The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain. Anthony Seldon

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’.⁵ Thereafter, 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.⁶ It 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.⁷ Endemic 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.⁸ Classic 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.⁹ On the right there is talk of a new ‘civic conservatism’; on the left, of a ‘stakeholder economy’.¹⁰ The 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,

      Communities are scattered to the winds by the gale of creative destruction. Endless ‘downsizing’ and ‘flattening’ of enterprises fosters ubiquitous insecurity and makes loyalty to the company a cruel joke. The celebration of consumer choice, as the only undisputed value in market societies, devalues commitment and stability in personal relationships and encourages the view of marriage and the family as vehicles of self-realisation. The dynamism of market processes dissolves social hierarchies and overturns established expectations. Status is ephemeral, trust frail and contract sovereign. The dissolution of communities promoted by market-driven labour mobility weakens, where it does not entirely destroy, the informal social monitoring of behaviour which is the most effective preventive measure against crime.¹¹

      These intimations are still tentative and inchoate (not to say confused). Only time will tell if they can provide the basis for the kind of intellectual and moral leadership I have been discussing. Through the fog, however, it is possible to discern the outlines of a third phase and a new political divide. This new divide cuts across the divides of the last fifty or even one hundred years, and the political vocabulary of the twentieth century does not capture it. On one side are those, of left and right alike, who believe that institutions are the guarantors of freedom, and collectivities the schools of individuality. On the other are those, also of left and right, who see institutional pressures as harbingers of tyranny, and who put their faith in the spontaneous mutual adjustment of unconstrained individuals. As Robert Skidelsky has suggested, it may perhaps be a divide between political and economic liberals, or on a deeper level between pessimists and optimists.¹² Be that as it may, it is clear that, just as the final act of a play can give unforeseen meaning to the earlier acts, the tentative emergence of this new divide puts those that have preceded it in a new and unexpected light.

      So far, perhaps, so obvious. The final chapter of this story may be unfamiliar, but the first two are well-known. The inner meaning, however, is not obvious at all. Three sets of arguments underpinned post-war Keynesian social democracy, each with a long pedigree. The first was economic. As Keynes put it in his famous essay, ‘The End of Laissez-Faire’,

      The world is not so governed from above that private and social interests always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of