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The Conservative victory in the October 1951 general election returned Winston Churchill to Downing Street — but the Britain he governed was radically different from the one he had led through the Second World War. The Attlee governments of 1945–51 had constructed a welfare state and a mixed economy that fundamentally reshaped the relationship between state and citizen: the National Health Service, a comprehensive system of national insurance, the nationalisation of coal, rail, gas, electricity and the Bank of England, and a sustained commitment to full employment. The question that frames this opening period of the depth study is whether the incoming Conservatives accepted that Attlee settlement — creating a genuine post-war consensus — or whether apparent continuity masked deeper ideological tensions that would only surface much later.
This period also marks the high tide of Britain's post-war confidence and the moment that confidence was punctured. Between 1951 and 1957 living standards rose, rationing finally ended (1954), and the Conservatives recast themselves as managers of prosperity. Yet the Suez Crisis of 1956 exposed with brutal clarity the gap between Britain's imperial self-image and its diminished real power. Churchill and Eden, both Edwardian figures shaped by the age of empire, struggled to adapt to a world of decolonisation, American dominance and consumer democracy.
Key Question: To what extent did the Conservative governments of 1951–1957 accept and sustain the post-war settlement built by Attlee, and how far did Suez reveal the limits of British power?
Key Definition: Post-war consensus — the contested idea that, from roughly 1945 to 1979, the two main parties broadly agreed on the welfare state, a mixed economy, Keynesian demand management to sustain full employment, and the conciliation of organised labour. Whether this "consensus" was real, partial or a retrospective myth is itself a central historiographical debate.
This lesson belongs to Component 2 (Paper 2): a Depth study, Option 2S — The Making of Modern Britain, 1951–2007, covering Part One ("Building a New Britain, 1951–1979") at its outset. As a depth study, Paper 2 demands close knowledge of a relatively short span and rewards precise command of dates, ministers, legislation and statistics rather than sweeping generalisation.
| Key Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Election | 25 October 1951 — Conservatives won 321 seats to Labour's 295, despite Labour winning more total votes (48.8% to 48.0%). The electoral system's bias and the collapse of the Liberal vote delivered a Conservative majority of 17. |
| Churchill's age | 76 at the time of the election — already in declining health, having suffered a minor stroke in 1949 and a more serious one in 1953 |
| Cabinet | R.A. Butler (Chancellor), Anthony Eden (Foreign Secretary), Harold Macmillan (Housing), and Lord Woolton (party chairman, who after the 1945 defeat had rebuilt and modernised Conservative organisation and fundraising) |
| Industrial Charter (1947) | The Conservatives had already signalled acceptance of the mixed economy in their 1947 Industrial Charter, drafted largely by Butler and Macmillan — a deliberate repositioning away from inter-war laissez-faire |
It is important to be precise about the 1951 result, because it is frequently misremembered. Labour actually polled its highest-ever total vote (just under 14 million) and a higher share than the Conservatives, yet lost. The Conservative win owed much to the near-disappearance of the Liberals, who fielded only 109 candidates; in many seats former Liberal voters split towards the Conservatives. This matters for the consensus question: the Conservatives returned to power not on a mandate to dismantle the Attlee settlement but on a promise to administer it more efficiently and to "set the people free" from the irritations of austerity, controls and rationing.
Analysing the causes of the 1951 outcome rewards a multi-factor approach. Labour's defeat was less a popular rejection than a story of exhaustion and electoral arithmetic: six years of austerity, the strain of devaluation (1949) and the Korean War rearmament programme had divided the Cabinet (Bevan, Wilson and Freeman resigned over health charges in April 1951), while boundary changes and the Liberal collapse worked against Labour's geographically concentrated vote. The Conservatives, meanwhile, had genuinely modernised under Woolton's organisational reforms and Butler's policy rethinking, neutralising the welfare issue by promising to keep and improve the new social services. The lesson for the consensus debate is that the Conservatives won precisely by accepting the broad shape of the post-war settlement rather than offering to reverse it — a striking confirmation that, by 1951, the terms of political competition had shifted onto the ground Attlee had laid out.
The idea of a post-war consensus is often crystallised in the nickname "Butskellism." The Economist coined the term in 1954, fusing the names of R.A. Butler (Conservative Chancellor) and Hugh Gaitskell (his Labour predecessor and shadow), to suggest that economic policy scarcely changed when government changed hands. Both, it was claimed, pursued broadly Keynesian demand management, both prioritised full employment, and both accepted the mixed economy. The areas of supposed agreement were:
Historiographical anchor. Paul Addison (The Road to 1945, 1975) argued that the wartime coalition forged a genuine social-democratic consensus around the Beveridge Report that endured until the 1970s. Ben Pimlott challenged this in his 1988 essay "Is the 'Postwar Consensus' a Myth?", arguing that contemporaries did not feel part of any consensus and that genuine ideological differences were merely muffled by prosperity. Harriet Jones and Michael Kandiah (eds., The Myth of Consensus, 1996) staked out the productive middle ground: real agreement on certain outcomes (the NHS, full employment) coexisted with real disagreement on others (housing tenure, nationalisation, selection in education).
Harold Macmillan, as Minister of Housing and Local Government, delivered the eye-catching pledge to build 300,000 houses a year, achieving it in 1953 — a year ahead of schedule. The achievement, secured through:
made Macmillan's reputation and propelled him towards the premiership. Crucially, the shift in tenure foreshadowed a long Conservative theme — the "property-owning democracy" — that would culminate in Thatcher's Right to Buy three decades later. This is a sharp instance where continuity (the state still drove a vast housing programme) coexisted with divergence (a deliberate tilt from public to private ownership).
| Policy Area | Action |
|---|---|
| NHS | Retained, but prescription charges (introduced 1952) and charges for spectacles and dentures were levied — the very issue over which Bevan and Wilson had resigned from Attlee's Cabinet in 1951 |
| Education | Maintained the tripartite system of the 1944 Butler Education Act (grammar, secondary modern, technical), though technical schools were rarely built, leaving a de facto binary divide |
| National Insurance | Beveridge-era benefits maintained, but their real value was eroded by inflation |
| Rationing | Finally ended in July 1954, when meat came off the ration — a powerful symbol of the end of austerity |
| Iron, steel and road haulage | De-nationalised (Iron and Steel Act 1953) — the principal exception to acceptance of the mixed economy |
R.A. Butler as Chancellor pursued cautious Keynesianism, keeping unemployment below 2% throughout the 1950s and using Bank Rate and credit controls to steer demand. But the early appearance of "stop-go" — the alternation between expansion (to win votes or pursue growth) and squeeze (to defend sterling and the balance of payments) — is already visible. The 1955 budget, in which Butler cut sixpence off income tax just before the election, was followed within months by a deflationary autumn "pots-and-pans" budget that raised purchase tax. Critics seized on this as proof that growth was being sacrificed to short-term electoral and external pressures.
Churchill suffered a severe stroke on 23 June 1953, the gravity of which was concealed from the public with the active complicity of the press barons Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Camrose. He recovered partially but governed increasingly through his private office. He finally resigned on 5 April 1955, handing over — as long anticipated — to Anthony Eden, who had served as Foreign Secretary across three spells (1935–38 under Chamberlain, 1940–45, and 1951–55). Eden promptly called and won the May 1955 general election, increasing the Conservative majority to around 60. He thus entered Suez with a fresh mandate and a glittering diplomatic reputation — which makes the scale of his subsequent fall all the more dramatic.
timeline
title Premierships and Crises 1951-1957
1951 : Conservatives win election : Churchill PM
1952 : NHS prescription charges : first atomic bomb test
1953 : Churchill's stroke (concealed) : 300,000 houses achieved
1954 : Rationing ends
1955 : Eden becomes PM : Conservatives re-elected
1956 : Suez Crisis (Jul-Nov)
1957 : Eden resigns : Macmillan PM
The Suez Crisis was the defining event of Eden's premiership and is conventionally treated as a watershed in Britain's post-war retreat from global power.
| Phase | Events |
|---|---|
| Background | Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956, after the US and Britain abruptly withdrew funding for the Aswan High Dam |
| Collusion | Britain, France and Israel secretly agreed the Protocol of Sèvres (24 October 1956): Israel would attack Egypt; Britain and France would intervene as "peacekeepers" to separate the combatants and seize the Canal Zone |
| Military action | Israel invaded on 29 October; Anglo-French bombing began on 31 October; paratroopers landed at Port Said on 5 November |
| US opposition | President Eisenhower, neither consulted nor sympathetic, was furious that the operation coincided with the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising, wrecking Western moral standing. The US blocked British access to IMF support and let a run on sterling develop |
| Withdrawal | Faced with a sterling crisis, US financial pressure and a UN General Assembly resolution demanding withdrawal, Britain accepted a ceasefire on 6 November and withdrew by December |
| Resignation | Eden resigned on 9 January 1957, citing ill health (he had genuinely been gravely ill after botched bile-duct surgery), though Suez had made his position untenable |
The crisis is best analysed as a collision between perception and reality. Eden, scarred by the memory of appeasement in the 1930s, cast Nasser as a new Mussolini or Hitler whom Britain must not be seen to placate. But the economic reality was decisive: sterling's vulnerability handed Washington a veto over British policy. When the US Treasury declined to support the pound, Britain's gold and dollar reserves haemorrhaged, and Macmillan — Chancellor at the time, and the Cabinet's leading "hawk" turned leading "dove" — reportedly warned that the reserves could not stand the strain. The lesson contemporaries drew was stark: Britain could no longer undertake major military action against the wishes of the United States.
Historiographical anchor. Keith Kyle (Suez, 1991) provided the definitive narrative, demonstrating the extent of collusion and the dishonesty of Eden's public denials. W. Roger Louis placed Suez within the wider end of Britain's imperial role in the Middle East. David Carlton (Anthony Eden, 1981) stressed Eden's ill health and temperament. More recently, historians including Brian Harrison (Seeking a Role, 2009) have asked whether Suez was the clean "watershed" of legend, noting that Britain retained substantial global and "East of Suez" commitments until the late 1960s.
Examiners reward candidates who can organise the crisis around second-order concepts rather than simply retelling the story. The following grid models how the causes interacted, distinguishing long-, medium- and short-term factors:
| Timescale | Factor | Analytical weight |
|---|---|---|
| Long-term | Britain's imperial self-image and strategic dependence on the Canal as the route to the Gulf and India | Conditioned Eden's instinct that withdrawal from the Middle East was unthinkable |
| Long-term | Sterling's structural weakness and the sterling-area system | The hidden constraint that ultimately decided the outcome |
| Medium-term | The 1930s "lesson" of appeasement, deeply internalised by Eden | Framed Nasser as a dictator who must be confronted, distorting judgement |
| Short-term | The withdrawal of Aswan Dam funding (July 1956) and Nasser's nationalisation | The immediate trigger |
| Short-term | The Protocol of Sèvres and Eisenhower's hostility | Converted a diplomatic problem into a national humiliation |
The consequences are equally examinable. In the short term, Eden fell and Macmillan rose. In the medium term, Britain accelerated decolonisation and reappraised its world role, applying to join the EEC by 1961. In the longer term, the doctrine that Britain would not act militarily against American wishes hardened into a near-permanent feature of foreign policy — broken, arguably, only with the Falklands in 1982, and then only because the United States ultimately acquiesced. Yet the strongest answers also note the limits of change: the "special relationship" was quickly repaired by Macmillan and Eisenhower at Bermuda (March 1957), and Britain's nuclear and NATO commitments continued uninterrupted. Suez wounded prestige more than it altered structures.
Beneath high politics, the social fabric of Britain was changing in ways that the 1951–57 governments did not create but did preside over. The end of rationing (1954), near-full employment, and the spread of consumer durables — televisions (boosted enormously by the 1953 coronation), refrigerators, and the first stirrings of hire-purchase consumption — began to reshape working-class life. Commercial television arrived with ITV in 1955, breaking the BBC monopoly and signalling a more commercial, consumer-oriented culture. Yet the picture was uneven: housing shortages persisted despite Macmillan's programme, the slum-clearance problem was vast, and the first significant wave of Commonwealth immigration — symbolised by the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 and continuing through the 1950s — met with discrimination in housing and employment that the welfare state did nothing to address. David Kynaston's reconstruction of the period insists on holding these realities together: genuine, broadly shared improvement and stubborn inequality and prejudice. For the historian, "never had it so good" (Macmillan's 1957 phrase) is therefore best treated as a claim to be interrogated, not a description to be accepted.
Paper 2 Section A confronts you with contemporary primary sources and asks you to assess their value for a specific enquiry. The supreme AO2 skill is to interrogate a source's provenance, tone, purpose and content-in-context — and to weigh both its utility and its limitations, rather than dismissing it with a stock label.
Consider the type of source a 1951–57 question is likely to set. A representative example would be a Prime Minister's public broadcast or party-conference speech — say, a Conservative ministerial defence of the government's economic record in the mid-1950s. How should you handle such a source?
A crucial integrity rule: characterise sources by their kind and function; never invent an attributed quotation. If you cannot recall exact wording, describe the source's argument in your own words and analyse its provenance.
The consensus debate is the natural AO3 battleground for this period, and you should be able to deploy real historians in genuine disagreement — and then evaluate them.
To evaluate rather than merely list: Pimlott's scepticism is a vital corrective against treating "consensus" as a thing that contemporaries consciously inhabited, yet his critique can understate the structural continuities — no Conservative government from 1951 seriously attempted to abolish the NHS or restore mass unemployment. The most convincing position, associated with Jones and Kandiah, is that "consensus" is a useful but bounded analytical tool: it captures a real convergence on certain ends while leaving room for genuine ideological conflict over means and emphasis.
This opening period sets up every theme that runs through the whole 1951–2007 course, and the strongest students will think forwards as well as within the period.
Section A (Paper 2), AO2. With reference to these sources and your understanding of the historical context, assess the value of the two sources to a historian studying the impact of the Suez Crisis on Britain's standing in the world. (30 marks — wholly AO2.)
(In the real exam two or three sources are printed. Here they are characterised by provenance, not reproduced or invented.)
Mid-band response. "Source A is useful because it tells us the government thought Suez was justified, and Source B is useful because it shows that some people disagreed. Source A is biased because it comes from the government, so it would defend its own policy. Source B is a newspaper, so it might be biased too. Both sources are from 1956, so they are reliable because they are from the time. Overall the sources show that Suez divided opinion in Britain." (This asserts "bias" without using content or context; it equates contemporaneity with reliability; it does not address the actual enquiry about Britain's standing in the world.)
Stronger response. "Source A's value lies precisely in its provenance: as an official defence of intervention, it reveals how the government wished to frame Suez — as a necessary policing action — at the very moment its policy was collapsing under American and financial pressure. Its limitation is that, being public and persuasive, it conceals the secret collusion at Sèvres, which the historian must supply from context. Source B, as a critical editorial, captures the domestic political backlash and the sense of national humiliation, though as commentary it reflects its title's stance and tells us more about opinion than about events. Together the sources illuminate the divided domestic reaction." (Now provenance is linked to purpose and content; context is deployed; but the judgement on Britain's standing in the world could be sharper.)
Top-band response. "For an enquiry into Britain's world standing, the two sources are valuable in complementary and asymmetric ways. Source A is most revealing not for what it asserts but for what its defensiveness betrays: a government insisting on Britain's right to act unilaterally at the precise moment that the run on sterling and Eisenhower's refusal of support were demonstrating that Britain could no longer do so without American consent. Read against the context of the reserves crisis, the source's confident public tone is itself evidence of the gap between imperial self-image and real power — the very theme of the enquiry. Source B's value is different: as a critical editorial it registers the domestic recognition of humiliation, but as press commentary shaped by editorial line it is a guide to opinion rather than to the diplomatic balance of forces, and must be weighed accordingly. Neither source, being British and contemporaneous, can directly attest to how Britain was viewed abroad; for that the historian needs American and UN material. The sources are therefore most valuable as evidence of British perceptions of decline, and the discriminating historian uses them for that, while drawing the verdict on actual standing from the financial and diplomatic record." (Sustained, source-specific value judgement; provenance evaluated in context; explicit awareness of what the sources cannot show.)
Examiner-style commentary: The decisive AO2 discriminator is value-in-context, not "reliability." The top-band answer never says a source is "biased and therefore useless"; instead it shows that the official source's partiality is exactly what makes it valuable for the enquiry, and it states clearly what each source cannot reveal. Anchoring the speech against the sterling crisis is the move that earns the highest level.
Although Section A is the source paper, the same period also generates Section B depth essays (25 marks, AO1-led) — for example: "To what extent was Suez a turning point in Britain's post-war decline?" A top-band essay here would not narrate the crisis but would argue: it would distinguish prestige (transformed) from structures (largely intact), weigh Suez against rival turning points (the EEC veto of 1963, the East-of-Suez withdrawal of 1968), and reach a supported judgement that Suez was a psychological watershed whose practical consequences were slower and more limited than the shock implied. The transferable lesson is that depth-study essays reward a clear line of argument, sustained comparison of factors, and a conclusion that genuinely weighs rather than merely summarises.
Between 1951 and 1957 the Conservatives governed a Britain transformed by the Attlee settlement, which they broadly accepted while tilting policy towards private housing, de-nationalising steel and easing controls. Living standards rose and rationing ended, lending substance to the idea of "Butskellite" consensus — though that consensus, as Pimlott warns, was never as conscious or complete as later nostalgia implied. Suez in 1956 was the period's hinge: it exposed Britain's financial dependence on the United States and shattered Eden, even as historians continue to debate how decisive a "watershed" it really was. The themes set here — consensus, stop-go economics, sterling weakness, and Britain's contested world role — frame the entire depth study.
This content is aligned with the AQA A-Level History (7042) specification.