15
15
Social Democracy, Nationalism and Declinism
There is no more dangerous illusion than the comfortable doctrine that the world owes us a living. One of the dangers of the old-boy network approach to life is … that it is international, that whatever we do, whenever we run into trouble, we can always rely on a special relationship with someone or other to bail us out. From now on Britain will have just as much influence in the world as we can earn, as we can deserve. We have no accumulated reserves on which to live.
Harold Wilson, speech at Scarborough, 1963
the old idols of gentlemanly sloth and corpse-like ‘stability’ had to give way to the over-riding demands of one new, hard god: production. British capitalism, which had dominated the world without severing itself from a semi-feudal past, had now to come nakedly of age.
Tom Nairn, 19641
Our island is one of the very few provinces of Europe which has not in this century suffered from civil or international war upon its own soil; and which has escaped the consequences – gas chambers, ‘quisling’ regimes, partisan movements, terror and counter-terror – which have coloured the outlook of whole nations, East and West. It is very easy for us to fall into insular, parochial attitudes …
E. P. Thompson, 19572
Our jobs, our living standards, and the role of Britain in the World all depend on our ability to earn our living as a nation. That is why Britain has to pay her way in trade and transactions with the outside world. In the last financial year, 1969/70, our national surplus was £550 million – the largest we have ever had.
Now Britain’s Strong – Let’s Make It Great to Live In, Labour Party manifesto, 19703
It is telling that efforts to anatomize British power still evoke the cliché the ‘Establishment’. The term appeared, though perhaps not for the first time, in the Spectator in 1955 and became famous because of the furious reaction the article elicited. What was meant, and not meant, by the ‘Establishment’ provides a rich illustration of the limits of the concept. Anyone, wrote Henry Fairlie,
who has at any point been close to the exercise of power will know what I mean when I say that the ‘Establishment’ can be seen at work in the activities of, not only the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the chairman of the Arts Council, the Director-General of the BBC, and even the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter.
But this was about civic, public power; power over what was said, not what was done. The focus was on religion (an indicator that it was still important), royalty, the arts and letters. The cases he gave were the rallying around the Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, and a story of how Clement Attlee stopped a very mildly critical article by an MP about Princess Margaret.4 No doubt ideological power lay in such interconnected places, but in this account of the ‘Establishment’ there is no City, no military, no business, no United States, no science, no technology. It was hardly an analysis of who ran the United Kingdom, a question rarely addressed well, nor even who did the influential thinking. We are left with neither an account of the elite nor elite thought.
Histories of the ideas which animated political action in the United Kingdom after 1945 seem to imply that social democracy and/or liberalism dominated. Social democracy essentially means the policies of the Labour Party, understood as the creation of a welfare state, and an accommodation with capitalism. Historians of the left tend to favour liberalism, and make the point that British social democracy was but weakly developed. They might speak indeed of the myth of social democracy.5 This argument is essentially a liberal continuity thesis supported by references to the post-war ideas of two liberals, Keynes and Beveridge, the importance of Edwardian liberal innovations in welfare and of the supposed failure to transform the nature of the state and state intervention in the post-Second World War years. Both stories, as has already been suggested, are not only misleading in different ways, but also insufficient. This is not to say there were no liberal ideas in play – there certainly were – for example in the powerful arguments which seemed to explain why liberal conservatives and right social democrats sought the bracing competition and rational transnationalism of the Common Market. But these were far from the only ideas in play – we cannot usefully characterize British ideas as liberal and/or social democratic only.
Illustration 15.1: ‘The New Cabinet’, by Vicky. In the centre is Lord Hailsham. L to R, John Boyd-Orr, nutritionist, A. J. P. Taylor, historian, John Osborne, playwright, T. S. Eliot, poet, Edith Sitwell, poet, Malcolm Muggeridge, journalist, Bertrand Russell, philosopher, Victor Gollancz, publisher, Basil Liddell Hart, military intellectual, Kingsley Martin, journalist, and Vicky, cartoonist. (British Cartoon Archive VY1066 published 1958)
What is notable, or rather should be, is the post-war importance of critiques, often implicit, but deep and strong, of liberalism. These were certainly not only social democratic. In the years after 1950 especially the argument would repeatedly be made that the United Kingdom had not been Prussian enough, not continental enough, in terms of both the economy and military practice. These criticisms came from left and right. But we need to take note of the importance, subterranean as it often was, of British nationalism, and especially of its manifestation in history, policy and political economy.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
If liberalism and social democracy, like Keynesianism and the welfare state, won’t do as place holders for the key ideas and assumptions which shaped state and society, what, then, were they? Political economy is indeed central, but what kind of political economy? Was there, for example, a distinctive social democratic political economy?6 Or sociology? It is difficult indeed to find an economics which was distinctly social democratic, committed to the Labour Party, with a distinctive analysis of capitalism. There were powerful economists who advised prime ministers such as Sir Donald MacDougall, Sir Alec Cairncross, and Lords Roberthall, Balogh and Kaldor, but few if any had a distinctly social democratic outlook.7 Only the last two were brought in as political appointees, to Harold Wilson. Harold Wilson was himself an economist, but we have no study of what was distinctive about his economic thought beyond his commitment to planning, and his rejection of a policy of devaluation of sterling in 1964 (though he was forced to devalue in 1967). Wilson did, however, show a marked understanding of the need of government control over firms so that they would follow the national interest rather than their own interest.
Labour’s analysis of capitalism and that of Labour-sympathizing intellectuals was weak. Anthony Crosland’s Future of Socialism (1956) in essence argued that the class of capitalists that had ruled the world no longer existed. Individual capitalists had lost the power to control large enterprises, which were now in the hands of managers, not shareholders, and they were not concerned just with the pursuit of profit. As far as control of industry was concerned, the state had all the power it needed, and, furthermore, it was suggested, the new managerial controllers were not as averse as the old capitalists to working with the state. The problem was that this was supposition – the actual nature of the policies and programmes of enterprises was not discussed.8 Critics of Crosland did not get very far either. For the new left that emerged after 1956 analyses of the capitalists in particular was an urgent task in the light of Crosland’s revisionism. ‘Analysis of the power structure of British society … is thus the greatest present research need.’9 The aim was to show individual capitalist control, control over many firms by interlocking directorships and the links between finance and industry.
One looks in vain (until the 1970s) for an elaborated set of arguments from the left for alternative ways of running the economy to that practised by the Conservatives in the 1950s, except for making general arguments about planning and putting the interests of the nation first. What is harder still to find is anyone setting out a general case, and methods, for a new national calculus which would work out what was best for the nation in terms of both equity and efficiency. There were no distinctive criteria for nationalized industries, though they were nationalized on the basis that they should indeed be run on principles concerning their national importance. The government produced criteria which merely aped the profit criteria for private firms, which often made nationalized industries unprofitable when they did what they were supposed to do – behave differently from a private enterprise.10 This is not to say that nationalized industries and other state enterprises did not in fact operate to distinctly national and other criteria – they did, most notably in buying British and ignoring the costs of doing so – the point here is that these crucial issues were not the subject of sustained analysis on the left. To put it another way, the Labour Party generally relied on state experts rather than on its own, not just in matters of war, or research, but even in its own area of special concern, the nationalized industries. It did not have, as the much more politically marginal communist parties of France and Italy did, a cadre of intellectuals of renown developing party-specific positions. Indeed, the levels of political education within the Labour Party were notoriously low.
The exception that proves the rule is the economics and sociology of the welfare state. Here, there was a left tradition of investigation and policy prescription operating on assumptions as to what was best for the nation. For example, in criticizing the notion of the NHS as a cost to the individual through taxation, and private medicine as a saving to the taxpayer, one found the response that both private and public medicine cost the nation money, the issue was which system was more equitable and more efficient. The NHS could convincingly come out best on both grounds. Thus the National Health Service, it was argued, was a cheap as well as equitable way of providing the nation with the health care it might provide itself by less equitable and more expensive private means. Similarly, a national state pension scheme of a generous kind might well be the most efficient from a national point of view. The issue is whether one system of giving money to particular people was more efficient and equitable than another. Similarly, one finds objections to the idea that benefits were a cost and tax allowances a saving. After all, they are both transfers from a public pot to private individuals. The argument for child benefits was made on this basis. This was the sort of argument indeed put forward by the applied economists of the welfare state, who served on Royal Commissions and advised the Labour Party on the NHS and on pensions.11 It is crucial to note that, far from arguing from a Beveridgean consensus, they generally rejected Beveridge’s central policy, the flat-rate contribution and benefit.
This is not to say these were the only views on these matters, or that the only policies were those of the left. An assumption of uniformity of view, of experts in favour of the actually existing welfare state, is belied by a group of doctors and others who continued to oppose the NHS, including health economists, through the 1950s into the 1960s and 1970s.12 Much of the application of efficiency thinking to the NHS was the sort of work study and operational research already in use in government and industry to reduce costs.13
The extent to which professionals concerned with the state represented or pushed policy in a progressive direction remains open. The assumption that the state-connected professionals were of the left is based on the prior assumption that the state was overwhelmingly a welfare state.14 There were small numbers of lawyers, architects and sociologists concerned with welfare, from health, to labour law, to race relations, but whether the welfare state professionals were generally progressive has not been established. Taking a broader look at the experts connected to the state, not least the warfare state, suggests that this is far from a safe generalization.
The thesis of the left that British social democracy was weak is thus surely right. Where I think the argument goes wrong is in assuming that therefore liberalism triumphed or at least continued to have the dominant influence. There were alternatives to liberalism in the past, and in the present. In the past the dominant one was imperialism; after 1950 it was nationalism, which liberals had always regarded as a powerful anti-liberal view.
BRITISH NATIONALISM
Because British nationalism did not label itself as such, it has barely been noticed by historians, who might see in it only a residual imperialism and racism. It is recognized in the forms of anti-British nationalism such that nationalism in British history usually means Scottish and Welsh and Irish nationalism. British nationalism barely seems to exist at all, nor indeed does English nationalism. This tends to be associated with a very few figures – often no more than Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher.15 They were, however, not economic nationalists.
Yet British nationalism of the left did exist. As we have seen, it was manifest in many aspects of British life after 1945. It was a post-imperial nationalism, similar to the post-imperial nationalism of other parts of the British empire. It was not derivative from these other imperial nationalisms, as has been suggested.16 Indeed, on the left especially, but not exclusively, the failure to be national enough was seen as the central problem with the United Kingdom in the past, and into the present. As we have seen, during the war many communists and others on the left promoted a nationalist critique of British liberalism and imperialism. As I suggested in Part I, Labour could be seen as a nationalist party after 1945, indeed as the nationalist party. It put nation before class, it invoked national victories from the past, and not class victories (or defeats).17 It is not accidental that Labour prime ministers invoked the national interest again and again, nor was it a mere cliché.
As in the past and elsewhere, nationalism was important in the writing of history. The 1950s to the 1970s saw the writing of very national, though certainly not necessarily celebratory, accounts of recent British or English history. Histories typically ignored or downplayed the empire and abroad, telling a story of the coming-together of the British people. Just as Australian nationalists, long after the event, created national stories around ANZAC and Singapore, so post-war British nationalists chose 1940 as the moment in which the island nation discovered itself. Histories began to tell a national story in which ‘Britain stood alone’ in 1940, that is, the island nation stood alone. The war was given a national framing and was fought by a mobilization of the left and the people. The war was a good war, in its aims, and in that it was good for the people who fought it. What was to be regretted was that its progressive logic did not endure longer, that its promise was betrayed. The complex politics of history and memory projected a hoped-for national future onto the past (and especially 1940). Then it took that invented past for the actual past, so the future looks nostalgic.
A. J. P. Taylor’s English History 1914–1945, has as a key theme of the story of the Second World War that of a nation coming of age by looking to itself, by fighting a ‘people’s war’ in which the left was prominent. Success came from mobilizing the British people. Angus Calder in his People’s War also told a story of a nation, not an empire, which found its strength by turning inwards and binding together to create a successful national effort, led by the left. He celebrated national effort and exaggerated the extent to which the United Kingdom was cut off from the world. Calder and many other historians of the left take 1940 not 1945 as the key moment in which the new nation is born, making it clear that, although the nation is to be interpreted in terms of class, what was important was nation trumping class. That has proven a powerful historical argument, whatever its grasp on reality.18
The war came to be seen as the one moment in which the nation or perhaps just the elite could be raised from its lethargy, in a way post-war Labour governments, for example, could not. Where, say, the white heat of the 1960s failed, the wartime spirit had succeeded. A. J. P. Taylor insisted that it was the war which brought the British economy into the twentieth century. The communist historian Eric Hobsbawm saw it as the moment of national renewal and of technical advance, and the empire as hindrance. After 1940, the United Kingdom was turned ‘in the interests of survival, into the most state-planned and state-managed economy ever introduced outside a frankly socialist country’ in part because of ‘implicit political pressure of the working classes’.19 He also celebrated national agricultural production. That image of the war as the national and industrial moment of exception recurs in many more instances.20 He and others developed the genuinely national critique in which internationalist British capitalism failed, except in the moment it was national, taken to be the Second World War.
It is notable that the right did not write histories of the nation at war. Winston Churchill wrote a semi-official history of the war in its entirety, not just the role of the United Kingdom, or even that of the British empire. If anything, its focus was on the Anglo-American alliance. Historians of the right have followed him in telling stories of the Second World War as a whole rather than specifically writing about the British experience. Histories of the fighting British empire did not appear until the twenty-first century.21 It is indeed worth noting the absence of imperialist (rather than imperial) histories of the twentieth-century United Kingdom, and the few that are supportive of the British empire write from a liberal point of view portraying the empire as diffuser of trade and enlightenment, rather than as a trading bloc or the basis of military power.22 The reason is perhaps obvious – there were bigger fish to fry in the Cold War – and the US alliance was central. Imperialism was a fringe activity confined to private spaces. One of the spaces it can be found hinted at is in the suggestions by some historians that it would have been better to do a deal with Hitler in 1940, and thus have preserved a powerful empire. Churchill discovered the reality of British weakness and made it worse by fighting the war. By 1945 the empire was finished, the UK depended on the USA, a Labour government was in power, and the USSR dominated half of Europe: 1945 was ‘the end of glory’.23
The left’s critical nationalism had a core weakness. It had no analysis of the local British elite, relying as it did on the idea of a non-national British elite. The nationalism of the left in particular helps explain the failure to actively criticize the actual policies and practices of the British elite, except where they are seen as the stooges of foreigners: Americans, the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’ (that is, Swiss bankers) or later the bureaucrats of Brussels. In nationalist left fantasies the United Kingdom was militaristic because it sold out to the USA, capitalist because it was in hock to American business, or the high authorities of the Common Market. It also helps explain the lack of an alternative theory of society, the constant invocation of the nation, the admiration for British forms and the explanation of weakness in national terms. It was also weak in that it could not beat the Conservatives when it came to claiming the imagery of the nation. Thus nationalism remained, as Tom Nairn suggested, focused on the symbolism of monarchy, armed forces, parliament – on mystificatory forms rather than on possibilities of popular mobilization.24
DECLINISM
There was, however, one very important nationalist critique of the British elite. The failure of the national elite was central to the failure of national will, the failure that led to what was seen as ‘decline’. Declinism may be defined as the explanation of relative decline, by what is taken to be national failings. The most notable exponent of this sort of analysis was Correlli Barnett, writing from the 1960s. He argued that the British nation was not nationalist enough, too militarily weak, too geared to abroad. Empire was a drain on national power. The United Kingdom should have been more like Germany – more national, more militarist, more scientific, less imperial, naval and liberal. Correlli Barnett created a negative, inverted story in which in the Second World War the United Kingdom did not mobilize nationally but became dependent on the USA.25 Weakened and distracted by empire, it was saved in 1940 by the United States and became its pensioner during the war. Such theses later found strong echoes on the left. In 1991 Angus Calder was to argue that the whole myth of the Blitz was designed to cover up that momentous transfer of power to the US in 1940.26
For the nationalist left the empire and British internationalist capitalism were also a central cause of decline. Empire (allegedly) gave the United Kingdom protected markets for low-quality manufacturers, provided prestigious careers which drew the elite away from industry and led to wasteful warlike expenditure of the wrong sort. Empire cushioned the United Kingdom from the realities of the cruel real world for too long and gave an old ruling class prestige and power they would otherwise have lost. Investments overseas, a distinctive feature of British capitalism, required a payback, which came in the form of imports, undermining the national economy.27 These were central arguments of post-war nationalist histories, as they were of nationalist political economy earlier. Declinism, a central feature of intellectual discourse from the 1950s into the 1990s, was a very important expression of anti-imperialist, anti-liberal nationalism.28
Declinism arose from a sense that the nation was weakening relative to other nations, expressed, for example, in the number of national comparative statistics which emerged in the 1950s. The central observation was that the British nation was not growing as fast as others. The new league tables of rates of growth of GDP had the United Kingdom as a straggler. As a result of low relative (but high absolute) rates of growth the British economy was shrinking relative to the world economy as a whole, and others were thus grabbing larger shares of world production and indeed trade. Low relative rates of growth got confused with low efficiency. Within the nationalist frame this was interpreted as national failure due to national failings. The key failure according to declinist analyses was that the United Kingdom was, and had not been, national enough in its capitalism, in its elite. Fix those national failings, the implication went, and the United Kingdom would once again be a top dog.
An internationalist framing would note that the United Kingdom was bound to weaken relative to other powers, as they became more successful. That was to be expected and welcomed in any internationalist calculus of well-being, in which everyone was getting richer, and the poor faster than the richer. It would also have led to the conclusion that even if the UK had the most efficient workers, the most ruthless entrepreneurs, the most inventive engineers, it would still have declined relatively. It could only have been avoided if, say, places like Germany and Japan had been turned into poor agricultural countries and the Soviet Union bombed out of existence.
Declinism has to be seen as the unwitting last refuge of great power delusions. Indeed, the very centrality of declinism, while it insisted on decline, was evidence of unwillingness to come to terms with its reality, taking solace in the idea that it might be reversed. Declinism was, paradoxically, a reason why the UK has not been able to adjust to inevitable, and welcome, relative decline. It is useful to think of it partly as a response to an elite that was shamed by Suez, as part also of the anti-deferential mood of the 1960s; and also something which affected policy by undermining the confidence of the elite, not least with respect to the Common Market.29 It was a common declinist theme that empire had been and continued to be too important in the political imagination, that too much attention was granted to the maintenance of sterling, and defence expenditure.30 Yet it was also a form of jingoism, a delusion about inherent superiority, dressed up as critique.
Declinism was at the core of the early 1960s attack on the elite, understood as a political class, an economic class, a social elite. This went right across the political spectrum. These criticisms took a particularly rich form among left intellectuals, though it needs to be recognized that it came in many ideological varieties. Thus Eric Hobsbawm in his widely read Industry and Empire (1968) claimed that British industry, formed in the ‘archaic phase of industrialization’, had not needed much in the way of science, and as a result the new sciences and technologies of the late nineteenth century, these ‘winds of change … grew sluggish’ as they crossed the Channel.31 British scientific and technical education was in this and so many other accounts, negligible. Hobsbawm saw economic decline as a palpable fact in the interwar years. There was a move to larger firms, but merely a defensive anti-competitive one which did not improve the basic condition of the economy.32 Only the state promoted new techniques, for example, the jet and radar. Declinism was also central to the analysis of the British condition by the new left. In the early 1960s Tom Nairn could write: ‘As is well-known, every major index of economic development shows the inferiority of British capitalism to its main competitors.’33 The key idea was that the British elite was aristocratic, old-fashioned and inefficient; the industrial middle class had succumbed to the aristocracy; elite culture became fixated on the countryside and aristocratic rather than bourgeois virtues.34 This led to immobility, archaism, rigidity, crystallization, petrification, indeed ‘stale constipation and sedimentary ancestor-worship’.35 Perry Anderson dismissed the British intellectuals and technocrats as useless. He discounted the importance of British intellectual Marxism of the 1930s, which was, in his view, dominated by ‘poets and natural scientists – the two vocations most unsuited to effect any lasting transformation of British culture’. He went on: ‘where there was a bid to “apply” their formal beliefs, the outcome was frequently bad art and false science: at its worst the rhymes of Spender and the fantasies of Bernal’.36 For all this dismissal of British intellectual traditions, Anderson was a very British analyst of his time, reproducing in his own distinctive language the key theses of the declinists: ‘Today Britain stands revealed as a sclerosed, archaic society, trapped and burdened by its past successes.’ He claimed the causes were old: ‘under-investment at home, lagging technological innovation since the end of the last century’; the Treasury, after the City of London (the financial centre), was ‘the second great albatross round the neck of British economic growth’. The British state needed to be interventionist, technocratic, but all it offered was ‘universal dilettantism and anachronistic economic liberalism’, while the British educational system was only belatedly scientific. And so on and so forth.37 The key underlying point was that the elite was stuck in its Edwardian globalist liberal imperialism.
On the left the critique of British capitalism’s internationalism echoed left nationalist critiques in post-colonial contexts, where the lack of a national bourgeoisie, rather than a cosmopolitan one connected more to global capital than the nation, was the central element of ‘dependista’ political economy. The United Kingdom came to be written about as if it were Argentina. This sort of argument was to have especial prominence in the work of Scottish left-nationalists.38 The Scottish elite was by implication more industrial, more scientific, more democratic than the English, or at least had been.
Just as Anderson and Nairn’s arguments are not known for their declinism, not least because it was a commonplace, E. P. Thompson’s famous response, similarly, is not known for its anti-declinism, its invocation of the importance of science and political economy, or its hints at the significance of the warfare state.39 Thompson noted the ‘uncomfortable affinity of tone’ between the pronouncements of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn on the one hand and ‘the journalistic diagnosticians of the British malaise whom they profess to despise … Mr David Frost, Mr Shanks, and Comrade Anderson are saying different things but there is the same edge to the voice.’ Thompson worried that they all overlooked ‘certain strengths and humane traditions’ in Britain, but more importantly, in attacking what they saw as left-overs from Old Corruption, they were blind to the reality that a ‘new, and entirely different, predatory complex occupies the state’. He asked whether it was not to this new Thing of vast power and influence, ‘rather than to the hunting of an aristocratic Snark, that an analysis of the political formations of our time should be addressed?’40 Interestingly he did not give the Thing a more specifically modern name – nor indeed did he complain of a British military-industrial complex or a British warfare state; he had a wide and rather vague concept in mind. But there was an inkling here of something the rest of the left implicitly denied existed, except as yet another archaic remnant.
By framing decline in the way it did, declinism took to explaining what never happened with explanations which didn’t work. It sought to explain a supposed catastrophic failure, by invoking the power of finance, or the aristocracy or imperial thought, or literature, or the classics. All these explanations were blown up to monstrous proportions. The supposed lack of entrepreneurs, large corporations, research laboratories and technocrats that these explanations supposedly accounted for became deeply entrenched as authoritatively established historical reality. Thus, what should have been the most obvious features of twentieth-century British history were consigned to near non-existence. This itself may be seen as an exaggeration. But even an authoritative voice, Margaret Gowing, an official historian of the war economy and the British nuclear programme, could state in the 1970s that ‘My own research in atomic energy shows that at the end of the Second World War, which had strengthened British industry, the industrial base of scientific technology in Britain was extremely thin.’41 She was hardly alone in this kind of distorted account. Yet at most what any index of strength showed was that British capitalism was behind US capital and perhaps German capitalism, but that it was by most indicators one of the top three capitalisms in the world, with, one might add, a base of industrial scientific technology not much thinner than that of Germany or of the USA either.
Declinists managed the extraordinary feat of not seeing what one might have thought was in plain sight. But of course declinism was never merely descriptive, it was primarily prescriptive. To judge from its explanations of British failure and what it appeared to take to be the reasons for the success of the nations it compared the United Kingdom unfavourably with (Wilhelmine Germany was a favourite), its prescription was a strong technocratic state and economic nationalism. It is telling in this context that the early critics of declinism were typically economic liberals such as Lord Hailsham and Enoch Powell, and free-market-supporting US economic historians examining the British case.42
Historians, mostly still believing in decline, disputed particular explanations for it into the early 1990s. Thereafter, while declinism was discredited and assumed to have dissipated, its deep assumptions still lingered on, deeply embedded in the historical literature.
THE TECHNOCRATIC CRITIQUE
National declinism peddled the fanciful doctrine of the anti-technocratic British elite. In the British post-war case the discourse on experts was a very strange one (quite different from that in the USA). It insisted on the lack of significance of the expert in the United Kingdom, consequential low investment in innovation and all the rest. This was a very peculiar attempt to write out of history the actual experts who were in fact so central to British history. The denunciation was essentially that the elite was old-fashioned, trained in the wrong subjects, had the wrong attitudes – these criticisms applied particularly to the business, political and civil service elite, and it usually came from those with the background they themselves were criticizing – public school boys who studied arts subjects at Oxbridge. There was little original in the critique, but it was general from the 1960s onwards. It came from experts themselves, and their dismal failure to tell empirically coherent stories about themselves has seriously misled historians as to their significance.
One of the prime culprits was C. P. Snow, the scientist-novelist, in his Two Cultures lecture of 1959. Sir Charles Snow was a living refutation of his own thesis, as he was a major cultural figure of the 1950s and 1960s, who was a company director, was elevated to the peerage and had a position in government. He inherited the mantle of H. G. Wells as diagnostician, prophet, critic, politico and all-round sage.
His idea was simple, indeed simplistic. It was that British elite culture was peculiar in that it was particularly divided between the cultures of ‘science’ and of ‘literature’, and that these divisions were increasing. The scientists (academic physicists he meant) had the future in their bones, while the literary men, novelists and poets were ‘natural Luddites’, indeed proto-fascists. The former were to the left, and of more humble origin, than the literary types whose culture dominated the state. Questions of class, power and knowledge were mixed up with ignorant gusto. Snow’s thesis was taken as reportage from a man who was famed for understanding the elite, but it is laughably wrong.
The literary scholar F. R. Leavis attacked Snow’s childish fictions, from the perspective not of literature, but of the engaged and enraged intellectual. That such an intellectual nullity as Snow, wrong on literature, and on science, could be taken seriously in the modern metropolitan world of culture (he was the lead book reviewer for The Sunday Times) was for Leavis a sign of the corruption of that world. The significance of Snow was not what he said, but that he was granted enormous significance by the knowers and shakers of the modern United Kingdom, showing them up for what they were. Leavis’ potent attack has been disparaged for a lack of politesse, and as the predictable riposte from literature. But they were arguing about very different things. Snow was making a crass, historically ignorant plea for ‘science’, while Leavis was outraged that such tat could be taken seriously. Snow’s thesis would have been much more plausible had Leavis won the ideological battle, had we remembered Snow as the unfortunate victim of Leavis’s demolition, a minor Ludwig Feuerbach or Eugen Dühring (of whom we know only because they were the butt of theoretical abuse by Marx and Engels) of the British literary or perhaps scientific scene. But the point is that Leavis lost and knew he was losing. As a result we cannot escape repeated invocations of Snow’s thesis as if it described reality, or at least a serious basis for discussion, not just in the past but in the present.
Two Cultures, or rather the tradition it exemplified and sustained, is centrally about making the case for science, for action, for modernity. It does so by systematically downplaying the significance of what it supports. It sucks science, technology, modernity out of British history, leaving it over-populated with caricatures of literary intellectuals, anti-scientific mandarins and the like. While celebrating science it removes it from history except as the odd exception which proves the rule. It is what I have called an anti-history, forced to take out of history that which is central to it for the history to make sense. Alas Snow’s argument, though certainly not originally his, is found implicitly and explicitly in much writing about the United Kingdom, manifest in studies of the civil service which deal only with the administrative class and not the scientists and engineers, which treat universities as if they consist only of arts faculties, books as if they were all novels and science as if it were all academic physics. It is impossible to understand British knowing, the history of the universities and the history of education if one believes Snow to have been right, or simply shares his assumptions. Equally, it is impossible to understand the world of British ideas if one does not appreciate why such empirically dubious accounts could hold such sway in the world of ideas, and even affairs of state.
The Fulton Report of the 1960s provides an example. The philosopher John Fulton, vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex, chaired an inquiry into the civil service. It was set up in 1966, in the technocratic moment, and reported in 1968. It took up the classic long-standing technocratic critique of the civil service and made it official. Its structures were made, it claimed, in the nineteenth century, making it unfit for the twentieth; the key administrative class were ‘amateurs’ or ‘generalists’; they were too concerned with policy and incapable as ‘managers’; the divisions between classes, that is the separate hierarchies of administrators, scientists, engineers, lawyers, economists, prevented the professionals influencing policy, the domain of the administrators.
It was all very convincing within the intellectual frameworks of the time, and the civil service was interpreted as resisting the proposed reforms – not least the unified grading structure at the top, and the opening of all top jobs, in principle, to all professionals. The problem was that the report, and subsequent analysis, remained fixated on the administrative class and refused to recognize the enormous power and authority of the professionals. For it was they who were critical in pushing the grands projets of the post-war state, from nuclear weapons, to nuclear reactors, to Concorde, and all the other cases we have looked at. Many of these projects, especially in the 1960s, were run by joint teams of professionals and administrators, with the professionals very much in charge. It can be put this way – the standard account of the civil service focuses on the assistant, under-deputy and permanent secretaries – the administrators – and ignored the power and influence of the directors, directors-general and controllers – the professionals. There was a position called director-general Concorde, for example, filled by an engineer.43 There were controllers of guided weapons and the like. Indeed, in many ministries unified hierarchies long pre-dated Fulton, and this was especially true of the Ministry of Technology.44 Fulton suggested reforms which as far as the warfare state were concerned were redundant.
John Fulton was an example of an important new phenomenon, the academic taking on state roles and political roles. To be sure, some academics had been prominent as intellectuals before the war – men such as G. D. H. Cole, a reader in economics in Oxford from 1925 and the first Chichele professor of social and political theory (1944), and Professor Harold Laski of the London School of Economics. In Oxford Gilbert Murray, a liberal classicist, was a major public intellectual prominent in the League of Nations Union, as was, from Cambridge, the liberal conservative historian G. M. Trevelyan, author of the bestselling English Social History (1944). There were also a few academics who took on important advisory roles for government: for example, Sir William Beveridge, the LSE director in the 1930s, Sir Henry Tizard, the rector of Imperial College (1929–42), and John Maynard Keynes of Cambridge, though he was only a part-time don, best thought of as a London figure, a man who made himself independently very wealthy in order to enjoy metropolitan life to the full. During the Second World War many young and ambitious dons from across the system (though typically Oxbridge graduates) went into state service. The worlds of thought and action were peculiarly conjoined, which helped shape a future of close interconnection of state and university in the aid of a national project of reconstruction. Many of these men were to become great academic and state panjandrums. Oliver Franks, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, joined the ministry of supply as a principal, rising to become permanent secretary just after the war. Among his government work was an inquiry into the Falklands War of 1982. P. M. S. Blackett and Solly Zuckerman were academic scientists in and out of government. Senior academics chaired Royal Commissions: for example, the economist Lord Robbins looked into higher education and recommended its expansion in 1963. Academics, most of them scientists, chaired Royal Commissions on the press (1949), the civil service (1952–3), environmental pollution (1971–2011) and the National Health Service (1975–9). Thus it was that the chairman of the Royal Commission on broadcasting (1977), a historian of the British intellectual elite, could call the post-Second World War years ‘Our Age’.45
Where we find British technocrats is not in arguments celebrating them, extolling their achievements or even analysing their importance in business and the state. We find them complaining that they are not taken seriously, that they have no power, expressing Snow-like arguments. We find them everywhere. In his first speech as leader of the Labour Party in 1963 Harold Wilson claimed that ‘Those charged with the control of our affairs must be ready to think and to speak in the language or our scientific age.’ However, the standard declinist point was central. He said, indeed, that ‘for commanding heights of British industry today to be controlled by men whose only claim is their aristocratic connections or the power of inherited wealth or speculative finance’ was as irrelevant to the twentieth century as the purchase of commissions in the nineteenth. In ‘science and industry we are content to remain a nation of Gentlemen in a world of Players’. That is one reason the speech is important – it is a powerful instance of Wilson’s technocratic critique of the British business elite.
Yet it can be read another way. Wilson was one of the most technical of prime ministers, an economic historian and statistician, who had been a civil service professional, not an administrator. His father was an industrial chemist. His most famous speech has one of the most famous misquoted phrases in British political history – the white heat of the technological revolution. That speech was a celebration of the machine, of science. Wilson claimed that:
In all our plans for the future, we are re-defining and we are re-stating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution … the Britain to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry.
Social Democracy, Nationalism and Declinism
There is no more dangerous illusion than the comfortable doctrine that the world owes us a living. One of the dangers of the old-boy network approach to life is … that it is international, that whatever we do, whenever we run into trouble, we can always rely on a special relationship with someone or other to bail us out. From now on Britain will have just as much influence in the world as we can earn, as we can deserve. We have no accumulated reserves on which to live.
Harold Wilson, speech at Scarborough, 1963
the old idols of gentlemanly sloth and corpse-like ‘stability’ had to give way to the over-riding demands of one new, hard god: production. British capitalism, which had dominated the world without severing itself from a semi-feudal past, had now to come nakedly of age.
Tom Nairn, 19641
Our island is one of the very few provinces of Europe which has not in this century suffered from civil or international war upon its own soil; and which has escaped the consequences – gas chambers, ‘quisling’ regimes, partisan movements, terror and counter-terror – which have coloured the outlook of whole nations, East and West. It is very easy for us to fall into insular, parochial attitudes …
E. P. Thompson, 19572
Our jobs, our living standards, and the role of Britain in the World all depend on our ability to earn our living as a nation. That is why Britain has to pay her way in trade and transactions with the outside world. In the last financial year, 1969/70, our national surplus was £550 million – the largest we have ever had.
Now Britain’s Strong – Let’s Make It Great to Live In, Labour Party manifesto, 19703
It is telling that efforts to anatomize British power still evoke the cliché the ‘Establishment’. The term appeared, though perhaps not for the first time, in the Spectator in 1955 and became famous because of the furious reaction the article elicited. What was meant, and not meant, by the ‘Establishment’ provides a rich illustration of the limits of the concept. Anyone, wrote Henry Fairlie,
who has at any point been close to the exercise of power will know what I mean when I say that the ‘Establishment’ can be seen at work in the activities of, not only the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the chairman of the Arts Council, the Director-General of the BBC, and even the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter.
But this was about civic, public power; power over what was said, not what was done. The focus was on religion (an indicator that it was still important), royalty, the arts and letters. The cases he gave were the rallying around the Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, and a story of how Clement Attlee stopped a very mildly critical article by an MP about Princess Margaret.4 No doubt ideological power lay in such interconnected places, but in this account of the ‘Establishment’ there is no City, no military, no business, no United States, no science, no technology. It was hardly an analysis of who ran the United Kingdom, a question rarely addressed well, nor even who did the influential thinking. We are left with neither an account of the elite nor elite thought.
Histories of the ideas which animated political action in the United Kingdom after 1945 seem to imply that social democracy and/or liberalism dominated. Social democracy essentially means the policies of the Labour Party, understood as the creation of a welfare state, and an accommodation with capitalism. Historians of the left tend to favour liberalism, and make the point that British social democracy was but weakly developed. They might speak indeed of the myth of social democracy.5 This argument is essentially a liberal continuity thesis supported by references to the post-war ideas of two liberals, Keynes and Beveridge, the importance of Edwardian liberal innovations in welfare and of the supposed failure to transform the nature of the state and state intervention in the post-Second World War years. Both stories, as has already been suggested, are not only misleading in different ways, but also insufficient. This is not to say there were no liberal ideas in play – there certainly were – for example in the powerful arguments which seemed to explain why liberal conservatives and right social democrats sought the bracing competition and rational transnationalism of the Common Market. But these were far from the only ideas in play – we cannot usefully characterize British ideas as liberal and/or social democratic only.
Illustration 15.1: ‘The New Cabinet’, by Vicky. In the centre is Lord Hailsham. L to R, John Boyd-Orr, nutritionist, A. J. P. Taylor, historian, John Osborne, playwright, T. S. Eliot, poet, Edith Sitwell, poet, Malcolm Muggeridge, journalist, Bertrand Russell, philosopher, Victor Gollancz, publisher, Basil Liddell Hart, military intellectual, Kingsley Martin, journalist, and Vicky, cartoonist. (British Cartoon Archive VY1066 published 1958)
What is notable, or rather should be, is the post-war importance of critiques, often implicit, but deep and strong, of liberalism. These were certainly not only social democratic. In the years after 1950 especially the argument would repeatedly be made that the United Kingdom had not been Prussian enough, not continental enough, in terms of both the economy and military practice. These criticisms came from left and right. But we need to take note of the importance, subterranean as it often was, of British nationalism, and especially of its manifestation in history, policy and political economy.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
If liberalism and social democracy, like Keynesianism and the welfare state, won’t do as place holders for the key ideas and assumptions which shaped state and society, what, then, were they? Political economy is indeed central, but what kind of political economy? Was there, for example, a distinctive social democratic political economy?6 Or sociology? It is difficult indeed to find an economics which was distinctly social democratic, committed to the Labour Party, with a distinctive analysis of capitalism. There were powerful economists who advised prime ministers such as Sir Donald MacDougall, Sir Alec Cairncross, and Lords Roberthall, Balogh and Kaldor, but few if any had a distinctly social democratic outlook.7 Only the last two were brought in as political appointees, to Harold Wilson. Harold Wilson was himself an economist, but we have no study of what was distinctive about his economic thought beyond his commitment to planning, and his rejection of a policy of devaluation of sterling in 1964 (though he was forced to devalue in 1967). Wilson did, however, show a marked understanding of the need of government control over firms so that they would follow the national interest rather than their own interest.
Labour’s analysis of capitalism and that of Labour-sympathizing intellectuals was weak. Anthony Crosland’s Future of Socialism (1956) in essence argued that the class of capitalists that had ruled the world no longer existed. Individual capitalists had lost the power to control large enterprises, which were now in the hands of managers, not shareholders, and they were not concerned just with the pursuit of profit. As far as control of industry was concerned, the state had all the power it needed, and, furthermore, it was suggested, the new managerial controllers were not as averse as the old capitalists to working with the state. The problem was that this was supposition – the actual nature of the policies and programmes of enterprises was not discussed.8 Critics of Crosland did not get very far either. For the new left that emerged after 1956 analyses of the capitalists in particular was an urgent task in the light of Crosland’s revisionism. ‘Analysis of the power structure of British society … is thus the greatest present research need.’9 The aim was to show individual capitalist control, control over many firms by interlocking directorships and the links between finance and industry.
One looks in vain (until the 1970s) for an elaborated set of arguments from the left for alternative ways of running the economy to that practised by the Conservatives in the 1950s, except for making general arguments about planning and putting the interests of the nation first. What is harder still to find is anyone setting out a general case, and methods, for a new national calculus which would work out what was best for the nation in terms of both equity and efficiency. There were no distinctive criteria for nationalized industries, though they were nationalized on the basis that they should indeed be run on principles concerning their national importance. The government produced criteria which merely aped the profit criteria for private firms, which often made nationalized industries unprofitable when they did what they were supposed to do – behave differently from a private enterprise.10 This is not to say that nationalized industries and other state enterprises did not in fact operate to distinctly national and other criteria – they did, most notably in buying British and ignoring the costs of doing so – the point here is that these crucial issues were not the subject of sustained analysis on the left. To put it another way, the Labour Party generally relied on state experts rather than on its own, not just in matters of war, or research, but even in its own area of special concern, the nationalized industries. It did not have, as the much more politically marginal communist parties of France and Italy did, a cadre of intellectuals of renown developing party-specific positions. Indeed, the levels of political education within the Labour Party were notoriously low.
The exception that proves the rule is the economics and sociology of the welfare state. Here, there was a left tradition of investigation and policy prescription operating on assumptions as to what was best for the nation. For example, in criticizing the notion of the NHS as a cost to the individual through taxation, and private medicine as a saving to the taxpayer, one found the response that both private and public medicine cost the nation money, the issue was which system was more equitable and more efficient. The NHS could convincingly come out best on both grounds. Thus the National Health Service, it was argued, was a cheap as well as equitable way of providing the nation with the health care it might provide itself by less equitable and more expensive private means. Similarly, a national state pension scheme of a generous kind might well be the most efficient from a national point of view. The issue is whether one system of giving money to particular people was more efficient and equitable than another. Similarly, one finds objections to the idea that benefits were a cost and tax allowances a saving. After all, they are both transfers from a public pot to private individuals. The argument for child benefits was made on this basis. This was the sort of argument indeed put forward by the applied economists of the welfare state, who served on Royal Commissions and advised the Labour Party on the NHS and on pensions.11 It is crucial to note that, far from arguing from a Beveridgean consensus, they generally rejected Beveridge’s central policy, the flat-rate contribution and benefit.
This is not to say these were the only views on these matters, or that the only policies were those of the left. An assumption of uniformity of view, of experts in favour of the actually existing welfare state, is belied by a group of doctors and others who continued to oppose the NHS, including health economists, through the 1950s into the 1960s and 1970s.12 Much of the application of efficiency thinking to the NHS was the sort of work study and operational research already in use in government and industry to reduce costs.13
The extent to which professionals concerned with the state represented or pushed policy in a progressive direction remains open. The assumption that the state-connected professionals were of the left is based on the prior assumption that the state was overwhelmingly a welfare state.14 There were small numbers of lawyers, architects and sociologists concerned with welfare, from health, to labour law, to race relations, but whether the welfare state professionals were generally progressive has not been established. Taking a broader look at the experts connected to the state, not least the warfare state, suggests that this is far from a safe generalization.
The thesis of the left that British social democracy was weak is thus surely right. Where I think the argument goes wrong is in assuming that therefore liberalism triumphed or at least continued to have the dominant influence. There were alternatives to liberalism in the past, and in the present. In the past the dominant one was imperialism; after 1950 it was nationalism, which liberals had always regarded as a powerful anti-liberal view.
BRITISH NATIONALISM
Because British nationalism did not label itself as such, it has barely been noticed by historians, who might see in it only a residual imperialism and racism. It is recognized in the forms of anti-British nationalism such that nationalism in British history usually means Scottish and Welsh and Irish nationalism. British nationalism barely seems to exist at all, nor indeed does English nationalism. This tends to be associated with a very few figures – often no more than Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher.15 They were, however, not economic nationalists.
Yet British nationalism of the left did exist. As we have seen, it was manifest in many aspects of British life after 1945. It was a post-imperial nationalism, similar to the post-imperial nationalism of other parts of the British empire. It was not derivative from these other imperial nationalisms, as has been suggested.16 Indeed, on the left especially, but not exclusively, the failure to be national enough was seen as the central problem with the United Kingdom in the past, and into the present. As we have seen, during the war many communists and others on the left promoted a nationalist critique of British liberalism and imperialism. As I suggested in Part I, Labour could be seen as a nationalist party after 1945, indeed as the nationalist party. It put nation before class, it invoked national victories from the past, and not class victories (or defeats).17 It is not accidental that Labour prime ministers invoked the national interest again and again, nor was it a mere cliché.
As in the past and elsewhere, nationalism was important in the writing of history. The 1950s to the 1970s saw the writing of very national, though certainly not necessarily celebratory, accounts of recent British or English history. Histories typically ignored or downplayed the empire and abroad, telling a story of the coming-together of the British people. Just as Australian nationalists, long after the event, created national stories around ANZAC and Singapore, so post-war British nationalists chose 1940 as the moment in which the island nation discovered itself. Histories began to tell a national story in which ‘Britain stood alone’ in 1940, that is, the island nation stood alone. The war was given a national framing and was fought by a mobilization of the left and the people. The war was a good war, in its aims, and in that it was good for the people who fought it. What was to be regretted was that its progressive logic did not endure longer, that its promise was betrayed. The complex politics of history and memory projected a hoped-for national future onto the past (and especially 1940). Then it took that invented past for the actual past, so the future looks nostalgic.
A. J. P. Taylor’s English History 1914–1945, has as a key theme of the story of the Second World War that of a nation coming of age by looking to itself, by fighting a ‘people’s war’ in which the left was prominent. Success came from mobilizing the British people. Angus Calder in his People’s War also told a story of a nation, not an empire, which found its strength by turning inwards and binding together to create a successful national effort, led by the left. He celebrated national effort and exaggerated the extent to which the United Kingdom was cut off from the world. Calder and many other historians of the left take 1940 not 1945 as the key moment in which the new nation is born, making it clear that, although the nation is to be interpreted in terms of class, what was important was nation trumping class. That has proven a powerful historical argument, whatever its grasp on reality.18
The war came to be seen as the one moment in which the nation or perhaps just the elite could be raised from its lethargy, in a way post-war Labour governments, for example, could not. Where, say, the white heat of the 1960s failed, the wartime spirit had succeeded. A. J. P. Taylor insisted that it was the war which brought the British economy into the twentieth century. The communist historian Eric Hobsbawm saw it as the moment of national renewal and of technical advance, and the empire as hindrance. After 1940, the United Kingdom was turned ‘in the interests of survival, into the most state-planned and state-managed economy ever introduced outside a frankly socialist country’ in part because of ‘implicit political pressure of the working classes’.19 He also celebrated national agricultural production. That image of the war as the national and industrial moment of exception recurs in many more instances.20 He and others developed the genuinely national critique in which internationalist British capitalism failed, except in the moment it was national, taken to be the Second World War.
It is notable that the right did not write histories of the nation at war. Winston Churchill wrote a semi-official history of the war in its entirety, not just the role of the United Kingdom, or even that of the British empire. If anything, its focus was on the Anglo-American alliance. Historians of the right have followed him in telling stories of the Second World War as a whole rather than specifically writing about the British experience. Histories of the fighting British empire did not appear until the twenty-first century.21 It is indeed worth noting the absence of imperialist (rather than imperial) histories of the twentieth-century United Kingdom, and the few that are supportive of the British empire write from a liberal point of view portraying the empire as diffuser of trade and enlightenment, rather than as a trading bloc or the basis of military power.22 The reason is perhaps obvious – there were bigger fish to fry in the Cold War – and the US alliance was central. Imperialism was a fringe activity confined to private spaces. One of the spaces it can be found hinted at is in the suggestions by some historians that it would have been better to do a deal with Hitler in 1940, and thus have preserved a powerful empire. Churchill discovered the reality of British weakness and made it worse by fighting the war. By 1945 the empire was finished, the UK depended on the USA, a Labour government was in power, and the USSR dominated half of Europe: 1945 was ‘the end of glory’.23
The left’s critical nationalism had a core weakness. It had no analysis of the local British elite, relying as it did on the idea of a non-national British elite. The nationalism of the left in particular helps explain the failure to actively criticize the actual policies and practices of the British elite, except where they are seen as the stooges of foreigners: Americans, the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’ (that is, Swiss bankers) or later the bureaucrats of Brussels. In nationalist left fantasies the United Kingdom was militaristic because it sold out to the USA, capitalist because it was in hock to American business, or the high authorities of the Common Market. It also helps explain the lack of an alternative theory of society, the constant invocation of the nation, the admiration for British forms and the explanation of weakness in national terms. It was also weak in that it could not beat the Conservatives when it came to claiming the imagery of the nation. Thus nationalism remained, as Tom Nairn suggested, focused on the symbolism of monarchy, armed forces, parliament – on mystificatory forms rather than on possibilities of popular mobilization.24
DECLINISM
There was, however, one very important nationalist critique of the British elite. The failure of the national elite was central to the failure of national will, the failure that led to what was seen as ‘decline’. Declinism may be defined as the explanation of relative decline, by what is taken to be national failings. The most notable exponent of this sort of analysis was Correlli Barnett, writing from the 1960s. He argued that the British nation was not nationalist enough, too militarily weak, too geared to abroad. Empire was a drain on national power. The United Kingdom should have been more like Germany – more national, more militarist, more scientific, less imperial, naval and liberal. Correlli Barnett created a negative, inverted story in which in the Second World War the United Kingdom did not mobilize nationally but became dependent on the USA.25 Weakened and distracted by empire, it was saved in 1940 by the United States and became its pensioner during the war. Such theses later found strong echoes on the left. In 1991 Angus Calder was to argue that the whole myth of the Blitz was designed to cover up that momentous transfer of power to the US in 1940.26
For the nationalist left the empire and British internationalist capitalism were also a central cause of decline. Empire (allegedly) gave the United Kingdom protected markets for low-quality manufacturers, provided prestigious careers which drew the elite away from industry and led to wasteful warlike expenditure of the wrong sort. Empire cushioned the United Kingdom from the realities of the cruel real world for too long and gave an old ruling class prestige and power they would otherwise have lost. Investments overseas, a distinctive feature of British capitalism, required a payback, which came in the form of imports, undermining the national economy.27 These were central arguments of post-war nationalist histories, as they were of nationalist political economy earlier. Declinism, a central feature of intellectual discourse from the 1950s into the 1990s, was a very important expression of anti-imperialist, anti-liberal nationalism.28
Declinism arose from a sense that the nation was weakening relative to other nations, expressed, for example, in the number of national comparative statistics which emerged in the 1950s. The central observation was that the British nation was not growing as fast as others. The new league tables of rates of growth of GDP had the United Kingdom as a straggler. As a result of low relative (but high absolute) rates of growth the British economy was shrinking relative to the world economy as a whole, and others were thus grabbing larger shares of world production and indeed trade. Low relative rates of growth got confused with low efficiency. Within the nationalist frame this was interpreted as national failure due to national failings. The key failure according to declinist analyses was that the United Kingdom was, and had not been, national enough in its capitalism, in its elite. Fix those national failings, the implication went, and the United Kingdom would once again be a top dog.
An internationalist framing would note that the United Kingdom was bound to weaken relative to other powers, as they became more successful. That was to be expected and welcomed in any internationalist calculus of well-being, in which everyone was getting richer, and the poor faster than the richer. It would also have led to the conclusion that even if the UK had the most efficient workers, the most ruthless entrepreneurs, the most inventive engineers, it would still have declined relatively. It could only have been avoided if, say, places like Germany and Japan had been turned into poor agricultural countries and the Soviet Union bombed out of existence.
Declinism has to be seen as the unwitting last refuge of great power delusions. Indeed, the very centrality of declinism, while it insisted on decline, was evidence of unwillingness to come to terms with its reality, taking solace in the idea that it might be reversed. Declinism was, paradoxically, a reason why the UK has not been able to adjust to inevitable, and welcome, relative decline. It is useful to think of it partly as a response to an elite that was shamed by Suez, as part also of the anti-deferential mood of the 1960s; and also something which affected policy by undermining the confidence of the elite, not least with respect to the Common Market.29 It was a common declinist theme that empire had been and continued to be too important in the political imagination, that too much attention was granted to the maintenance of sterling, and defence expenditure.30 Yet it was also a form of jingoism, a delusion about inherent superiority, dressed up as critique.
Declinism was at the core of the early 1960s attack on the elite, understood as a political class, an economic class, a social elite. This went right across the political spectrum. These criticisms took a particularly rich form among left intellectuals, though it needs to be recognized that it came in many ideological varieties. Thus Eric Hobsbawm in his widely read Industry and Empire (1968) claimed that British industry, formed in the ‘archaic phase of industrialization’, had not needed much in the way of science, and as a result the new sciences and technologies of the late nineteenth century, these ‘winds of change … grew sluggish’ as they crossed the Channel.31 British scientific and technical education was in this and so many other accounts, negligible. Hobsbawm saw economic decline as a palpable fact in the interwar years. There was a move to larger firms, but merely a defensive anti-competitive one which did not improve the basic condition of the economy.32 Only the state promoted new techniques, for example, the jet and radar. Declinism was also central to the analysis of the British condition by the new left. In the early 1960s Tom Nairn could write: ‘As is well-known, every major index of economic development shows the inferiority of British capitalism to its main competitors.’33 The key idea was that the British elite was aristocratic, old-fashioned and inefficient; the industrial middle class had succumbed to the aristocracy; elite culture became fixated on the countryside and aristocratic rather than bourgeois virtues.34 This led to immobility, archaism, rigidity, crystallization, petrification, indeed ‘stale constipation and sedimentary ancestor-worship’.35 Perry Anderson dismissed the British intellectuals and technocrats as useless. He discounted the importance of British intellectual Marxism of the 1930s, which was, in his view, dominated by ‘poets and natural scientists – the two vocations most unsuited to effect any lasting transformation of British culture’. He went on: ‘where there was a bid to “apply” their formal beliefs, the outcome was frequently bad art and false science: at its worst the rhymes of Spender and the fantasies of Bernal’.36 For all this dismissal of British intellectual traditions, Anderson was a very British analyst of his time, reproducing in his own distinctive language the key theses of the declinists: ‘Today Britain stands revealed as a sclerosed, archaic society, trapped and burdened by its past successes.’ He claimed the causes were old: ‘under-investment at home, lagging technological innovation since the end of the last century’; the Treasury, after the City of London (the financial centre), was ‘the second great albatross round the neck of British economic growth’. The British state needed to be interventionist, technocratic, but all it offered was ‘universal dilettantism and anachronistic economic liberalism’, while the British educational system was only belatedly scientific. And so on and so forth.37 The key underlying point was that the elite was stuck in its Edwardian globalist liberal imperialism.
On the left the critique of British capitalism’s internationalism echoed left nationalist critiques in post-colonial contexts, where the lack of a national bourgeoisie, rather than a cosmopolitan one connected more to global capital than the nation, was the central element of ‘dependista’ political economy. The United Kingdom came to be written about as if it were Argentina. This sort of argument was to have especial prominence in the work of Scottish left-nationalists.38 The Scottish elite was by implication more industrial, more scientific, more democratic than the English, or at least had been.
Just as Anderson and Nairn’s arguments are not known for their declinism, not least because it was a commonplace, E. P. Thompson’s famous response, similarly, is not known for its anti-declinism, its invocation of the importance of science and political economy, or its hints at the significance of the warfare state.39 Thompson noted the ‘uncomfortable affinity of tone’ between the pronouncements of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn on the one hand and ‘the journalistic diagnosticians of the British malaise whom they profess to despise … Mr David Frost, Mr Shanks, and Comrade Anderson are saying different things but there is the same edge to the voice.’ Thompson worried that they all overlooked ‘certain strengths and humane traditions’ in Britain, but more importantly, in attacking what they saw as left-overs from Old Corruption, they were blind to the reality that a ‘new, and entirely different, predatory complex occupies the state’. He asked whether it was not to this new Thing of vast power and influence, ‘rather than to the hunting of an aristocratic Snark, that an analysis of the political formations of our time should be addressed?’40 Interestingly he did not give the Thing a more specifically modern name – nor indeed did he complain of a British military-industrial complex or a British warfare state; he had a wide and rather vague concept in mind. But there was an inkling here of something the rest of the left implicitly denied existed, except as yet another archaic remnant.
By framing decline in the way it did, declinism took to explaining what never happened with explanations which didn’t work. It sought to explain a supposed catastrophic failure, by invoking the power of finance, or the aristocracy or imperial thought, or literature, or the classics. All these explanations were blown up to monstrous proportions. The supposed lack of entrepreneurs, large corporations, research laboratories and technocrats that these explanations supposedly accounted for became deeply entrenched as authoritatively established historical reality. Thus, what should have been the most obvious features of twentieth-century British history were consigned to near non-existence. This itself may be seen as an exaggeration. But even an authoritative voice, Margaret Gowing, an official historian of the war economy and the British nuclear programme, could state in the 1970s that ‘My own research in atomic energy shows that at the end of the Second World War, which had strengthened British industry, the industrial base of scientific technology in Britain was extremely thin.’41 She was hardly alone in this kind of distorted account. Yet at most what any index of strength showed was that British capitalism was behind US capital and perhaps German capitalism, but that it was by most indicators one of the top three capitalisms in the world, with, one might add, a base of industrial scientific technology not much thinner than that of Germany or of the USA either.
Declinists managed the extraordinary feat of not seeing what one might have thought was in plain sight. But of course declinism was never merely descriptive, it was primarily prescriptive. To judge from its explanations of British failure and what it appeared to take to be the reasons for the success of the nations it compared the United Kingdom unfavourably with (Wilhelmine Germany was a favourite), its prescription was a strong technocratic state and economic nationalism. It is telling in this context that the early critics of declinism were typically economic liberals such as Lord Hailsham and Enoch Powell, and free-market-supporting US economic historians examining the British case.42
Historians, mostly still believing in decline, disputed particular explanations for it into the early 1990s. Thereafter, while declinism was discredited and assumed to have dissipated, its deep assumptions still lingered on, deeply embedded in the historical literature.
THE TECHNOCRATIC CRITIQUE
National declinism peddled the fanciful doctrine of the anti-technocratic British elite. In the British post-war case the discourse on experts was a very strange one (quite different from that in the USA). It insisted on the lack of significance of the expert in the United Kingdom, consequential low investment in innovation and all the rest. This was a very peculiar attempt to write out of history the actual experts who were in fact so central to British history. The denunciation was essentially that the elite was old-fashioned, trained in the wrong subjects, had the wrong attitudes – these criticisms applied particularly to the business, political and civil service elite, and it usually came from those with the background they themselves were criticizing – public school boys who studied arts subjects at Oxbridge. There was little original in the critique, but it was general from the 1960s onwards. It came from experts themselves, and their dismal failure to tell empirically coherent stories about themselves has seriously misled historians as to their significance.
One of the prime culprits was C. P. Snow, the scientist-novelist, in his Two Cultures lecture of 1959. Sir Charles Snow was a living refutation of his own thesis, as he was a major cultural figure of the 1950s and 1960s, who was a company director, was elevated to the peerage and had a position in government. He inherited the mantle of H. G. Wells as diagnostician, prophet, critic, politico and all-round sage.
His idea was simple, indeed simplistic. It was that British elite culture was peculiar in that it was particularly divided between the cultures of ‘science’ and of ‘literature’, and that these divisions were increasing. The scientists (academic physicists he meant) had the future in their bones, while the literary men, novelists and poets were ‘natural Luddites’, indeed proto-fascists. The former were to the left, and of more humble origin, than the literary types whose culture dominated the state. Questions of class, power and knowledge were mixed up with ignorant gusto. Snow’s thesis was taken as reportage from a man who was famed for understanding the elite, but it is laughably wrong.
The literary scholar F. R. Leavis attacked Snow’s childish fictions, from the perspective not of literature, but of the engaged and enraged intellectual. That such an intellectual nullity as Snow, wrong on literature, and on science, could be taken seriously in the modern metropolitan world of culture (he was the lead book reviewer for The Sunday Times) was for Leavis a sign of the corruption of that world. The significance of Snow was not what he said, but that he was granted enormous significance by the knowers and shakers of the modern United Kingdom, showing them up for what they were. Leavis’ potent attack has been disparaged for a lack of politesse, and as the predictable riposte from literature. But they were arguing about very different things. Snow was making a crass, historically ignorant plea for ‘science’, while Leavis was outraged that such tat could be taken seriously. Snow’s thesis would have been much more plausible had Leavis won the ideological battle, had we remembered Snow as the unfortunate victim of Leavis’s demolition, a minor Ludwig Feuerbach or Eugen Dühring (of whom we know only because they were the butt of theoretical abuse by Marx and Engels) of the British literary or perhaps scientific scene. But the point is that Leavis lost and knew he was losing. As a result we cannot escape repeated invocations of Snow’s thesis as if it described reality, or at least a serious basis for discussion, not just in the past but in the present.
Two Cultures, or rather the tradition it exemplified and sustained, is centrally about making the case for science, for action, for modernity. It does so by systematically downplaying the significance of what it supports. It sucks science, technology, modernity out of British history, leaving it over-populated with caricatures of literary intellectuals, anti-scientific mandarins and the like. While celebrating science it removes it from history except as the odd exception which proves the rule. It is what I have called an anti-history, forced to take out of history that which is central to it for the history to make sense. Alas Snow’s argument, though certainly not originally his, is found implicitly and explicitly in much writing about the United Kingdom, manifest in studies of the civil service which deal only with the administrative class and not the scientists and engineers, which treat universities as if they consist only of arts faculties, books as if they were all novels and science as if it were all academic physics. It is impossible to understand British knowing, the history of the universities and the history of education if one believes Snow to have been right, or simply shares his assumptions. Equally, it is impossible to understand the world of British ideas if one does not appreciate why such empirically dubious accounts could hold such sway in the world of ideas, and even affairs of state.
The Fulton Report of the 1960s provides an example. The philosopher John Fulton, vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex, chaired an inquiry into the civil service. It was set up in 1966, in the technocratic moment, and reported in 1968. It took up the classic long-standing technocratic critique of the civil service and made it official. Its structures were made, it claimed, in the nineteenth century, making it unfit for the twentieth; the key administrative class were ‘amateurs’ or ‘generalists’; they were too concerned with policy and incapable as ‘managers’; the divisions between classes, that is the separate hierarchies of administrators, scientists, engineers, lawyers, economists, prevented the professionals influencing policy, the domain of the administrators.
It was all very convincing within the intellectual frameworks of the time, and the civil service was interpreted as resisting the proposed reforms – not least the unified grading structure at the top, and the opening of all top jobs, in principle, to all professionals. The problem was that the report, and subsequent analysis, remained fixated on the administrative class and refused to recognize the enormous power and authority of the professionals. For it was they who were critical in pushing the grands projets of the post-war state, from nuclear weapons, to nuclear reactors, to Concorde, and all the other cases we have looked at. Many of these projects, especially in the 1960s, were run by joint teams of professionals and administrators, with the professionals very much in charge. It can be put this way – the standard account of the civil service focuses on the assistant, under-deputy and permanent secretaries – the administrators – and ignored the power and influence of the directors, directors-general and controllers – the professionals. There was a position called director-general Concorde, for example, filled by an engineer.43 There were controllers of guided weapons and the like. Indeed, in many ministries unified hierarchies long pre-dated Fulton, and this was especially true of the Ministry of Technology.44 Fulton suggested reforms which as far as the warfare state were concerned were redundant.
John Fulton was an example of an important new phenomenon, the academic taking on state roles and political roles. To be sure, some academics had been prominent as intellectuals before the war – men such as G. D. H. Cole, a reader in economics in Oxford from 1925 and the first Chichele professor of social and political theory (1944), and Professor Harold Laski of the London School of Economics. In Oxford Gilbert Murray, a liberal classicist, was a major public intellectual prominent in the League of Nations Union, as was, from Cambridge, the liberal conservative historian G. M. Trevelyan, author of the bestselling English Social History (1944). There were also a few academics who took on important advisory roles for government: for example, Sir William Beveridge, the LSE director in the 1930s, Sir Henry Tizard, the rector of Imperial College (1929–42), and John Maynard Keynes of Cambridge, though he was only a part-time don, best thought of as a London figure, a man who made himself independently very wealthy in order to enjoy metropolitan life to the full. During the Second World War many young and ambitious dons from across the system (though typically Oxbridge graduates) went into state service. The worlds of thought and action were peculiarly conjoined, which helped shape a future of close interconnection of state and university in the aid of a national project of reconstruction. Many of these men were to become great academic and state panjandrums. Oliver Franks, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, joined the ministry of supply as a principal, rising to become permanent secretary just after the war. Among his government work was an inquiry into the Falklands War of 1982. P. M. S. Blackett and Solly Zuckerman were academic scientists in and out of government. Senior academics chaired Royal Commissions: for example, the economist Lord Robbins looked into higher education and recommended its expansion in 1963. Academics, most of them scientists, chaired Royal Commissions on the press (1949), the civil service (1952–3), environmental pollution (1971–2011) and the National Health Service (1975–9). Thus it was that the chairman of the Royal Commission on broadcasting (1977), a historian of the British intellectual elite, could call the post-Second World War years ‘Our Age’.45
Where we find British technocrats is not in arguments celebrating them, extolling their achievements or even analysing their importance in business and the state. We find them complaining that they are not taken seriously, that they have no power, expressing Snow-like arguments. We find them everywhere. In his first speech as leader of the Labour Party in 1963 Harold Wilson claimed that ‘Those charged with the control of our affairs must be ready to think and to speak in the language or our scientific age.’ However, the standard declinist point was central. He said, indeed, that ‘for commanding heights of British industry today to be controlled by men whose only claim is their aristocratic connections or the power of inherited wealth or speculative finance’ was as irrelevant to the twentieth century as the purchase of commissions in the nineteenth. In ‘science and industry we are content to remain a nation of Gentlemen in a world of Players’. That is one reason the speech is important – it is a powerful instance of Wilson’s technocratic critique of the British business elite.
Yet it can be read another way. Wilson was one of the most technical of prime ministers, an economic historian and statistician, who had been a civil service professional, not an administrator. His father was an industrial chemist. His most famous speech has one of the most famous misquoted phrases in British political history – the white heat of the technological revolution. That speech was a celebration of the machine, of science. Wilson claimed that:
In all our plans for the future, we are re-defining and we are re-stating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution … the Britain to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry.
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