AQA A-Level History: The Making of Modern Britain 1951–2007

Read the three sources below and then answer the question that follows. All three sources are original pastiche written for this exercise; they are not genuine documents.

Source A — written for this exercise in the style of a private letter from a Conservative backbench MP to a constituency party chairman, October 1959.

You will, I think, share my satisfaction at the result. The country has plainly grown weary of being told that anything good must be paid for in misery, and our message that the people have never had it so good plainly struck home on the doorstep. New houses, full employment, the motor-car on the drive and the television set in the front room — these are the things that win elections now, not the old class quarrels. We have made our peace with the welfare arrangements the previous government left us, and the voters reward us for it. Some of our friends grumble that we have become too comfortable, too willing to manage the State the Socialists built. I confess I do not lose sleep over it. Prosperity is a sound foundation for a party, and I see no reason why it should not carry us through the next decade.

Source B — written for this exercise in the style of an editorial in a left-leaning newspaper, March 1961.

Ministers congratulate themselves on an age of affluence, but the affluence is thin and unevenly spread. Behind the gleaming shop windows the old problems endure: slums that have not been cleared, hospitals starved of capital, schools in huts left over from the war. The Government boasts that it accepts full employment and the health service, yet acceptance is not the same as conviction, and a settlement maintained only because it is popular will not survive the first cold wind. Worse, the comfortable consensus has bred complacency. While our competitors invest and modernise, Britain drifts, her industry tired and her productivity stagnant. The truth the affluent society dares not face is that we are consuming today what we have failed to earn, and the reckoning, when it comes, will fall hardest on those who have gained least.

Source C — written for this exercise in the style of an internal Treasury memorandum to a senior minister, January 1962.

The central difficulty remains the reconciliation of commitments. Full employment, the maintained level of the social services and a stable exchange rate cannot all be held simultaneously when demand presses against capacity, as the recurring pressure on the balance of payments demonstrates. Each time the economy is expanded to honour our undertaking on employment, imports surge, sterling weakens and we are obliged to apply the brake. This cycle, now familiar, is not the product of mismanagement but of obligations no government feels able to disown. It is my duty to advise that the present settlement, broadly shared across the parties, constrains policy far more tightly than ministers publicly acknowledge, and that planning machinery of some kind may be required if these competing aims are to be held together over the longer term.

Question: With reference to these sources and your understanding of the historical context, assess the value of these three sources to a historian studying the nature and extent of the post-war consensus in Britain in the years 1951 to 1964. [30 marks]

To what extent did the Labour governments of 1964 to 1970 fail to deliver the modernisation of Britain that Harold Wilson had promised? [25 marks]

How far was trade-union power the main reason for the economic and political crises that afflicted Britain in the 1970s? [25 marks]

'Thatcherism transformed the British economy but at an unacceptable social cost.' Assess the validity of this view of the years 1979 to 1990. [25 marks]

How significant a break with the Thatcherite settlement was the New Labour government of Tony Blair in the years 1997 to 2007? [25 marks]