post-war politics - historians' arguments

Question 1

Zweiniger-Bargielowska

Answer 1

• Post-war Labour is male-centred and productionist
• Strong emphasis on gender differences in experiences of shortages and attitude towards austerity; women most directly affected. Targeted by a patronising government propaganda about the kitchen front. IZB describes how shopping became frustrating, time-consuming and dispiriting experience – waits in queues, poor quality goods. Wereas men benefited from full employment.
• Relationship between consumption and morale.
• Differentiates between different public attitudes to different aspects of the serious reduction of consumption during, and immediately after, the war.
  o More discontent about rationing of clothes than food (esp. amongst women with children)
  o More discontent about rationing after the war, than during the war (when there was an acquiescence of the need for sacrifices). Disillusionment amongst young women.
• Argues that Labour continued to be associated with austerity, in contrast to the Conservative’s campaign against it. These issues dominated political debate in the late 1940s and were crucial factors in the electoral fortunes of both parties after 1945.
• Conservative propaganda had particular appeal amongst women voters, especially after 1955. ‘gender differenced in the experience of and attitudes towards austerity were more important than those between classes’.
• Sees ‘housewives’ as a homogenous group.
• Overlaps between class and gender – e.g. decline of domestic servants, ‘housewife’ transcending class. Austerity differed between women according to class.

Question 2

Jones and Kandiah; The Myth of Consensus

Answer 2

• Popular belief in a broad national consensus on social and economic reform in post-war Britain stretches back to the period itself.
• Revisionist school emerged wrt Addison’s consensus in the 1980s; exaggerated depth of ideological agreement on reconstruction and extent of post-war policy parallels.
• Consensus arguable an invention of the Conservatives – party felt the need to re-fashion itself after 45 and distance itself from the policies of the inter-war period.
• BUT, beneath the progressive veneer of the Conservatives’ ‘middle way’ lurked traditional commitments to private enterprise, individual self-reliance, and other neoliberal components of Conservative ideology.
• Labour contribution to the myth: they had a moderate image. But, after 1947 the government continued to plan inroads into the private sector.
• Conservative toleration of the welfare state and the public sector after 1951 was due not to a conversion to collectivism but to the fear that public opinion would not accept a radical dismantling of postwar reforms.

Question 3

Addison; the road to 1945

Answer 3

• Emergence of a high level ‘consensus’ in the war years. ‘elite’ consensus on reconstruction – by the end of the war both Labour and Conservative leaders were committed to the shared agenda of ‘reformed capitalism’.
• Formation of a middle ground in politics.
• Although the Liberal party shrank as a party, its ideas shaped politics across the 20C, particularly post 1945.

Question 4

Hennessey

Answer 4

if there had been a Churchill government after 1945…there would have been a health service’.

Question 5

Green

Answer 5

• We need to be wary of consensus
• Conservatives’ 1945 election campaign was influenced by Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom; particular link to ‘Gestapo’ speech.

Question 6

Jackson

Answer 6

• We need to be wary of consensus
• Health would not have happened in the way that it did without Labour winning the election in 1945
• Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom provides a neo-liberal critique of state welfare. It was influential in the Conservatives’ 1945 election campaign, and played a part in Churchill’s infamous gestapo speech.

Question 7

Jefferys

Answer 7

• WW2 – considerable party conflict over Beveridge. February 1943 commons debate important for establishing who was most committed.
• The war made only moderate inroads in reducing the dissention of party politics.
• Challenges the notion of consensus; wartime Conservatism was lukewarm about social reform, Coalition policies rarely got beyond the planning stage.
• If a coalition did exist it was a product of the late 40s and early 50s rather than the war years.
• Argues that the 1945 election was more open than more open than the final result suggested. Argues for shorter-term causes of the Labour landslide.
• Labour Back Bench Revolt on the Beveridge Report in 1943.

Question 8

Francis

Answer 8

• Exhausted public leads to the tactical strengthening of Keynesianism – reluctance to accept post-war market economy.
• Even though Labour’s policies were seen as tactical by most, they still had fundamentally socialist aims.
• The Labour movement was less radical and less socialist than might be expected.
• Labour leaders did apply socialism, but never worked out a thoroughly unproblematic way of putting socialism into practise. By 1951 socialism was in need of revision.
• Ideological dimension of policy making; key players were Attlee, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton, Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan (NHS), Hugh Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins.
• Four element of British socialism; Four-elements Marxism, Fabianism, economic planning and ethical socialism.
• NHS and education both reflect Labour’s socialist ideology. Tripartite, rather than comprehensive, system of education fitted with Labour’s idea of socialism at the time.
• Following achievements of nationalisation from 1945-7, party programme slowed because disagreement over the aim of party ownership.
• Need to finance public spending undermined Labour’s abhorrence of direct taxes.

Question 9

Hinton

Answer 9

• (opposed to I-ZB and Steedman) British Housewives League was largely a middle-class pressure group on the right of the Conservative party. Labour did better among women than men between 1945 and 1950.
• Social services were more important to working class women in 1950/51.

Question 10

Webster

Answer 10

• Paints a bleak picture of living conditions and the development of the health service before 1939. It was the circumstances of the war, and the character of Bevan, that led to the creation of the NHS.
• Unlike many of his colleagues, Bevan had strong ideas and was able to act decisively on them.

Question 11

Toye

Answer 11

• 1931 marked a watershed – Labour got rid of the ‘gradualism’ that had been its downfall and advocated planning.
• Disagrees with Alan Booth, who argues that throughout the 1930s. Labour economists made little progress in articulating a political economy of socialist planning.

Question 12

Carolyn Steedman: Landscape for a Good Woman

Answer 12

• Post-war Labour is male-centred and productionist. Condemns the aspiration (particularly of women) for ‘luxury’, and marks of ‘distinction’ as irrational, bourgeois and immoral.