Anthony Seldon - The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain

Eventually, however, Act One gave way to Act Two. Gradually in the 1950s, and with gathering speed in the 1960s, Keynesian social democrats abandoned the austere moral activism of Attlee, Beveridge and Cripps. Keynes himself had never really shared it; though he killed himself overworking for his country, his moral vision was always suffused with the hedonistic relativism he had absorbed in the Cambridge and Bloomsbury of his youth. Later Keynesian economists saw themselves as technicians rather than moralists, or even citizens. In their eyes, their professional task was to understand the working of the economic system and to advise policy makers how to translate their preferences into action. As private individuals they might or might not make moral judgements of their own, but the realm of moral judgement and the realm of economic science were to be kept rigidly apart. What was true of post-Keynesian economic collectivism was also true, albeit for different reasons, of post-Beveridgean welfare collectivism. The notions that rights should be balanced by duties, that activity was better than dependence and the point of collective provision was to foster self-reliance and civic activism came to be seen as patronising, or elitist, or (horror of horrors) ‘judgemental’. Meanwhile, the service ethic of the professional mandarinate – the twentieth-century equivalent of the ‘clerisy’ of the nineteenth century and, as such, the chief guardians of the moral-activist tradition – came to be seen as camouflage for illegitimate privilege. 31On a deeper level, as Geoff Mulgan’s chapter suggests, the moral and cultural presuppositions of that ethic were undermined by a loss of confidence on the part of the mandarinate itself, exacerbated by an insistent demotic relativism on the part of its critics. Among left-of-centre Keynesian social democrats, equality came to be seen as a good in itself, irrespective of the uses to which the fruits of egalitarian policies were put. Among their right-of-centre counterparts, a technocratic managerialism, in which the good life was equated with rising living standards and political leadership with the promotion of economic growth, increasingly prevailed. 32

If the mentality of the first group was epitomised in Hugh Gaitskell’s ‘socialism is about equality’, that of the second was summed up in Harold Macmillan’s 1957 boast that the British people had ‘never had it so good’. If the emblematic Keynesian social democrat of the 1940s was William Beveridge, that of the 1960s and 1970s was Anthony Crosland, with his ringing plea for an ethic of private pleasure in place of the Fabian ethic of public duty:

We need not only higher exports and old age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing-hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating-houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places, better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes, statues in the centre of new housing estates, better-designed street lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum …

… To-day we are all incipient bureaucrats and practical administrators. We have all, so to speak, been trained at the L.S.E., are familiar with Blue Books and White Papers, and know our way around Whitehall … Now the time has come for a reaction: for a greater emphasis on private life, on freedom and dissent, on culture, beauty, leisure, and even frivolity. Total abstinence and a good filing system are not now the right sign-posts to the socialist Utopia: or, at least, if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside. 33

Alas for riverside cafes. As Raymond Plant suggests in a later chapter, hedonistic collectivism contains a built-in flaw. By definition, the redistribution it demands makes some people better off and others worse off. Also by definition, it can offer no convincing moral argument for doing so. If rights are not balanced by duties, why should the rich make sacrifices for the poor? If collective provision is not a means to moral improvement, why should those who do not need it pay taxes to pay for it? If the public domain is not a place of engagement, governed by a service ethic, what is to prevent it from becoming a battleground for predatory vested interests? Hedonistic collectivists could not answer these questions. By the mid-1970s, Act Two was ending. It was clear that there was a moral and rhetorical vacuum at the heart of the Keynesian social-democratic system. The beginning of Act Three saw the New Right rushing in to fill it.

For the New Right attack on the Keynesian social-democratic system was moral as well as economic and political: in the last analysis, moral rather than economic or political. Market forces were better than state intervention, not just because they were more efficient, but because the market-place was quintessentially the realm of freedom, and because only free people can be moral agents. Thrift, enterprise and self-reliance were, of course, the building blocks of a prosperous economy. But that was not the chief reason for valuing them. They were also the stigmata of the ‘vigorous virtues’ – of virtues whose possessors were, above all, ‘upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against enemies’. 34The ‘dependency culture’ allegedly created by the hedonistic collectivists of the Crosland generation was condemned, not just because it ate into the public purse, but because it turned those it entrapped into ‘moral cripples’. 35‘Victorian values’ were extolled, not just because they had prevailed in the days of Britain’s glory, but because they were morally right. Collective action and collective provision were not only sources of inflationary overload. They were sources of moral escapism, encouraging those who took part in them to shelter from the consequences of their own actions, and so engendering a corrosive culture of guilt. 36

But Act Three did not – could not – last. The moralistic individualism of the late 1970s and early 1980s turned out to be as fragile as the hedonistic collectivism which had preceded it. Moralistic individualists sought to resurrect the moral economy of the nineteenth century by returning to its political economy. They saw that the ‘vigorous virtues’ had flourished in a market economy, and they assumed that the way to reinstate them was to give freer reign to market forces. They forgot that the ‘vigorous virtues’ of nineteenth-century Britain had been nurtured by, and embodied in, a much older network of institutions and practices, whose origins lay far back in the pre-market past. The market economy of the nineteenth-century lived off a stock of moral capital, accumulated over long generations to which the norms of the marketplace were at best alien and at worst anathema. Its apologists did not fully recognise the significance of this moral legacy. It was part of the air they breathed, and they simply took it for granted. Matters are quite different today. Today, as Mrs Thatcher and Hayek both half-recognised, a moral order capable of sustaining the vigorous virtues can no longer be taken for granted; it has to be created. But market forces cannot create it. The market is inherently amoral, antinomian, subversive of all values except the values of free exchange. In the market-place, the customer is king; and customers sooner or later get what they are prepared to pay for, irrespective of its moral quality. The New Right’s moral vision was, in short, at odds with its economic vision. Act Three came to an end in the mid-1980s, with the victory of the latter over the former.

Act Four lasted from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s. Its central theme lay in a strange mutation of policy and rhetoric, uncannily reminiscent of the mutation which had transformed the moral collectivism of the post-war period into the hedonistic collectivism of the 1960s and early 1970s. Mrs Thatcher herself continued to bang the moral-activist drum; when they remembered to, so did her ministers. But the drum-beats sounded ever-more faintly. Where early Thatcherism offered fiscal austerity, ‘painful medicine’ and patriotic self-sacrifice, later Thatcherism relied on easy credit, paper profits, profligate tax cuts and a consumption boom. Despite lip-service to the contrary, Alderman Roberts, with his Methodist austerities and his Grantham corner shop, ceased to be the iconic Thatcherite. He was replaced by Essex Man. Moral individualism gave way to hedonistic individualism: the vigorous virtues to the easy-going vices.