Attlee’s Labour government had it all mapped out, then, when it was elected in 1945, and it set to work with remarkable enthusiasm. From the rubble of the Second World War it built a comprehensive Welfare State. It would be wrong to assume that the Conservatives applauded from the sidelines, however, as Attlee’s grand vision materialised. The battle against the creation of the NHS was the most prominent example of Conservative dissent. Yet the Conservatives, once in government after 1951, did not dismantle what Labour had built. Indeed, the scope of the Welfare State even increased, as the project had acquired a lot of momentum. Many of the Churchill government policies interlocked seamlessly with those of its predecessor. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Treasury, where R. A. Butler followed Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell’s methods so diligently that commentators talked of “Butskellism”. This involved policies geared towards full employment and a mixed, balanced economy.
Partly this was due to the convictions of the party leadership, and in particular those of Winston Churchill, an elder statesman with no wish to inflame party rivalry and encourage extremism. He deliberately snubbed prominent right-wingers in his party like Lord Salisbury and Oliver Lyttelton over Cabinet posts. Walter Monckton, his Minister of Labour, was told by Churchill not to resist wage demands, becoming as a result much loved by the unions. In fact the Left too committed itself to the consensus, with the TUC declaring in 1952 its intention to continue “the long-standing practice to seek to work amicably with whatever government is in power.” A voluntary adherence by the Conservative leadership to consensual politics could be seen as late as 1957, under Harold Macmillan, who wrote a book titled The Middle Way, and who declared that “in the long run, and for the common good, the umpire is better than the duel.” One year later, the Cabinet caused the resignation of Peter Thorneycroft by refusing to accept the Treasury’s monetarist, anti-consensual policies.
By the 1960s, however, British politics had shifted to an adversarial style. In opposition until 1964, the Labour party began to call for radical change, such as full nuclear disarmament in 1960 - a clear departure from the consensus. Marxists began to achieve prominence in the party. The Conservatives too began to drift away from the centre, for instance with the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrant Act. The return of Sir Oswald Mosley and the rise of Enoch Powell were symptomatic of the slow death of consensual politics.
A consensus of sorts did endure until the 1970s, but it was no longer the result of agreement and co-operation between the Left and the Right. The ageing statesmen, veterans of the War, had been replaced, and their obsession with the stability of the nation was considered old hat. Books with titles like The Stagnant Society and a whole series by Penguin entitled What Is Wrong With Britain are testament to a general change of attitude. Harold Wilson and Ted Heath were thought of as a new breed. If a consensus endured, therefore, it was due to factors other than their own wishes.
Prime among these was the need by both parties to capture and to keep the votes of a generally moderate electorate. It is not by coincidence that, after its nadir immediately after the war, the Liberal party began a slow journey back to a respectable share of the vote in the 1960s and 70s: middle-of-the-road electors did not like the two major parties drifting away from the centre. The Labour government of 1964, which had promised so much radicalism before the election, found itself needing to defend a majority of five. Radicalism was thrown clean out of the window in favour of party political considerations. Kenneth Morgan has called Wilson’s style of government “the politics of survival.” The success that moderate policies enjoyed encouraged the Labour leadership to keep the Left of the party marginalized after the 1966 election. Ted Heath too soon discovered the dangers of moving away from the Centre. His party’s tentative - and unpopular - shift to the Right in 1970 was very quickly abandoned, and indeed the Conservatives became famous for their U-turns.
The second major factor that tied governments to the consensus was the economic vulnerability of Britain. The War left a legacy of debt, and the country was never able to reverse the trend of fading international importance and stagnation. There were balance of payments crises in 1949, 1951 and 1955, a monetary crisis in 1966, devaluation in 1967, and the OPEC oil crisis in 1973. The conditions attached to the IMF loan of 1976 included £3 billion in cuts to public spending. All these contributed to making radical Left-wing policies simply impossible to carry out. On the other side of the coin, the power of the unions grew throughout the period (and was formalised by the formation of the National Economic Development Council in 1962), debilitating strikes were common, and popular support for the Welfare State did not wane. Radical right-wing action was therefore not an option for a party wishing to win elections. Against their private wishes and in spite of rhetoric, both Labour and the Conservatives were shackled to the consensus.
A further brake on radical politics was the civil service. Ministers came and went, but from one government to the next the same measured footsteps could be heard along the corridors of Whitehall. All the top men came from the same privileged background, and had climbed the ladder of promotion over the course of many years of service to the state. They were moderate, cautious, and resistant to change. Ministers relied on them for advice about particular policies, as they were far more experienced in their respective fields; and ministers relied on them to execute those policies. It was easy, in an era of weak governments, for high-ranking civil servants to delay or water down those directives which they thought went too far.
It is obvious that the consensus could not endure indefinitely. There were only so many cracks that could be papered over, the party faithful could only be betrayed a limited number of times. The consensus had been a sham since the early 1960s; by the late 1970s, the Labour Left was furious with the weak and compromising leadership of Wilson, then James Callaghan. In the Conservatives too, Heath was replaced by Margaret Thatcher in 1975 - she needs no introduction. It was now obvious that Keynesian economics had failed: Britain’s economic health had declined, relative to the rest of the Western world, non-stop since the War. The 70s, the years of “stagflation” (stagnation and inflation), discredited social democracy. Official Labour policy veered leftwards; the Conservative party went right, espousing the monetarist system of Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek. The Winter of Discontent in 1978-9 and the election of Thatcher buried any remaining notion of consensus.
A glance back at the post-war years gives an impression of remarkable co-operation and continuity between the various governments of the time. But it is dangerous to talk of a single “consensus” lasting thirty years. As Rodney Lowe has noted, “its nature was constantly evolving.” The word consensus, misleadingly, conveys a sense of mutual and bona fide assent. While this was the case in the period immediately after the end of the Second World War, it does not reflect the politics of the 1960s and 1970s, which were adversarial in style. Successive governments may have pursued similar policies while in office, but rarely did they will it. The 1960s and 70s are remembered for great social change (and dislocation) and industrial unrest: hardly the stuff of cheerful agreement. There was a consensus between successive governments in the 60s and 70s; but it was limited to the policies they pursued in office.
