Thatcherism and the Reinvention of Labour

Abstract

There is something of a vacuum at the heart of a theory of consensus when it is not related to political change. Malcolm Smith rightly suggests that of itself consensus as a concept may not demonstrate how it ‘is arrived at, the mechanism by which general agreement [his definition] is reached, or how general agreement changes over time, how resistant or alternative stances are incorporated into a new, replacement general agreement’.¹ Writing of the efforts of Conservative ministers to block certain Labour initiatives in social policy reform after 1942, Paul Addison suggests that they were ‘acting, nevertheless, in a field of force, created by Labour’.² Conservatives drew up plans for social reform that were ‘closer to Labour ideals than they were to the ideals of Neville Chamberlain’.³ The result of the return of the Conservatives to office after 1951 saw the collectivist advance of the 1940s stemmed but not reversed, and while the Churchill government may have gone some way to meeting the pledge to ‘set the people free’ by restoring some authority to market liberalism at the expense of collectivist planning, the Tory party stood on the right of the post-war political middle ground. Then, as now, political and ideological constraints determined what ministers as political actors could do.