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CHAPTER 10

Conservatives, Consensus and the New Jerusalem

I am proud of our achievement. There is an immense amount more to do. Let us go forward in this fight in the spirit of William Blake:

I will not cease from mental strife,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.

Clement Attlee’s final words to the 1951 Labour Party conference, three weeks before the Conservatives were returned to power

And so it was that, by the time they took the bunting down from the streets after VE-Day and turned from the war to the future, the British in their dreams and illusions and in their flinching from reality had already written the broad scenario for Britain’s postwar descent … As that descent took its course, the illusions and the dreams of 1945 would fade one by one – the imperial and Commonwealth role, the world-power role, British industrial genius, and, at the last, New Jerusalem itself, a dream turned to a dank reality of a segregated, subliterate, unskilled, unhealthy and institutionalised proletariat hanging on the nipple of state maternalism.

Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War, p. 340

By 1951, a plausible updated version of a land fit for heroes had been built on the scarred foundations of an ancient, war-ravaged community. From 1945–51 onwards, Labour’s central political faith, its prime claim to be the unique custodian of the progressive idea, lay with its inextricable identification with the rise and decline of the welfare state.

Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, p. 187

It was decency socialism, very Clem Attlee – fair play, fair chances, fair shares and co-operative conduct.

Neil Kinnock, interview, 1993

The Labour government which was swept to power in the summer of that year [1945] had, in the fields of social reform and reconstruction, only to complete the work which the Coalition had begun and in some cases bring forward Bills already drafted.

R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible, p. 125

TO THE QUESTION, ‘Would there have been a welfare state if the Conservatives had won in 1945?’, the answer is plainly yes. There was by then a consensus that there would, even if the phrase itself, popularised by Archbishop Temple,¹ was only slowly entering common parlance. At the simplest level, it is tempting to point merely to the three ‘Bs’ – Beveridge, soon to become a Liberal MP, devising social security, the Conservative Butler producing the Education Act, and the Labour Bevan founding the NHS – as answer enough.

The reality, of course, is more complex. It was none the less the coalition’s Education Act, drawn up by the Conservative Butler, which Labour implemented. Equally, despite alarm about the cost, there would have been Conservative social security provisions along the Beveridge lines. The Family Allowances Act had already been passed. The wartime coalition had agreed that phasing in pensions over twenty years was not politically tenable. Jim Griffiths’s Bills went through the Commons with Conservative assent and barely a dissenting voice. He had found drafts of them on taking office, which he modified but did not alter fundamentally. It is entirely possible that a Conservative government would have backed away from some of the social security compromises it had made with its Labour and Liberal partners in coalition, just as Willink, in the interregnum between the coalition and Labour’s victory, further modified the NHS proposals.² Benefit rates might well have been less generous. But the broad structure is unlikely to have been radically different. The insurance base was acceptable to the Conservatives in coalition and there is little or nothing to suggest the system would have been much more selective, or less universal.

There would, too, have been a National Health Service, free at the point of use. That was coalition policy and remained Willink’s stance. Guy Dain, the chairman of the BMA’s council, told a secret session of its representative body in May 1945 that an ‘all-in’ NHS appeared to be the unanimous policy not just of the then government, but of Parliament.³ The NHS would have looked very different. Even though Willink in a 1962 health service debate was generous enough to declare that ‘this is an opportunity for me to admit that in my view the Labour government was right when it undertook the daunting step of taking over 1334 voluntary and 1771 municipal hospitals’,⁴ it remains difficult to see a Conservative Government nationalising the hospitals in the way Bevan engineered. The alternative creation might not have worked as well as the NHS, the range of services might have been less comprehensive and it is impossible to see what different compromises a Conservative government would have forged with the doctors. But even Bevan (in his more emollient moods when he was not calling the Tories ‘vermin’) was prepared to admit that ‘every party made its contribution’ to the NHS,⁵ while Attlee went out of his way to stress the cross-party nature of the measure on vesting day in 1948.

The White Paper Employment Policy had been a coalition effort and had defined a government commitment to ‘high and stable’ employment, even if the tools it adumbrated required further development. Even in housing, the coalition was already heavily involved and a Conservative administration would have had to be even more so, given the immense legacy of wartime damage and the demographic and electoral pressures. Local authorities would not have been chosen as almost the sole source of supply, as they were in the early years of the 1945 government: controls on private house building were gradually eased in the years to 1951. But in the past Conservative governments had put money into council houses and Macmillan was to use them as a major tool in his housing drive.

Butler, in arguing that Labour had only to complete the work of coalition, greatly overstates the case. But it is plain that the welfare state was in the making well ahead of 1945. Some of this is just the force of history. Modern welfare states of widely differing design in their details emerged at varying rates, but in general rapidly, across the rest of the industrialised world after 1945. Modern industrial societies have to have them. They all, like the UK, had been developing them before the Second World War.

At the most naïve level, once rural economies break up and money rather than barter or labour, in return for shelter, protection and care, becomes the dominant means of exchange, societies have to make some collective provision in cash and kind unless they are prepared to let the weakest literally go to the wall. The rural economy with extensive family networks can cope up to a point even with the village idiot, exchanging food and shelter for whatever limited work can be done. The modern cash economy is largely denied that option. It has to provide benefits, in cash or kind, paid for collectively by those who do not know the recipients, unless it is prepared to see people starve or die unnecessarily.

Of course Britain’s welfare state, like those in the rest of Europe, was created as much more than just a rescue system for the weak. They all dramatically brought the middle classes and above into the net – indeed, that is one of the defining shifts of the 1940s. In Britain it meant that the middle class no longer had to pay the market cost of private health care or take out private insurance. No longer did they have to pay school fees. Their children came to receive maintenance grants at university, and it was disproportionately their children who reached university. Indeed it is the huge middle-class stake in ‘free’ education and health care that have made those the most enduring and popular features of the welfare state. The middle class, like everyone else, also received maternity benefits and family allowances, along with the prospect of a state pension and a death grant of a size that at the time would buy a basic funeral. These cash benefits, however, were flat-rate and so were relatively less important to them than to the less well off. Although they had a stake in social security, it was a lesser stake than in education and health – one factor which may help to explain the slowly growing scepticism over social security in a society which progressively became more middle class with a shrinking labouring class. But if the welfare state gave the middle class a major shareholding, it also produced a significant transfer of resources from the better off to the less well off. As importantly, and arguably even more importantly, it shifted resources between the generations at key moments in life. People paid taxes in middle life when in work, and in return were helped with their children’s upbringing and education, were guaranteed help when sick, and were assisted in old age when earning ceased. There was therefore, and remained, a widespread vested interest – or, to put it more kindly, a mutual interest – in the welfare state, on top of the ‘never again’ revulsion felt over the effects of the 1930s depression.

That revulsion was far from confined to the Labour Party and those who voted for it. Harold Macmillan had written The Middle Way in 1938, with its advocacy of a mixed economy and far greater state intervention than was believed in by the Tory party of the 1930s. He would never forget the poverty and unemployment he had seen in his Stockton-on-Tees constituency. During the war The Middle Way became the creed for the burgeoning Tory Reform Group and once in opposition Churchill gave Butler, Macmillan, Eden and other increasingly senior figures in the party the position and influence to develop those ideas into a radical rethink of the Conservative position.

Needless to say, furious inter-party conflict remained. One of the ironies of politics can be that the closer Government and Opposition are to each other’s position, the louder any distinctions between them may have to be proclaimed. Thus it was over health and housing. The nationalisation of iron and steel, too, caused splenetic divisions, the industry over the years being nationalised, de-nationalised, re-nationalised and finally privatised. Yet even Sir John Anderson, the Treasury ‘dry’, to use modern parlance, who had helped enrage the Tory Reform Group back-benchers over Beveridge, acknowledged that: ‘In the case of the Bank of England, Transport, Cable and Wireless, Electricity and Coal the onus of proving the need for socialisation may not unreasonably be held to have been discharged.’⁶ It was in the main ailing but essential industries, and the public utilities which clearly played a social as well as commercial role, which Labour nationalised, not flourishing industries which would make large profits for the state to spend.

‘The overwhelming electoral defeat of 1945 shook the Conservative Party out of its lethargy and impelled it to re-think its philosophy and re-form its ranks with a thoroughness unmatched for a century,’ Butler has recorded.⁷ Indeed, for a time the party was so seared by its past that its Young Turks, including Macmillan, argued it should change its name.⁸ So large was Labour’s majority that the Tories even toyed with the idea of proportional representation as a road back to at least a share of power. Socialism, Butler says, had provided the electorate ‘with a vision and a doctrine to which we had no authoritative answer or articulated alternative’.⁹ And the Conservatives were faced, Butler was to judge in the mellowness of hindsight, not just with a new intake of the horny-handed sons of toil but with a significant body of new middle-class Labour MPs who ‘had little desire to subvert existing institutions: a moderate affluence was, in their view, respectable and their main (and legitimate) targets were the remaining extremes’.¹⁰ The Conservatives’ predicament was one of ‘magnitude and difficulty’. It was ‘our need to convince a broad spectrum of the electorate, whose minds were scarred by inter-war memories and myths, that we had an alternative policy to socialism which was viable, efficient and humane, which would release and reward enterprise and initiative but without abandoning social justice or reverting to mass unemployment’.¹¹ By the time of the next election the Conservatives had to show that they had ‘accommodated themselves to a social revolution’.¹²

It was Butler who was to lead what became a Tory revolution as, in Anthony Howard’s words, the Conservatives’ ‘philosopher-in-chief’. Churchill appointed him chairman of both the moribund Conservative Research Department and the cumbersomely named Advisory Committee on Policy and Political Education to which the Conservative Political Centre was answerable. Together they formed what Butler dubbed ‘a thinking machine’ – a precursor of the modern think-tanks. Into the research department came a galaxy of future stars: Reginald Maudling concentrating on economics, Iain Macleod on social policy, and Enoch Powell. Then in 1946, after a dispirited party conference had called for a new approach, Churchill appointed Butler chairman of what proved to be the most important body of them all, an industrial committee whose members included rising stars such as Macmillan, David Eccles, Peter Thorneycroft and Derrick Heathcoat-Amory, as well as more established names such as the two Olivers, Lyttelton and Stanley.

The outcome was the Industrial Charter, described by Anthony Howard as probably ‘the most memorable concession a free enterprise party ever made to the spirit of Keynesian economics’.¹³ It is not, as Butler himself was to confess, the most riveting of reads. He still had the powerful, free-market, laissez-faire right wing to deal with in the person of such wonderfully named back-benchers as Sir Waldron Smithers and Sir Herbert Williams, the latter convinced that the Conservatives in the war had been led to accept ‘pink Socialism’.¹⁴ There were other Tory MPs for whom, as Macmillan put it in 1947, ‘time does not merely stand still, it runs backwards’.¹⁵ They had on their side the might of the Beaverbrook press, notably the Daily Express, Sunday Express and Evening Standard, then in its heyday. Butler attempted to outflank his opponents by boring them. ‘Rarely in the field of political pamphleteering,’ he observed, ‘can a document so radical in effect have been written with such flatness of language and blandness of tone.’ The aim was to give the party ‘a painless but permanent face-lift; the more unflamboyant the changes, the less likely were the features to sag again. Our first purpose was to counter the charge and the fear that we were the party of industrial go-as-you-please and devil-take-the-hindmost, that full employment and the Welfare State were not safe in our hands.’¹⁶

So while the charter did have much on industry (accepting the nationalisation of the Bank of England, coal and the railways on a case by case basis) and on co-operation within industry (much of which now reads as rather idealistic and quaint), its core was the Keynesian duty of the government to regulate the economy. It was a remarkable revision of the party’s 1930s position. ‘Perhaps its [the government’s] greatest duty,’ the document said, ‘is to ensure that such main priorities as the maintenance of employment and our well-developed social services are fulfilled before subsidiary objectives are sought and that the tasks set are not beyond the capacity of the resources available.’¹⁷

There was a healthy Conservative qualification at the end of that sentence – in effect, ‘we have to be able to afford it’. But equally, the first duties of government were clearly spelt out. The charter was thus, in Butler’s words, ‘first and foremost an assurance that, in the interests of efficiency, full employment and social security, modern Conservatism would maintain strong central guidance over the operation of the economy’. The charter contained plenty to mark Conservatism out from Socialism. Indeed, its objective was to state a clear alternative. There were themes which were to recur endlessly over the years: the improvement of incentives via lower taxation, the removal of controls, the shrinking of the civil service, the sharpening of competition.¹⁸ But it finally defined what Lord Woolton was to call the ‘shandy gaff’ of Labour/Tory centralism which was to be the core of British politics for the next thirty years.

For all the charter’s bland language it was far from certain the right would acquiesce, and the admittedly partisan Tribune predicted it would ‘split the Tory party as it has not been divided for a half a century’. The prediction proved no better than the grammar and at a carefully stage-managed Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1947 the right was routed by this renewal of ‘One Nation’ Conservatism. The charter went through despite a hiccup recorded by Maudling, who was asked by Churchill to provide a five-line summary for his winding-up speech. Churchill read it slowly, only to declare: ‘But I don’t agree with a word of this.’ ‘But, sir,’ Maudling was forced to protest, ‘this is what the conference adopted.’¹⁹

Anthony Howard’s judgement is that the charter ‘ended up virtually sealing the party off from its pre-war past’. Butler, more grandiloquently, echoed the Spectator’s view that it destroyed ‘the last excuse for labelling the Conservative party as reactionary’.²⁰ That may have been true internally in 1947. But The Right Road for Britain, a document produced two years later which formed the basis for the 1950 and 1951 manifestos, shows how far the party knew it had still to go to convince the public.

In 1949 it was still felt necessary to produce an immensely detailed three-page appendix, packed with small print and headed ‘Our contribution to the social services 1918–1945’, listing all such measures passed ‘by Parliaments with Conservative majorities’. With a rather desperate air, it presented the Tories as the real founders of the welfare state. The body of the document stated: ‘The Conservative party has welcomed the new social services which it has done so much to create. We regard them as mainly our own handiwork. We shall endeavour faithfully to maintain the range and scope of these services, and the rate of benefits.’ Indeed, it even went so far as to argue that the ‘vast experiment in social organisation’ in which Britain now ‘led the world’ had been ‘the work of the Conservative and Liberal Parties’ and that Labour in the past four years had merely ‘carried out in partisan spirit the plans prepared by the National Coalition Government with its large Conservative majority. They have no claim to any achievement of their own.’

None of this made The Right Road a cosily bipartisan effort. Other strains of thought remained extant. In 1945, Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian free market economist, had written The Road to Serfdom, asserting that all forms of socialism and economic planning end inescapably in tyranny. It sold widely; Sir Waldron Smithers, for one, was a Hayek fan and its influence may even have inspired Churchill’s disastrous claim in the 1945 election that Labour would introduce a Gestapo. Hayek himself was installed at the London School of Economics, where he provided a powerful counterpoint to the arguments of the social policy wizards who became known as ‘Titmuss and the Titmice’: first T. H. Marshall, who provided a theoretical construct which legitimized the welfare state as a historical force, then Titmuss himself, and later Brian Abel-Smith, Peter Townsend and their successors, all of whom heavily influenced the thinking not just of Labour but of more moderate Conservatives by providing both a critique and a renewal of the vision of the welfare state as well as of its detailed implementation.

By 1949, Hayek’s influence had waned, with his star not set to rise again politically until the mid-1970s. His influence, none the less, can be seen in the opening sentence of The Right Road for Britain which stated baldly: ‘Britain today has the choice of two – and only two – roads. One leads downwards to the Socialist state and inevitably into communism.’ The other, of course, was the Conservative way, including a commitment to ‘the property-owning democracy’. (That was the only memorable phrase ever attributed to Anthony Eden, who had popularised it at the 1946 Tory party conference, using it to embrace employee share ownership and profit sharing as well as home ownership.)²¹ A review of rent controls was promised and it was noted acidly that it now took three men to build what two had built before the war. Seamlessly, however, the document also pledged more four- and five-bedroom council houses for larger families, and more smaller ones for elderly couples and single people.

The preservation of grammar schools was beginning to emerge as a Tory theme, but The Right Road for Britain also conceded that ‘Under certain circumstances, variations of the multi-lateral idea may well be adopted’, and while the party wanted to get rid of price controls and rationing it underlined that for necessities ‘we shall not until there is enough to go round’.²² So long did the image of the ‘bad old Tory days’ linger that a popular question-and-answer version of the pamphlet even referred directly to them and asked: ‘Q: Is it true that the Conservatives want to cut the social services? A: This is a deliberate lie.’²³

The fact that not just the party’s leaders but its activists had changed was shown at the 1950 party conference, held after the general election. With the Conservatives having made much of Labour’s failure to achieve the 300,000 houses a year built before the war, the conference became restive during a housing policy debate with representatives clamouring for a concrete Tory target. They started to chant: ‘Three hundred thousand.’ When the chair ruled such a move out of order the normally compliant ranks of Conservatives were for once reduced to uproar. Lord Woolton, the Tory party chairman, was sitting beside Butler and whispered, ‘Could we build 300,000?’ to which Butler replied ‘The question is should we?’ – a distinction that Anthony Howard judges went straight over ‘that populist politician’s head’. Butler added, however, that if the question was whether such a target was technically feasible, then the back-room staff should be consulted. David Clarke, the director of the Conservative Research Department, off the platform, said it could be done, and Lord Woolton stepped forward to declare: ‘This is magnificent. You want a figure of 300,000 put in? Madam chairman, I am sure that those of us on the platform here will be very glad indeed to have such a figure put in!’²⁴ Butler was to comment thirty years later on Lord Woolton’s ‘This is magnificent’: ‘So, in a sense, it was. Both the promise and the achievement were magnificent politically; economically, however, they placed a severe strain upon our resources which contributed to the difficulties of 1954–5.’²⁵

In this way the Tory party went into the 1951 election committed to building 300,000 houses a year and to the maintenance of the rest of Britain’s welfare state. The question then arises, did this amount to a consensus? And if so, how long did it last? If the definition is taken to mean unanimity, then plainly there was no consensus, not even within parties let alone between them. The left of the Labour Party – and at times not just the left – remained implacably opposed to private provision in education and health, for example, and fought to have their extinction included in the party programme. Within the Conservative Party the acceptance of a far greater degree of collectivism by Butler, Eden, Macmillan and Heath had still to contend with the remaining free market adherents of Hayek. Between the parties there remained fierce practical disputes about, for example, the role of the private and public sectors in housing – arguments which reflected key underlying distinctions in philosophy: the value of personal freedom and ownership against collective provision, of universality against selectivity, of choice against equality. It remained true that in an ideal world, untrammelled by realities and electoral considerations, Labour would happily have spent more and the Conservatives less. On the broadest of fronts – the handling of the economy, nationalisation, fiscal redistribution – profound differences between the parties remained.

But on the narrower issue of the welfare state and the services provided under it, the areas of agreement for a long time proved more important than areas of dispute, despite genuine battles over particular policies and a fierce picking of differences. The maintenance of full employment, for example, remained a shared goal right up to the late 1970s. It might not have done. In early 1952 the Treasury put to Butler, then Chancellor, a programme called ROBOT after the initials of the Treasury civil servants – ROwan, BOlton and OTto Clarke – who constructed it. It proposed floating the pound, producing steep rises in prices of imported food and raw materials and a consequent surge in unemployment. Butler believed in the scheme, stating in his memoirs that the decision not to go ahead was ‘a fundamental [economic] mistake’. But Lord Cherwell, one of Churchill’s key advisers, saw Butler’s proposal as ‘a reckless leap in the dark’ which would have ‘appalling political and economic consequences at home and abroad’,²⁶ and with Eden, Woolton and others against opposition built to the point where, as Butler later recorded, ‘among ministerial colleagues I could count Oliver Lyttelton alone as a consistent supporter’. The scheme was rejected in the face of a range of objections among which the fear of unemployment loomed large. Had it gone ahead history would have been different and, as Butler noted wryly and regretfully, ‘the term Butskellism might never have been invented’.²⁷

But it was rejected and the consensus on full employment held. Other parts of the welfare state faced similar challenges in the early Conservative years. Education and health were subjected to repeated assaults by the Treasury under Chancellors ranging from Butler through Macmillan and on to Peter Thorneycroft with proposals ranging from excluding dental and ophthalmic services from the NHS to cutting a year from either end of compulsory schooling. Hard and long battles were fought in Cabinet and Cabinet committees on these issues, to the point where it is arguable that the Conservatives once in government were less plainly committed to the welfare state up to 1958 than they were afterwards – 1958 being the year Macmillan allowed his Chancellor, Thorneycroft, to resign rather than accept cuts which included a hospital boarding fee, removal of the family allowance from the second child and a string of other options for retrenchment of the welfare state.

Yet despite these alarms, the fact is that no effective challenge to universal, free secondary schooling was mounted and tax-funded higher education was to expand dramatically. The same applied in health, where again a universal service free at the point of use survived essentially unscathed, despite the introduction of some charges. On social security the Conservatives accepted and broadly maintained the universalism of Beveridge. The levels of benefit that were set came, over time, to see more people relying on means-tested benefits. But no universal benefits became means-tested and the biggest battles up to the 1970s were over how and how far to extend second pensions, not how to cut back existing provision.

None of this amounts to a true consensus – absolute agreement on what should be done about every area at every time. It was as much a matter of compromise as a true meeting of minds between the parties. What it does demonstrate, however, is a large degree of consensus in action, if not in thought, with its degree varying by time and by subject. Labour did not, for example, abolish private education, any more than the Conservatives introduced charges for hospital admissions. And while the construction of a second pension was a bitterly contested subject for twenty years, the final introduction of SERPS, the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme, was to prove in 1976 a bipartisan measure despite, by then, a decade of Conservative rhetoric about greater selectivity. Up to the 1980s the differences between the parties produced for the welfare state services an oscillation around a mean, rather than any great swing in one direction or the other. The trend was in favour of the social democratic ideas embodied by the institutions and services of the welfare state. In these circumstances, and held within pragmatic bounds, the differences between the parties need make no difference to the broad shape of welfare. Given full rein, however, the views of the Conservative right or the Labour left would lead to very different societies.²⁸

Michael Fraser joined the Conservative Research Department in 1946 and was only to lose his role in it, by then as chairman, when Mrs Thatcher became leader thirty years later. In 1987, as Lord Fraser of Kilmorack, he summed it up thus:

In a fundamental sense there must always be a good deal of common ground between the main parties alternating in government in a free society. When in power, after all, they are governing the same country, with the same history, people, problems and elbow-room, or lack of it, within the same world. Because the two main parties coming out of the coalition government in 1945 had already hammered out, not without some hard bargaining and horse-trading, the broad policies for dealing after the war with those social problems that had been identified and prepared for during the war on the basis of the Beveridge Report, the Employment Policy White Paper and the Butler Education Act of 1944, there was for a time an unusual degree of apparent unity of aim. To say, however, that the situation after 1945 amounted to a ‘consensus’ is a myth of more recent origin. No one thought that at the time. The real position was like that of two trains, starting off from parallel platforms at some great London terminus and running for a time on broadly parallel lines but always heading for very different destinations.²⁹

There were to be plenty of bouts of rhetoric – and occasional policy gestures – about what those different destinations were over the years. As early as 1950 the brightest of the new intake of Tory MPs, including Macleod, Angus Maude, Powell and, in a strictly limited role, Edward Heath, produced the One Nation pamphlet whose endorsement of the welfare state was tempered by important qualifications. In both parties there would be individuals and groupings who would argue for more extreme positions. But in terms of what was put to the electorate it would be the late 1970s and early 1980s before the differences of the destinations were spelled out in stark terms. Equally, it would take until the late 1990s and very changed economic circumstances, for some of the Conservatives’ ideas about targeting to triumph.

In 1945, in A. H. Halsey’s phrase, Labour inherited a Britain that was ‘by today’s standards … a poverty stricken country exhausted by war’.³⁰ And yet by 1951, despite austerity, Cripps, rationing (which for a time after the war became even more stringent and did not finally end until 1954); despite utility furniture (which was virtually all that was available until 1949), the absence of bananas for five and a half years up to 1946, and the fact that the street lights did not go back on in Piccadilly until 1949 (four years after the war ended and a decade after they had gone out); despite all this, Britain was slowly becoming more prosperous. While the convertibility crisis, devaluation and the impact of the Korean War each shook the Labour Government’s confidence and set back planned spending, the overall record of the six years was of growth, rapidly rising production and an export-led boom. The 1945–51 era was also the period of long, hot, almost Edwardian summers, of Bradman, Compton and Edrich, of record football league and cinema attendances (a third of the population went to the pictures once a week, one in eight twice a week).³¹ It was the Britain of young Richard Attenborough playing the delinquent Pinky in the film of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and Dirk Bogarde murdering, in The Blue Lamp, the same Jack Warner who was to rise seemingly eternal on television as the avuncular Dixon of Dock Green. The 1940s and early 1950s was the Britain of those now grainy classics Brief Encounter and The Third Man, Ealing comedies like Passport to Pimlico - a cheerful revolt against rationing and bureaucracy – and The Lavender Hill Mob, and the boom in Butlin holiday camps. There was the ‘New Look’, ‘spivs’ – the first self-confident denial of the collective spirit the war was meant to have established – and endless ‘fiddling’ of coupons. Dockers discovered the strike weapon and turned themselves into the shock troops of the working class, producing the first manifestations of the ‘I’m All Right Jack’ philosophy. Britain had moved from the government-sponsored ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition in 1946 (dubbed by the wags ‘Britain Can’t Have It’, as almost all the goods displayed were for export only) to the muddy excitement (and controversy) of the Festival of Britain in 1951, built on a rubble-strewn bomb site with the Festival Hall symbolising a musical revival which included the reintroduction of the Proms and the rise of ‘Flash Harry’ (Sir Malcolm Sargent). Publishing boomed as paper controls ended, Animal Farm finally saw the light of day, Brideshead Revisited presented an elegy for a lost age and Graham Greene produced The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. C. P. Snow started his ‘Strangers and Brothers’ sequence. Lumps of sculpture by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth started to be scattered approvingly across the landscape and Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer begin to gain a wider audience. The first national parks were established; the Pennine Way was planned. Legal aid emerged as a small and unobtrusive part of the welfare state, but one which when it started in 1950 covered almost 80 per cent of the population.

It remained, however, a Britain where many newly-wed couples still lived with their parents for lack of any other home; where tenement slums still existed, terraced houses could still shelter several families sharing a gas ring and a single lavatory, and where families would still find they would have to wait nine or ten years for a council house. More than 40 per cent of households did not have a fixed bath and 15 per cent had to share a lavatory,³² television sets were a treasured rarity, pianos were still valued, and virtually every home had a Bakelite or wood cabinet mains radio.

In the Britain of 1951, Neil Kinnock, an eight-year-old in the Welsh valleys, was about to benefit not just from attending a grammar school but from the further education that in the 1980s would allow him to declare, in one of the few moments in that decade which caught the resonance of the post-war achievement, that he was ‘the first Kinnock in a thousand generations’ to go to university. John Major was a nine-year-old in Worcester Park, about to follow the same path to grammar school, though not to university. Tony Blair, whose education would take in the Scottish public school Fettes and Oxford University, was not even born. Hilda Margaret Roberts was of an earlier generation, the one before the welfare state. A scholarship girl at the grant-aided grammar school in Kesteven in 1936, her alderman and grocer father had been able to find the funds that let her take up a place at Oxford in 1943. As the Conservatives took office in 1951, she was already twenty-five, a losing candidate at Dartford in both 1950 and 1951. But she was on her way.