Britain in the 20th Century: The Collapse of the Postwar Settlement, 1964-1979

Gresham College presents the collapse of the post-war settlement 1964 to 1979 by Professor Vernon Bogdan all ladies and gentlemen this lecture is part of a series on post-war British politics and I should be talking about the collapse of the post-war settlement propel you to the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher the next lecture will talk on on fascism and the final lecture will talk about the 1990s if you like post Thatcherism and this lecture is his pre Thatcherism tries to explain how it came about now those who've been to the earlier lectures will remember that they dealt with the construction of a post-war settlement and the broad satisfaction with it on the part of both major political parties and the Conservatives who in power in the 1950s actually managed to increase their majority twice in 1955 and 1959 because of that broad satisfaction now around about 1964 reasons which aren't wholly clear that satisfaction began to diminish amongst what you might call opinion formers previously people had said isn't British economic performance good if you compared with the interwar years when we had mass mass unemployment and deprivation we're doing enormous ly well we are creating an affluent society people are enjoying consumer goods they could never previously dream of cars television sets foreign holidays more and more people owning their own home we can really complement ourselves on our progress around about 1960 people began say well perhaps we are doing better than we were but when measured against other countries we're not really doing very well at all that other countries have consistently outgrown Britain since the war and in 1960 people could say that British industrial production has increased by 40% since the war it's not too bad but when they looked at France it had doubled since the war Germany and Italy two point five times two point five since the war Japan quadrupled so we were doing quite well perhaps but not well compared with other countries and people said what are we going to do about it and the first response was that the post-war settlement needed buttressing it needed reform and that was the view of most centrist politicians from the labor and conservative parties there were two extreme responses from the left and the right which said the post-war settlement was itself to blame for our problems and that Britain could only improve her performance by getting rid of it the Left said we must move on we haven't got enough state control it's only you who have a society in which the commanding heights are owned by the state that we can hope to improve economically now that view was never particularly popular the right said it's mistake to have a strong state as we built up too strong a state since the war and we should look radically at the post-war commitment to the role of the state and in particularly the welfare state and in that you see the origins of fascism now that wasn't for the these views weren't very strongly held in the 1950s and 60s was an undercurrent which supported it and probably the main representative of the left in the 1950s was a known Bevin then Tony Benn and of the right Enoch Powell but they didn't make much headway at that time because the immediate response to Britain's economic problems were to reform the settlement so as to strengthen and maintain it and the optimism of post-war years was still there that we can put things right later on in the 1970s people began to think where perhaps we can't put it right and the way to put it right can be summed up in two magic words of the 1960s which almost all sensible minded people supported the first was planning and the second was Europe now a planning then became a magic word and people look to the continent particularly to France where they said Frances economic success compared with Britain had come about because of planning and from the period of 1960 to 1962 there was a great reappraisal of British economic policy particularly on the part of the Conservative Party traditionally dedicated the free market and the absence of state control they said that we need a lot more planning and in 1961 they set up a National Economic Development Council sometimes called Neddie which compose had representatives of government management and the unions to plan the economy to see what more could be done now of course if you're going to plan the economy one important part of the economy is wages and incomes and so in 1962 the conserve to set up another body called the National incomes Commission which was known as Niki and that would plan incomes and wages and this involved of course getting cooperation from the trade unions and the Conservatives said if the trade unions cooperated they would be given a place in helping to decide economic policy in forums like Neddie but a bit vague and the unions didn't really trust a Conservative government didn't know really what to do incomes policy had worked between 1948 and 1952 had worked in a voluntary way but it was not so likely to work as time went on because in the late 1940s Atlee government said if you want to keep full employment on your welfare benefits you must show wage restraint and these were new things for employment and so-and-so the union said well that that that's a reasonable request to make but by the 1960s these things were taken for granted so what was the point of self-discipline in any case the trade union said we'll get a much better deal from the labor party with an incomes policy then we will for the confirm the Conservatives so they were rather skeptical about this now you may say looking at it in retrospect this is a very odd thing for a Conservative government to be doing to be strengthening the state and to be having an incomes policy which is in effect the state deciding roughly what increase in wages is affordable and what groups will get increases in wages perhaps above the norm what groups less than the norm and so on is this a sensible thing for a Conservative government to be doing and you may argue this is an aberration for conservatives to get themselves in mesh in that and you could say the Conservatives lost the intellectual initiative that they'd got to power as a free-market party in 1951 they'd said the Labour government had got too much in messaging controlled and now they were implicitly confessing that perhaps the left was right perhaps we didn't we need more control so you may say this smooth the path for the Labour Party which came to power in 1964 and Harold Wilson also committed to planning and also committed to an income policy though Wilson rather artfully called it the planned growth in wages to conciliate the union's so that that may have been important in helping the Labour Party now the Conservatives said we need faster growth and they said we've been far too modest in our ambitions they said we need a growth rate of 4% in the economy to pay for all the desirable things we want welfare health education and all the rest of it there was one very small problem with the 4% growth rate that we hadn't achieved it since mid Victorian time and people I think politicians were even less clear about how they were going to get a higher rate of growth than they were in how to control inflation so that was a serious problem some someone once said that economics was the science of getting things wrong with confidence and the I should say the concern with growth in the 1960s actually led to growth being lower than it had been in the 1950s that the obsession of politicians with growth meant the rate was rather lower now it's also been said about economics that if you have two economists in the room you'll have two opinions unless one of them is Lord Keynes in which case you'll have three opinions two of which are his but Harold Wilson and the Labour Party's had four percent was far too an ambitious and the Labour Party would have a much higher rate of growth and four percent in fact and say the rate of growth of 1960s was lower than the 1950s and economists politician did not know how to secure it and I think it's fair to say they probably don't know how to get it either and I think all that they can say which isn't helpful for politicians the policies that are likely to improve growth are very long-term for example one way to improve growth might have been at that time better management education better technical education but the effects of that wouldn't be seen in the lifetime of one government they'd be seen over a long period and another example where spat seeing the benefits today would be if you could get a more flexible labor market through reform of the trade unions and that was done by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and it took time I think for its benefits to be seen I think it's reasonable to say we can see them now that the recession has not led to such a high level of unemployment because of a more flexible labor market though it's also fair to say productivity has has not increased as much as it might have done but the benefits of a flexible labor market took some years to have their effect so the ways as in what we do know all we do know about economic it's a long-term matter but of course politicians didn't want to hear that because they're considering the next few years of the election so that is a serious problem and the effects of the policies of planning which included incomes policy which was adopted by the Labour Party labour went even further than the Conservatives because they adopted a statutory income as policy that conserves its policy been voluntary in the late sixties the Wilson government adopted a statutory policy the effect were to give much greater power to the trade unions whose cooperation was needed to make planning effective and to introduce an inflationary bias into the economy and to lead to questions about whether Britain was governor ballif it depended on the trade you now to get trade union consent and that also Alda tended to discredit the post-war consensus and led to Thatcherism now the second magic word after planning was a Europe and Europe was meant to complement planning by bringing what politician called a cold shower of competition into British industry Europe was an expanding market a great challenge and therefore hopefully Britain entered Europe export trade would expand the difficulty was that export costs were high in Britain that industry at that time was riddled with restrictive practices the rate of technical progress was low and trade union demands as we've seen have been increasing so maybe that open competition with the continent would actually damage British industry rather than encourage it but poll treason didn't take that view and one the President of the Board of Trade in 1961 when Britain made her first application to join Europe said that we must look at the problems of our trading relations with Europe as an opportunity and a challenge I think the great effect of going into a wider European market will be the efficient firms prosper and the inefficient will go down that surely is precisely what we must see in this country if our economy is really to expand and our growth is to be more rapid but Europe just like planning involved clashes with vested interests that will if you caught that which are very important at the time the first was with the Commonwealth relationship and our supplies of cheap food which wasn't vested interest from from the Commonwealth countries particularly from New Zealand Australia and Canada because the Common Market policy was based on a supranational tariff a common tariff of the common market countries together with a sustaining of the incomes of farmers by policies which meant high prices the food and is obviously suited the Continental economies particularly that of France which are a large agricultural sector it didn't suit our own economy which had a very small agricultural sector in which as I say relied on Commonwealth imports for cheap food our method of subsidizing agriculture was quite different from that of the continent and agriculture was a very important influence in the Conservative Party at that time as no doubt it is and there was still great belief in the Commonwealth and obviously in the great advantage of cheap food and when we tried to enter the common market in as it was then European Union was then called in 1961 we hoped to negotiate special arrangements of the Commonwealth as the French had done for their colonial empire but this all failed and gradually in negotiations we had to surrender our hopes for that and we had to agree to a very brief transitional period without special terms for the Commonwealth countries and the six members of the community that then was so they may prepare to have special arrangements the Commonwealth only during the transitional period which would end in 1970 and that one would have to give way on all the other questions which we did but rather Layton in negotiations too late from the point of view of getting in because the Gauls position during this time was strengthening in France and in 1963 he vetoed a British entry now all the same this you may say is another aberration in the conservative part and I think anyone who didn't know new British history would find it odd that it was a Conservative government that first tried to get into Europe with the opposition incidentally at the time of the Labour Party on what you might call Euroskeptic grounds and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell who felt a strong feeling for the Commonwealth as many people of his generation did said that if we entered Europe it would be the end of a thousand years of history and that a federal system might suit the countries of the continent it certainly doesn't suit Britain so the parties switched sides in a sense over the past 50 years but you'll think it rather odd it was the Conservatives who try to get us in because here's another aberration in conservative policy if you like because after all the Conservatives tend to be the Nationalists a patriotic party who like isn't it a bit odd of them wishing to join a supranational organization on the continent which certainly Anthony Eden had not wanted to join and earlier conservative governments had not want to join we were not involved in the early negotiation at that so here's another problem with your the second leg of the new policy now all these um problems I think reached their culmination in the short-lived heath government from 1970 to 1974 he succeeded at a third attempt could Wilson have tried to get us in de Gaulle and vetoed it but after the gold had left the presidency in 1969 French attitudes relaxed and Edward Heath was able to get Britain in but only on terms which meant a rocketing rise in the price of food which fuelled what was already a high level of inflation and it was clear at a time that entry into Europe was not shall we say particularly popular and it's worth saying we didn't have a referendum then we had a referendum in 1975 when we were already in and that resulted in a two-to-one majority for staying in sort of the forces of British conservatism and small C if you like we were listed in terms of staying in well in 1970 2/3 when we joined it might have been different who knows anyway Edward he got us into Europe but the other wing of modernization planning got heat into very serious trouble indeed because in 1972 he too instituted a statutory incomes policy and that led him into a clash with the miners in 1974 the miners were determined to breach the policy he thought on political grounds but the miners said we have a special case our work is difficult we've fallen behind in the wages struggle and we really ought to be allowed to catch up so that was a very serious problem and he seemed to be caught in a cul-de-sac from which there was no way out and he called an election on the slogan of who governs and he appealed to the country in language which would have had a lot of effect in the 1940s but by the 1970s I think was greeted with a belly laugh I mean he said this he said think national they think of the nation as a whole think of these proposals that is his statutory incomes policy as members of a society that can only beat rising prices if it acts together as one nation now in the time of Ackley and the Churchill peacetime government I think people responded that language was a great deal of deference sense of social obligation resulting from the war by the 1970s that sense of social obligation and worn-out and different groups including the miners said you know if we can use the market to get more why shouldn't we why should we think of one nation why shouldn't we think of our position as miners now heat was caught in the cul-de-sac as I said he called an election call on the principle of who governs at the beginning of the campaign I know from experience Labour MPs at the time had told me they were terribly frightened they thought that a election fought on the question of government versus the unions would lead to a Tory landslide but the result was very different and the reason I've circulated the paper on the result is that I think the 9th February 1974 election is the most important single election of the post-war period marking a watershed between the triumphs of the post-war settlement and its ending now if you look at that table you can see firstly that it led to a hung parliament that Britain's first hung parliament since 1929 of course the next one was 2010 so the answer to Heath's question who governs was we don't know now there's a further of the oddity that if you do a quick calculation of the results it was unlike the 2010 hung parliament in that no two parties together could secure a majority except for the conservative and Labour Party in coalition which were unlikely but there was no way that a major party together with a minor party could get enough seats for a majority a majority being 300 and 18 seats so to get a majority you need a major party and at least two minor parties very unlikely to happen further oddity of the result was that the Labour Party with the largest party and short of a majority but a largest party although the Conservatives won more votes so that the wrong side won and that's an oddity now another oddity about the result was the Liberals made a breakthrough in terms of votes as you can see they got nearly 20% of the vote but they won only 14 seats out of 635 and on a proportional system they would have won a nearly 130 seats so you won't be surprised to hear that the argument for a proportional representation began to get off the ground after that election previously the liberal has done so badly that people said well of course they would argue for a proportional representation wouldn't day but given that governments got nearly 50 percent of the vote in the 1950s and 60s as near as makes little difference people said this is a this is a theoretical matter which we're not gonna bother ourselves with it's a that's rather cranky idea but here you see the night the night no party got more than as it were 38% of the vote which was just over a third of the vote and the Liberals seem very badly done Bart well they got half the vote of the other two major parties but hardly any seats so that was one problem you see the Constitution you came into politics now further travelled the Northern Irish parties it's it's masked here they're 12 seats with 3.1 percent of the vote but the problem there was that a group called the United I'll stay unionist coalition on 51% of the Northern Irish vote gained 11 of the 12 seats and that coalition's purpose it was run by the unionists the Protestants was to destroy the power sharing arrangement which Edward Heath had established in northern I the power sharing arrangement is they still into what no of anion has now on the Good Friday Agreement from 1998 and so that the election gave the Northern Ireland unionist parties so they said a mandate to destroy it and in the summer perhaps emboldened by the miners there was a strike of power workers in northern arm which compelled all these persuaded the Labour government to end the power-sharing explained it came back in 1998 so the so-called Sunningdale agreement was destroyed and some people said the Good Friday Agreement was Sunningdale for slow learners because you need an hour 24 years and many more deaths before he and paisley been instrumental in destroying the 1974 agreement accepted something very similar in 1998 but that was a tragedy for Northern Ireland then if you look at Scotland the SNP won seven seats and 22 percent of the Scottish vote and Scottish nationalism having been seen before then as another cranky exercise as totally out of date came into the forefront of politics and persuaded the government to spend a lot of time on proposals with devolution which were then defeated in a referendum in Scotland in 79 or are not defeated but accepted by very small majority in Westminster is not implemented now who may be interested with all the talk on devolution 22% of the Scottish vote in February there was another election October 1974 at which the SNP gained 30% of the Scottish vote now we all know how well the SNP is done in the Scottish Parliament but if you look at the general election of 2010 the SNP then got 20% of the Scottish vote which is less than they got in February 1974 and a third less than they got in October 1974 so if you're just looking at parliamentary elections the SNP has lost a third of its support in a period of 30 the 36 years between 1974 and 2010 packed with bearing in nine but you can see all that led to a devolution and you can see how now the the election is very paradoxical really because it would seem at first that the election gave tremendous support to the centrist forces in British life after all Heath had gone to the country saying who governed and people said well this is this is polarizing we don't want that and they said perhaps a Labour Party representing the union's that's to polarizing as where liberals got a huge vote huge centrist vote rejection of extremes but in practice as it happens the election of February 9-10 for why I think it's so important it signaled the end of consensus on the future the end of the consensus on the post-war settlement and Heath asked the question who governs although although you may say the election doesn't give the key run so I think that one clear answer not you and Heath art of trying perhaps mistakenly to form a coalition of Liberals resigned and a Labour minority government took office which had another election in October 1974 which it gained a very small majority overall charge of three and continue to govern until 1979 when my Rattata came to power but the question wasn't only how Britain was to be governed who governs but can Britain be governed at all against the veto of the trade unions because it seems if Heath had challenged the trade unions and actually being defeated by the trade unions and this raised a very difficult problem could Britain be governed against the wishes of the trade unions earth one question there were the second question raised by the success of the SNP and also in a different way by the success of the unionists in Northern Ireland and that question is still with us I think can Britain be held together at all you know what is the country which is being governed and that was a tremendous worry for politicians from that period now the Labour response to how Britain could be governed was that Heath had fallen because his attitude towards the trade unions was confrontational and that he wasn't offering the union's anything in return for wage restraint and if he followed the principles of the a Teegarden to the 1940s they said Atlee helped to create a fair society and that's how you got Union cooperation and the Labour Party produced the idea of the social contract they said in return in return for increasing what they called a social wage at his benefits unions should accept reductions or constraint on their on their real wages as it were and they said that is their policy and this involved the labor government of the day in serious problems the first was that Labour took the view perhaps naturally but foolishly that there actually won the election though their vote in 1974 was 1/8 less than it was in 1970 when they'd lost the election the only reason they won was that the Conservatives lost even more doubts most of which went to the Liberals some to the Scottish nationalists and the Labour Party took with you this shows people do not want and a policy against the wishes of the unions at what people want is cooperation with the trade unions and that was a misreading of public opinion because every opinion poll showed that people thought not that the trade unions should have a greater role in policymaking but they should have a smaller role in policymaking indeed many people were beginning to get rather frightened of the extent of trade union power but the Labour government instead of reducing the power of the trade use actually increased it by making the closed shot mandatory and giving the trade rooms all sorts of other powers in policymaking and they said in return for this that will the trade unions exercise restraint now this was a grave error big an odd for the Labour government to make because the trade unions could not even if they'd wish to do so and many didn't they could not reciprocate for this reason those with long memories who attended my lecture on the general strike which has been well over a year ago we remember the problems that tu si had in coordinating action on the general strike and the reason for that was that every union is autonomous and highly jealous of its autonomy the tu sees a loose Federation without power of the individual Union which greatly resent any attempt by the tu si to control them they are not willing to do that the trade unions and cells do not have power over their members except by consent and during the 1970s trade union power was becoming fragmented and wrote in power on the shop floor of shop stewards and the collapse of deference and the shop stewards were saying many of them on the Left if your union leaders are agreeing to wage restraint you should go against their wishes because we can get you more money by a more militant policy that had seemed to pay off underneath because the mind has seen to won their battle against Heath so if trade union leader cooperated they had the risk of being undermined by a people on the shop floor and the situation well thumbed up by our other right-wing trade union leader leader of the miners Jo Gormley who said that these incomes policies and I quote put us in a false position our role in society is to look after our members not run the country what's more I think the TU C overstepped its powers in trying to interfere with the authority of the individual unions in point of fact that T she doesn't have any powers it's a federation and all its members are autonomous now it may be that the policy proposed of the social contract could have worked in the 1940s when a sense of deference and civic obligation was very strong authority was much more secure than it came to be in the seventies when I mean the phrase often used under permissive society which is an exaggeration but the growth of individualism is an important feature of post-war politics I think the decline of a sense of civic cohesion if you like perhaps inevitable long after the war a decline of the sense of social obligation the Labour Party wanted to create 1945 which I think couldn't be done and the attempts to get the consent of the unions ended horribly in the so-called winter of discontent of nineteen seventy eight nine with massive public sector strikes against incomes policy and people like myself who remember that peered will remember the folk images of rubbish left in the streets in London uncollected cancer patients being sent home because the hospital porters were on strike the dead being unburied in Liverpool having to be buried at sea because of the strike of those doing that essential public work and this is a were a horrible reaction against this sense rather noble vision that people have attended earlier lectures may remember that Ernest bed-in who I think is the one most influential figures of the early post will be the Ernest Bevin and he'll you may remember if you attended early lectures after general strike Bevin and said strikes a lot a sensible way of advancing trade union interests let's try and be more constructive let's work with management let's work with government we can't of course get a socialist society overnight I didn't expect that but what we can do is to cooperate work together to improve conditions on the only principle I lay down is that the trade union should be consulted on policies of affect them that people in the Union shouldn't be treated as mere factors of production mere hands they should be consulted their view should be taken into account and that marked post immediate post-war policy both labour and conservative governments it worked well but it ended horrible caricature and I think one can't exaggerate the effects of the winter of discontent one of the prime surgeons Callahan one of his advisers Bernard Donahue said after the general election of 1979 there is no question that the public sector unions elected Margaret Thatcher in 1979 indeed she subsequently said thank you to them in her own individual way um and that um been put forward in a very prescient comment by an Owen Bevan after the Labour's election defeats in 1959 he said the trade unionist votes at the polls against the consequences of his own anarchy so I think is a very powerful point that people who pressed harder for ways when it came to the election they were shocked by what happened they voted conservative now I think the winter of discontent really frightened and horrified people a breakdown of consent and it frightened even people in the labour party there's a very interesting passage in the book by a Treasury Minister at a time called Joel Barnett he's called inside the Treasury and when when there were strikes at the time the one of the strikes I was of the porters and others working at the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital which James Kallen was probably his wife was a governor and Tony Benn in cabinet apparently said these strikes of what happens if you press working people too far and Kalin replied what do you think of people who go on strike in a Children's Hospital that's nothing to do with socialism as I brought up to believe and the Labour Party were deeply shocked that these antisocial actions could occur by people within the labor movement and the country even more deeply shocked and I think it didn't affect just the election of 1979 but elections right through the 1992 indeed I had memories of 1992 and people saying and I was working for a television company then that they did not vote labor because it would mean another winter of discontent the trade unions would control the country it was a deep folk memory as important to the memory of the Jaro marches and unemployment in the interwar years and if you had to choose one factor to explain why the Conservatives were in power for 18 years why Margaret Thatcher was there for so long I think that is a key factor this great fear that people had that if you voted labour you'd have the same all over again and there was a cartoon in The Daily Telegraph in 1979 with a picture of Callaghan and a trade union leader behind him and underneath it said vote Labour or else and that was people were very very frightened in a way it perhaps difficult to understand now now what happened to this a great liberal vote because after all in the election of February 1974 six million people 19 percent voted liberal by far the largest liberal vote since the war at that time in the October election which followed a few months later five million people voted liberal nearly as many but people studying elections have found how volatile liberal vote was that three million of those who voted liberal in February did not vote liberal in October and 2 million who did not vote liberal in February voted liberal in October so liberal vote is much more volatile than others and the figures constitute great and change but that indicated a decline in support for the two major parties which was to continue and be strengthened as time went on which of course makes a hung parliament more likely but it wasn't noticed because for most of the time we did have single party majority governments and the Liberals thought to capitalize on this and later on in the 1980s they had a support of a defection from the Labour Party called a social democrat party the SDP but its policy wanted to recreate a zit work past they wanted to recreate that consensus which had been shattered and won a support of the SDP rather unkindly caricature did he said what the SDP and the Liberal SDP Alliance was offering was a better yesterday and go back to the past and the liberal vote in some ways shows an alienation from the two major parties but it was not if you like a centrist alienation and I think that was back the mistake that Liberals made it wasn't that people were worried about the Constitution and said we must have proportional representation and and all the other liberal Nostrum it wasn't that at all but the alienation was I think from the post-war settlement and the Liberals were the convenient vehicle for that now when you had these incomes policies which and planning which people sometimes labeled corporatism that involved management unions and government getting together to try and plan the economy but what about those people who didn't belong to management all the unions what role did they have it in this dispensation weren't they the Forgotten people now a lot of these people form the core of the conservative constituency with a large see the constituency of the conservative party self-employed people people in small businesses people on fixed incomes pensioners people who would suffer enormous Lee both from inflation and from trade union power they weren't part of what seemed a corporatist consensus now all the figures we have show that conservative support is much strong amongst such people then it is amongst the large managers in industry or amongst professional groupings indeed that 90% to small businessmen and as a self-employed will vote conservatives a much higher class conscience if you like and amongst trade unions with the trade union labor votes about 2/3 2/3 of the organized working class normally a voted labor but this is 90% a very very strong degree if you want to call it out of class consciousness these were the Forgotten people they always voted conservative but the conservative party didn't seem to be protecting them it seemed to forgotten them and its eagerness to get on terms with large businesses and with the trade unions they were seemingly lost sight of and these people are very fearful of the power of the trade unions and the policies needed to secure that power the Conservatives were not protecting them and therefore they would look to a new form of conservatism which would protect them and that new form of conservatism could be called if you like a cure ISM and factor ISM I think is a response that weakening of social solidarity and the weakening of the post-war settlement which depended on social solidarity that point of view we often think of 1968 as a revolutionary year and people like tariq Ali and Tony Benz revolutionaries but perhaps the real revolutionaries were people like Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher who were attacking the post-war settlement from the right because what we've seen was that these desperate attempt to recreate the settlement in the 1970s failed and that the conservative attempt to increase the power of the state might have been acceptable if it had solved the problem of inflation if it had dealt with trade union power but when it didn't people fit not only was it wrong it was ideologically misguided this isn't the sort of thing conservative governments should be doing now the essence of Thatcherism all the alternative policies offered in the late 1970s were that if you're going to resolve Britain's problems you have to go beyond the post-war settlement and instead of government's trying to operate with the unions and management they must keep them both at a distance give much greater role for market power if that increases unemployment temporally that that's a price that has to be paid for the necessary shakeout that's needed in industry but you cannot have government planning of industry governments don't know very much about what makes a successful business pointless having incomes policies they're counterproductive and in any case I think even a Labour government if it had been returned in 1979 would not have had an income policy out of the cul-de-sac which it had led people into and that the Conservative Party should also be a much more Nationalist Party that's been in the past that again an aberrational mistake for the Conservatives go overboard about Europe that doesn't fit in with with the basic instincts of those people who vote conservative tend to be perhaps while suspicious of the continent suspicious of foreigners and want a more patriotic sort of policy and so the ending of the post-war settlement led not as you might think from the February 1974 general election to a resounding movement of the center or a consensus politics but to the end of it and the introduction of something called Thatcherism and a new labour in the 1990s you may say was an adaptation of Labour Party to Thatcherism just as the Conservatives in the 1950s had accepted the Atlee government's policies and administered them so new labour accepted much of fascism and agreed to administer that but what I want to hope to have shown in this talk is that fascism was not simply the product of one woman's brain remarkable though no doubt that is but that it can be explained as a result of the events that happened in the 1960s and particular 1970s which led to the end of the post-war settlements now you may think it's a good thing that the post-war settlement ended or a bad thing but I hope I've convinced you that it has in fact ended thank you for information please visit www.gfi.com/webmonitor

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: Political History, British History, Alec Douglas-Home, Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Callaghan, Labour, Labour Party, Labour History, Winter of Discontent, Conservative, Conservative History, Conservative Party, Post-war politics, History, Politics, Westminster, Bogdanor, Vernon Bogdanor, Political History Lecture, Political History Talk, History Talk, Gresham, Gresham College, Free public lecture, Free education

Id: qUipv0U97L8

Length: 46min 1sec (2761 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2012