The Second World War and the Origins of Consensus

The Second World War and the Origins of Consensus

For much of the post war period the Second World War was nothing more than a curiosity in the minds of political historians. Much discussion of the period focussed upon the military and diplomatic history of the war. The establishment of a national wartime coalition in May 1940 indicated that there were perhaps very few major political shifts taking place that would demand historians attention.

Yet, the defeat of Churchill, who was a war hero, a giant in the public eyes in 1945, gives the impression that something else was afoot other than an electorate punishing the conservative dominated national government of the 1930’s.

No, Churchill’s inability to cash in on the war in the manner of Lloyd George in 1918 indicates that the experience of war had distilled fundamental changes in the political attitudes of the British.

The most often cited view of these changes is to be found in Paul Addison’s (1975) The Road to 1945. We will explore these arguments and consider some critiques of them.

Argues that these changes took place at an intellectual and a popular level.

At the level of the people the sacrifices of the war - the loss of life, rationing, the entire structure of austerity - had significantly raised people’s expectations of securing a better life after the war. There was an emerging view that to defeat Nazism and the Axis powers demanded a greater reward than the hollow victory, which had greeted returning troops in 1918. “a land fit for heroes” indeed but poor ones.

In many ways, this view had been sponsored by the government that the war effort was for the benefit of the common man.

Another important factor at this level so argues Addison was that the war experience disrupted the order of civil society. The deep rooted class based structures which had been the basis upon which the first world war had been fought, were to be challenged in a whole host of ways - not least a growing commitment to a more egalitarian society.

This was recognised by politicians on all sides. Anthony Eden commented that the

“War would bring about fundamental changes to the economic and social life of the country”.

Bevan, who was to become a giant in the post war political landscape, suggested that,

“War opens minds that were sealed, stimulates dormant intelligence’s and recruits into political controversy thousands who would otherwise be in the political hinterland”.

Now as we know the war never quite released the revolutionary fervour that Bevan wanted but, it did have a profound impact.

Addison contends that the war profoundly altered people’s expectations of what the proper role of government in society.

Now there is a certain logic at work here, In order to mobilise an entire country for the purposes of war, demanded something other than the laissez faire mind set that prevailed in the 1930s.

No in these circumstances, a collective effort and the government managed institutions necessary to deliver such a mobilisation was demanded.

Now the important thing here was that throughout the 1930s with a dominant free trade ethic, the people were routinely told that the government could not and should not manage the economy and maintain full employment - (remember the general strike of 1926).

Now by the mid 1940s the institutions put in place were widely regarded as successful models of organisation that could be translated operationally to peacetime.

That said, perception and reality are two different things, the war historian Corelli Barnett whose major work “The Audit of War” contends that actually total employment in all sectors of the economy actually fell by 1.6 million.

And further that the symptoms of long term decline in the British economy that had been evident since the 1890’s were further entrenched during the war, and that the chickens of Britain’s uncompetitive industrial culture were to come to roost in the post war years.

All of this is persuasive - far be it for me to consider it a truth - very arguable. But not necessarily the point. It was the perception of success and failure that is important here.

The important thing to note is that the war sort of exaggerated the public perception of the state as a significant power in managing the socio economic affairs of the nation. Principally the management of the economy and crucially to provide for full employment.

Centralised planning which was to serve the country so well during wartime was believed to be the model, which would solve the problems that Britain would surely encounter after the war.

The second level upon where there was a significant change we might broadly call intellectual.

The mood of the people became increasingly underpinned by an intellectual acceptance of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, whose publication the general theory of employment, money and interest influenced many economists drafted into the civil service for war purposes.

Keynes general theory suggested that it was possible that the government could manage the amount of demand for goods and services in the economy at any one time.

Further, that governments should accept permanent responsibility for aggregate demand in the economy so as to ensure that full employment could be maintained without causing a vicious spiral of wage inflation. Keynes regarded the unfettered free market, which had been the dominant organisational paradigm of the twenties and thirties, as inefficient and socially unjust. The radical side to Keynes was the suggestion that if growth was not high enough to sustain full employment, then the government ought to borrow money to finance expenditure and deficit spend its way out of recession.

So to go back to Addison then, whose general proposition is that these two forces intellectual and popular had taken root in the demand for major post war social reform. It was held together by the firmly held belief that the state had the capacity to reduce social injustice, expand the economy and provide a better life for citizens.

Just as an aside to show how far, these ideas had come, a special edition of “picture post” in late 1941 gave a vision of a future planned society as highly desirable. Architects such as Maxwell Fry, economists like Thomas Balogh, Scientists like Julian Huxley and Novelists like J B Priestley sketched their vision of a future planned utopia.

Importantly all of these people were public figures not obscure academics, who commanded popular approval.

I think the bottom line here is that the making of the ‘consensus’ - so called - had its first ingredient. A general and widespread belief that the poverty and social decay of the 1930s would not be repeated in the late 1940s.

Now to get a clearer picture of the conditions in which the consensus emerged, these popular and intellectual changes have to set alongside major political changes that were independent of what we have been talking about hitherto.

When the so called “guilty men” of Chamberlains conservative national government fell in may 1940 it was replaced by a genuinely all party coalition led by Winston Churchill.

OK so what did this national government look like? Churchill was remarkably generous to the Labour party, in fact most of the senior domestic posts were given to high profile Labour Figures. This generosity was almost certainly conditioned by the fact that most of the senior conservative figures, with the exception of Eden and Churchill, were associated with the “guilty men” associated with appeasement and the war failed to throw up any high flying Conservatives.

Clement Attlee became Lord Privy Seal and later Deputy Prime Minister. Attlee soon established himself as a powerful domestic figure, providing the face of ‘home’ whilst Churchill focused upon the diplomatic and military matters.

Churchill appointed Ernest Bevin - GS of the T and G - as the minister of Labour. Now bearing in mind what I said earlier about planning Bevin brought the Trade Unions into direct corporate relationship with government. In other words the necessity of war brought the TUs into the centre of government decision making over a range of issues, industrial policy, regional policy and welfare. The war gave Trade Unions a status in politics and society that they had never enjoyed.

Now this wasn’t an accident, as Peter Hennessy has rigorously documented Bevin knew exactly what he was doing and he certainly expected this new arrangement to outlast the war.

Herbert Morrison was given the initial job of Minister of Supply but later became home secretary a post in which he excelled.

Its fair to say that the wartime cabinet was a congenial one and the papers we have access to in public records testify to that. Churchill was able to focus on the war effort and to his credit the daily conduct of the war effort, whilst the senior Labour figures had the opportunity to put in place some of their plans for the future.

So Political developments in the structure and make up of government and changes in popular expectations came together with a coalition that was ready t actively promote blueprints for the future.

The most significant of these was the Beveridge Report of 1942.

Essentially Beveridge, sought to consolidate existing schemes of social suppport into on universal national scheme.

Beveridge argued that the future success of any social security system would involve a number of things:

The introduction of family allowances

The creation of a national health service

The maintenance of a high level of employment.

The acceptance of this plan by all parties represented a coming together of a number of themes. First, the conservatives could no longer, even if they so wished, maintain an argument for a return to the politics of the 1930s. Second, (Aneurin Bevan excluded) the Labour party dropped the woolly idealism that characterised it in the 1930s in favour of progressive capitalism, a reformist social democracy, in place of revolutionary change - the vehicle of which would be major social reform and state planning.

A cabinet committee on reconstruction was set up in 1943 which reached broad agreement upon social security, health and education and a series of white papers appeared in that year.

Educational Reconstruction 1943 - Education Act 1944

1944 white paper A National Health Service

1944 White paper Employment Policy

Critics of Addison

Kavanagh no real consensus on a consensus

Ramsden - Tories did not focus upon the post war world - Churchill was dismissive of national Health Plans and did not read the White Paper of his own government.

Conservative MPs though publicly silent voiced mounting private criticism of the major regulatory plans for after the war

It is true to say that the Tory Reform Group was in the ascendancy in the party but it was a long way from capturing the hearts and minds of the Conservatives between 1942 and 1945.

What can we say about these comments? They clearly indicate that there was no end to party politics because of the war - this was not an ‘end of ideology’ but I’m not sure that Addison was arguing that. He was simply suggesting that the experience of the war and using that experience to explain Labours 146 seat majority in the 1945 election map together in a way that strongly suggest a meeting of minds at elite level.

Consensus is perhaps too strong a word - implying social harmony and an absence of conflict.

Peter Hennessy and Anthony Seldon both suggest that most will agree with the term ‘post war settlement’

Two things then ought to be clear:

1. A growing acceptance of the economic planning and collectivist social policies associated with parties of the left, which the war contributed to. The war effort involved a massive and widely popular exercise in government control and direction. The welfare policies, discussed and publicised if not implemented by the Coalition, were also a part of Labour's programme. The successes of the Red Army and the Soviet Union, acclaimed in the press and, if only to check the appeal of the British Communist Party, by government agencies, were popularly interpreted as a further justification of socialist planning. The war had brought not only an expansion of the government's regulatory role far in excess of anything experienced in the previous conflict; it had also been accompanied by the ideological conversion not apparent in the earlier conflict.

2. Labour clearly gained from participation in the coalition. Men like Bevin, Attlee, Morrison, Dalton and Cripps (who rejoined the party early in 1945) were prominent, able and, in some cases, popular members of wartime governments. In particular, Bevin, as Minister of Labour and National Service, and Morrison, as Home Secretary, held offices, which were very much in the public eye.Bevin used wartime conditions to boost the income of low-paid groups and to extend collective bargaining, notably in the cases of agricultural, retailing and catering workers. By contrast, Churchill, in spite, of his popularity as a war leader, was not necessarily viewed as a desirable peacetime premier (a view reinforced by his staid and scaremongering style of electioneering in 1945.) Of other Conservatives, only Lord Woolton (Minister of Food and later Minister of Reconstruction) and Rab Butler had a credibility in domestic policy to match that of their Labour counterparts.