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The thirteen years of Conservative government between 1951 and 1964 are conventionally described as the era of "consensus politics" — a period in which both major parties broadly accepted the framework bequeathed by the Attlee settlement: the mixed economy, the welfare state, full employment, Keynesian demand management, and the Atlantic alliance with its nuclear deterrent. It was also an age of rising affluence, when, in Harold Macmillan's famous phrase, most Britons had "never had it so good," and when a consumer society of televisions, cars, and home ownership spread across the social scale. Yet it was simultaneously an age of anxiety — about Britain's slipping economic performance relative to its competitors, about the loss of empire dramatised by Suez, about immigration and national identity, and about the challenge of a new youth culture to the deference of the old order.
This lesson examines the Conservative governments of Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, and Douglas-Home, the social and cultural transformation of the 1950s and early 1960s, and the great interpretive question that gives the period its name: was "consensus" a genuine and accurate description of post-war politics, or a misleading myth that obscures the real and persistent differences between the parties? As the concluding lesson of the breadth study, it also invites a synoptic backward glance over the whole century of transformation since 1851. The analysis is framed by the second-order concepts of change and continuity, significance, and consequence.
Key Question: Was the period 1951–1964 genuinely an age of "consensus" — a real cross-party agreement on the welfare state, the mixed economy, full employment, and Britain's world role — or does "consensus" exaggerate a superficial similarity of policy outcomes while masking enduring differences of ideology and motivation between the parties?
This lesson belongs to Paper 1 (Breadth study), Option 1G: Challenge and Transformation: Britain, c1851–1964, and forms the conclusion of Part Two and of the whole option, bringing the century-long story of transformation to its close in the affluent, anxious, post-imperial Britain of the early 1960s.
The Conservatives won the 1951 general election with 321 seats to Labour's 295 — even though Labour actually polled more total votes (around 13.9 million to the Conservatives' 13.7 million), a quirk of the electoral system. Churchill returned to Downing Street at the age of 76. The central question for the new government was whether it would dismantle the Attlee settlement — and the answer, decisively, was that it would not.
| Area | Conservative Approach |
|---|---|
| NHS | Maintained and expanded; real health spending rose; the principle of a free, universal service was accepted |
| National Insurance and welfare | Maintained; benefits were periodically uprated; the welfare state was treated as a permanent fixture |
| Full employment | Maintained as a central policy objective; unemployment rarely exceeded 2 per cent through the 1950s — a deliberate Keynesian commitment |
| Nationalisation | Only iron and steel and road haulage were returned to private ownership (1953); coal, rail, the utilities, and the Bank of England remained nationalised |
| Housing | Harold Macmillan, as Housing Minister, made his reputation by hitting the popular target of 300,000 houses a year by 1953 — out-building Labour and proving Conservative commitment to social provision |
Key Definition: "Butskellism" was a term coined by The Economist in 1954 — fusing the names of the Conservative Chancellor R.A. Butler and his Labour predecessor Hugh Gaitskell — to describe the apparent convergence of the two parties' economic policy around Keynesian demand management, the mixed economy, and the welfare state. It became the shorthand for the whole "consensus" thesis: the claim that, whatever their rhetoric, the parties in office pursued broadly the same policies.
Exam Tip: The Conservatives' acceptance of the Attlee settlement is the single strongest piece of evidence for the consensus thesis. The decisive analytical point is why they accepted it: partly conviction (the "One Nation" tradition, the memory of the 1930s), but also hard electoral calculation — the welfare state and full employment were popular, and to attack them was to invite defeat. This distinction between policy convergence and ideological agreement is the key to the whole AO3 debate.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 was Britain's most humiliating post-war foreign-policy disaster and a defining moment in the recognition of imperial decline.
| Event | Detail |
|---|---|
| Background | The Egyptian President Nasser nationalised the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956, threatening a vital imperial artery |
| Collusion | Britain, France, and Israel secretly agreed (the Protocol of Sèvres, 24 October 1956) that Israel would invade Egypt, giving Britain and France a pretext to intervene as "peacekeepers" and seize the Canal |
| American opposition | President Eisenhower, furious at not being consulted and fearful of the Cold War consequences, opposed the operation and applied financial pressure — refusing to support a run on the pound unless Britain withdrew |
| The humiliating climax | Financially and diplomatically isolated, Britain accepted a ceasefire on 6 November 1956 and withdrew — a national humiliation |
| Eden's fall | Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Churchill in 1955, resigned in January 1957, ostensibly on grounds of ill-health |
| Interpretation | Detail |
|---|---|
| The limits of independent power | Suez proved that Britain could no longer act as an independent great power against American wishes — a watershed in national self-perception |
| The "special relationship" | The crisis exposed the fundamental inequality of the Anglo-American relationship and led Macmillan to rebuild it as the cornerstone of British policy |
| Acceleration of decolonisation | Suez accelerated the retreat from empire; Macmillan's "Wind of Change" speech (Cape Town, February 1960) publicly acknowledged the inevitability of African independence, and the early 1960s saw a rush of colonies to nationhood |
Exam Tip: Suez is the period's clearest illustration of Britain's relative decline as a world power — the theme that runs (in economic form) through the whole post-war story. Note that it was not a consensus issue: it bitterly divided the parties and the country, with Labour and much liberal opinion opposing the intervention. This makes Suez useful evidence against a too-comprehensive consensus thesis — the consensus, such as it was, covered domestic policy far more than foreign policy.
As the concluding lesson of the breadth study, this period invites a synoptic backward glance over the whole century since 1851 — the kind of long-run perspective that the strongest candidates bring to Section B essays spanning the option. The Britain of 1964 was almost unrecognisable from the mid-Victorian society of the Great Exhibition, and the direction and drivers of that transformation are the central concern of the course.
| Theme | Britain c1851 | Britain c1964 |
|---|---|---|
| The franchise | A narrow, propertied, all-male electorate (about a fifth of adult men) | Universal adult suffrage for men and women over 21 since 1928 |
| Party system | Loose parliamentary factions led by personalities | Disciplined mass parties; Labour, born only in 1900, now a party of government |
| The state and welfare | Laissez-faire, self-help, and the deterrent Poor Law | A comprehensive welfare state, the NHS, and full employment as a policy objective |
| The economy | The "workshop of the world" with no industrial rival | A relatively declining economy, out-grown by its competitors, anxious about "stop-go" |
| Empire and world role | The world's dominant imperial and naval power | A power in imperial retreat, dependent on the USA, its limits exposed at Suez |
| Society | Rigid class hierarchy, deference, and widespread poverty | An affluent consumer society, eroding deference, and the beginnings of multi-ethnic Britain |
Two broad analytical observations emerge from this comparison. First, the drivers of transformation were recurrent: war (the two world wars repeatedly accelerated change in the state, the franchise, and class relations), economic change (industrialisation, then relative decline), organised pressure (the franchise campaigns, the labour movement), and the slow, contested redefinition of the proper role of the state. Second, the change was uneven and contested, not a smooth march of progress: it advanced through crisis and conflict, some of it (the 1962 immigration restriction, the persistence of relative poverty and class inequality) cutting against any simple narrative of liberal improvement. The "transformation" of Britain was real and profound, but it was the product of struggle, contingency, and crisis rather than of inevitable progress — a fitting final judgement for the whole option.
Exam Tip: Examiners reward candidates who can step back and assess long-run change across the whole period. When a Section B question invites a sweeping judgement (on democracy, the state, class, or Britain's world role across 1851–1964), use the drivers of change — war, economic transformation, organised pressure, and the redefinition of the state — as your analytical framework, and be ready to argue that change was uneven and contested, not a straight line of progress.
Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister in January 1957 and dominated politics until his resignation in October 1963, presiding over the high noon of post-war affluence — and over the first clear signs of the economic anxieties that would dog Britain for decades.
Macmillan's celebrated remark (Bedford, 20 July 1957) — that "most of our people have never had it so good" — captured a genuine transformation in living standards.
| Indicator | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Real wages | Average real wages rose by roughly 40 per cent between 1951 and 1964 |
| Consumer durables | Television ownership leapt from a small minority of households around 1950 to the great majority by 1964; car ownership roughly tripled; washing machines, refrigerators, and telephones spread widely |
| Home ownership | Owner-occupation rose substantially (from under a third to over two-fifths of households), reshaping social aspirations |
| Full employment | Unemployment stayed below 2 per cent for most of the period — a transformation from the 1930s |
| Hire purchase | The rapid expansion of consumer credit ("never-never") put goods within reach of working-class families for the first time |
Beneath the consumer boom, however, structural economic weaknesses were accumulating that would define Britain's later "declinism."
| Problem | Detail |
|---|---|
| Relative decline | British economic growth, though historically respectable, lagged behind that of West Germany, France, Italy, and Japan — Britain's share of world trade and manufacturing fell |
| "Stop-go" | Governments lurched between stimulating the economy (provoking inflation and balance-of-payments deficits) and restraining it (raising unemployment) — damaging, short-term instability |
| Balance of payments | Recurrent payments crises reflected weak competitiveness and the cost of overseas commitments |
| Under-investment | British industry invested less than its rivals in new plant, research, and training, and was dogged by poor industrial relations and restrictive practices |
| The EEC | Recognising relative decline, Macmillan applied to join the European Economic Community in 1961 — only for de Gaulle to veto British entry in January 1963, a further humiliation |
Key Definition: "Stop-go" was the characteristic economic cycle of the period: when growth sucked in imports and threatened the pound (the "go" phase), the government would apply the brakes — raising interest rates and taxes (the "stop" phase) — until unemployment rose, whereupon it would reflate again. This short-termist alternation, driven by the priority of defending sterling's exchange rate, was widely blamed for discouraging the long-term investment Britain needed and became a stock theme of post-war "declinism."
The affluent society was also a society in rapid cultural transformation, as new prosperity, a growing youth population, and a loosening of old deferences reshaped attitudes and behaviour.
| Interpretation | Detail |
|---|---|
| Embourgeoisement thesis | The widely-canvassed claim that rising prosperity was turning the working class middle-class in values and behaviour — and thus eroding Labour's electoral base (Labour lost three elections in a row, 1951–59) |
| Goldthorpe and Lockwood | Their Affluent Worker studies (Luton, published 1968–69) challenged embourgeoisement: affluent workers retained distinct working-class identities and an "instrumental" (money-focused) rather than middle-class "normative" orientation to work — they had not become middle-class, only better-off |
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