Controlling the narrative is the name of the game now. We like to think of it as a new game, one that we are smart enough to see through. In British politics, it has been strongly associated with Tony Blair and New Labour. In fact, it was an ambition openly declared by Blair’s Svengali, Alastair Campbell: “We are going to take the initiative with the media announcing stories in a cycle determined by us.”
But of course it is not a new ambition at all. One way or another, all regimes attempt to impress their version of events on the public mind and memory. George Orwell put it rather better in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” In really successful operations, the narrative fossilizes over time into accepted fact, and historians for generations after have the devil of a job chipping away at the cement. Kit Kowol, a young Oxford historian now working in Brisbane, has taken on a particularly ticklish task in his recent book, Blue Jerusalem: to dig up and, where necessary, demolish the foundations of the conventional narrative of 1945 in Britain and to offer a rival version in which the “New Jerusalem” is painted not Labour red but Tory blue.
In its simplest form, the usual narrative presumes that Labour’s smashing victory in the general election that summer signified a radical shift in British politics. A reactionary Tory Party was replaced by a go-ahead Labour regime, led by Clement Attlee, that introduced unheard-of innovations, such as the comprehensive National Health Service and the system of National Insurance, and nationalized large swaths of British industry. The demoralized Tory Party, led by Winston Churchill, by then an exhausted volcano, had no choice but to follow limply in Labour’s footsteps. When the inescapable postwar austerity returned them to power in 1951, they broadly accepted the Attlee welfare state and state ownership of what Labour called the “commanding heights” of the economy. The New Dawn of 1945 was followed by the drowsy afternoon of the Tory 1950s.
Kowol attacks this encrusted legend with vim and wit. His abattoir is soon filling up with sacred cows. He contends that the myth was
largely a product of left-leaning scholars who either celebrated the social and political transformations that the war and the postwar Attlee governments brought or, as frequently, were disappointed that these had not gone further.
The celebrators include Richard Titmuss, Arthur Marwick, and A.J.P. Taylor; the half-disappointed chroniclers on the left he identifies as Paul Addison (The Road to 1945, 1975), Angus Calder (The People’s War, 1969), and Kenneth O. Morgan (The People’s Peace, 1990). Even for the fully disappointed ones, Kowol declares, “the Left is still considered the engine of history,” and British political history still “tends to be written from the Labour point of view.”
Kowol points out that this narrative is further entrenched by the rather smaller number of right-leaning historians, such as John Charmley and Correlli Barnett, who more or less accept the same version of events but deplore it as a story of decline and loss for Britain and its place in the world. In particular, the conventional narrative has it that Labour ministers came up with these new ideas because they were
in charge of the main domestic ministries during the war and thus effectively ran domestic policy. By contrast, the assumption is made that senior Conservatives, not least Churchill, were so heavily focused on military and diplomatic policy that there was little Conservative positive political thinking done during the war.
All these assumptions, Kowol proclaims, are either false or, at best, highly debatable. To start with, for most of the war it was Conservatives who held the Exchequer and the ministries of education, pensions, health, trade, and agriculture, fisheries, and food. And there was not a dearth but a profusion of Conservative new thinking during the war. “Far from being uninterested in questions of reform during this period,” Kowol writes,
these Conservatives and their allies took the lead in pushing for the very boldest types of reconstruction imaginable by proposing the creation of a new kind of Christian State.
A thousand flowers bloomed, and not all of them smelled very nice.
Unfortunately, I think Kowol gets off on the wrong foot. He starts by introducing several weird individuals whose prominence in the book might lead us to think that we are supposed to see them as typical. On the first page, for example, there are the commonplace ruminations of John Baker White, which he published in 1942 as A Soldier Dares to Think. After briefly trying his hand at farming and joining a circus, Baker White joined the British Fascisti, spending hours spying on the subversive activities of Communists in Hammersmith and traveling to attend a Nuremberg rally in 1937 on behalf of the strikebreaking organization called the Economic League, before becoming Tory member of Parliament for Canterbury in 1945.
After several pages in the company of this marginal, not very appealing character, we are introduced to Viscount Lymington, later Earl of Portsmouth, a Fascist sympathizer, who resigned from the House of Commons, utterly disgusted by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, whom he called “a scheming old bladder of stale wind.” Lymington then joined several dotty völkisch groups, like the English Mistery, which promoted a return to a rural utopia unpolluted by inferior races. He eventually went off to farm in the White Highlands of Kenya, then the last refuge of disgruntled aristos. We hear even more about the endless intrigues of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, a man who never saw a wheel without trying to put a spoke in it. The Beaver’s (hotly contested) success in speeding up aircraft production for the Battle of Britain is far outweighed by his soft spot for Stalin and his hatred of the United States. Like Lymington, Beaverbrook was furious about the Government of India Act of 1935, rightly foreseeing that its apparently modest proposals for self-government were a prelude to independence and the gradual breakup of the British Empire.
Whatever Kowol intends, his selection of these umbrageous mavericks tends to reinforce the conventional narrative of the Tory Party before and during the war as a bunch of reactionary racists whose nastier instincts were tempered only by the need to win the war and get elected. But slowly and rather indistinctly, the picture of a different faction in the Tory Party begins to emerge. “Conservative proposals for the remaking of the postwar world can be found almost everywhere Conservatives operated,” Kowol writes,
in the ministries and departments they ran, the political organizations they joined or created, the journals and newspapers they read and contributed to, and the companies and trade associations they owned and worked for.
One of the remarkable figures in this respect was R.A. Butler, universally known as Rab. Famed for his sly ambiguities, he was at the same time a man of driving Christian ideals. At the outbreak of the war, he was merely undersecretary at the Foreign Office. He exercised far more influence as the founder, in the early part of the war, of the party’s Central Committee for National Policy, where Churchill left him very much to his own devices. Indeed, Churchill’s presence in Kowol’s subtitle, British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War, is rather misleading. The Old Man provided the victory; his bright young colleagues provided the postwar policies. He did not pretend to take much interest in their details.
Butler is remembered for his 1944 Education Act, which established a comprehensive system of state education that remains foundational. What strikes Kowol in particular is that “thanks to the Act, for the first time Christian education became compulsory in all state-maintained schools.” That is, of course, literally true. Ever since, in British state schools, assembly each day has begun with some sort of nondenominational prayer or homily. But Kowol fails to grasp Butler’s strategic cunning, which was as much a part of his Delphic personality as his Christian faith. Butler explained this in his two beguiling memoirs, The Art of the Possible (1971) and The Art of Memory (1982), arguing in the latter:
The churches could not afford to maintain all their schools, so they wanted some face-saving formula which would enable them to hand over the majority to the public authorities knowing that some basic religious teaching would still be given to their pupils.
Artful as ever, when he met church leaders to discuss his proposal, he won their hearts by inviting the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, to conclude the meeting with a prayer. But Butler revealed his true intention by pointing out that he consistently refused public funds for any new denominational schools and that he included in his proposal the idea that the three types of school could in time be amalgamated into one “comprehensive” school, which would be strictly secular. In other words, the religious clauses in the 1944 act were designed as a tactful management of the decline of religious schooling, not as any sort of revival.
One must in fact dismiss any idea that the Conservative policy initiatives during the war were reactionary, either in intention or in effect. Evelyn Waugh was not far off the mark when he complained that “the Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single second.” The Tories, for example, eagerly embraced a report, which the coalition government had commissioned from the civil servant (and later Liberal MP) Sir William Beveridge, on establishing a comprehensive system of state welfare. They would have been crazy not to: the Beveridge Report was an instant success with the public. It’s worth pointing out, though, that Beveridge asserted that the British social security system was already “on a scale not surpassed and hardly rivalled in any other country in the world” as a result of the reforms of David Lloyd George and Churchill before 1914 and Neville Chamberlain in the 1920s and 1930s. The wartime coalition government had already begun to create universal social security benefits in the Ministry of National Insurance Act of 1944, and the Tories claimed joint authorship ever afterward. Margaret Thatcher kept a copy of the Beveridge Report in her handbag and flourished it whenever she was challenged on her party’s welfare credentials.
Less well known is the party’s commitment, in the 1945 general election manifesto following a detailed proposal the year before, “to create a comprehensive health service covering the whole range of medical treatment from the general practitioner to the specialist, and from the hospital to convalescence and rehabilitation.” The main difference from the system that Nye Bevan actually introduced in 1946 is that local hospitals would have remained independent bodies, though largely state-funded, as the doctors wanted, rather than being taken over by the state. It’s still an open question whether a more devolved system of this sort, like the ones still operating in France and Germany, would have served patients better or worse.
The manifesto was presented in a personalized form as “Winston Churchill’s Declaration of Policy to the Electors,” and didn’t include the word “Conservative.” The appeal was concentrated on “Churchill the war-winner.” Kowol describes the document as “underwhelming,” at least in the view of critics on the right. Having read innumerable election manifestos, I would say this one seems forthright, ambitious, and commendably concrete in its pledges: to establish a modern welfare state, “the Govermnent accepts as one of its primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment”; to build 300,000 houses over the next two years; to maintain stable markets and prices for British farmers; and to institute far-reaching controls over the struggling coal mines. Overseas the manifesto was rather more timid, in deference to Churchill’s incurable imperialism, but it did promise to provide India with “a fuller opportunity to achieve Dominion Status,” to lead the other colonies “forward to self-governing institutions,” and to give full support to the infant United Nations being born in San Francisco.
It simply isn’t true, as Kowol claims, that “the result of the 1945 election meant that the plans Conservatives developed during the war were never to be realized.” On the contrary, behind the heated arguments about the nationalization of transportation and heavy industry, there was a good deal of consensus about the postwar social structure—a structure that is largely with us today, despite various contentious tinkerings at the edges over the years: the National Health Service free at the point of use, state-funded primary and secondary schools, National Insurance. The Conservatives were humiliated in 1945 not because their manifesto was no good but because they were not forgiven for the hardships of the two world wars and the economic slump in between. As so often, voters looked to the past, not the future, when making up their minds.
Kowol also overplays how new the Tory ideas were. He argues that the war “radicalised the Right as much, perhaps more than the Left,” but many of these ideas had been evolving long before 1940. They were the political legacy of the First World War rather than the second, the trenches of Picardy rather than the beaches of Normandy. This is the really forgotten chapter in the history of the Tory Party in the twentieth century.
Blue Jerusalem does not give much space to the interwar struggle between the idealistic modernizers in the party, the “YMCA,” as they were nicknamed, and the “Old Gang,” or as that subtle modernizer Stanley Baldwin described them in 1918, “the hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war.” In the late 1920s it seemed at times that the Old Gang was coming out on top, as maneuvers to get rid of Baldwin multiplied, fomented by the press lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, owners of the all-conquering Daily Express and Daily Mail. But Baldwin rallied magnificently with a speech in the Queen’s Hall on March 17, 1931, in which he declared, “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages” (a phrase he had lifted from his cousin Rudyard Kipling).
Baldwin not only neutralized the bumptious barons with a bravura that no subsequent Tory leader has dared to emulate; he won a thumping victory in the general election that October and was free to promote his fellow modernizers. After 1931 the modernizers were also aided by the presence of a Labour minority in the national government, and had space to develop their own policies without worrying too much about the Old Gang. On pensions, public housing, unemployment insurance, and health insurance, the governments of 1925–1935, under the leadership of Baldwin and Chamberlain, enacted legislation that bears comparison to LBJ’s Great Society.
Who were they, the so-called YMCA? To start with, they were mostly men of some intellectual brilliance (and resented for that by the hard-faced men): Harold Macmillan, Walter Elliot (who as minister of agriculture in 1933 set up the Milk Marketing Board and initiated the drive toward self-sufficiency in food that continued for the next fifty years), Henry Willink (who devised the proposal for a national health service), Duff Cooper, Oliver Stanley, John Buchan, and Anthony Eden. All had dazzling academic records, not at all typical of what John Stuart Mill had called “the stupid party.” Their records in World War I were no less remarkable. Most of them had won medals for feats of conspicuous gallantry, typically for rescuing wounded comrades under heavy fire. (Elliot won two Military Crosses.) They were deeply marked by the war and by their closeness to the men of all classes they had fought alongside.
They recognized that things could never be the same again. Another prominent YMCAer, the Scottish lawyer Noel Skelton, spelled this out in a memorable series of four articles in The Spectator in April and May 1923. Skelton had fought at Gallipoli, Salonica, and Le Cateau, and he had just been elected MP for Perth. He had great personal charm and eloquence—John Buchan’s wife compared him to “the hero of a Disraeli novel brought to life.” He died of cancer at fifty-five, having held only minor ministerial office and already tired of the political grind, so it is no surprise that he fell from public memory. Oddly enough, his death happened just after the polls closed during the 1935 election, and he became the first MP to be declared elected when already dead. Yet in truth, he never quite died, for no one else has phrased the terms of modern politics so trenchantly.
Skelton argued that this was “one of these times when old values have lost their meaning, old prejudices their force, old axioms their sanctity; when opinion, ideas, the minds of men are plastic.” After the 1918 Representation of the People Act, Britain was finally, electorally, a complete democracy. It was not simply that all adult men had the vote. “The acquisition of political rights by women has flung into the seething pot of our political life a fresh and distinctive ingredient”—a different mental and moral outlook. The absurd restriction of the vote to women over thirty until 1928 was only a measure of the mental distance yet to be traveled.
Skelton also claimed that the nation’s achievements in the war were largely due to the effects of the Liberal MP William Forster’s Elementary Education Act of 1870 and the Conservative MP Arthur Balfour’s Education Act of 1902. Anyone who lived through World War I could see that,
in a flash, the distance which Britain had gone along the road of education was revealed. The technical ability, the rapidity in acquiring new kinds of knowledge and in mastering new duties, the self-reliance, the self-respect, the power to accept responsibility, the spontaneous facing of sacrifice, the large grasp of the issues at stake, the firmness and fineness of temper, the general spaciousness of character and outlook displayed by the men and women of Britain meant, and could only mean, that the influences of education had penetrated deeply and strongly into their minds and character.
This profound change, according to Skelton, meant that voters would expect and deserve complete participation in the political process: “The prosperous, peach-fed classes do not readily understand the importance which the mass of the people attach to political life.” By contrast, the old
battles between Whig and Tory, Unionist and Liberal, were, like those of an earlier stage of armed warfare, fought on a narrow front and by small armies of professionals, whose passage through the life of the nation affected it hardly more than a charabanc disturbs the countryside today—some vapour and much noise, a rut left in the highway, a film of dust on the hedgerow.
Socialism, on the other hand, fought on the broadest of fronts, and the Tories too had to engage with the new wider understanding of politics:
For the mass of the people—those who mainly live by the wages of industry—political status and educational status have outstripped economic status. The structure has become lopsided. It is therefore unstable. Until our educated and politically minded democracy has become predominantly a property-owning democracy, neither the national equilibrium nor the balance of the life of the individual will be restored.
The first appearance of this phrase—“a property-owning democracy”—was both a wake-up call and the beginning of a debate that has lasted to the present day, and shows no sign of going away. Skelton’s friends Macmillan and Buchan were among the first to pick it up. Baldwin was not far behind. Churchill used the phrase as a party rallying cry in 1950. Perhaps most memorably, Eden, in a keynote speech at a Tory Party conference in Blackpool in 1946, declared that
our objective is a nationwide property-owning democracy…. Whereas the Socialist purpose is the concentration of ownership in the hands of the State, ours is the distribution of ownership over the widest practicable number of individuals.
Margaret Thatcher deployed the phrase in her defiant farewell speech in the Commons on the afternoon she resigned. Attacking the socialist obsession with equality, she trumpeted: “One doesn’t create wealth and opportunity that way. One does not create a property-owning democracy that way.”
But what precisely was this to mean in practice? In the last of his 1923 Spectator articles, Skelton spelled out his own program: it meant “co-partnery,” or co-ownership, in industry or its halfway house, profit sharing, and, in due course, seats on the board for the workers; it meant the revival of small-scale farming and agricultural co-ownership. (Skelton’s favorite example was former factory workers growing raspberries on a few acres outside Perth in his constituency.) It meant, too, “the resettlement of the land of England” and the reconstitution of the rural community. Skelton reminded his readers that, ironically, wider landownership was a reality in Ireland but not in Britain as a result of the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903.
Oddly, Skelton did not mention homeownership. Yet in the idea’s postwar revival, housing was where ownership was most often invoked. In 1951, in his first speech as minister of housing, Macmillan declared that “no property was more suitable for the creation of a property-owning democracy than house property.” A large fraction of the 300,000 new houses that he was able to boast of in December 1953 were built and owned by local councils. All the same, owner occupation did increase from 32 percent in 1938 to 42 percent in 1961, and it reached an all-time high of 73 percent in 2007. Thatcher’s sale of council houses boosted the process. And her privatizations of the 1980s—of Cable and Wireless, Rolls-Royce, British Airways, British Steel, British Telecom, plus the gas, water, and electricity utilities—helped to expand the number of private shareholders from three million in 1979 to 12 to 15 million in 1990. Five million people bought shares in British Gas alone. This huge leap was reinforced by tax incentives for employee shareholding and by Personal Equity Plans (today called Individual Savings Accounts), which enable people to invest their income in British industry entirely free of tax. Along with the sale of council houses, these schemes were the proudest boast of the Tories during the general elections of 1983 and 1987, and they convinced quite a few voters that the Tory Party no longer existed solely for the benefit of the rich. Ordinary people really were beginning to acquire what the oligarchs of the eighteenth century had denied them: “a stake in the country.”
Yet as we look around today, it is hard to deny that Skelton’s vision has stalled. Co-ownership, though still not negligible, is withering under the onslaught of private equity behemoths, who have scooped up the proceeds of the dispersion of public assets that were intended to benefit ordinary voters. Homeownership has slipped to 65 percent, with young people in particular finding it almost impossible to afford to buy a home. As for landownership, Britain remains one of the most unequal countries. Half of England is owned by less than one percent of the population; in Scotland the numbers are even more lopsided. Wherever an old aristocratic family bites the dust, a new tycoon hoovers up the acres. No political party in England has the nerve to campaign for wider landownership—and it is supported only timidly in Scotland. While income inequality has been restrained by higher taxes, inequalities of wealth and inheritance continue to grow, just as Thomas Piketty originally predicted (although he is less pessimistic today).
It is true, too, that the idea of a property-owning democracy has slipped from prominence. Neither it nor Skelton rates a mention in Blue Jerusalem. Kowol is at least half right to describe wartime conservatism as a “lost world,” and one of the ways in which it has been lost is that we don’t have a full history of this crucial tradition that stretches back to the 1920s. The nearest I can find is David Torrance’s masterly Noel Skelton and the Property-Owning Democracy (2010). Kowol’s sprightly and combative polemic opens the way for a deeper dig into this rich field of political archaeology, which remains as incompletely explored as downtown Pompeii.
Those who now call themselves conservatives retain little of the generous, open liberalism that was such an important ingredient in the conservatism of Baldwin, Churchill, and Macmillan. They are less and less willing to confront the critique presented more than sixty years ago by C.B. Macpherson in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1963): that the protection of individual property rights is not enough on its own. It must also include the extension of those rights to all citizens: the chance of owning your own home, of building up a nest egg, even of owning a piece of land, and the chance too of directly participating in community decisions like the closure of schools and hospitals and the building of roads and housing estates, things in which we can be said to have an implied shared property right. Otherwise, the system will, sooner or later, degenerate into the protection of the superrich—as it did in the heyday of the Whig magnates and is doing today with the coddling of the tech bros. All you hear at the moment are the barking of guard dogs and the braying of billionaires. Where are the Noel Skeltons of 2025?
The Tory Party of today seems to have nothing to say on these issues—or on much of anything else. British commentators have not been slow to notice how remarkably tongue-tied the new Conservative leader, the normally garrulous Kemi Badenoch, has been these past months. On macroeconomic issues, she cannot condemn Labour’s fiscal prudence without being reminded of the very similar austerity maintained for years by the Tory chancellor George Osborne; nor can she demand a dash for growth without recalling the calamitous breakout attempted by her painfully short-lived predecessor, Liz Truss, who was fatally spooked by the bond markets.
Badenoch’s single mantra—keep the immigrants out—doesn’t sound very convincing after the last Tory government’s limp failure to stop those tragically overladen small boats from crossing the Channel. On the right, she cannot compete with the red meat tossed to the voters by Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, which has been leading the opinion polls for months now with the Conservatives lagging in third place; equally, she has nothing to say to the old liberal wing of the party, which has defected en masse to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. The obvious response to the global schemozzle unleashed by Donald Trump would be to undo some of the lasting damage done to the UK by Brexit and draw closer to the EU. But that avenue of escape too is closed off, because the rump of her supporters are incorrigible Brexiters. Renewal would require a leap of courage, which looks quite beyond poor Badenoch or any of those around her. She and they appear to be, for want of a better word, well and truly Trussed.
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