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The thirteen years of Conservative government between 1951 and 1964 are conventionally described as the age of "consensus politics" and of "affluence" — the high noon of the settlement Attlee had built, and the moment when, in Harold Macmillan's famous phrase, most Britons had "never had it so good." Both major parties broadly accepted the framework bequeathed by the Attlee government: the mixed economy, the welfare state, full employment, Keynesian demand management, and the Atlantic alliance with its nuclear deterrent. And the period saw a genuine transformation in the material lives of ordinary people, as a consumer society of televisions, cars, washing machines 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, and about the first stirrings of a cultural revolt against the deference of the old order.
For a breadth study of how Britain was transformed, this period is crucial in two ways. First, it tests the durability of the political transformation of 1945: the Conservatives' acceptance of the Attlee settlement is the central evidence for the "post-war consensus," and their reasons for accepting it — conviction, or hard electoral calculation — are a rich analytical problem. Second, it marks a decisive transformation in the society and economy threads: the arrival of mass affluence, which reshaped class, aspiration and daily life, even as it masked a relative economic decline that would trouble Britain for decades. This lesson examines the Conservative governments of Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Douglas-Home, the affluent society and its limits, and the great interpretive question that gives the period its name — whether "consensus" was a genuine description of post-war politics or a misleading myth. It asks throughout how far Britain was genuinely transformed by affluence, and how real the consensus truly was.
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This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 1, Option 1H (Route H): "Britain transformed, 1918–97" — a thematic breadth study of political, economic, social and cultural change, assessed by extended analytical essays and by the evaluation of historians' interpretations. Within our teaching sequence it develops the post-war consensus strand (its high point and its first strains) and the society and economy threads (the transformation wrought by affluence and the countervailing reality of relative decline).
Because Paper 1 is a breadth paper, examiners look for command of change over time and for judgements about the scale and permanence of change. Keep asking how far affluence transformed British society, and how far the "consensus" was a real agreement rather than a superficial similarity. (For the precise assessment weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
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 compounded by the collapse of the Liberal vote. 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. This acceptance is the single strongest piece of evidence for the post-war consensus.
| Area | Conservative Approach |
|---|---|
| NHS | Maintained and expanded; real health spending rose; the principle of a free, universal service was accepted (though prescription and dental charges continued) |
| National Insurance and welfare | Maintained; benefits were periodically uprated; the welfare state was treated as a permanent fixture |
| Full employment | Maintained as a central 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 |
The convergence of the two parties' economic policy was crystallised in the term "Butskellism," coined by The Economist in 1954 by fusing the names of the Conservative Chancellor R.A. Butler and his Labour predecessor Hugh Gaitskell, to describe their apparent agreement on Keynesian demand management, the mixed economy and the welfare state. The decisive analytical point is why the Conservatives accepted the settlement: partly conviction (the "One Nation" tradition and 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 consensus debate. The Conservatives had signalled the shift as early as their 1947 Industrial Charter, which accepted the mixed economy; and Walter Monckton's conciliatory approach at the Ministry of Labour — buying industrial peace through concession — extended the consensus to industrial relations. The end of rationing in 1954 (when meat came off the ration) symbolised the Conservative promise to "set the people free" while keeping the social settlement intact.
The most visible transformation of the period was the arrival of mass affluence. Harold Macmillan, who became Prime Minister in January 1957 and dominated politics until October 1963, presided over its high noon; his celebrated remark at Bedford on 20 July 1957 — that "most of our people have never had it so good" — captured a genuine transformation in living standards, even though in context it was partly a warning about inflation.
| 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 |
This was a real transformation of daily life and of the society and class thread of the course. Rising prosperity, the spread of home ownership and the arrival of the consumer durable reshaped working-class aspirations and prompted an anxious debate about whether affluence was dissolving class itself. The "embourgeoisement" thesis — the claim that rising prosperity was turning the working class middle-class in values, and thereby eroding Labour's electoral base (Labour lost three elections in a row, 1951–59) — was widely canvassed. Yet it was decisively challenged by the sociologists John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood, whose Affluent Worker studies (of Luton, published 1968–69) found that affluent workers retained distinct working-class identities and an "instrumental" (money-focused) rather than middle-class orientation to work: they had not become middle-class, only better-off. Affluence, in other words, transformed the material condition of the working class without dissolving its identity — a nuance that matters greatly for any judgement about how far Britain was truly transformed.
Beneath the consumer boom, however, structural economic weaknesses were accumulating that would define Britain's later "declinism" and qualify any simple story of transformation. This is the countervailing reality that the strongest answers hold alongside the evidence of affluence.
| Problem | Detail |
|---|---|
| Relative decline | British growth, though historically respectable, lagged behind 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 payments deficits) and restraining it (raising unemployment) — damaging short-term instability, driven by the priority of defending sterling |
| 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 veto | 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 |
"Stop-go" was the characteristic economic cycle of the period: when growth sucked in imports and threatened the pound, the government would apply the brakes — raising interest rates and taxes — 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 it became a stock theme of post-war "declinism." The gap between the glittering surface of affluence and the accumulating weaknesses beneath is one of the central tensions of the period, and it means the "transformation" of these years was genuine but incomplete — a transformation of consumption more than of production.
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 — and it is analytically vital because it shows the limits of the consensus, which barely extended to foreign policy at all.
| Event | Detail |
|---|---|
| Background | The Egyptian President Nasser nationalised the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956, after Britain and the US withdrew funding for the Aswan High Dam |
| 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, 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 |
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 dictator whom Britain must not be seen to placate; but the economic reality was decisive, for sterling's vulnerability handed Washington a veto over British policy. When the US Treasury declined to support the pound, Britain's reserves haemorrhaged, and the lesson contemporaries drew was stark: Britain could no longer undertake major military action against the wishes of the United States. Suez accelerated the retreat from empire — Macmillan's "Wind of Change" speech at Cape Town in February 1960 publicly acknowledged the inevitability of African independence, and a rush of colonies reached nationhood in the early 1960s. For the consensus debate, the crucial point is that Suez 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.
The confident Conservatism of Macmillan's 1959 landslide — a majority of around 100, won on the slogan "Life's better with the Conservatives" — unravelled with remarkable speed after 1961, and the government's response illuminates a broader truth about the government thread: that both parties, faced with relative decline, reached instinctively for planning and corporatism rather than the free market. Confronted with another sterling crisis and rising inflation, Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd imposed an unpopular public-sector wages freeze — the "pay pause" of 1961 — that alienated the unions without solving the underlying problem. In 1962 the government created the National Economic Development Council ("Neddy"), a tripartite body of government, employers and unions charged with planning for growth — a turn towards French-style "indicative planning" that amounted to an admission that the free play of the market was not delivering the modernisation Britain needed. This corporatist reflex — the search for a workable bargain with the unions and a planned route to growth — is a continuity that runs forward through Wilson's National Plan to Heath's statutory policies, before it finally snapped in the Winter of Discontent. The "Night of the Long Knives" of July 1962, in which Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet (including Lloyd) in a single day, was intended to project decisive renewal but instead looked like panic, wounding his carefully cultivated image of unflappable calm.
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