THE MYTH OF CONSENSUS CONTEMPORARYHISTORY INCONTEXTSERIES Publishedinassociation with theInstitute 0/ContemporaryBritish History General Editor:Peter Catterall Peter CatterallandSean McDougall (editors) TIlENORTIIERNIRELANDQUESTIONINBRITISHPOUTICS WolframKaiser USING EUROPE,ABUSINGTIlEEUROPEANS:Britain and EuropeanIntegration, 1945-63 Paul Sharp TIlATCHER'SDIPLOMACY: The Revival ofBritishForeign Policy The Myth of Consensus New Views on British History, 1945-64 Edited by Harriet Jones Senior LecturerinContemporaryBritish History Unlversity0/Lu/on and Michael Kandiah Senior Research Fellow InstituteofContemporaryBritishHistory ~ in association with the "............, Palgrave Macmillan FirstpublishedinGreat Britain 1996by MACMILLANPRESSLTD Houndmills.Basingstoke,HampshireRG21 6XS andLondon Companiesandrepresentatives throughouttheworld Aeataloguerecordforthisbookisavailable fromtheBritishLibrary. ISBN 978-1-349-24944-2 ISBN 978-1-349-24942-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24942-8 FirstpublishedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica 1996by ST.MARTIN'SPRESS,INC., Scho1arlyandReferenceDivision, 175FifthAvenue, NewYork,N.Y. 10010 ISBN978-0-312-16154-5 Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-PublicationData The mythofconsensus:newviewsonBritishhistory, 1945-641edited byHarriet JonesandMichael Kandiah. p. cm. Includes bibliographicalreferencesandindex. ISBN978-0-312-16154-5 I. Great Britain-Hislory-GeorgeVI. 1936-52. 2.Great Britain-History-Elizabeth11. 1952- 3.Consensus(Sodal sciences) J.Jones, Harrlet. 11.Kandiah, Michael, 1962 DA588.M96 1996 941.084-dc20 96-20934 CIP Selection andeditorialmatter©HarrietJonesandMichael Kandiah 1996 General Editor'sPreface©PeterCatterall 1996.Forindividual chapterssee acknowledgements. Softcoverreprintofthehardcover1stedition 1996 Allrightsreserved.Noreproduction,copyortransmissionof thispublicationmaybemadewithoutwrittenpermission. Noparagraph ofthispublicationmaybereproduced,copiedor transmittedsavewnh writtenperrnissionorinaccordancewith theprovisionsoftheCopyright,DesignsandPatentsAct 1988, orunderthetermsofanylicence permittinglimitedcopying issuedbytheCopyrightLicensing Agency,90TottenhamCourt Road,London WIP9HE. Anypersonwhodoesanyunauthorisedactinrelation tothis publication maybeliabletocriminalprosecution andcivil claimsfordamages. 1098765432 05 04 03 02 0I 00 99 Contents Notes onContributors vii General Editor'sPreface ix PeterCatterall Introduction xiii HarrietIones ABloodlessCounter-Revolution:TheConservativeParty and theDefenceofInequality, 1945-51 HarrietJones 2 Consensus Here, Consensus There ...butnot ConsensusEverywhere:The Labour Party, Equality and Social Policy inthe 1950s 17 Nick Ellison 3 'NotRefonnedCapitalism,But ... Democratic Socialism':The Ideology oftheLabour Leadership, 1945-51 40 Martin Francis 4 ConservativeLeaders, Strategy- and 'Consensus'? 1945-64 58 Michael Kandiah 5 Consensus andConsumption: Rationing, Austerity andControls after theWar 79 lnaZweiniger-Bargielowska 6 Butskellism, the PostwarConsensusand the ManagedEconomy 97 Neil Rollings 7 The Politicsofthe 'Social' andthe 'Industrial' ~age, 1945-60 120 Noel Whiteside 8 Industrial OrganisationandOwnership, anda New Definition ofthePostwar 'Consensus' 139 Helen Mercer v vi Contents 9 DecolonisationandPostwarConsensus 157 Nicholas Owen Index 182 Notes on Contributors NickEllison is lecturerinsociologyand social policyat the University of Durham. His publications include Egalitarian Thought and Labour Polities:'Retreating Visions, published by Routledge in 1994. Martin Francis is a lecturerinmodern history attheUniversityofWales, Aberystwyth.He was forrnerly a lecturerin modern history and politicsat Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of Building a New Britain: Ideas and Polities under Labour, 1945-1951, to be published by ManchesterUniversity Pressin 1997. Harrlet Jones is a senior lecturer in contemporary British and European history at the UniversityofLuton.Her recent publications include(edited with Brian Brivati) What Difference did the War Make? and From Reeonstruetion to Integration:Britain and Europesince 1945and (edited with Lawrence Butler) Britain in the Twentieth Century. A Doeumentary Reader, Volume I, 1900-39;and VolumeU, 1939-70. Her next work, The Welfare Game: ConservativePolitiesandthe WelfareState, 1942-57will be published in 1997 by OxfordUniversityPress. 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 ofLord Woolton, forthcoming with ScolarPress. Helen Mercer is a lecturer in soeial and economic history at the London SchoolofEconomics. Herstudy ofthe historyofBritishcompetitionpoli eies, Construeting a Competitive Order. The Hidden History 0/British AntitrustPolicies, was published byCambridgeUniversity Press in 1994. Her recent work has included studies of the relationship between the Labourgovernmentsof1945-51 and privatebusinessmen. NicholasOwen isFellow and PraelectorinPolitics,The Queen'sCollege, Oxford.Aspeeialiston decolonisation,he iscompletinghismonographon the Labour Party and Indian independence, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. vii viii Noteson Contributors Neil Rollings is lecturer in economic and social history at the University ofGlasgow. A specialist on early postwar eeonomic poliey, his publica tions include Economic Planning 1943-51 (HMSO, 1992); and Labour Governments and Private1ndustry(Edinburgh, 1992). NoelWhiteside is Reader in Public Poliey at Bristol University. She has publishedextensivelyon labour markets andlabour market policies inthe twentieth eentury. Her books inelude Casual Labour (with Gordon Phillips), published by Oxford University Press in 1986;and Bad Times: Unemployment inBritish Social and Political History (Faber, 1991).She is eurrently completing Wages and Welfare (with Humphrey Southall), whieh isfortheoming withMacmillen. InaZweiniger-Bargielowska isaleeturer ineeonomie andsocial history at the University ofWales, Aberystwyth.She is working on amonograph entitled Austerity in Britain: Rationing and State Controls, 1939-1955. whieh will bepublished byOxford University Press. General Editor's Preface Whatiscontemporaryhistory?Itis aphrasewhich hascomeincreasingly 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 ofa 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 ofsocialism in Western societies and in nationalism against the West aroundthat point. Whetherthey are sufficienttomark a new era isanother 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 muchconsensusoverthechronologicalparameterstowhichcontem porary history is addressed. The German InstitutJUrZeitgeschichte is largelyconcerned with the explorationofthe Nazi period.For some, con temporary history is theperiodwithin living memory, anelastictimeframe which mightextend as far back as oral historians' continuing work in the Edwardianera, or even the 1890s. For othercontemporary historians their periodbegins with someconvenientgreat event, such asthe terminationof the SecondWorldWarin 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 ofthe 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 changeovertime, it notonlymakes its own distinctivecontribution toour understanding of the contemporary. Contemporary history, at the same time, also infonns the explorationof thecontemporaryundertaken bycol leagues in otherdisciplines using othermethodologies,such as sociology orpolitical science. Contemporary history not only brings historical methods to bear upon theexaminationofthe contemporary.It also sets out toexploreitindepth, to provide a longer perspective within which to scrutinise and seek to ix