Anthony Seldon - The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain

J. M. Keynes.2

[T]he supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ … A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power.

Antonio Gramsci.3

KEYNES’S heroic intellectualism dazzles more than it persuades. The notion that ideas rule the world, or shape societies, implies a platonic philosopher king, legislating for society from the outside. No such creature appears in this book. It is based on the assumption that, if thought influences action, action also influences thought. Madmen in authority may distil the frenzy of academic scribblers, but academic scribblers respond to the pressures of the society around them, and their scribbles resonate only when they speak to social forces. If practical men are apt to be enslaved by defunct economists, living economists inhabit a world managed by practical men. As Gramsci knew, intellectual leadership precedes domination, but as he also knew, successful intellectual leaders tailor their appeals to inherited traditions. Belief and behaviour, ideas and policies, visions of the future and legacies of the past, form a seamless web; attempts to unpick it, to give primacy to thought over action, or to action over thought, confuse more than they illuminate.

This web provides the subject matter of the chapters that follow. In different ways, they all explore different facets of the complex and fluctuating relationship between thought and action in post-war Britain. The remaining chapters examine particular aspects of that relationship. In this chapter, I try to pull some of the threads together. I trace the rise and fall of two clusters of ideas and assumptions, through which two sets of claimants for power have sought Gramsci’s ‘intellectual and moral leadership’, and I speculate about the possible emergence of a third cluster, as yet only half-formed. I begin by describing the varied fates of these clusters and discussing the ideas they contained. I then offer an interpretation of the courses they have followed.

It is a story that falls into three broad phases. From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, governments of right and left alike adhered to a form of liberal collectivism, sometimes known as ‘Keynesian social democracy’. 4As that formulation implies, liberal collectivism or Keynesian social democracy was not the preserve of any single political party. Nor was it the product of any single ideological tendency. Its intellectual ancestry was too rich and diverse to fit the pigeon-holes of left and right; and it owed more to the crises, contingencies and compromises of the early post-war period than to the doctrines championed by either major party at the beginning of the period. The Attlee Government, under which its essentials were embodied in legislation and (much more importantly) in administrative practice, set out in 1945 with quite different intentions. So did the Conservative opposition under Churchill. Yet by the early 1950s at the latest, it had become the lodestar of the two front benches in the House of Commons, of the Whitehall mandarinate, of the leaders of organised capital and organised labour and of the academic and journalistic apologists and interpreters of this nexus of interests. Dissenters – Aneurin Bevan and his followers in the Labour Party; Peter Thorneycroft, Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch in the Conservative Party – were either marginalised or obliged to recant.

For Labour, the Keynesian social-democratic moment came gradually. In the two years from 1947 to 1949, ministers slowly abandoned their original vision of a socially-controlled economy – in which resources would be allocated by political decisions rather than market-place haggling – in favour of a mixed economy centred upon Keynesian demand management. The fact that the retreat from social control was headed by Sir Stafford Cripps, the arch-visionary of 1945, only made it all the more poignant. The equivalent Conservative moment was more compressed. It came in 1952, when the Cabinet rejected the Treasury’s so-called ‘Robot’ plan for a floating pound, sterling convertibility and a return to market disciplines, on the grounds that it would lead to higher unemployment and, as Lord Cherwell argued, ‘put the Conservative Party out for a generation. Even a Government with a large majority could not survive such a sudden, complete reversal of policy’. 5Thereafter, on both sides of the party divide, the heirs of the practical men whom Keynes had teased took it for granted that they could exercise power only within Keynesian social-democratic parameters, and lead successfully only by showing that they were better Keynesian social democrats than their rivals.

The Keynesian social-democratic phase terminated amid the confusion and crises of the 1970s. In classic Gramscian fashion, it ended in the realm of ideas well before corresponding changes took place in the realm of governmental power. By the middle of the decade, at the latest, the authoritarian individualists of the New Right, with their emphasis on market freedom, social and monetary discipline and a tightly concentrated state, were making the ideological running. Keynesian social democrats still controlled the commanding heights of Whitehall, but the intellectual system on which they based their claim to power was patently crumbling. In a profound sense, they no longer knew what to do. Ministers waited in vain for coherent official advice; officials waited in vain for firm ministerial decisions. 6It was as though a sleek ocean liner had suddenly become a rudderless raft. The New Right offered an alternative craft, and for the best part of twenty years this was the only vessel following a confident course. To be sure, New Right politicians never won a majority of the popular vote. They did not need to. With dazzling political skill, they constructed a new social coalition, distributed in such a way as to procure them decisive parliamentary majorities in spite of their comparatively low levels of popular support. More important still, the New Right paradigm shaped the political agenda and controlled the intellectual weather.

How far it still does is a moot question. Little remains of the confident and decisive Conservative regime of the 1980s. Since Britain’s forced departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Major Government has been as rudderless as were the Wilson and Callaghan Governments of the 1970s. By the early months of 1996, the Conservative Party was riven by internal disputes as savage as those which tore the Labour Party apart in the early 1980s, and most observers took it for granted that a Labour Government was only a matter of time. But this does not necessarily betoken the end of the New Right paradigm, any more than the sad diminuendo of the second Attlee Government between February 1950 and October 1951 betokened the end of its Keynesian social-democratic predecessor. New Right ideology and Conservative statecraft have been symbiotically connected for nearly two decades, but they are not the same thing, and the disarray of the latter proves nothing about the former. On the structure of the British state and its place in an increasingly proto-federal European Union, Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ Party offers a decisive break, not just with Conservative policy, but with the governing assumptions of New Right politics. Yet on the only slightly less crucial issue of taxation and public expenditure it whistles an essentially New Right tune. It seems to be groping for a vision of the political economy as distinct from authoritarian individualism as authoritarian individualism was from Keynesian social democracy. It would be rash to assume that it will find what it is groping for.

Yet intimations of a possible new intellectual and policy paradigm are not difficult to detect – on the political right as well as on the left. The fall of communism has taken the zest out of the old battles of state against market, and socialism against capitalism. The simplistic universalities of the Cold War no longer resonate; the focus now is on complexity and difference. Persistent divergencies in the fortunes of market economies have focused attention on the varieties of capitalism, and on their moral and cultural dimensions. 7Endemic unemployment in Europe, the rise of the working poor in the United States, the transformation of labour markets everywhere and the associated threat of fragmentation and anomie have fostered a new concern with the dangers of social exclusion and the a priori necessity for social cohesion. 8Classic themes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the role of trust in a market economy; the prerequisites of civil society; the meaning of citizenship; the relationship between duties and rights; the need for and scope of a public domain; the threats to and demands of community – have been rediscovered. 9On the right there is talk of a new ‘civic conservatism’; on the left, of a ‘stakeholder economy’. 10The differences between them are real and important, but they spring from a shared experience and a common fear. As John Gray, one of the most passionate and original exponents of the new mood, puts it in an anguished pamphlet,