Postwar British Politics: From Conflict to Consensus. . - Reviews - book review

Contemporary Review, March, 2002 by James Munson

Postwar British Politics: From Conflict to Consensus. Peter Kerr. Routledge. [pounds sterling]55.00. 244 pages. ISBN 0-415-23275-9. This book grew up out of a doctoral thesis and its aim is 'to challenge the established narrative of the evolution of British politics in the post-war period'. Older explanations rely on 'a static and oversimplified account of political change which fails to address the complex and multi-layered factors which continually converge to generate change'.

A better view sees politics after 1945 as a gradual movement 'from conflict to relative consensus'. He rejects the view that the two radical governments, of Attlee in the 1940s and Thatcher in the 1980s and 1990s were unique and that in between were years of consensus. After a lengthy introduction the author turns first to the Thatcher governments and argues that academics have accepted as truth those governments' view of previous, 'consensus' politics. He then turns to the 'myth of the Keynesian, social-democratic state settlement'. After this he suggests a different, evolutionary view of political events that followed the Allied victory in 1945. Political change was, he argues, 'the product of both strategic adaptation and environmental elaboration'. He then has a survey of governments between 1945-76 which, he argues, were marked by 'fundamental conflicts and changes of direction' which were dynamic, not static. There is a chapter devoted to the nature of early post-war British politics, one on the evolution of Thatcherism between 1976 and 1997 and one on Thatcherism's 'hollow victory'. The Thatcher government did not break with a past of consensual government but with 'some of the practices of the post-war period'. The actual analysis of the Thatcher administrations is marked by such an open hostility that its credibility is sadly undermined.