No Turning Back

No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of PostWar Britain, by Paul Addison, Oxford University Press RRP£18.99, 352 pages

In his 1973 book Capitalism and the Permissive Society, the FT’s Samuel Brittan went way beyond budgets and deficits. Why, he asked, did the pro-market right persist in its dislike of social liberalism on the one hand, while the pro-permissive left persist in its dislike of economic liberalism on the other? Few others in the early 1970s were pondering the paradox, but the passage of time has amply vindicated Brittan in asking that searching question.

It is the subsequent triumph of the two liberalisms – economic and social – that lies at the heart of Paul Addison’s No Turning Back, a balanced, authoritative, deeply civilised survey of Britain between the landslides of Clement Attlee’s Old Labour in 1945 and Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997, with a brief coda on the dozen or so years since. An account of many merits, it falls some way short of being enthralling. There is little original research; there are too many dullish quotations by fellow historians; and the slight whiff of the textbook is enhanced by the paucity of memorable authorial asides, though Addison’s claim that Bernard Levin was George Orwell with a sense of humour provoked a splutter. No Turning Back, in short, fills an important gap, but occasionally one pines for the stimulating wilfulness of AN Wilson’s comparable Our Times.

Addison puts much stress on the failure of economic planning during the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the usual institutional suspects are present – including ill-focused politicians, complacent management and Luddite trade unions – but Addison’s master explanation seems to be the obstinate, deeply negative ubiquity of social class. “We can no longer accept the difference of status between the wage earner and the salary earner,” Harold Macmillan asserted as prime minister in 1962. But in a persuasive section about the “mirage” of a classless society, Addison shows how the new affluence of the working class hardly made a dent in accumulated resentments and self-perceptions. As for the visceral attitudes of management, the moustachioed Terry-Thomas said it all in the satirical film I’m All Right Jack as he looked down on marching workers below and observed with a sneer: “They’re the kind of people who don’t wear pyjamas in bed.”

Then of course came Margaret Thatcher, brutal de-industrialisation, the astonishingly rapid advance of the market and the end of some, but not all, of the old class certainties. Addison accepts that, in purely economic terms, Thatcherism was the medicine that Britain needed – the overdue passing of the free lunch – but he is notably circumspect about Thatcherite claims of an economic miracle. In particular, taking the 18 years (1979-1997) of Conservative rule as a whole, he notes that the annual rate of growth of 2.1 per cent was barely above that of France and actually below that of Germany, the United States and Japan. It is a point not often made by the school of forty-something Tory historians.

On the social side, Addison brings out with telling, sometimes personal testimony how profoundly conservative Britain was for many years, not least in attitudes to “the other”, whether immigrants, homosexuals or those just in some way disconcertingly different. Cultural habits remained entrenched. “Most of the men wear coats and ties, even in hot weather,” reported a visitor to the Lancashire resort of Morecambe in 1975. “Most of the women look dumpy, for Morecambe is not a weightwatchers’ town and thrives on chips, great meat pies, cream teas, sweets, and especially rock.” That same year Thatcher became Tory leader, and it is often forgotten how central to her initial appeal was a promise to turn back the clock to the 1950s, before the loss of authority and deference.

In the end, Thatcher’s economic liberalism – unleashing untold forces of change – trumped her social conservatism, and she lost the social battle. Not only could there be no return to a world before the major social reforms of the 1960s (abolition of capital punishment, legalisation of abortion and homosexuality), but a new, more chaotic world was rapidly emerging that, despite the subsequent best efforts of the New Labour nanny state, was more relaxed about personal behaviour. Indeed, it was a New Labour politician, Chris Smith, who revealed for the first time that it was possible to be an openly gay cabinet minister without the walls tumbling down.

Is there in 2010 really no turning back? Perhaps, yet it is hard not to sense a new impatience with the grotesquely inegalitarian consequences of the unfettered free market. Moreover, on the social side, there is no knowing what might be the consequences of a protracted spell of diminishing prosperity and rising unemployment. The unlovely human instinct for scapegoating “the other” may only be dormant.

David Kynaston is the author of ‘Family Britain, 1951-1957’ (Bloomsbury)