As the waters of the South Atlantic continue to flow through Westminster the post-war social democratic consensus [illegible] a long time ago. Andrew Gamble looks at two new biographies and reflects on the reasons for its passing.
Susan Crosland: Tony Crosland, Cape 1982, £10.95, and Nigel Fisher: Harold Macmillan, Weidenfield 1982, £12.95.
[illegible] unusual British politicians because [illegible] advocates of planning in the 1930s, [illegible] were intellectuals (although Macmillan did his best to disguise the fact after 1945), and both became important ideologists for their parties. Both also attempted to carry through some of their ideas into practice in government. In contrast to so many British politicians both had a conscious ideological view of the world which guided their political judgements and political activity. They belonged to different political generations, different political parties and drew inspiration from different political traditions. Yet the similarity of their conclusions about how a modern capitalist society should be organised is striking.
To understand the ideological underpinnings of the post-war consensus a perusal of Macmillan's The Middle Way (1938) and Crosland's The Future of Socialism (1956) is indispensable. Both were at different times major figures in their parties and their ideas have had lasting political importance. Yet today the ideas and reputation of both men have suffered an eclipse. The post-war consensus in which both so passionately believed has been discredited and the demons of right and left which they thought they had locked away for ever are once more at large.
These two biographies are useful, if limited, studies of the two politicians. Of the two the Fisher book is less valuable. It is conventional in its judgements and adds very little to what is already known of Macmillan's career and his political views. Fisher is a Conservative MP, the biographer of Ian Macleod and very much within the Macmillan—Macleod—Heath tradition in the party. His biography does not probe very far into the interesting and unanswered questions about Macmillan's career but it provides a useful summary of it. Susan Crosland's biography of her late husband is altogether different. It is an extraordinarily vivid human portrait of Crosland as well as giving some fascinating details about the development of his ideas and the character of the Labour leadership. It is also worth reading in order to understand more about the origins and development of the Labour Right. It describes how far the original Gaitskellite group had fragmented by the time of Crosland's death in 1977, and will be an important point of reference for the understanding of Crosland's own political standpoint and the way in which his views developed.
The post-war consensus has often been referred to as 'Butskellism' because of the apparent similarity between Gaitskell's and Butler's policies when they were Chancellors of the Exchequer in the 1950s. But this is one of the least important aspects of the consensus. To understand what it was really about, Macmillan and Crosland are far better guides than Butler and Gaitskell. The consensus established in the 1940s was more than simple 'policy coincidence'. It represented an agreement on the fundamental priorities of policy between the two major parties, an acceptance of the new balance of political forces and the limits which that set to the debate on policy. One of the most important and least discussed of these fundamentals was foreign policy. Crosland may have been on the brink of joining the Communist Party in 1939 and Macmillan was favourably impressed, like so [illegible] its aftermath transformed perceptions of communism and brought the great bulk of Western political leaders to accept the inclusion of their countries in a political and economic bloc dominated by the United States.
The consensus on foreign policy was the basis on which arose the consensus on domestic policy between the leaders of the political parties. It was with this aspect of the consensus that Macmillan and Crosland are most associated. Macmillan in his premiership became preoccupied with foreign affairs while Crosland was appointed Foreign Secretary just before he died. But their writings are concerned overwhelmingly with the problem of managing the domestic economy. Mixed economy and managed economy are familiar euphemisms for the new economic order which emerged in the 1940s. For its advocates, like Macmillan and Crosland, it contained four main features: a) a productive sector which contained predominantly private owned companies but with a proportion of state owned firms — all of which however were subjected to market criteria and market sanctions; b) an extension of state regulation and surveillance of the economy to enable the state to assume 'strategic control' and so promote full employment and economic growth; c) an expansion of welfare and social programmes, to create more equal opportunities for all citizens and to provide a more flexible, more contented, and better trained labour force; d) the recognition of independent working class organisations and the need to involve their leadership in formulating and carrying out economic policy.
All these central features of British social democratic politics were anticipated and explicitly endorsed by Macmillan in his writings in the 1920s and 1930s. In a characteristic statement of his views he wrote: 'There are those great aims upon which Unionism must concentrate — the modernisation of our economic methods, the humanisation of our industrial relations, and the expansion of our foreign and primarily of our imperial markets.' The 'Middle Way' for Macmillan meant a middle way between socialism and 'unrestrained individualism'. What was needed was to bring economic life under conscious direction and control to cope with what Macmillan saw as the two greatest scars of the capitalist system and the greatest threats to its political stability — unemployment and poverty. In another early statement he argued that laissez-faire led 'inevitably to socialism'. The only anti-socialist programme that has any chance of success is the organisation of a social and industrial structure which shall be neither capitalist nor socialist but democratic; where the wage earner shall be neither slave nor tyrant, but truly and in the widest sense Partner'. Such opinions put him close to social imperialists like Leo Amery, as well as to some currents of progressive Liberal opinion, notably Keynes. Keynes wrote to him in the 1930s; 'My main feeling is that you are not nearly bold enough with your proposals for developing the investment functions of the state.'
Macmillan was an isolated figure in the Conservative Party in the 1920s and 1930s
Yet Macmillan was an isolated figure in the Conservative Party in the 1920s and 1930s. He never held office and apart from a group of younger MPs he lacked supporters. He was constantly abused in the Conservative press as a semi Socialist — the Daily Mail openly rejoiced when he lost his seat at Stockton in 1929. If they had had the prescience to brand him 'wet' they would have done so. His concern for unemployment and his preference for much greater state coordination of the economy led him to sympathise strongly with Mosley when Mosley resigned over unemployment in 1930, and for a time he did contemplate joining Mosley's new party.
The war economy and the post-war reconstruction created a major shift in the balance of political forces and for Macmillan a major political opportunity. Since the Conservative Party was not obliged to accommodate itself to the enhanced electoral and industrial power of organised labour, Macmillan could effortlessly emerge as an architect of the New Conservatism, offering good reasons for accepting the reforms and changes the party had to accept if it was to survive as a mass political force. The Conservatives' Industrial Charter of 1947 he wrote: 'proved our determination to maintain full employment, to sustain and improve the social services and to continue the strategic control of the economy in the hands of the Government, while preserving, wherever possible, the tactical function of private enterprise.'
This was where Crosland came in. Crosland's political generation inherited the social democratic order which was established in the 1940s. In the 1950s, with Labour out of office, Crosland began to reflect on the ways in which British capitalism had been transformed and to redefine the goals and means of socialist activity. He gloried in the title 'revisionist'. What he wanted to revise were the traditional socialist doctrines of the British Labour Party, particularly Marxism. When he was only 22 he had declared: 'I am revising Marxism and will emerge as the modern Bernstein'. The Marxism he wanted to reject was the British Marxism of the 1930s as represented in the writings of John Strachey and which had influenced prominent Labour Party intellectuals such as Harold Laski. He was consciously looking for an ideological basis for non-Marxists in the Labour Party other than straightforward pragmatism and opportunism. In the Future of Socialism he attempted to provide one.
First, he argued that the Marxist analysis was fatally flawed because the modern economy could no longer be described as capitalist. As a result of democratic pressures it had been transformed into an industrial society in which private ownership of the means of production was no longer important. This economy no longer had any inevitable tendency to collapse. On the contrary it could grow forever, due to the extension of state control and the new techniques of economic management at the state's disposal. For Crosland the managerial revolution combined with the achievement of full employment, the enlarged social welfare programmes, the nationalisation of key industries and the trade unions, had made the nature and distribution of economic power substantially different from what had existed in capitalist economies.
Underlying this account was Crosland's view of the pluralist nature of political power, hence the fundamental neutrality of the state and the technical and political possibilities of unlimited growth. In a well-known passage in the Future of Socialism he wrote: 'if socialists want bolder planning they must simply choose bolder Ministers'. It was central to his whole argument that if properly managed the capitalist economy could produce enough wealth to permit a steady expansion of social and welfare programmes without precipitating accelerating inflation.
Crosland argued that for socialists the fundamental goal was the creation of a classless, egalitarian society. The fault of many socialists for him was to mistake means for ends. Public ownership was only a means towards a classless society, which might or might not be appropriate depending on political circumstances. In the 1950s he decided it was not. By the 1970s he thought it might be again. The political programme he advanced was centred on how socialists could create a more egalitarian society in the post-capitalist industrial society which now existed and was still disfigured by gross inequalities. Crosland therefore became one of the leading advocates of a programme of modernisation in the 1960s. Modernisation involved better management of the economy to ensure faster growth and significant social reforms, particularly of the education system.
Crosland's ideas greatly influenced the New Britain programme on which Labour campaigned in the 1960s. More planning, more state involvement, more tripartism were seen as the means to remedy Britain's relative economic decline and provide the funds for the progressive social democratic policies Crosland wanted to see. The aspiration was widely shared, not least by Harold Macmillan who as Prime Minister after 1956 restrained the advocates of cautious deflationary policies and eventually committed his government to the launching of a wide-ranging strategy of modernisation.
Yet by 1974 Crosland could write in Socialism Now: 'Extreme class inequalities remain, poverty is far from eliminated, the economy is in a state of semi-permanent crisis and inflation is rampant. All this undoubtedly belies the relative optimism of The Future of Socialism...Do these setbacks to our hopes demonstrate that the revisionist analysis of means and ends was wrong, and the Marxist analysis which it sought to rebut was right?' He rejected his doubts. He argued that there was a crisis of British capitalism, but not a crisis of world capitalism. Growth had been interrupted by the oil crisis but would soon be resumed. Progress towards the kind of society he favoured had been hindered by policy mistakes — the failure to devalue in 1964 — and because British society 'slow-moving, rigid and class-ridden' had proved much harder to change than he had supposed.
Macmillan and Crosland were both involved theoretically and practically so closely with the social democratic consensus and the modernisation strategy that it is hardly surprising that both have come under such fierce attack in the 1970s. The Macmillan era is seen by Thatcherites as an era of appeasement when the Conservative Party failed to roll back socialism, reduce the size of the state sector, or confront the power of the unions. The result was to unleash forces which produced the great inflation of the 1960s and 1970s. In the Labour Party Crosland's ideas have been challenged by the Labour Left but also increasingly by his former colleagues on the Labour Right. Crosland had been one of the strongest of Gaitskell's supporters and helped to organise the Campaign for Democratic Socialism which was intended to resist any leftwing takeover of the party. Crosland's views at this time were clearcut. The problem as he saw it was that the Left in the Labour Party was too big. In a letter to Gaitskell which Susan Crosland quotes, he analyses the 81 votes Wilson received when he stood against Gaitskell. They included he argued: '20 hard-boiled extreme Left... this is the crucial group which must be expelled'. Another group was: '30 New Statesmen or ex-ILP.... Many of these are intolerable and neurotic people who will always oppose us, but who nevertheless belong in the party and if we could get rid of group c (ie the extreme Left) would constitute a perfectly normal Left Wing.' Crosland was very anxious that the Right should not be sustained by trade union bloc votes alone, but should secure a permanent majority in the PLP and in the constituency parties.
Gaitskell's early death blighted Crosland's immediate prospects in the party, but Crosland was not an unqualified supporter of Gaitskell. He doubted whether he was a 'sufficiently radical' leader for a left-wing party. Crosland's egalitarian principles as well as his growing ambitions in the party led to increasing distance between himself and other prominent figures on the Labour Right, particularly Roy Jenkins. Crosland refused to vote for British entry to the EEC in 1971 and resisted overtures from Jenkins to form a Centre-Right alliance in the party to seize control of it and purge the Left. Within the Labour Government after 1974 Crosland emerged as a strong critic of cuts in welfare programmes and education and he fought hard in Cabinet against the terms of the IMF loan in 1976. He never abandoned Keynesianism or his belief in the desirability of high public spending. What he disliked most about many on the Labour Right was the uncritical way in which they embraced what he called the 'new illiterate and reactionary attitude to public expenditure'. He had earlier commented on the Jenkins faction in the party: 'Their idea of socialism is not mine. Roy has come actually to dislike socialism.' At the time of the IMF crisis he noted that there were some Cabinet Ministers, notably Prentice and Dell, who opposed the terms of the loan because they did not think them tough enough.
There is little doubt what Crosland would have thought of the Thatcher Government or of the SDP. Since he had worked out his own ideological position he resisted all attacks upon it whether from Right or Left. Not much is left of the edifice he constructed and the consensus on economic management and the institutional organisation of the economy of which he so much approved has gone. The experience of the last two Labour governments and the world recession has not convinced many socialists that he was right. But at least his egalitarian principles remained intact and he remained committed to the politics of Labour and to arguing his case within the labour movement. Under the hammer blows of Thatcherism Crosland would have instinctively moved Left rather than Right.
Macmillan also has not attempted to conceal his distaste for monetarism or his despair at the re-emergence of mass unemployment. In 1958 he said: 'Everyone in this hall tonight who is more than twenty five years of age has actually lived in a period when there were 2½ million unemployed in this country.... As long as I live I can never forget the impoverishment and demoralisation which all this brought with it. I am determined, as far as it lies within human power, never to allow this shadow to fall again upon our country'. In 1982 there is little light left for this brand of Tory or Labour politics. It is a measure of the polarisation that has occurred and the seriousness of the crisis that the political positions of Macmillan and Crosland which once were so central and mainstream have now become so marginal. There is much to reflect on in these two books; not least the new character of Conservatism which Thatcherism expresses — the search for a new political programme and a new popular national majority. Macmillan's comments on his successors [illegible] brilliantly concise: 'Ted was a very good (pause). Not a leader (pause). Now you [illegible] real leader (long pause). Whether she [illegible] leading you in the right direction...'
ANDREW GAMBLE is the author of [illegible] in Decline, Papermac 1981.