Contemporary Record

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Is the postwar consensus a myth?

Ben Pimlott , Dennis Kavanagh & Peter Morris

To cite this article: Ben Pimlott , Dennis Kavanagh & Peter Morris (1989) Is the postwar
consensus a myth?, Contemporary Record, 2:6, 12-15, DOI: 10.1080/13619468908581025

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CONTROVERSY
IS THE 'POSTWAR CONSENSUS' A MYTH?
The 'Postwar Consensus', which is alleged to have existed until the mid-1970s,
has become one of the cornerstones of our understanding of postwar British
history. But did it ever exist? Ben Pimlott argues that it did not, but Dennis
Kavanagh and Peter Morris, authors of a forthcoming book on the subject, argue
that Pimlott misreads the history.
COMMENTARY ONE
Politics contains fashionable words and
phrases that are soon on everybody's lips,
acquiring the status of instant explanation.
Some quickly vanish: others linger, become
universally absorbed, and gain a permanent
niche in our vocabulary shaping and
perhaps distorting the way in which we
view our world.
Consensus is one such word. It is a long-
established term, but one which has gained
an important place in British political
parlance only during the last decade.
Especially since Mrs Thatcher took office
in 1979 and began to introduce major
changes, the view has gained wide
acceptance that British politics used to be
characterised by a consensus but that this
nation-uniting mood no longer exists.
The alleged consensus has been regarded
in different ways. For some, particularly
on the political right, it was disastrously
misconceived: an ostrich-like refusal to
accept hard economic facts, a wrong-
headed conventional wisdom that led to the
crises of the 1970s. For others, especially
in the centre and centre-left of the political
spectrum, the supposed consensus was the
cause of much that has been good, a fertile
source of progressive social and economic
policy, and the basis for a more harmonious
and less divided society. Whether the
consensus has been villain or hero
whether its passing . is celebrated or
mourned few of the writers, journalists
and politicians who need to give
contemporary politics a reference point
doubt that it once existed.
Consensus is Latin for agreement, and
like many Latin terms, its first use in
English was scientific. Physiologists spoke
of a consensus to describe an agreement or
harmony of organs of the body which had
a specific purpose. In the middle of the last
century, the term began to be used to refer
to the body politic, but with the anatomical
usage still in mind.
In the twentieth century the physiological
origin has been forgotten, and the link
consciously discarded. Nevertheless, the
12
organic metaphor remains embedded in our
modern understanding of the term.
Consensus in political language is certainly
a more powerful and emotive term than
mere agreement. Consensus is said to exist
not when people merely agree, but when
they are happy agreeing, are not
constrained to agree, and leave few of their
number outside the broad parameters of
their agreement. Thus in the modern as
in the old-fashioned sense of the term,
a consensus is a harmony. Further, those
who are a part of it frequently share, a
purpose, in a way that is analogous to the
common purpose of bodily organs.
The official birthday of the 'postwar
consensus' according to true believers
- was May 1940, when Winston Churchill
took office at the head of a genuine
coalition (in contrast to that of 1931), the
most broad-based government this country
has ever known. Great emphasis is placed
on the war years by the consensus theorists
both enthusiasts like Paul Addison, and
critics such as Correlli Barnett because
it is on this key period of emergency-
created cooperation that their whole case
rests. And there is no doubt that this was
a remarkably innovative episode, in which
politicians of all parties as well as
permanent and temporary civil servants
played a part.
The need to streamline the economy to
meet the requirements of total war, the need
to maintain civilian morale and give people
something to work for, the red-tape-cutting
dynamism which Churchill's own
personality engendered: all these led to a
string of reforms, on which there was
undoubtedly wide agreement. Thus, during
the period 194043, universal social
security, family allowances, a root-and-
branch education reform, the main features
of a national health service, a revolutionary
new approach to budgetary policy, had all
been placed on the agenda. At the same
time, the policy goal of full employment,
together with ideas about town and country
planning and government intervention in
industry, was gaining acceptance.
It is here, according to its proponents,
that the British consensus theory takes off.
Four events, practical and symbolic, are
presented as foundation stones. Thefirst
arguably the most important was the
pioneering 'Keynesian' budget of Sir
Kingsley Wood in 1941, the result of
Maynard Keynes's direct influence in the
Treasury, as economic adviser. The second
was the Beveridge Report on Social Insur-
ance and Allied Services in 1942
blueprint for the postwar welfare state. The
other two both occurred in 1944, and were
directed towards a postwar world already
in sight. One was R.A. Butler's Education
Act which raised the school-leaving age and
provided free secondary education for all
children, including grammar school places
for a lucky minority; the other was an
Employment Policy White Paper, whose
full-employment goal was accepted by all
three political parties.
On each of these measures, reports and
statements there was some disagreement,
but on none, point out the 'consensus'
historians, was disagreement fundamental.
'All three parties went to the polls in 1945
committed to principles of social and
economic reconstruction* writes Addison:
' . . . the new consensus of the war years',
he sums up, 'was positive and purposeful'.
And so, according to the consensus
argument, it remained. A Labour
government, elected in July 1945 with
Clement Attlee as Prime Minister, inherited
the 'positive and purposeful' wartime
consensus and proceeded to carry out many
of the reforms which had been developed
in principle during the coalition years,
some of which were already in the
administrative pipeline. Eventually
defeated in the election of 1951, Labour
passed on the mantle to a new look Tory
Party, which quietly endorsed and even
embraced them. Meanwhile, economic
reconstruction and the Cold War forced
both major parties to tie Britain's fate
closely to that of the United States, bringing
Labour and Tory foreign policies into
agreement.
Here, then, we have the widely
proclaimed British consensus
alternatively billed as a golden age of rising
living standards, domestic and European
peace, full employment and social
improvement; or as locust years of
spendthrift state socialism leading to
national decline. The high priest of this era
is often presented as Harold Macmillan,
Vicky's 'Supermac', who combined in his
chameleon personality old and new, ancient
and modern, right and left. A crofter's
CONTEMPORARY RECORD
grandson who married a duke's daughter,
his manners were those of a grandee, but
his background belonged to the progressive
publishing world of Bloomsbury: Maynard
Keynes had been a childhood friend, and
Macmillan's pre-war book, The Middle
Way, scriptural text for the consensus-
minded, helped to inject Keynesian thought
into British politics.
Macmillan resigned in 1963, but so
it is generally maintained the consensus
which he led and epitomised survived him.
There are different opinions about when it
is supposed finally to have come to an end.
Some believe that a deepening divide was
already visible by the time of the 1970
election, when Edward Heath's 'Selsdon
Man' proposals seemed to mark a
Conservative shift to the right. For others,
the turning-point was the 197374 miners'
strike. The most decisive moment,
however, is frequently seen as the 1979
election, after which Mrs Thatcher
inaugurated a new kind of radical
Conservatism, consciously distancing
herself, not only from Labour policy, but
also from past Tory practice. This allegedly
consensus-breaking tilt by the government
was soon to be paralleled by Labour's tilt
to the left, leading to the fissure that saw
the launching of the SDP, and an enlarged
centre-grouping between the now distant
major party blocks.
Like most historical theories, the
consensus thesis is as much about the
present as the past. The assumption of
harmony in the past is a way of underlining
the gulf that is believed to exist in the
present. Thus, it is often argued that the
'end of consensus' has altered the
parameters of debate. The 'consensus'
theory is invoked in order to argue that a
much broader spectrum of opinion now
exists, characterised at the extremes by an
authoritarian, anti-bureaucratic, privatising
and nationalistic Conservatism, and by a
directive, union-orientated, neutralist
socialism.
Looking back over the past 50 years, this
Iheory of the British consensus certainly
provides a neat, convenient explanatory
framework, containing as it does a period
of -general prosperity and accelerating
expectations which had a very different
tone from our own. Few would dispute that
1940 marked the start of something new;
while the sense of a sea-change in British
politics during the 1970s has certainly been
widely felt.
Yet the notion that major changes have
occurred in prevailing ideas, even if
demonstrably true, does not necessarily
entail a lost consensus. We need to consider
the possibility, indeed, that the consensus
is a mirage, an illusion that rapidly fades
the closer one gets to it. We may argue,
against the popular theory of the consensus,
that genuine consensus in politics is very
rare and, further, that we see more
SUMMER 1989
agreement in the past than in the present.
The heat and passion of current controversy
always seems to burn more fiercely while
it is actually happening, than later, when
tempers have cooled. In retrospect, the
cause of a past dispute may often seem a
trifle, and the historian may be struck by
the closeness of rival points of view.
It is possible that both the nostalgic and
the rejectionist historians have fallen into
this trap, committing the grievous error of
anachronism. For taking the period of
supposed 'consensus' from the Second
World War to Mrs Thatcher - there is
little sign of the main political actors
regarding themselves as part of a 'national
consensus' at the time.
Tensions that had existed between
wartime ministerial partners, yet had been
hushed up because of the political truce,
surfaced as soon as Labour left the
government following the defeat of Hitler.
No election has been fought more
ferociously, or with more immoderate'
language, than that of 1945 in which
Churchill accused Labour of plotting to set
up a 'gestapo', as serious an allegation,
within weeks of the opening of the death
camps, as it is possible to imagine.
The 1945 Labour government took up
the Beveridge Report as its own, and
implemented or adapted many of its
proposals, which embodied the principle of
universality in the provision of state
benefits. Conservatives subsequently
accepted what Labour had done. Yet the
notion that Tory paternalists had as much
to do with extending the social role of the
state as Labour welfarists, is, folklore of the
kind disseminated by Conservative Central
Office at election time, or by Marxists keen
to discredit the 'bourgeois' Labour Party.
Few political battles have been as bitter as
Nye Bevan's fight with the Tory-backed
doctors over the creation of the Health
Service. Few ideological strands have been
as consistent as the Tories' hostility towards
treating the 'undeserving poor' latterly
renamed 'welfare scroungers' with
generosity. Conservative opposition to the
principles of universality, always latent,
became increasingly vocal from the mid-
1960s almost a quarter of a century
before Mrs Thatcher came to power.
It is easy to take for granted hard-won
reforms, and to forget how bitterly they
were contested at the time. When one
policy triumphs over another, it is tempting
to regard the change as inevitable, and as
part of a progressive, consensual evolution.
Yet the reality of radical reform is that it
has seldom come without a fight.
During the 1950s, there was agreement
of a kind between the two front benches and
the Treasury, though scarcely amounting
to a 'consensus'. Huge differences between
the parties remained. There was certainly
no element of me-tooism about Anthony
Crosland's impassioned plea for greater
social equality, The Future of Socialism,
which was published in 1956 and
conceived, not as a statement for the
middle-of-the-road and the consensus-
minded, but as a radical alternative to
prevailing Tory attitudes.
What about followers, as distinct from
leaders? Did they at least share a
'consensus'? The American scholar,
Samuel Beer, in his book Britain Against
Itself, argues that consensus existed in the
1950s and 1960s because 'party
government had given rise to an agreement
on the common good which, to be sure, fell
far short of unanimity, but which did
accomplish the aggregation of the
preferences of a large majority of the
electorate'. Yet even this is far from clear.
Indeed we may go further. Whatever lines
of continuity or discontinuity may have
existed at the top, ordinary voters appear
to have been more divided during the
period of the so-called consensus than since
its supposed conclusion.
In an age of agreement, even of
agreement that fell short of unanimity, it
would be reasonable to expect the electorate
to care little which party held office.
Consensus-mindedness might also seem
conducive to the growth of a centre party,
which could best express the shared values
of much of the nation. In fact, throughout
the key years of the supposed consensus,
rigid loyalty to one major party or the other
was the norm, and switching the exception,
while the political centre was af its most
insignificant. True, there was electoral
tranquillity of sorts. Opinion shifted little
from one general election to the next. From
1950 to 1970 the conservative vote was
never outside the range 43.549.5% or the
Labour vote outside 4 3 - 4 9 . This
tranquillity in contrast to the volatility
of before the war, or of the last decade and
a half has been offered as evidence of
consensus. A moment's thought will show
it as the reverse. Sandbagged in their
electoral trenches, early postwar voters can
be seen as the anonymous infantry of two
implacably opposed armies in an era of
adversarial politics, with the middle-way
Liberals floundering in no-man's-land.
But the greatest problem for the
consensus theory is in defining the essence
of the consensus itself, that ghostly cloak
which, we are assured, encompassed our
national life through happy or wastrel
years. I began by discussing the origins and
usage of the term consensus, and then
examined the topography of the supposed
British one. Yet what, even notionally,
does the terrain amount to? The British
postwar consensus could be defined, not
entirely flippantly, as the product of a
consensus among historians about those
political ideas that should be regarded as
important, and hence to be used as
touchstones of the consensus. Neither is it
irrelevant to consider the political
13
 Attlee as Prime Minister in 1946 did political tensions resurface after the Second World War coalition?
orientation of those historians from whom
the consensus thesis is derived. Some
the rejectionists bolster their sympathy
for modern Conservatism by contrasting it
with the alleged compromises of the past.
Others, probably the majority, display
towards the kind of policy package they
choose to label 'consensus' a shamelessly
sentimental yearning.
Ben Pimlott
Ben Pimlott is Professor of Politics and
Contemporary History at Birkbeck
College, London. His article is adapted
from his chapter 'The Myth of Consensus'
in Lesley M. Smith (ed.) The Making of
Britain: Echoes of Greatness,
(Macmillan, 1988).
COMMENTARY TWO
Our book on the postwar consensus is based
on two assumptions. The first is that there
were discernible and significant continuities
in many areas of British policy and political
approach from the Attlee government to the
mid-1970s. The second is that from the
mid-1970s onwards, there has been a clear
break with many of those continuities. In
14
using the word 'consensus' to describe the
policy mix of the postwar decades, we are
aware of its limitations but remain
convinced that it is a useful descriptive
term. We examine five areas of public
policy the mixed economy, full
employment, trade unions, welfare and
foreign policy. We try to show how an
adversarial party system could coincide
with broad areas of policy consensus.
Policy in the above areas formed
something of a social demopratic package.
It was a middle way, neither free market
capitalist (as in the United States) nor state
socialist (as in postwar Eastern Europe).
Success in the war had vindicated the active
state and it was widely felt that the postwar
reconstruction of society and economy
should similarly be guided by the
government. From 1951, Conservative
governments accepted many of the policies,
on the grounds that full employment and
state welfare were electorally popular and
that the cooperation of major interests like
business and the trade unions was necessary
to govern the country. Today, both new
right Conservatives and many socialists
would complain that before 1979 social
democracy prevailed, regardless of which
party was in government.
Many forces produced a convergence of
policy between governments. Public
opinion seemed attached to many planks of
the consensus and politicians calculated that
the electorate would punish parties that
veered too sharply from them. There
developed the idea of a 'middle ground',
represented by the consensus, which the
electorate wanted. The British tradition of
making policy by consultation with interests
meant that any party in government would
have to accommodate the persistent claims
from major interests like the City, business
and the unions. The permanence of the
senior.civil service was another factor. A
number of permanent secretaries in the
1960s and 1970s had served their
apprenticeships in Whitehall in the war
years or under the 1945 Labour
government. Their sense of what was
'practical' or what one serving civil servant
called 'ongoing reality' was a force for
continuity and convergence.
There is a problem about using the term
consensus as a synonym for cross-party
agreement. After all, disagreement about
ends and means is the life blood of politics.
Political disagreement arises inevitably
from human diversity and the clash of
individual and group interests. Politics is
the activity of reconciling, in a fashion,
these differences and establishing a
common policy for society. An obvious
problem follows: the idea of consensus is
at odds with political activity. Was nothing
at stake in general elections, were different
party programmes false labels, was the
party clash little more than a cover for rival
personal ambitions? One has only to recall
the bitter mood at the time of Suez (1956),
CONTEMPORARY RECORD
Mr Heath's free market period (1970-72),
or the February 1974 election, for any idea
of complete agreement to become wholly
unrealistic. The last 18 months of the Attlee
government (195051) were marked by
intense inter-party conflict in the House of
Commons, and the plan to nationalise the
steel industry was a cause of all-out political
warfare that revealed stark differences in
policy assumptions. Later, in the 1970s,
S.E. Finer argued that the problem with
Britain was that politics was insufficiently
consensual and marked by over-frequent
switches in policy.
It thus becomes possible to put forward
the view that the consensus was nothing of
the sort, that it is myth. Ben Pimlott, in
particular, queries the assumption of near
unanimity in postwar politics. He claims
that politicians during the 1960s and early
1970s thought that they were divided on
fundamental issues. Pimlott thinks that the
idea of consensus is an artefact of historians
and commentators who look back
nostalgically to a pre-1979 era of alleged
good feeling; they have been reinforced by
new right commentators who wish to
discredit many pre-1979 ruling ideas and
compromises and stress 1979 as a turning
point.
The record does not, however, support
Pimlott's doubts. Consider, for example,
two areas, immigration and education. In
1947, Labour nearly adopted controls on
immigration from the New
Commonwealth, as did the Conservatives
in 1953. But at dike level there was
agreement on an 'open-door' policy to such
immigration. In response to backbench
pressure the Conservatives then imposed
limits on Commonwealth immigration in
1962. At the time, Labour bitterly opposed
the measure, but in government it further
tightened controls in 1965 and 1968. More
restrictions, other than those on EEC
nationals seeking to enter the country for
employment, have since been imposed by
legislation in 1971 and 1980. Enoch
Powell's ministerial career was destroyed
after he raised the issue in 1968, and Mrs
Thatcher, as opposition leader,
embarrassed colleagues when she said in
1978 that people felt 'swamped' by
immigrants. For the last two decades elite
agreement has been maintained by largely
ignoring the issue.
On secondary education the agreement
about a tripartite system grammer,
secondary modern and technical schools
prevailed until 1964 when the Labour
government switched to support of
comprehensives. The Labour governments
in 1965 and 1974 introduced orders making
comprehensive schooling mandatory, by
insisting that all local authorities submit
plans for reorganisation. The new
Conservative government withdrew the
order in 1970 leaving the decision about
reorganisation with the local authorities. On
SUMMER 1989
its return to office in 1974, Labour
reimposed the order, while the
Conservatives in 1979 withdrew it again.
On the surface, policy has clearly been
discontinuous. By 1979 more than 90% of
secondary schools were comprehensive and
over a period of more than 20 years the
largest number of such schools were
created under a Conservative minister of
education, Margaret Thatcher (1970-74).
Pimlott also points to such features in the
1950s and 1960s as the high levels of party
identification, class-based voting, trade
union members' electoral support for
Labour, and the stability of individual
voting patterns. These are adduced as
evidence of differences between the parties.
They are irrelevant, however, to the thesis
of consensus the continuity of policy
between governments.
Of course one has to take account of the
intensely partisan nature of political debate
in Britain as well as the adversarial nature
of party competition. Political discussion
has never lacked passion, and debate
between the parties has often been
markedly antagonistic. It was precisely
because competing party structures and
loyalties were so strong that 'new ideas'
had such difficulty in breaking through in
the inter-war years; and whatever else the
Second World War may have done to
British politics, it did nothing to weaken the
strangle-hold of the parties on policy
implementation. But again, such
considerations do not affect the fact of
policy consensus.
So if the term consensus is to be used to
describe significant aspects of British
politics in the period after 1945, it is
important to be clear about the sense in
which the word is being employed. Broadly
speaking, we use it in two senses, apart
from the agreement on political institutions
and procedures. One refers to a style of
government characterized by
institutionalised consultation between
government and the major economic actors,
including notably the trade unions. This is
what Middlemas in his The Politics of
Industrial Society (1979) means by a
continuous contract, in which the interests
involved become governing institutions. It
implies that the art of government is as
much one of harmonizing the wishes of
groups in civil society as of imposing a set
of policies on them. The second theme
refers to a range of policies that were
pursued by governments of both parties
between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s.
It is probably best to think of a set of
parameters which bounded the set of policy
options regarded by senior politicians and
civil servants as administratively
practicable, economically affordable and
politically acceptable. In other words, the
disagreements between the party elites were
contained. In the late nineteenth century,
the constitutional lawyer, A.V. Dicey said
that the Conservative and Liberal Parties
divided on differences which are 'important
but not fundamental'. Addison has this in
mind when he talks of a postwar settlement.
On welfare, for example, it was a question
of the level of benefits and range of
entitlements; on the retreat from empire,
a question of pace and timing; on public
ownership, a question of the extent of state
regulation. No Labour government after
1945 seriously entertained ideas; of"
widespread public ownership and no
Conservative one until 1979 had tried to
dismantle the nationalised sector.
There were party differences of rhetoric
(particularly in Parliament, at annual party
conferences and during general elections)
and of emphasis (Conservatives, for
example, were keener than Labour to cut
income tax, Labour more sympathetic than
Conservatives to local authority housing).
The Tory discourse was predominantly one
of freedom of opportunity, preserving
Britain's influence in- the world,
encouraging and rewarding enterprise and
fostering a property-owning democracy.
Labour's language emphasised equality,
economic planning, fairness, advancing the
interests of working people and their
families, and the multi-racial
Commonwealth.
In addition, both the Labour and
Conservative Parties contained wings
which dissented from the ruling orthodoxy.
In opposition, these voices grew stronger
in the councils of each party. Conservative
right wingers called for more individualistic
and free market policies, lower direct
taxation and reduced state spending. They
opposed the retreat from empire and were
critical of the country's obviously
subordinate relationship with the United
States. The Labour left advocated unilateral
nuclear disarmament, major extensions to
public ownership and a harsher climate for
private business and wealth. If one listened
exclusively to these voices then the parties
appeared to be far apart. But the
govemmentalists in both political parties
were overwhelmingly drawn from the
centre of the political spectrum and, for all
the differences of nuance and rhetoric, it
is the continuity of policy which stands out.
Thus consensus politics are inextricably
linked with policy making as an elite
process and with the existence of a strong
centre.
Dennis Kavanagh
and Peter Morris
Dennis Kavanagh is Professor of Politics
and Peter Morris a Lecturer in Politics at
the University of Nottingham. Their book
on the Consensus is being published by
Blackwell in May 1989.
15