You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
This lesson examines the concepts of consensus politics and adversary politics in the UK, exploring how the relationship between the major parties has shifted over time. These two concepts provide one of the most useful frameworks in the whole Political Participation section, because they capture not the policies of any single party but the shape of the competition between the parties — whether the major parties broadly agree (so that elections change the management but not the direction of the country) or fundamentally disagree (so that elections offer a genuine choice between rival visions). A confident answer treats the history of post-war British politics as a movement between these two modes, and uses that movement to evaluate which better serves democracy.
A central organising idea for the lesson is that the UK has experienced two great "settlements" and a succession of disruptions. The first was the post-war (social-democratic) consensus of roughly 1945 to 1979, when Labour and the Conservatives broadly agreed on the welfare state, the mixed economy and full employment. The second was the Thatcherite (neoliberal) settlement that broke the first and which, in modified form, New Labour came to accept after 1997 — leading some to speak of a new, market-based consensus. Since 2010, and especially over Brexit, politics has become markedly more adversarial again. Tracing this sequence — consensus, breach, new consensus, renewed adversary politics — is the analytical spine of any strong answer.
Consensus politics exists when the major parties broadly agree on the fundamental questions of policy, so that a change of government produces continuity rather than a dramatic reversal of direction. It does not mean that the parties agree on everything, or that they stop competing; vigorous partisan argument continues over detail, competence and emphasis. What defines consensus is agreement on the underlying framework — the basic settlement about the role of the state, the economy and society — within which day-to-day disagreement takes place. Consensus is therefore best understood as a shared set of assumptions that both parties accept, rather than identical manifestos.
The period from 1945 to 1979 is often described as an era of consensus between Labour and the Conservatives:
| Policy Area | Consensus Position |
|---|---|
| Economy | Keynesian demand management; government intervention to maintain full employment |
| Welfare state | Broad acceptance of the NHS, state pensions, social security, and council housing |
| Nationalisation | Acceptance of key industries in public ownership (although the Conservatives were less enthusiastic) |
| Trade unions | Recognition of trade unions as legitimate partners in economic management |
| Foreign policy | Cold War alliances (NATO, nuclear deterrent); decolonisation |
| Education | Expansion of comprehensive education and university access |
This consensus is sometimes called "Butskellism" — a term coined by The Economist from the names of the Conservative Chancellor R.A. Butler and the Labour Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell, whose economic policies were seen as so similar as to be virtually interchangeable. The label neatly captures the essence of the post-war consensus: that whichever party held the Treasury, the broad direction of economic management — Keynesian demand management to sustain full employment, within a mixed economy and an expanding welfare state — would remain the same.
It is important to be precise about what the post-war consensus was and was not. It rested on a shared acceptance of the Keynesian–Beveridgean settlement: John Maynard Keynes' argument that government should manage demand to maintain employment, and William Beveridge's blueprint for a comprehensive welfare state attacking the "five giants" of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The 1945 Attlee government built the institutional core of this settlement — the NHS, National Insurance, nationalised utilities — and crucially the Conservative governments of the 1950s did not dismantle it, choosing instead to manage it. That Conservative acceptance is the decisive fact: a consensus exists only when both main parties operate within the same framework, and the Conservatives' decision to retain the welfare state and the mixed economy is what made the period consensual rather than merely a Labour ascendancy.
It is also worth noting that the consensus was always partial and contested, which is why some historians question how real it was. The parties differed in emphasis — the Conservatives were less enthusiastic about nationalisation and more sympathetic to private enterprise, Labour more committed to public ownership and equality — and there were sharp arguments over particular policies. The strongest answers present the post-war consensus as a genuine agreement on the fundamentals (the welfare state, full employment, the mixed economy) that coexisted with real partisan disagreement over detail and degree.
The consensus can be analysed as resting on several mutually reinforcing pillars, each of which both parties accepted:
Presenting the consensus through these pillars is analytically powerful because it shows exactly what was agreed and therefore exactly what Thatcher later broke. Each pillar — the mixed economy, full employment, the welfare state, the union partnership — was directly challenged by the Thatcherite settlement, which is why 1979 marks such a clean dividing line. A candidate who can name the pillars of the consensus and then show Thatcherism dismantling them one by one demonstrates precisely the structured, comparative analysis the higher mark bands reward.
Adversary politics exists when the major parties fundamentally disagree on the basic questions of policy, so that a change of government produces a significant change of direction. The voter is offered a genuine choice between competing visions of society rather than a choice between rival managers of a shared settlement. The term is associated with the political scientist S.E. Finer, who in the 1970s criticised the British system for producing exactly this: sharp swings of policy as governments alternated, which he argued created damaging instability and discontinuity (for example in the repeated nationalisation and denationalisation of industries). Adversary politics is thus not merely a description but, in its origins, a critique — the claim that excessive partisan polarisation, exaggerated by an electoral system that hands full power to one side, is bad for effective government.
Finer's argument connects this topic directly to the debate on the electoral system, and the link is worth drawing out. Under First Past the Post, a single party normally wins a Commons majority on a minority of the popular vote and can then govern without compromise, reversing its predecessor's policies wholesale. Finer contended that this manufactured, winner-takes-all power exaggerated the natural differences between the parties into destabilising lurches of policy, and he advocated electoral reform partly as a way of forcing the moderation and continuity that coalition government tends to produce. The implication — important for evaluation — is that adversary politics in Britain is partly an artefact of the electoral system rather than a simple reflection of how divided the country is. A proportional system, by making coalition normal, would tend to soften adversarialism and push politics towards negotiated consensus, exactly as it has at the devolved level.
The instability Finer had in mind was vividly illustrated by the 1970s themselves. The Heath Conservative government (1970–74) and the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments that followed clashed over industrial relations, prices and incomes policy, and the role of the unions, against a backdrop of economic crisis, inflation and industrial unrest that culminated in the "Winter of Discontent" of 1978–79. It was the visible failure of the consensus to cope with these crises, as much as ideological conviction, that prepared the ground for the Thatcherite breach — a reminder that shifts between consensus and adversary politics are driven by events and economic conditions, not by ideas alone.
Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979 broke the post-war consensus:
| Policy Area | Thatcher's Approach |
|---|---|
| Economy | Monetarism; supply-side economics; reduced state intervention |
| Nationalisation | Privatisation of state-owned industries |
| Trade unions | Confrontation and legislation to reduce union power |
| Welfare | Reduction of welfare dependency; emphasis on personal responsibility |
| Taxation | Lower income tax (from 83% top rate to 40%); shift towards indirect taxation (VAT) |
| Foreign policy | Strong Cold War stance; Falklands War; euroscepticism |
Thatcher's government represented a clear adversary approach — deliberately rejecting the post-war settlement that previous Labour and Conservative governments had upheld. The point that Thatcherism broke not just with Labour but with the Conservative tradition of consensus management (the "wet" One Nation tradition examined elsewhere in this course) is crucial: it explains why the 1979 election is treated as a genuine watershed rather than an ordinary change of government.
The decisive significance of Thatcherism for this topic is that it ended the post-war consensus and replaced one settlement with another. Where the post-war consensus had assumed an active, demand-managing state, a mixed economy and a partnership with the unions, Thatcherism asserted the priority of the market, the rolling back of the state, the defeat of inflation through control of the money supply (monetarism), the privatisation of nationalised industries and the curbing of trade-union power. This was adversary politics in its sharpest form — and the divisions were dramatised by the bitter conflicts of the period, above all the 1984–85 miners' strike. Crucially, however, Thatcherism did not merely produce a temporary swing; it shifted the centre of gravity of British politics so decisively that the next consensus would be built on her terms, not on the terms of 1945.
A subtle but important analytical point is that adversary politics can create a new consensus. Thatcher won the argument so comprehensively that her opponents eventually accepted much of her settlement, just as the Conservatives had earlier accepted the Attlee settlement. Each consensus, on this reading, is the legacy of a previous period of successful adversary politics — a pattern that gives the post-war story its underlying rhythm.
Tony Blair's New Labour was sometimes accused of creating, or accepting, a new consensus — this time a market-based one built on Thatcherite foundations:
Some commentators identified a further consensus between New Labour and David Cameron's modernised Conservatives in the years around 2010:
The existence of this apparent convergence is precisely what fuelled the complaint — common in the early 2010s — that "they're all the same", and it gave new energy to anti-establishment and populist alternatives. It is a powerful illustration of the central evaluative trade-off: a centrist consensus may be moderate and stable, but it narrows choice and can breed the disaffection on which insurgent movements feed.
A higher-level analysis asks not only whether politics is consensual or adversarial at a given moment, but why it shifts between the two. Several factors are usually identified, and weaving them into an answer lifts it well above mere narration.
| Factor | How it pushes towards consensus or adversary politics |
|---|---|
| Economic conditions | Crises (the stagflation of the 1970s, the 2008 financial crash) discredit the prevailing settlement and open the way to a more adversarial search for alternatives; periods of stable growth tend to entrench consensus |
| The electoral system | FPTP hands full power to one party on a minority of the vote, which Finer argued exaggerates adversarialism by allowing each new government to reverse its predecessor |
| Party leadership and ideology | The capture of a party by its ideological wing (Thatcher's New Right, Corbyn's socialist left) drives adversary politics; the dominance of pragmatic, centrist leaders (Blair, Cameron) tends to produce convergence |
| The position of the median voter | Parties chasing the centre ground produce consensus; when the electorate itself polarises (as over Brexit), the parties are pulled apart |
| New political cleavages | The emergence of new dividing lines — the environment, immigration, the EU — can disrupt an existing consensus and generate fresh conflict that cuts across old alignments |
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.