Britain After Empire

Britain After Empire Constructing a Post-War Political-Cultural Project P. W. Preston Britain After Empire This page intentionally left blank Britain After Empire Constructing a Post-War Political-Cultural Project P. W. Preston Professor of Political Sociology, University of Birmingham, UK © P. W. Preston 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-02382-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-43834-1 ISBN 978-1-137-02383-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137023834 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Contents Preface vi Acknowledgements viii 1 After the Empire: Establishment Designs, High Arts and Popular Culture in Britain 1 2 Foundation Myths: The War, Wartime and ‘Continuing Britain’ 19 3 Grand Designs: Patrician Reformers, Subaltern Demands and the Ideal of Welfare 40 4 Making Enemies: The Cold War 62 5 Voices of Complaint, Voices of Assertion 82 6 Patrician Retreat: Quickening Change in the 1950s and Early 1960s 97 7 Affluence Attained, Affluence Doubted 112 8 Corporate World, Media and Politics 138 9 Amongst the Bullshit Industries 157 10 Familiar Utopias: New Technologies and the Internet 177 11 Continuing Britain: Contemporary Political Culture Unpacked 196 Notes 218 Bibliography (Readings/Viewings) 257 Index 267 v Preface This text tracks the intermingled intellectual/moral responses of elites and masses to the collapse of the British state-empire system in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. It asks how the elite sought to fashion a new project/identity for itself, how its ideas were disseminated and how ordinary people responded. The elements of these political-cultural processes are sought in elite designs (policies, plans, declarations and the like), high arts (novels, theatre, fine arts, art-house film and so on) and popular culture (radio, film, television, newspapers and magazines and lately the burgeoning realm of digital media). Establishing this project entailed a creative mixture of denial and confection. The former dismissed the hitherto peripheral territories of empire as of little enduring relevance, parts of an empire accumulated in a fit of absent-mindedness, and given away in due time in a peaceful consensual fashion, whilst the latter reworked the collective memory of the now shrunken core territories, claiming that Britain was a long-established nation-state, now legatee of empire, recent victor in a virtuous war, favoured ally of America and something of a model for other countries-in-general. This political-cultural product of these interlinked manoeuvres can be tagged ‘continuing Britain’. Against this comfortable, deluded tale, the present text presents a rather more scep- tical view: that the British polity comprises an entrenched, enlightened oligarchic elite, in thrall to the USA via finance, defence and ideolog- ical nostalgia, ordering a demobilized acquiescent mass content with welfare-buttressed debt-fuelled consumerism. The frame of the polity is resilient, the passing detail fluid, and the possibilities of internally gen- erated reform seemingly slight, but not altogether absent. With this in mind, unpacking the accumulated logic of the post-war political-culture might help uncover novel intellectual spaces, which might, in turn, help drive change. ∗∗∗∗∗ A companion volume will turn to the counterpart to this story of the creation of continuing Britain and look at the ‘Empire after Empire’ and track the ways in which the dissolution of the state-empire system pro- vided opportunities for aspiring local replacement elites to seize power, vi Preface vii construct states, fashion nations and thereafter, one way or another, pur- sue economic and social development. Together, therefore, these texts assert that the starting point for any discussion of the political history of Britain in the twentieth century – and of its present-day unfolding political culture – is a recognition of the ineluctable centrality of the collapse of the state-empire system; an experience, it might be noted, replicated in several other European countries, and whose consequences, taken together, run down to the present in the form of the European Union. Acknowledgements This text is one of a sequence dealing with the political culture of my home-patch, Britain, but its origins, like those of its companion vol- umes, lie elsewhere; in travel, in the experience of other cultures and in the curious experience of looking at my own country from the outside, with to some extent outsider’s eyes. The first moves in these enquiries were made whilst I was living and working in Bielefeld, later on further materials were added in Tokyo, Hong Kong and most recently Bangkok. And, as scholarship is a collective endeavour, I should like to offer my thanks to friends, colleagues and students scattered around these and other places in Europe and East Asia. viii 1 After the Empire: Establishment Designs, High Arts and Popular Culture in Britain In the late summer of 1939 the British elite ruled a state-empire system1 that embraced territories and peoples spanning the globe, an empire upon which ‘the sun never set’, within which an identity was available to all – ‘British’ – and where, amongst that elite, various prob- lems notwithstanding, the future health of ‘the Empire’ was taken for granted. Yet six years later, in the summer of 1945, it was clear that the system could no longer be sustained; the metropolitan core elite could command neither the economic resources, nor the military capa- bility, nor the politico-intellectual convictions that were necessary to sustain their state-empire and within a few years it was dissolved. In the hitherto peripheral territories a number of new states were formed – in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean – and their place within the wider evolving industrial-capitalist system ordered under the rubric of state formation, nation-building and economic advance, or, in brief, development, where the precise pursuit of this goal was inflected by sometimes violent disputes, both local and international, as to the most effective course of action. All this is rea- sonably familiar: the empire dissolved, some parts did well, others, not so well. The other part of the tale, events in the hitherto core, are not so well known. It is here that a species of putative common sense reigns: the empire lost, the core continued. It is a poor story, for in the hitherto core areas, that is, in this case, the British Isles, the elite had perforce to rethink their own location within a radically changed environment; one that had seen the dissolution of a state-empire system centred on their hitherto core territory, the subordination of that territory to the require- ments of newly established global powers and the mobilization of their domestic population around claims for economic, social and political 1 2 Britain After Empire reform. Cast in terms of extant elite interests and self-understandings, the episode was a catastrophe – a loss of empire. This text tracks the intermingled intellectual/moral responses of elites to that loss of the state-empire and the identities attached thereto in the years following the end of the Second World War. It looks at how the elite reimagined their place in the world, the ways in which they fash- ioned this new project; the various components, the means whereby it was put into practice and the ways in which these policies and ideas found expression when deployed amongst the wider population. The elements of this still unfolding process will be sought in elite designs (policies, plans, declarations and the like), high arts (novels, theatre, fine arts, art-house film and so on) and popular culture (radio, film, television, newspapers and magazines and lately the burgeoning realm of digital media). Overall, the text will argue that the elite’s creative response to the loss of state-empire entailed both denial, as the peripheral territories were reimagined as of relatively little consequence, and confection, such that the hitherto core areas were imaginatively reworked as a long extant nation-state, ‘continuing Britain’. This process saw the construction of a distinctive politico-cultural project: one that was biased towards finance, overly committed to the military-industrial complex, subordi- nate to the United States and resentful of its inevitably ordinary place within the organizations made in mainland Europe.

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