Reassessing Britain’s ‘post-war consensus’: the politics of reason 1945–1979

Since the late-1970s, scholars have been engaged in a vibrant debate about the nature of post-war British politics. While some writers have suggested that the three decades that succeeded the Second World War witnessed a bi-partisan consensus on key policy questions, others have argued that it was conflict, not agreement, that marked the period. This article offers a novel contribution to this controversy by drawing attention to the epistemological beliefs of the Labour and Conservative parties. It argues that once these beliefs are considered, it becomes possible to reconcile some of the competing claims made by proponents and critics of the ‘post-war consensus’ thesis. Labour and Conservative leaders may have been wedded to different beliefs, but they also shared a common enthusiasm for empiricist reasoning and were both reluctant to identify fixed political ‘ends’ that they sought to realise. Consequently, they were both committed to evolutionary forms of change, and they eschewed the notion that any social or political arrangement was of universal value

Mrs Thatcher’s Macroeconomic Adventurism, 1979-1981 and its Political Consequences

Drawing on the influential analysis of Thatcherism by the late Jim Bulpitt, this paper seeks to do two things. First, to use the enquiries of the Treasury and Civil Service Committee of 1980 to underpin an account of economic policy-making in the initial period after 1979 which stresses the inadequacy of accounts which see policy as based upon a coherent, monetarist doctrine. Instead, it is argued that policy in this period is best described as 'adventurist', based on strikingly little analysis of its possible consequences. Second, this analysis is linked to the question of Conservative 'statecraft', and especially what Bulpitt called the 'political argument hegemony', which enabled the Conservatives to win the 1983 election despite mass unemployment. Here, it is argued, notions of economic 'decline' were crucial