A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  Gender was an issue for men as well as women. The loss of empire and the end of conscription affected notions of masculinity. Although these ideas remained important in some spheres, notably the military, among black youths, and as far as boys’ attitudes towards certain subjects in schools were concerned, less emphasis was placed overall on what had been seen as masculine values, and some of these values and practices were questioned, indeed mocked, not least in the satirical programmes that became increasingly common on television from the early 1960s, notably Beyond the Fringe. The decline of manual work and the growing importance of women workers also contributed to the same sense of changing, indeed, in some contexts, imperilled, masculinity. Different attitudes to homosexuality contributed powerfully to this sense, as did the marginality of men in many families, especially with the growing significance of single mothers. The role of women in the workforce was also important as women became primary wage-earners in many individual households. Moreover, more men had to answer to female managers and to adjust to women as equals in the workplace.

  As well as gender, ethnicity was an increasingly important theme from the 1960s. The Race Relations Act of 1965 was an attempt to include immigrants within the nation without any demand that they assimilate, the latter possibly a mistake. The Act made it illegal to discriminate in public places, and established the Race Relations Board to tackle complaints. Housing and employment, both major spheres of serious discrimination, were excluded until the second Race Relations Act of 1968, and a third Act followed in 1976. Legislation was made contentious by Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech warning of the baleful consequences of mass immigration; Powell (1912–98), a Conservative MP, was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet for this speech. Race relations also came to play a role in school curricula and citizenship ceremonies.

  Race relations legislation failed to convince many immigrants (understood as New Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants) that they were not the victims of a racialist system, but it marked a major advance on the earlier situation when no such legal protection existed. Nevertheless, race relations continued to be high-profile and contentious, with particular concern about policing by immigrants arguing that they suffered unfair treatment, and about crime by both immigrants and ‘whites’, each alleging undue criminality on the part of the other group. At the same time, it would be mistaken to consider immigrants as a bloc and race relations as a simple issue of their relationship with the native ‘white’ community. For example, there were also serious tensions between Asians and West Indians, while the caste-like attitude of some Asian communities, not least towards marriage, was highly exclusionist.

  Society in Flux

  Society was in a situation of greater flux than in the 1950s, let alone the 1930s, and the alignments and classification of the nineteenth century were no longer relevant. This situation was matched in the cultural world, which was one of bewildering complexity and of artistic hierarchies under repeated challenge. Yet, alongside the rhythm of cultural change, there was a continuing fissure between elite and popular cultural forms, and a wide disjuncture between ‘high-’ and ‘low-’brow works. The overwhelming characteristic of popular ‘low-’brow works was a reluctance to experiment with form and style. A pattern of contrast that was essentially set earlier in the century, with the impact of Modernism, ensured that there were very differing understandings and experiences of culture and the arts. These differences reflected the wider cultural politics of a society containing highly varied levels of income, education and expectation.

  Yet choice existed: in social behaviour, personal mores and artistic taste. The role of choice was true more generally in the reaction against deference and hierarchy, which affected all organizations and careers. The royal family faced public criticism, not least on the grounds of cost and relevance. George VI (1895–1952; r. 1936–52) had won respect by his resolution during the Second World War, notably staying in London during the Blitz. Moreover, the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 proved a key moment of national pride, identity and occasion for the society of the 1950s, and, as queen from 1952, she helped maintain the nation’s sense of continuity. The royal family’s support for good causes, notably voluntary organizations, contributed to a strong sense that the monarchy had an important purpose.

  However, there was mounting criticism from the 1960s and, in particular, the 1990s. The death of Princess Diana, the ex-wife of Charles, Prince of Wales, in 1997 led to a large-scale public outpouring of grief that contrasted with earlier habits and yet also focused a sense that the royal family (as opposed to the estranged ‘People’s Princess’) was out of date. In addition, when the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, died in 2002, there was a display of critical comments that contrasted notably with the deference shown to the royal family in 1930, the year of her birth.

  The abandonment of deference was wide-ranging. Thus, a willingness to question the police became more pronounced from the 1960s, and the police, like other public and private bodies, had to devote more time to establishing a complaints procedure and to addressing criticism.

  More generally, the strength of consumers within a market economy that, after the end of post-war austerity and rationing, had been expanded by growth and large-scale privatizations, promoted democratization, as, however guided by advertising, consumers made their own purchasing decisions. In addition, taxpayers were encouraged under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s to see public expenditure as questionable and open to challenge: taxes were ‘our’ money, spent by the state. Under John Major, Conservative Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, the Citizens’ Charter (and all its variants: Patients, Schools, Further Education, etc.) promoted a culture of complaint and redress, admittedly most heavily used by the middle class. This process was taken forward by the Human Rights Act of 1998 which undermined traditional structures of deference and authority by enshrining rights over regulations.

  The consequences of the extension of rights proved very varied, as did their political context. Most obviously, individuals were given legal rights at work in 1963, and individual rights were pushed actively by the Thatcher government as it sought to establish a new practice of employment and a culture of work focused not on the traditional collective bargaining, which affirmed the role of trade unions, but on legal regulation – regulation therefore established by Parliament and regulated by the courts. As a consequence, the culture of redress led to defensiveness on the part of institutions and individuals, and thus, ironically, expanded the size of the bureaucracy.

  Accountability was pushed by consumer groups, notably the Consumers’ Association, from mid-century with comparative testing magazines, for example Which? and Consumer Reports, encouraging the centrality of informed consumer choice. Moreover, the endless satisfaction survey/market research/focus groups of the 1990s and 2000s promoted a sense of democratized (public) services, an idea pushed by Tony Blair who greatly favoured policy by market research. Accountability, transparency, consultation and openness became ‘buzz’ words and oft-cited ideas, with the very concept of the ‘buzz’ word reflecting the vogue for the fashionable.

  These tendencies, however, accompanied the contrary collectivism stemming from universal public provision in crucial fields such as education and health, again underlining the tensions at play in society. Thus, alongside democratization came the anti-democratic rise in the power of quangos: government-appointed bodies that, despite their frequent talk of consultation, lacked accountability and instead often existed to advance and enforce centrally fixed standards.

  Politics, 1945–64

  Collectivism stemmed in part not from socialism but from a strengthening of the earlier commitment to government-directed reform. In the 1930s, there was a widespread sense that government had to act in response to the Depression, and there was a wave of what was later termed ‘middle opinion’, which began to champion the ideas that would later underpin the post-war consensus. For example, in 1931 the pressure group Political and Economic Planni
ng was formed to promote planning and a more interventionist style of economic management. However, there was far less intervention in the economy than critics thought appropriate.

  From 1945, the policies of successive Labour governments further strengthened this identification of reform with government action. Labour thinkers in the 1930s elaborated ideas of corporatist socialism that were implemented by the 1945–51 Attlee governments, with intellectual approaches given particular credence. The academics who had entered government service during the war provided a new definition of expertise; although it often lacked a pragmatic feel or a grasp of economic realities. Planning reflected a strong current of collectivism; self-help had gone, as well as the laissez-faire state. ‘Welfare’ in part represented the triumph of human agencies in society over spiritual responses to life, while the memory of widespread unemployment in the 1930s encouraged government action.

  Until the advance in the late 1970s of the neo-liberal free market economics that were to be associated with Thatcher, state intervention in the economy was conventionally seen in terms of reform. Although particularly associated with Labour, it was also supported by Conservative governments, as with the establishment of the Central Electricity Board (1926), the British Broadcasting Corporation (1926), the London Passenger Transport Board (1933) and the British Overseas Airways Corporation (1939). Furthermore, under the Conservatives, there was also considerable regulation in other sections of the economy, for example the rail system. Moreover, in 1938, it was agreed that coal royalties would be nationalized from 1942.

  This situation did not represent some lack of confidence in capitalism by Conservative governments, but, rather, a pragmatic willingness to consider a range of options for the organization of sections of the economy, and a belief, looking back to late-nineteenth-century attitudes, that public ownership could be a positive step. Competition was not seen as a goal in itself. Instead, public ownership was viewed as a potentially effective form of management, as with the creation from 1933 of the National Grid by the Central Electricity Board. These policies were developed by the Labour governments of 1945–51.

  Egalitarianism represented another current of reform thought, indeed a secular ideology, although, within the Labour Party, there was a tension between gradualist, Fabian approaches and those which called for a true socialist overturning of the old order. A belief that people are equal, and should be treated equally, had been associated from the outset with Labour, and it lay behind the creation of the National Health Service, which was both an assertion of the importance of equality within the community and a device to achieve it. Whereas the National Insurance Scheme of 1911 had been intended to help transfer income over the lifetime of an individual in order to provide for health care, the NHS offered state provision paid for by taxation. Moreover, family allowances were introduced in 1945, and paid from the outset to mothers, not fathers.

  The creation of the NHS was a good example of Labour’s success in adapting socialist ideology to the British political and government system. Labour’s overwhelming electoral victory in 1945 reflected considerable support for its policies from both middle-and working-class voters, and support for collectivist assumptions, but other factors also played a role, notably the degree to which Labour’s role in the wartime Coalition proved that they could run things. Moreover, there was a rejection of the 1930s’ Depression and, in part, of the image of pre-war society as class-oriented, and these attitudes led to opposition to the Conservatives.

  On the whole, state provision and control were pushed most strongly by Labour governments, which nationalized coal in 1947, the railways and electricity in 1948, gas in 1949, and iron and steel in 1951, and wished to nationalize much more, including wholesaling, while Conservative administrations adopted a more ambivalent position. Notably, when the Conservatives, still under Churchill, returned to power after the election of 25 October 1951, with 321 seats to Labour’s 295, they did not return to the policies of the 1930s. Instead, there was much with which Churchill would have been familiar as a reforming Liberal imperialist in the 1900s. Accepting the consequences of 1945, the adaptable Conservatives continued the welfare state and, indeed, much of Labour policy. Only the recently nationalized iron and steel, and road haulage were denationalized, both in 1953; the railways, gas, coal and electricity remained in the public sector. There was no equivalent to the Thatcherite privatizations of the 1980s.

  Allowing for the importance of debates and divisions within the political parties, the Conservatives did not wish to lose support by being associated anew with the policies of the 1930s, and, in particular, successfully worked to keep the centrist Liberals weak. Prosperity was to be ensured, Churchill pressing in 1951 a policy of ‘houses, red meat, and not getting scuppered’. A continuity of economic policy between the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, and his Conservative replacement from 1951, R.A. Butler, including a fixed exchange rate for sterling, Keynesian demand management and a commitment to ‘full’ employment, led to the phrase ‘Butskellism’ being coined by the Economist in 1954. The Conservative government decided that it was not sensible to legislate against trade union rights, such as closed shop agreements and the legal immunities the unions had gained in 1906, and, from the later standards of Thatcherism, the unions were appeased. Indeed, Churchill urged his naturally emollient Minister of Labour, Walter Monckton (1891–1965), to give in on pay awards in order to avoid strikes. Moreover, in the early 1960s, the Macmillan ministry sought to develop economic planning.

  There was also continuity in foreign and imperial policy after 1951: the Churchill government was equally, if not more, supportive of the Atlantic (Anglo-American) Alliance, NATO and the Commonwealth. The consensus of the 1950s was not a new departure, but, in many senses, a reworking of the consensus policies and attitudes of the 1920s and of the war years. It drew on the prolonged boom in the Western economy between 1945 and 1973, which helped underwrite policies of full employment and which kept unemployment relatively low.

  In practice, however, consensus was not universal. Although continuing the welfare state, the Conservatives did not make it more generous, as Labour, now in the luxury of opposition, advocated. There was also a Conservative determination to resist higher taxes. Thus, very different policy goals between the major parties ensured that elections mattered. Aside from these differences, there were also contrasting responses to circumstances. The Conservatives saw Labour as overly socialist and as unreliable against Soviet Communism, while, in opposition from 1951, Labour sought to replenish its ideological identity and to distinguish itself from the government. Yet, it did so without going far to the left. Indeed, the limited extent of political radicalism was readily apparent in 1945–65. Nazi activities had discredited the extreme right, and, although Oswald Mosley continued his Fascist electioneering, he had less prominence than before the war; while the policies and eventual failure of the Soviet Union struck successive blows at the credibility of the far left. The registered membership of the Communist Party fell from 56,000 in 1942 to 25,000 in 1958.

  The Liberals pursued a centrist policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s and they sought to offer a radical, but non-socialist, opposition to the Conservative government, but they lacked parliamentary weight and won only six seats in each of the elections of 1951, 1955 and 1959.

  The Conservatives held office until 1964, with Churchill as Prime Minister until 1955, Sir Anthony Eden in 1955–7, Harold Macmillan in 1957–63, and then Sir Alec Douglas-Home. We tend to judge the past from the present, and notably so when using the same terms. Thus, most readers will associate Conservative governments with those of Margaret Thatcher and John Major in 1979–97, but that is not the background from which to look at their predecessors in 1951–64. There are significant comparisons between the two periods, not least a determination to support the American alliance, but there was no attempt in 1951–64 to change dramatically, or even significantly, the welfare state or labour relations. Inste
ad, there was a ‘one nation’ Tory paternalism that was later to be anathema to Thatcher, a paternalism, moreover, that matched the cultural conservatism of the 1950s.

  The Tories handsomely won re-election in 1955 and 1959; which underlines the political change that the 1960s represented. On 26 May 1955, the Conservatives, under the newly appointed Eden, won 49.7 per cent of the vote and 345 seats, compared to Labour’s 46.4 per cent and 277 seats. In the 1950s, most seats were won by the two major parties. The Liberals won only six seats, while the Scottish and Welsh nationalist movements did not gather strength until the 1960s.

  In 1959, the Conservative hoardings proclaimed ‘Life’s better with the Conservatives, Don’t let Labour ruin it’, and there is little doubt that a sense of affluence helped greatly in their electoral victory, as, more broadly, did the growth in the middle class and the expansion of owner-occupation of housing. ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’, a phrase Macmillan had employed in a speech in July 1957, was much used during the next election campaign. On 8 October 1959, the Conservatives won 365 seats, their best post-war figure until Thatcher’s second victory in 1983.