THE MYTH OF CONSENSUS CONTEMPORARY HISTORY IN CONTEXT SERIES Published in association with the Institute 0/Contemporary British History General Editor: Peter Catterall Peter Catterall and Sean McDougall (editors) TIlE NORTIIERN IRELAND QUESTION IN BRITISH POUTICS Wolfram Kaiser USING EUROPE, ABUSING TIlE EUROPEANS: Britain and European Integration, 1945-63 Paul Sharp TIlATCHER'S DIPLOMACY: The Revival ofBritish Foreign Policy The Myth ofConsensus New Views on British History, 1945-64 Edited by Harriet Jones Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History Unlversity 0/Lu/on and Michael Kandiah Senior Research Fellow Institute ofContemporary British History ~ in association with the "............, Palgrave Macmillan First published in Great Britain 1996 by MACMILLAN PRESSLTD Houndmills. Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A eatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library . ISBN 978-1-349-24944-2 ISBN 978-1-349-24942-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24942-8 First published in the United States of America 1996 by ST.MARTIN'S PRESS,INC., Scho1arly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-16154-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The myth of consensus : new views on British history, 1945-641 edited by Harriet Jones and Michael Kandiah. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-16154-5 I. Great Britain-Hislory-George VI. 1936-52. 2. Great Britain-History-Elizabeth 11. 1952- 3. Consensus (Sodal sciences) J. Jones, Harrlet. 11 . Kandiah, Michael, 1962­ DA588.M96 1996 941.084-dc20 96-20934 CIP Selection and editorial matter © Harriet Jones and Michael Kandiah 1996 General Editor's Preface © Peter Catterall 1996. For individual chapters see acknowledgements. Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced , copied or transmitted save wnh written perrnission 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, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W IP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 1098765432 05 04 03 02 0 I 00 99 Contents Notes on Contributors vii General Editor's Preface ix Peter Catterall Introduction xiii Harriet Iones A Bloodless Counter-Revolution: The Conservative Party and the Defence of Inequality, 1945-51 Harriet Jones 2 Consensus Here, Consensus There ... but not Consensus Everywhere: The Labour Party, Equality and Social Policy in the 1950s 17 Nick Ellison 3 'Not Refonned Capitalism, But ... Democratic Socialism': The Ideology of the Labour Leadership, 1945-51 40 Martin Francis 4 Conservative Leaders, Strategy - and 'Consensus'? 1945-64 58 Michael Kandiah 5 Consensus and Consumption: Rationing, Austerity and Controls after the War 79 lna Zweiniger-Bargielowska 6 Butskellism, the Postwar Consensus and the Managed Economy 97 Neil Rollings 7 The Politics ofthe 'Social' and the 'Industrial' ~age, 1945-60 120 Noel Whiteside 8 Industrial Organisation and Ownership, and a New Definition of the Postwar 'Consensus' 139 Helen Mercer v vi Contents 9 Decolonisation and Postwar Consensus 157 Nicholas Owen Index 182 Notes on Contributors Nick Ellison is lecturer in sociology and social policy at the University of Durham. His publications include Egalitarian Thought and Labour Polities:'Retreating Visions, published by Routledge in 1994. Martin Francis is a lecturer in modern history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He was forrnerly a lecturer in modern history and politics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of Building a New Britain: Ideas and Polities under Labour, 1945-1951 , to be published by Manchester University Press in 1997. Harrlet Jones is a senior lecturer in contemporary British and European history at the University of Luton . Her recent publications include (edited with Brian Brivati) What Difference did the War Make? and From Reeonstruetion to Integration: Britain and Europe since 1945 and (edited with Lawrence Butler) Britain in the Twentieth Century. A Doeumentary Reader, Volume I, 1900-39; and Volume U, 1939-70. Her next work, The Welfare Game: Conservative Polities and the Welfare State, 1942-57 will be published in 1997 by Oxford University Press. Michael Kandiah is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary British History and teaches British political history at the University of London.A speeialist on the history of the postwar Conservative Party, he is currently writing a biography of Lord Woolton, forthcoming with Scolar Press. Helen Mercer is a lecturer in soeial and economic history at the London School of Economics. Her study of the history of British competition poli­ eies, Construeting a Competitive Order. The Hidden History 0/ British Antitrust Policies, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. Her recent work has included studies of the relationship between the Labour governments of 1945-51 and private businessmen. Nicholas Owen is Fellow and Praelector in Politics, The Queen's College, Oxford.A speeialist on decolonisation, he is completing his monograph on the Labour Party and Indian independence, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. vii viii Notes on Contributors Neil Rollings is lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow. A specialist on early postwar eeonomic poliey, his publica­ tions include Economic Planning 1943-51 (HMSO, 1992); and Labour Governments and Private 1ndustry (Edinburgh, 1992). Noel Whiteside is Reader in Public Poliey at Bristol University. She has published extensivelyon labour markets and labour market policies in the twentieth eentury. Her books inelude Casual Labour (with Gordon Phillips), published by Oxford University Press in 1986; and Bad Times: Unemployment in British Social and Political History (Faber, 1991). She is eurrently completing Wages and Welfare (with Humphrey Southall), whieh is fortheoming with Macmillen. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska is a leeturer in eeonomie and social history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She is working on a monograph entitled Austerity in Britain: Rationing and State Controls, 1939-1955. whieh will be published by Oxford University Press. General Editor's Preface What is contemporary history? It is a phrase which has come increasingly into vogue. There have even been suggestions that it might be applied to describe, like mediaeval history, a distinctive, if necessarily imprecisely dated period. In the 1950s Geoffrey Barraclough suggested in his An Introduction to Contemporary History that changes around 1890 were sufficiently marked to characterise them as the start of a new, contempo­ rary era. It is certainly true that there were important developments in society and culture and in long-term economic trends, not to mention the rise of socialism in Western societies and in nationalism against the West around that point. Whether they are sufficient to mark a new era is another matter. Barraclough's definition is far from commanding universal support, at least as far as the practice of contemporary historians is con­ cerned. Far from being applied to a generally agreed period, there is not even much consensus over the chronological parameters to which contem­ porary history is addressed. The German Institut JUr Zeitgeschichte is largely concerned with the exploration of the Nazi period. For some, con­ temporary history is the period within living memory, an elastic timeframe which might extend as far back as oral historians' continuing work in the Edwardian era, or even the 1890s. For other contemporary historians their period begins with some convenient great event, such as the termination of the Second World War in 1945. Instead of being understood as a distinctive period, contemporary history seems in practice more to involve the bringing of historical approaches and rigour to the analysis of the contemporary, however it is delineated. As such, contemporary history has a long and honourable tra­ dition, going back, as R.W. Seton-Watson pointed out, to the time of Thucydides. Through exploring contemporary developments historically, identifying the causes, circumstances, processes and consequences of change over time, it not only makes its own distinctive contribution to our understanding of the contemporary. Contemporary history, at the same time, also infonns the exploration of the contemporary undertaken by col­ leagues in other disciplines using other methodologies, such as sociology or political science. Contemporary history not only brings historical methods to bear upon the examination of the contemporary. It also sets out to explore it in depth, to provide a longer perspective within which to scrutinise and seek to ix x General Editor 's Preface understand it. Otherwise there is a danger of looking at recent events purely from one end of the telescope. An example cited by Barraclough is the way in which the Korean War was treated in contemporary comment 'simply as an episode in the postwar conflict between the communist and the "free" worlds and the fact that it was part of a far older struggle, reach­ ing back almost a century, for a dominating position in the western Pacific