When I was growing up in the 1950s, the hierarchical structures of British society and politics seemed virtually unchanged from the Victorian era. The upper classes, exemplified by plummy-voiced politicians like Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, still seemed to be in charge. The Coronation of 1953, which I watched on our neighbours’ tiny, blue-tinged television, was an expression not only of seemingly eternal tradition but also of the centrality of the Church of England in our national life. The British empire appeared as still more or less intact, with its representatives from all over the world joining in the celebrations. The aristocracy, in the guise of berobed grandees such as the Duke of Norfolk, appointed by hereditary right to run the Coronation show, continued to fill the benches of the House of Lords. The great majority of politicians in the House of Commons seemed to belong as much to the old elites. True, the Labour Party was now a significant force in the Commons, but its leader, Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford), had as plummy a voice as his opponents on the Conservative and Liberal benches.
And yet there had been significant changes in British politics and society during the war – changes broadly accepted on all sides of the mainstream political world. A rough consensus known as “Butskellism” dominated the scene, a portmanteau put together from Gaitskell’s name and that of Rab Butler, the leading social reformer on the Tory benches and the architect of the 1944 Education Act. This act legislated for free universal state education at every level, thus securing the backing of the Labour Party, and the provision of a strong element of non-denominational Christian education in schools, and therefore winning the support of the Tories. The National Health Service, set up by the Labour government in 1948 but already adumbrated by the Conservative health minister Henry Willink during the war, enjoyed broad political support across the board. The national consensus, though sometimes fraying at the edges, endured until it was finally dismantled by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
There have been many excellent books charting the origins of this consensus, the most original and powerfully argued among them being the late Paul Addison’s The Road to 1945, published in a revised edition 30 years ago. Addison traced the emergence of a shared vision of social reform back to the 1930s, which confronted politicians on all sides with the challenge of dealing with the Depression. But above all he emphasised the impact of the Second World War as – following the pioneering account of the popular historian Angus Calder – a “people’s war”, symbolised by the hundreds of small boats that crossed the English Channel to rescue the troops trapped at Dunkirk by the German advance across France in 1940.
Now, however, the young historian Kit Kowol, formerly of King’s College London but presently living in Brisbane, Australia, has called all of this into question, aiming to dispute what he labels as a “social-democratic consensus”. By examining a wide range of Conservative writers, societies and periodicals, he provides a stimulating and thought-provoking reassessment of Tory thinking in the war years. Far from being intellectually moribund and forced as a consequence to follow the lead of the Labour Party, the Conservative Party was a powerhouse of fresh, original and challenging ideas. The emphasis on religious education in the 1944 Education Act, for example, was just one example of their influence. For Tories, Dunkirk was the result not of the democratic spirit of a “people’s war”, but a vindication of military professionalism and traditional hierarchies of command. The wartime coalition government presided over by Churchill was dominated, even on the domestic front, by Conservatives, not socialists.
Some of Kowol’s most interesting pages are devoted to Conservative visions of foreign policy. The empire, he insists, was still central to their thinking, but so was European integration or even world federation: both, naturally, under “white Anglo-Saxon” leadership. Here, though, the book’s argument begins to run into trouble. For neither of these ambitions was even a remotely realistic one. More generally, too, while Kowol disinters a whole range of more or less forgotten Tory thinkers and think tanks (as we would call them now), he cannot really show that any of them were very influential. Some of their ideas were deeply unrealistic. A “ruralist” such as Philip Oyler, for instance, wanted to dig up the nation’s roads and replace them with orchards or fields of asparagus and alfalfa. Organisations such as the English Mistery or English Array, periodicals like The Nineteenth Century and After or Truth, and individuals such as Captain Russell Grenfell or Sir John Wardlaw-Milne, were marginal to the main story of politics during the war. Lord Beaverbrook, the mercurial arch-imperialist news proprietor, gets too much attention; Winston Churchill, oddly in view of the book’s subtitle, gets too little, though his long history as a social reformer surely contributed a good deal to the wartime and postwar consensus.
There are too many slips and minor errors in the book that should have been weeded out by its editors: for example, Kowol’s citation of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s claim that, on returning to Britain on 30 September 1938 with a slip of paper signed by himself and the German dictator Adolf Hitler, the two men’s signatures gave “peace in our time” – whereas it was, of course, “peace for our time”. Far more important, however, is the fact that Kowol largely ignores the massive literature on the postwar Labour government and its central part in the political consensus that delivered social reform. Trying to convey the impression that it was Conservative ideas that triumphed won’t succeed if you don’t simultaneously assess the contribution of Labour ideas.
The continued domination of empire, religion and social hierarchy I experienced in the Britain of my childhood was rather like one of those cartoon figures who runs off a cliff and keeps running in empty space until it realises there’s nothing underneath it. In fact, the British empire was already doomed by Indian independence (1947) and the unstoppable rise of national liberation movements in many parts of the globe, taking advantage of the vulnerability of the empire shown by Japanese conquests during the war. The British empire’s bloody and violent attempts to suppress such movements in Malaya and elsewhere were doomed to failure. At home, rapid social and cultural change began to bite in the 1960s, dissolving society into more egalitarian, liberal and tolerant structures. Religious observance started to decline at the same time, and this trend has continued to the present day. The traditional ceremony I observed with my awestruck adult neighbours at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 looked completely out of place at the Coronation of her son 70 years later, a 21st-century echo of a forgotten world.
In the end, Kit Kowol’s lively book doesn’t, to my mind, quite succeed in overturning the “social-democratic orthodoxy” so powerfully expressed by Paul Addison. But it does provide a lot of entertainment along the way.
Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War
Kit Kowol
Oxford University Press, 352pp, £30
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[See also: The case against George Orwell]
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This article appears in the 08 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Power Gap