Every British person has taken in the myth of the 1945 general election and the Labour victory. Labour’s victory in that year marked a clear rejection of the past, of the 1930s, with its high unemployment presided over by Conservative governments. Instead, they voted to get rid of the old world and start anew with the foundation of the NHS and the nationalisation of the railways and other major industries. But, the most important part of this myth is that it wasn’t a completely fresh start because the war had shown the way. In order to fight the war, we are told, there was greater collectivisation, greater pulling together, greater social equality than ever before. Everyone was rationed in exactly the same way. So the war paved the way for the post war socialist future. And this is attested to by the fact that the post-war consensus – Butskellism as it came to be known – was rooted in the Conservative Party’s acceptance, broadly speaking, of the Labour party’s work in that first post-war government of 1945-51. One important reason for that acceptance – again, goes the traditional story – was the Conservative Party’s own intellectual exhaustion.
In Blue Jerusalem Kit Kowol, a historian at King’s College London, takes issue with this view of the war. He argues that, far from being exhausted, Conservatism during the war was very much alive and fizzing with ideas. He also argues, convincingly, that the prosecution of the war was driven by competing visions of what the country was fighting for and that conservative visions won out over more left-wing interpretations of the war. One thing that comes through very strongly in Kowol’s book is that, in conservative circles, commitment to the continuance of the Empire was absolutely central to their thinking. Imperialists wanted to preserve some form of imperial preference in trade and so becoming too reliant on the United States was a potentially dangerous strategic move. Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill’s minister of Aircraft Production, was firmly in this camp, advocating an alliance with the Soviet Union in order to lessen British dependence on the US.
There were more ancient Tory ambitions advocated. One particularly anachronistic strand was the ‘back to the soil’ conservatism advocated by, most prominently, Lord Lymington. He wanted to see a return to agriculture as the basis of the country after the war—an agrarian society led by the aristocracy. Again, that may sound daft now, but the war, with its dramatic increase in domestic agricultural production, land girls and the like, arguably, gave support to such a vision. There was equally serious thinking done around how to make the country a Christian country once again. And while that might sound odd in the mid-20th century, it did bear some fruit in RAB Butler’s 1944 Education Act, which, for the first time, required daily acts of worship in so-called voluntary and county schools. That provision is still in force.
The modern Conservative party, with its uncompromising devotion to the Atlantic alliance, its devotion to entrepreneurialism and levelling up feels a long way from the Conservatism depicted in this book. But then 2024 and modern Britain is a very long way away from the Britain of 1939-45. We may still talk about ‘the War’ as if it was something we all share in. We endlessly commemorate its battles and heroes. But politically Britain has changed out of all recognition over the past 80 years, in ways no one at the time – Conservative or Labour – would have expected.
Benedict King, Contributing Editor
Five Books review