The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain

Act Four lasted from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s. Its central theme lay in a strange mutation of policy and rhetoric, uncannily reminiscent of the mutation which had transformed the moral collectivism of the post-war period into the hedonistic collectivism of the 1960s and early 1970s. Mrs Thatcher herself continued to bang the moral-activist drum; when they remembered to, so did her ministers. But the drum-beats sounded ever-more faintly. Where early Thatcherism offered fiscal austerity, ‘painful medicine’ and patriotic self-sacrifice, later Thatcherism relied on easy credit, paper profits, profligate tax cuts and a consumption boom. Despite lip-service to the contrary, Alderman Roberts, with his Methodist austerities and his Grantham corner shop, ceased to be the iconic Thatcherite. He was replaced by Essex Man. Moral individualism gave way to hedonistic individualism: the vigorous virtues to the easy-going vices.

In a further twist, however, Act Four is now giving way to Act Five. Just as the hedonist-collectivist ascendancy of the 1960s and early 1970s was challenged by the moral-activist individualism of early Thatcherism, so the hedonist-individualism of late Thatcherism is now under attack from what looks suspiciously like a new kind of moral collectivism. Moral-activist drum-beats are sounding once again, but the drummers are collectivists, not individualists.

What are we to make of all this? An obvious caveat should be made at the outset. Ideological reductionism is as dangerous as any other variety. My stylised account is, by definition, incomplete and over-simplified. The ideological ups and downs on which I have focused provide only part of the explanation for the political ups and downs which have accompanied them; and even the ideological ups and downs cannot be explained solely in ideological terms. Ideology is an indispensable weapon in the struggle for power, but it is not the only weapon; and even the most accomplished ideologist will not get far if the structural and institutional cards are stacked against him. The arguments advanced, first by the rising liberal collectivists of the early-twentieth century, then by the rising New Right of the 1970s and now by the reborn civic activists of the 1990s have struck chords only because they have seemed to their listeners to correspond with, and to make sense of, structural changes. By the same token, the relationship between those arguments and the policies followed by their proponents has been as problematic, fluctuating and confused as such relationships usually are.

That said, the arguments concerned repay study. They show, I believe, that the political culture of this country is both more complex, and less plastic, than is often imagined. The debate between what I have called ‘moralists’ and ‘hedonists’ – between activity and satisfaction, moral growth and utility maximisation – goes back to the dawn of the market economy, and has continued, in varying guises, ever since. To be sure, the ontological foundations of the moral-activist case have varied through time. In our day, fear of the wrath of God has been largely replaced by fear of global warming and the declining sperm count. But the continuities are as striking as the differences. Despite appearances to the contrary – the decline of religion, the threat to the family, the spread of moral relativism, the de-legitimation of traditional elites – there is still a strong moral-activist strand in Britain’s political culture. The stubborn longevity of that strand helps to explain both the triumph of Keynesian social democracy in the early post-war period, and the rise of the New Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It also helps to explain the disarray of the New Right today, and the tentative emergence of the new political divide I discussed earlier. For the moral activism of early Thatcherism had more in common with the moral activism of the post-war generation of Keynesian social democrats than ideologues of left or right could bring themselves to admit. In her memoirs Mrs Thatcher wrote of her upbringing: ‘My “Bloomsbury” was Grantham – Methodism, the grocer’s shop, Rotary and all the serious, sober virtues cultivated and esteemed in that environment’.37 The same ‘serious, sober virtues’ animated the early Labour movement, haunted the pages of the Beveridge Report and shaped the culture of much of the working class. Not the least of the reasons for Mrs Thatcher’s electoral success was that they gave her rhetoric a popular resonance that the hedonistic collectivists of the 1960s and 1970s could not emulate. And, to complete the story, the moral activism of the Blair generation of collectivists draws on essentially the same reservoir of virtues and traditions.

The moral activist strand in British political culture can perhaps be traced back, through the liberal collectivists of the early twentieth century, the popular radicals of the nineteenth and the Country Party of the eighteenth to the puritans of the seventeenth. But the details of its lineage need not concern us here. What matters is that the roots of the moral-activist sensibility lie deep in the history of western civilisation, in the legacy of Athens on the one hand and of Jerusalem on the other. The most striking feature of the story I have tried to tell is that in a secular, heterogeneous, supposedly multi-cultural late twentieth century society, faced with challenges almost inconceivably different from those that faced classical Greece or ancient Israel, those roots can still put forth fruit.

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