John Barnes, Historian

© John Barnes

25 October 2002

Lecture 3 ~ Wartime Consensus or Postwar Settlement?

Although a good many historians had their doubts, and some expressed them in lectures, the question of whether a war and postwar consensus existed did not figure in the literature until the late 1980s. Debate then raged to a point where Addison, often regarded as the original progenitor of the idea, agreed to shift his ground. The tide of intellectual opinion has now shifted to such an extent that a recent text can describe the notion cuttingly as a "Woozle that wasn't".

In fact the notion did not originate with Addison. In the second volume of his life of Bevin, Alan Bullock identified the development since the war of "a hybrid society to which neither of the terms 'capitalism' nor 'socialism'.... can be applied with much success". Its main features were "a mixed economy, partly in public, partly in private ownership, with both sectors subject to constant intervention by Government, a managed as well as a mixed economy"; "a commitment by all parties to the maintenance of full employment"; "the welfare state"; "extension of the State's provision of education in order to provide greater equality of opportunity"; "great improvement in the position of the industrial worker and increased recognition of the role of unions in industry, even if this still falls far short (on both sides) of Bevin's conception of a partnership between management and men"; and "a great increase in Government consultation of interest groups (chief among them, the TUC and the employers' associations) and the attempt to build up a tripartite pattern of co-operation.... in carrying out economic policy".[i]

There had been some earlier thinking along these lines, notably in David Thompson's 20^th century volume in the Pelican History of England, and Harry Eckstein had penned a characteristically pertinent passage in his introduction to his account of the National Health Service. There were earlier straws in the wind, the charge of Butskellism hurled at Churchill's Chancellor in 1954, for example, and amusingly Edward Hyams's novel Gentian Violet published a year earlier. In its pages can be found the story of a young candidate who stood for both the Conservative and Labour parties, was elected and wholly escaped detection.

Two years after Bullock published, Angus Calder's superb treatment of The People's War identified a developing consensus during the war years that included the whole of the centre of British political life and from which "sprang the ideology which was to govern the practice of both parties after the war". He took a more jaundiced view of the result than most who subsequently hailed the postwar consensus.[ii] But it is to Addison's Road to 1945 that one must look for the most coherently worked out attempt to explain the genesis of postwar politics in terms of a war-generated elite consensus. He argued that the war acted as a kind of crucible from which emerged a new agenda for domestic reform. It is important to note that he did not play down the continuing political conflicts within the wartime Coalition and that he recognised that the Attlee Government went beyond the Coalition framework, although "to some extent" only. He argued further that "the convergence of the two main parties, which had begun in 1940, was largely completed in the late 1940s" and that it represented a dilution of Conservative politics. "The 1940s", he writes, "were the decade when the Conservatives were obliged to integrate some of Labour's most important demands into their own philosophy. They were able to do so without too much pain because Labour's demands had largely been cast in a mould of thought provided by the non-socialist intelligentsia between the wars and during World War II.... Such was Mr Attlee's consensus, the new dispensation which began after Dunkirk in 1940 and until recent years [Addison was writing in 1975] seemed to be the natural order of British politics. We were all - almost all - Butskellites then."[iii] Slightly earlier Andrew Gamble's influential account of The Conservative Nation, had laid less stress on the war than the realisation by the "Progressive" Tories after their defeat in 1945, that they would have to accommodate their party and programme to the leftward tide. Anthony Seldon subsequently offered a strikingly consensual picture of Churchill's postwar government, while Pimlott in his biography of Dalton argued that Labour's 1945 manifesto "reflected no more than the official position of the progressive wing of an essentially harmonious Coalition."[iv]

Not everyone could accept that what had happened amounted to a coming together of minds. Instead Middlemas pictured an accommodation by the state to the new realities of power, an emergent corporatist bias, and when he turned to give a detailed account of the war and postwar period, he spoke in terms not of consensus, but of a "postwar settlement".

The rapidity with which Addison's account became a commonplace owed something no doubt to its convenience for those political actors, both Left and Right, who in the 1970s were anxious to leave the middle ground. That there were some doubting voices, Addison acknowledged and duly modified his position in a fine essay on 'The Road from 1945'.[v] But it was not until José Harris published her essay, 'Political Values and the debate on State welfare 1940-45' that the idea of consensus explicitly came under fire in print.[vi] She argued that a determination not to repeat the mistakes made after World War I did not amount to a common platform and that all the attempts made to translate a common sense of purpose into a specific programme had failed. In effect she was providing evidence to support contemporary views that "national consensus was an artificially manufactured myth" and in the following year Jefferys, in a review of the politics of reconstruction, suggested that while they were agreed on the agenda to be tackled, "the parties were in many ways as far apart on social issues as they had been before 1939".[vii] A more dramatic challenge came from Ben Pimlott in a brief essay penned in 1988 for L.M.Smith's The Making of Britain: Echoes of Greatness: "consensus is a mirage," he concluded, "an illusion that rapidly fades the closer one gets to it."

Part of the problem with the consensus thesis is the lack of agreement as to what is entailed, but there are also considerable disputes about the date at which it begins and ends. Although they are not altogether easy to distinguish, there are really five points of view on the question of whether or not there was a consensus: -

1)      The belief, of which Addison offers the most convincing exposition, that the war generated a consensus, which is often held to have lasted until it was overturned by Mrs Thatcher. We are concerned here only with its advent. In Addison's view, "the Coalition proved to be the greatest reforming administration since the Liberal Government of 1905-14. Here in the midst of war, was an astonishing example of the uses of adversity. Social security for all, family allowances, major reform in education, a National Health Service, Keynesian budgetary technique, full employment policies, town and country planning, closer relations between the state and industry - all these had been set on foot by the spring of 1943. By the spring of 1945 a new and wide ranging prospectus of peacetime development was at an advanced stage of preparation within the civil service, w2hile educational reform had already been embodied in the Butler Act of 1944.... All three parties went to the polls in 1945 committed to principles of social and economic reconstruction, which their leaders had endorsed as members of the Coalition. A massive new middle ground had arisen in politics.... The new consensus of the war years was positive and purposeful. Naturally the parties displayed differences of emphasis and they still disagreed strongly on the question of nationalisation. At the hustings the rhetorical debate between state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism was renewed with acrimony. In practice the Conservative and Labour leaders had by-passed most of it in favour of 'pragmatic' reform in a mixed economy. When Labour swept to victory in 1945 the new consensus fell, like a branch of ripe plums, into the lap of Mr Attlee." (The Road to 1945 p.14)

2)      The view that at the end of the war "apart from the recognition that particular issues would have to be tackled, the parties were in many ways as far apart on social issues as they had been before 1939". Jefferys views the degree of agreement reached as the minimum necessary to maintain the wartime coalition and suggests that it consisted of a desire to postpone the consideration of controversial matters and to confine themselves to plans for the postwar world, which were sufficiently ambiguous to permit of very different interpretations. This view is supported by various studies of the Labour party, most notably Brooke, and by Lee's excellent account of the Churchill Coalition. He attributes its premature break-up to the renewal of partisan politics in 1943/44. In his study of the Churchill coalition, Jefferys remains convinced that there was a post-war consensus but argues that it id not emerge until the late 1940s (essentially the view taken earlier by Gamble). By the time he wrote Retreat from the New Jerusalem, however, which deals with the 1951-64 Conservative Government his scepticism about the existence of the consensus clearly extended beyond the 1940s.

3)      Alternatively what took place in the latter years of the war can be interpreted as an accommodation to the increased prominence of the Labour movement or more generally to a deliberately conceived postwar settlement between the government, industrial, trade union and financial institutions. Keith Middlemas argues that the settlement secured their incorporation as governing institutions into an extended state.

4)      In an attempt to rescue the concept of consensus from the disrepute into which it was perceived as falling, certain political scientists (Kavanagh & Morris and to some extent Seldon) have returned to Bullock's original formulation. They have redefined the concept in terms of a set of broad parameters. Limits were set, within which policy differences between the parties were fought out and which prescribed the way in which postwar politics had to be conducted.

5)      This last point of view has much in common with the view of state theorists like Hay, who are concerned lest we lose sight of the impact of the war in setting a new trajectory for the British State. He echoes Marwick and Cronin in identifying the Second World War like the First as a catalyst or significant accelerator of state expansion. "During periods of total war, the state takes on greater responsibilities with a corresponding increase in its level of expenditure. Although many of these costs are specific to the prosecution of the war effort, a significant proportion of such expenditure (that, in particular, relating to securing heightened levels of war mobilization amongst the working class) may prove difficult to shed in the initial postwar period, or subsequently."

Unless one is prepared to accept that the war created a dominant set of ideas (see for example Peter Hall on the spread of Keynesianism) or ways of looking at the world, consensus is not easy to deploy as an explanatory vehicle for the presumed diminution in ideological conflict. However it is possible to argue that the convergence was due to one or more of the following: -

1)      Popular preferences, single peaked, leading to a Downsian process of convergence.

2)      A Whitehall consensus exerting considerable pressure on politicians to conform to its perceptions of technocratic rationality, functional necessity or "reality".

3)      A front bench or elite consensus, which subordinates ideology to the practicalities

of problem solving and which is usually confined to "governmentalists".

.

There is good evidence that a popular consensus was in being by late 1943, largely negative in character, concentrating on the past failings of policy and society [cf. the Ministry of Information's report, 'Public Feeling on Postwar Reconstruction' November 1942]. This did not extend to either Churchill at No 10 or the Treasury and substantial party differences remain evident. The crisis over the Beveridge report, where Labour divided the House against the Government, led Churchill, after some delay, to commit the Coalition to a major programme of economic and social reform, to the establishment in November 1943 of a Ministry of Reconstruction, and to what has become known colloquially as "the White Paper chase". This is the period on which debate mainly centres, but the revisionists appear to have established that over the period 1944-47 a degree of consensus persisted on a nucleus of social reforms, fostered by a civil service desire for continuity, but which was accompanied by a revival of ideological conflict over nationalisation and the management of the economy more generally.

In a partial recantation of his earlier views, Addison sought to distinguish between economic and social policy, but on examination the distinction seems less than satisfactory. The commitment to a high and stable level of employment (the concept of full employment comes rather later) is clearly consensual and is perceived not only as essential to the viability of the welfare state, but also necessary if parties are to secure electoral success. Note, however, that the original figure was set quite high and that the figure of 3% comes from Beveridge's Full Employment in a Free Society and is not official policy until the closing stages of the Labour Government.

At one level, in terms of the five major areas, which can be taken as constituting the welfare state (NB shorn of the redistributionist overtones conferred on it by Marshall, Titmuss and other social scientists, largely located within LSE) e.g. social security, NHS, education, housing and personal social services, there is a genuine consensus on broad objectives so far as the first three are concerned and possibly on housing as well. However, there is a good deal more conflict, actual and potential, about significant details and this is not confined to the political parties. Arguably there are more major differences over ultimate purpose.

Convenient here to deal briefly with the administrative input in the closing stages of the war, which illustrates the limits both to the degree of consensus within Whitehall and the extent to which it coincides with or differs from the popular consensus and the views of politicians.

(a)    Phillips Committee - hostility to family allowances and the principle of adequacy, together with a concern about the burden of increased welfare expenditure.

(b)   Dissent over the content of the Employment Policy White paper, which bears all the marks of a carefully crafted compromise.

(c)    The 11+ as opposed to the 13+ for "streaming" (but were they perhaps right?)

The issues on which there were major partisan disputes are largely concerned with public ownership and the running of the economy, but note particularly

1)      Control of land use. Cf. the hopes expressed in the foreword to the White paper and the failure to implement it which leads Cox to his pessimistic conclusion.

2)      Health - Webster's verdict.

3)      The contradictions in the Beveridge report which lead to the abandonment of adequacy and allow the parties to differ.

4)      Party ambivalence over the Employment Policy White paper.

5)      Nationalisation.

6)      Controls.

The conclusion must be that there is neither an explicit nor an implicit accord between the parties on policy and most certainly not on long-term goals, a view of what society might be (Cf. Oakeshott). If there is an element of consensus to be found, it probably subsists in the general welcome accorded to the notions of a National Health Service, the provision of secondary education and of universal social insurance. But agreement on these broad propositions leaves room for considerable differences over the way these policies are put into effect and to what end.

It is important to revisit the way in which terms have been used, often interchangeably, to capture what is going on. The three principally used are consensus, settlement and Keynesian welfare state, the last implying an ideational consensus which is, I think, hardest of all to find in these years, but more generally used these days to characterise an active state. Of them all the term "settlement" perhaps has most to offer as a characterisation of what happened in Britain as a result of the war.[viii] The term can be used in two ways. First as a "stabilised and sedimented set of state structures" or to put it in a marginally more comprehensible way, the emergence of a particular set of relationships between the state, economy, civil society and the public sphere that become institutionalised in postwar Britain. Secondly, an accommodation of forces, in this case a compromise reached with organised labour that makes for a period of relative social harmony. Jessop argued that "the creation of the mixed economy and the welfare state during the post-war Labour administration laid the foundations for the economic and political settlement between capital and labour in the next two decades" and Hay accepts that the broader definition of settlement (the first above) that he wishes to use is dependent upon this compromise. What is interesting is that the version of consensus that its latest analysts wish to preserve fits more neatly the notion of settlement and has something to offer in relation to the distinction that Hay wishes to offer between state-shaping governments (Attlee's and Thatcher's) and state accommodating governments that do not seek to transform the contours of the state. Thus, for example, Kavanagh argues that there may not have been inter-party agreement on the creation of the NHS, but that once built, like a house it became part of the landscape. Kavanagh and Morris offered six central pillars which constrained political practice in the postwar period:

1.      Full employment

2.      The mixed economy

3.      Active or interventionist government

4.      Social welfare provision

5.      Conciliation of the trade unions

6.      The cult of expertise

The principle of a job for life, at least so far as men were concerned, was clearly popular and could by 1950 be regarded by Marshall as a civil right, is clearly linked to the need to manage the economy, and is clearly traceable to the 1944 White paper. It became a necessary though not sufficient condition for electoral success. It was also essential to the maintenance of the welfare state. Clearly it did involve a fundamental re-ordering of the priorities responsibilities and boundaries of the state.

The mixed economy was more a product of the postwar years and, while it involved an extension in the scope and responsibilities of the state, allowed considerable room for differences as to its value and the ways in which these publicly regulated monopolies were run.

The active management of the extended state was equally clearly a product of the war, but left considerable room for differences over the form such management should take.

The welfare settlement took shape over the period 1944 to 1948 and included universal national insurance, a comprehensive NHS free at the point of delivery, free compulsory education until the age of 15 and an extended state housing sector. But all of this had roots in the interwar period and, however important as structural underpinnings for the settlement, allowed considerable scope for party differentiation (the NHS excepted after 1949) and were never as consensual as they appeared to be.

The degree of corporatism in the settlement is controversial, but what is clear is that it was consensual in its approach to industrial relations and tripartite in character.

It is also true that technocracy, managerialism and paternalism characterised much of the postwar elitist mindset.

Understanding why these were the contours of the postwar settlement and underlining the fact that it was neither altogether stable nor static, we need to pay attention to the notion that what emerged was part of a major shift in the liberal democracies to welfare capitalism, with the state securing the conditions for capital accumulation, financing itself through taxation and legitimising itself with forms of welfare provision. Even if one does not accept the Marxist thesis that the demands of capital accumulation and social legitimation are contradictory, it is obvious that there are inbuilt tensions, partly resolved by continuing economic growth and (Offe suggests) by a functional separation of these state tasks. Similarly Jessop argues that the institutionalised accord between the various interests takes two forms, a producers' settlement and a redistributive or politicians ' settlement. Neither of these characterisations allows enough for the importance of the City in shaping the parameters of the postwar settlement and building in further tensions that at times could come close to undermining it. Hence Hay wonders at its durability; Middlemas by contrast is more aware of the way in which the settlement was eroded and had, in his view, to be reconstructed in the early 1960s.

Clearly the notion of a postwar settlement is much more realistic than that of consensus, the latter being best confined to those areas where the preferences of the electorate were clearly single-peaked. The extent to which this was a product of the war or worked out over a rather longer period is open to debate and the extent of the settlement and its constraining effect can be exaggerated. In many ways the institutionalisation of industrial relations and City dominance, which were already well entrenched, were probably more important than anything settled at the end of the war. Nevertheless in terms of the displacement effect of the war on public finance, the increased scope of the State's responsibilities, and the perception that social and economic problems form an integrated whole, it is probably right to accept Hay's contention that the postwar state did take on a new trajectory and there is no doubt that it had to adjust to the new-found confidence and increased power of the Labour movement. If this amounted to a postwar settlement, it did not prevent the Attlee Government from seeking to extract from it serious progress towards a Socialist Commonwealth, nor did it prevent their Conservative opponents from developing a rather different concept of the state. Despite persuasive arguments in favour of its existence therefore, it has to be said that its explanatory force is limited and Hay's sharp distinction between state-shaping and state-accommodating governments will inevitably come into question.