indeed we are further told that the consensus was responsible for many of the social problems visible in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s.

  But the roots of this apparent consensus can be traced back to the inter-war years. The privations, at least for working people, of the 1920s and 1930s and the clearly polarised, along class lines, response of the government to that period of economic crisis, which sought to protect the owners of finance capital, were still clear in the post-war memory. In addition, the minority Labour governments of 1923 and 1929 appeared powerless to break free from the drive for profit of British capitalism. It was in this environment that the idea of a negotiated settlement between labour and capital, which would ensure steady economic growth but also alleviate the suffering of many, gained currency (Addison, 1975 ; Sked and Cook, 1979 ; Briggs, 1983

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  State and Society Fourth Edition

  A Social and Political History of Britain since 1870

  • Martin Pugh(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  276 State and Society politics by 1945. Something similar had appeared during the First World War, but that had been a superficial and ephemeral mood; the ideas of 1945 proved very enduring. This consensus can be seen in terms of broad agreement about the policies, the style and the institutions of government. In this sense, con-sensus was far from new. Periods of bitter debate over the constitution are rela-tively rare in British history; what is characteristic about the post-1945 consensus is the agreement on the substance of policies. There was a very marked contrast with the Liberal government of 1905–14, which also used a landslide victory as the launch-pad for major innovations in policy. It encountered bitter opposition which had no parallel in 1945–51. The nearest Attlee’s government came to a constitutional issue was the decision to trim slightly the House of Lords veto by allowing the Commons to overrule the peers by passing a disputed bill in two sessions rather than three. There were five major areas in which Labour and the Conservatives adopted the same approach. First, the welfare state was consistently respected. Second, full employment was accepted as a legitimate and central aim. Third, the mixed economy, involving a much larger state sector than before 1939, became an established fact. Fourth, it was considered that the participation of the trade unions by consultation and conciliation was as necessary in peacetime as it had been in war. Fifth, it is often forgotten that the fundamentals of foreign, defence and imperial policy were also common to both parties. This involved commitment to NATO, the nuclear deterrent, the gradual run-down of Empire, and enthusiasm for the Commonwealth. This last dimension is an important reminder that the consensus was not simply a matter of concessions by the Conservatives; for, if they moved to the left in social and economic policy, Labour moved to the right in external affairs.

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  Learning Policy

  Towards the Certified Society

  • P. Ainley(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  It preceded many of the other measures intro- ducing the new welfare state, being drawn up and agreed during the war so that the proposed bill was first published in 1943 and enacted in 1944. Like the Beveridge Report covering the whole field of social security, the Education Act was thus a product of cross-party consensus in the wartime coalition government. It is a prime example of what, when 28 Learning Policy the consensus was maintained by the postwar Labour gov- ernment, was called ‘Butskellism’ by its critics on the Left, who derisively combined the name of the Conservative Minister of Education, R.A.B. Butler, with that of the Labour Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell. This party political consensus both contained and reflect- ed a popular, democratic consensus for radical change which emerged during the war. This was the popular foundation for the classic welfare state, which remains, as Blackwell and Seabrook recorded, ‘the most enduring creation of British Labourism’ and ‘the English working class’s great existential protest against the way they were told life had to be’ (1985, p. 37). Even though Winston Churchill’s Conservatives were – to their own and nearly everyone else’s surprise – heavily defeated in the immediate postwar general election of 1945, they came to accept the new type of welfare state, which was inaugurated by the Labour government of 1945–50. Consequently, when the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, they did not substantially alter the status quo as they found it. Indeed, they went on to run the new type of classic welfare state which their opposition had introduced for the next 13 years. Political consensus extended beyond party political com- promise.

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  Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain

  • Camilla Schofield(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1–25 (pp. 2–3). 65 King, ‘The Afghan War,’ p. 23. 66 Henry Tudor, Political Myth (London: Pall Mall, 1972), p. 137. 67 Ibid., p. 138. Postwar, postcolonial Britain 15 asserted unity and belonging, both on the front and at home, despite the stark realities of class difference and political alienation. The idea that the services of the postwar welfare state were a direct political recompense for wartime sacrifices can be found in a vast number of Powell’s letters from the public. In this sense, the collective memory of the Second World War served as a touchstone, a point of departure, in conceiving of social justice and the responsibilities of state power in British society. This is quite different from the argument that collective memories of the war neatly and unequivocally produced an imagined transcendence of social divisions. 68 Instead, the memory of wartime sac- rifice could be held up against postwar deprivation and an uncertain future. But the meaning of the victory of the Second World War trans- formed over time, subject to multiple and competing political contexts and ongoing reconstructions throughout the postwar period. Austerity rationing, the Cold War in Europe, the ending of National Service, the passing presence of the First World War generation and, even, greater access to home-centred consumption would all involve some reworking of what it was that the Second World War had been fought for. While it may be clear that the myth of the Second World War was linked to shifting notions of the relationship between citizen and state in Britain’s postwar era, it is less clear how the predominant myths of the war relate in complex ways to postwar beliefs about British international power, its history and its political legacies. Importantly, in the postwar years, the notion of wartime ‘sacrifice’ worked on both the domestic and international levels.

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  Clear Blue Water?

  The Conservative Party and the Welfare State since 1940

  • Page, Robert M., Robert M. Page(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Policy Press

    (Publisher)

  TWO From war to peace: the Conservatives and the welfare state in the 1940s The Conservative Party’s growing dominance in British politics was underlined at the 1935 General Election when the ‘National’ Conservative government was re-elected to office. The Conservatives secured 47.8% of the popular vote, returning 386 MPs to Westminster. Although Labour recovered from its disastrous showing in the 1931 General Election (when it was reduced to just 52 MPs), it only managed to win 154 seats on the basis of 38% of the popular vote. It was acknowledged within Labour circles that there was limited prospect of the party making significant inroads into the Conservative vote by the time of the next General Election in 1939 or 1940. However, the outbreak of the Second World War disrupted the domestic political scene and proved to be a catalyst for a dramatic revival in the fortunes of the Labour Party. In this chapter, attention will be focused, first, on the impact of the Second World War on the Conservative Party’s approach to social policy during the period of coalition government from September 1940 until 1945. Attention will then shift to the growing influence of progressive ‘One Nation’ Conservatism towards the end of the war, which was to underpin the party’s peacetime thinking on the welfare state from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Conservative social policy during the Second World War Labour’s decision to join the coalition government in 1940, which was conditional on Neville Chamberlain relinquishing his position as Prime Minister, 1 had a significant impact on the Conservative Party’s approach to social policy for the remainder of the war and beyond. Labour’s willingness to join the coalition was premised on a clear understanding that there would no longer be an exclusive focus on the military campaign. At Labour’s insistence, post-war reconstruction was to be moved up the political agenda

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