To what extent was there a consensus in British politics from 1945 until 1979 ?

Résumé du document

Full employment is probably the most important issue of all, as the other issues are mere consequences. The first sign of a increasing the consensus about the question of full employment was based on the employment policy in May 1944, which was initiated by the governments to ensure a ?high and stable level of employment'. According to David Dutton (1991: 17), ?its opening sentence would be engrained upon the hearts and indeed the manifestos of Conservative and Labour governments for the next thirty years.'

Extraits

[...] But some authors such as Pimlott, Jones, Kandiah and Deakin think that the idea of consensus, instead of explaining the period, rather miss the key problems that occurred. Ben Pimlott is probably the harsher opponent to the notion of a post-war consensus between 1945 and 1979. He exposed his views in The Myth of Consensus (Smith 1988), arguing for example that the campaign for the fundamental general election of 1945 was one of the most ferocious Britain ever seen. Moreover, for a lot of policies, debates were still very strong after 1951, Labour and Conservative keeping some hard oppositions. [...]

[...] To what extent was there a consensus in British politics from 1945 until 1979 ? ‘Controversy there must be on some of the issues before us, but this will be a small part of the work and interests we have in common' said Winston Churchill for his first parliamentary speech on returning to the premiership (Dutton 1991: 41). Thus, the period between the end of the Second World War, in 1945, and the first election of Margaret Thatcher, in 1979, classically appears as a period of consensus in British politics. [...]

[...] Of course, it does not mean that everyone agreed with these policies at this time. People like Enoch Powell on the right started already to criticize number of the policies that had been run before. But in criticizing consensus, they recognized it in the same time. For example about Trade Union conciliation, Enoch Powell wrote in 1968: Party came to power without any specific policy on trade union law and practice, and it faithfully carried that non-commitment out for thirteen years' (Dorey 1995: 47). [...]

[...] For David Dutton (1991: opening sentence would be engrained upon the hearts and indeed the manifestos of Conservative and Labour governments for the next thirty years.' Indeed, this goal corresponded to a high expectation of the British population after the years of sacrifices of the war. Robert Skidelsky (Marquand & Seldon 1996: 48) spoke thereby of an ‘implicit social contract' between the state and the citizens. However, if the goal was known and broadly accepted, that was also because the way to reach it was equally subject of consensus: Keynesianism. Thus, for Robert Skidelsky (Marquand & Seldon 1996: Keynesianism a collection of ideas, policies, and institutions designed to maintain full employment'. [...]

[...] Indeed, though the Labour was traditionally more tempted by pacifism, disarmament and international collective security, Stalinism and the iron curtain convinced Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary of 1945, to attract the United States of America in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. If the preceding ideas formed the content of the consensus in British politics between 1945 and 1979, they were not all accepted suddenly by every politician in 1945 to be abandoned as suddenly in 1979. In that perspective, the following part aims at showing that consensus means neither unanimity nor uniformity. Three periods in the post-war consensus can therefore be distinguished (Dutton 1991). [...]