You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The thirteen years of Conservative government from October 1951 to October 1964 are remembered as the age of affluence — the years of "never had it so good," when rationing ended, living standards climbed, and a new consumer society of televisions, cars, and washing machines took shape. They were also years of striking political continuity: the Conservatives, returning to power under Churchill, did not dismantle the Attlee settlement but broadly accepted it, governing a mixed economy and a welfare state they had once opposed. This apparent bipartisan agreement on the fundamentals of policy is what historians call the post-war consensus, and whether it was real, partial, or a retrospective myth is one of the central debates of the whole period.
Yet the era was not one of untroubled success. The Suez Crisis of 1956 exposed with brutal clarity the gap between Britain's imperial self-image and its diminished real power; the economy, though growing, was dogged by the "stop-go" cycle and the recurring weakness of sterling; and by the early 1960s the confident Conservatism of the affluent years was unravelling amid economic difficulty, the humiliation of de Gaulle's veto, and the scandals that helped sweep Harold Macmillan from office. This lesson traces the whole arc — from the Conservatives' acceptance of the settlement, through the high tide of affluence and the shock of Suez, to the "wind of change" and the fall of the government in 1964 — and asks what the period reveals about consensus, affluence, and Britain's place in the world.
The organising question is this: how far did the Conservative governments of 1951–1964 represent a genuine consensus politics of shared prosperity, and how far did the affluence and stability of the period mask deeper problems — economic weakness, imperial decline, and social change — that were already eroding the settlement by 1964? Keep asking whether the continuities were as solid, and the prosperity as universal, as the era's own self-image suggested.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y113 (British period study and enquiry): Britain 1930–1997, and it opens the post-war politics, economy, and world role thread that our teaching sequence carries forward from the Attlee settlement. Within our own arrangement we treat the whole 1951–64 Conservative era as a single study — consensus, affluence, Suez, decolonisation, and the 1964 fall together — because the pedagogical logic of "the rise and unravelling of the affluent consensus" clarifies the material better than a premiership-by-premiership survey would. This structure is our own, not a transcription of the specification's ordering. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Because Y113 is a period study, examiners look for command of change over time and for judgements that reach across the era rather than settling into narrow description of a single crisis. Keep asking how each development altered the distribution of prosperity and Britain's standing in the world, and how far the consensus was genuine.
The Conservative victory of 25 October 1951 returned Churchill to Downing Street, but it is frequently misremembered, and precision here marks out strong candidates. Labour actually polled its highest-ever total vote — just under 14 million, a higher share than the Conservatives — yet lost, because the near-collapse of the Liberals (who fielded only 109 candidates) delivered former Liberal voters to the Conservatives and the electoral system did the rest. The Conservatives returned 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.
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The result | Conservatives 321 seats to Labour's 295, despite Labour winning more votes (48.8% to 48.0%); a Conservative majority of 17 |
| Churchill's age | 76 at the election, in declining health, and increasingly a figurehead after a serious stroke in 1953 (concealed from the public) |
| The Cabinet | R.A. Butler (Chancellor), Anthony Eden (Foreign Secretary), Harold Macmillan (Housing), and Lord Woolton, who had modernised Conservative organisation after 1945 |
| The Industrial Charter (1947) | The Conservatives had already signalled acceptance of the mixed economy in this Butler–Macmillan document, deliberately repositioning away from inter-war laissez-faire |
The Conservatives' acceptance of the settlement is the foundation of the 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. The idea is often crystallised in the nickname "Butskellism," coined by The Economist in 1954 to fuse R.A. Butler and his Labour predecessor Hugh Gaitskell and to suggest that economic policy scarcely changed when government changed hands.
| Area of supposed agreement | Detail |
|---|---|
| The welfare state | The NHS and national insurance retained; full employment treated as a permanent policy goal |
| A mixed economy | Only iron, steel, and road haulage denationalised; coal, rail, gas, and electricity left in public ownership |
| Keynesian demand management | Fiscal and monetary policy used to smooth the cycle and hold unemployment down (below 2 per cent throughout the 1950s) |
| Conciliation of the unions | Walter Monckton at the Ministry of Labour earned the nickname the "oil-can" for buying industrial peace through concession |
| Defence and the deterrent | NATO membership and a bipartisan nuclear policy; Britain tested its first atomic bomb in 1952 |
The consensus, however, must not be overstated, and the historiography is unusually rich ground for evaluation. Paul Addison argued that the war forged a genuine social-democratic consensus that endured for a generation; Ben Pimlott replied that contemporaries did not feel part of any consensus and that real ideological differences were merely muffled by prosperity. The productive middle ground, associated with Harriet Jones and Michael Kandiah, is that real agreement on certain outcomes (the NHS, full employment) coexisted with real disagreement on others (housing tenure, nationalisation, selection in education). The Conservatives, after all, denationalised steel, tilted housing towards private ownership, and levied NHS charges — differences of emphasis within a broadly shared framework.
Under Churchill and then Eden and Macmillan, the Conservatives recast themselves as the managers of prosperity, and the substance behind the claim was real. Macmillan, as Housing Minister, delivered the eye-catching pledge to build 300,000 houses a year, achieving it in 1953 a year ahead of schedule — and deliberately tilting the programme towards private sale, foreshadowing the long Conservative theme of the "property-owning democracy." Rationing finally ended in July 1954, a powerful symbol of the close of austerity, and living standards climbed steadily through the decade.
| Indicator | Data |
|---|---|
| Real wages | Rose by roughly 20 per cent between 1951 and 1959; average weekly earnings continued climbing into the early 1960s |
| Consumer goods | Television ownership rose from around 4 per cent of households in 1950 to roughly 75 per cent by 1961; car ownership roughly doubled in the 1950s |
| Unemployment | Remained low, generally below 2.5 per cent, for most of the decade |
| Hire purchase | Credit-fuelled consumption transformed retail — washing machines, refrigerators, and televisions became mass-market goods |
On 20 July 1957, Macmillan told a Conservative rally at Bedford that "most of our people have never had it so good" — a phrase, borrowed from a US Democratic slogan, that became his trademark and, eventually, a weapon his critics used to imply complacency. In the same speech, however, he added a warning about inflation that is usually forgotten, a nuance worth deploying to show that the soundbite oversimplifies his actual argument. For the historian, "never had it so good" is best treated as a claim to be interrogated, not a description to be accepted. David Kynaston's reconstruction of the period insists on holding two realities together: genuine, broadly shared improvement and stubborn inequality and prejudice. Housing shortages and slums persisted despite Macmillan's programme; regional disparities endured; and the first significant wave of Commonwealth immigration — symbolised by the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 and continuing through the 1950s — met discrimination in housing and employment that the welfare state did nothing to address. Dominic Sandbrook likewise argues that the affluence was real but uneven, and that the cultural changes of the period were evolutionary rather than the "revolution" of legend.
Beneath the prosperity lay a persistent economic anxiety that qualifies the whole picture. Butler's cautious Keynesianism kept unemployment low, 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) — was already visible. The 1955 budget, which 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, and critics seized on this as proof that growth was being sacrificed to short-term electoral and external pressures. The structural weakness of sterling, and the priority given to defending it, would shape economic policy for decades — and would prove decisive at Suez.
Churchill resigned in April 1955, handing over to Anthony Eden, who promptly won the May 1955 election with an increased majority and a glittering diplomatic reputation — which makes the scale of his subsequent fall all the more dramatic. The Suez Crisis was the defining event of his 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 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; 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 resolution, Britain accepted a ceasefire on 6 November and withdrew by December |
| Resignation | Eden resigned on 9 January 1957, citing ill health, 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 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 the lesson contemporaries drew was stark — Britain could no longer undertake major military action against the wishes of the United States. The definitive narrative by Keith Kyle demonstrated the extent of the 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; and more recently Brian Harrison has asked whether Suez was the clean "watershed" of legend, noting that Britain retained substantial "East of Suez" commitments into the late 1960s.
The significance of Suez repays careful weighing, and examiners reward candidates who treat "watershed" as a claim to be tested rather than a fact to be asserted. In the short term, Eden fell and Macmillan rose; in the medium term, Britain accelerated decolonisation and, within five years, applied to join the EEC; and in the longer term, the doctrine that Britain would not act militarily against American wishes hardened into a near-permanent feature of foreign policy. Yet the limits of the change matter too: the "special relationship" was quickly repaired by Macmillan and Eisenhower at Bermuda in March 1957, and Britain's nuclear and NATO commitments continued uninterrupted. Suez wounded prestige more than it altered structures — a psychological watershed whose practical consequences were slower and more limited than the shock implied.
Macmillan, appointed in January 1957, repaired the wreckage of Suez and rode the wave of affluence to a third successive and increased Conservative victory in October 1959 (a majority of around 100). The slogan "Life's better with the Conservatives — don't let Labour ruin it" captured the mood, and the result triggered an anguished Labour debate about whether prosperity had made the working class permanently Conservative. 1959 looked like the high-water mark of the Conservative ascendancy — which makes the rapid reversal of 1961–63 all the more striking.
On 3 February 1960, Macmillan told the South African Parliament in Cape Town that "the wind of change is blowing through this continent," and that the "growth of national consciousness is a political fact" which policy must accept. Delivered in the citadel of apartheid, the speech signalled that Britain would not resist African independence, enraged white settlers and the Conservative right, but framed Macmillan as a realist reading the direction of history.
| Year | Territory | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1957 | Ghana (Gold Coast) | First sub-Saharan African colony to independence; Kwame Nkrumah its leader |
| 1960 | Nigeria, British Somaliland, Cyprus | Nigeria was Britain's most populous African colony |
| 1961 | Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Kuwait; South Africa left the Commonwealth | South Africa withdrew under pressure over apartheid |
| 1962 | Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda | Caribbean and East African decolonisation |
| 1963 | Kenya, Zanzibar; the formation of Malaysia | Kenyan independence followed the suppression of the Mau Mau |
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.