Britannia’s Burden: the Political Evolution of Modern Britain 1951-1990
Bernard Porter
Edward Arnold, London, 1994.
Bernard Porter’s latest is a Marxist text-book. However it is Marxism with a difference. There is no happy ending nor even the promise of one. The argument is serious and absorbing. It does not observe the normal conventions of blandness and controversy-avoidness which characterise many works at this level. A summary will demonstrate why.
Porter starts with the Great Exhibition of 1851. This, he points out, was seen at the time and has generally been been regarded since, as marking the apogee of British power and influence in the world. But for Porter mid-Victorian capitalism was full of contradictions which Britain escaped from only by embracing social reform and paternalistic imperialism. Then the empire vanished in the generation after 1950 and paternalism duly faded from the political agenda. As the rationale for interventionism thus disappeared so the debt of the modern Right to Gladstonian faith in personal thrift, free enterprise, unfettered markets and minimal government became increasingly obvious.
Conservatism’s embrace of radical liberalism heralded the collapse of the 1945 consensus which had built the welfare state and sustained full employment. By 1979 Labour’s defence of the post-war order had become hopeless in the face of both historical forces beyond its control and its own contradictions. Not just economic planning but Keynesian demand management was proving impossible in the face of capital’s rapid internationalisation, while trade union willingness to accept stagnant or even falling living standards in the cause of high employment had obviously evaporated. So after 1979 there was indeed ‘no alternative’ to a reassertion of laissez faire, pursued with zeal by Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher sought to recreate the liberal synthesis of free markets, liberty and greatness which (she believed) had characterised Britain in 1851. Yet this could not be done. Economic liberalisation, if anything, accelerated industrial decline and precipitated an unsustainable credit boom, leading to a slump. Meanwhile left-wing resistance to Thatcherism, particularly at the level of trade unions and local authorities, pushed the government into increasingly centralising and authoritarian policies. Thatcher finally fell by the wayside in 1990, unseated by the contradictions of her own ideology, particularly over European integration, and by the idiocies of the poll tax. Yet no new politico-economic strategy appeared and the defenceless British economy continued to receive a buffeting from international capital, bringing to its people increasing insecurity, immiseration and social disintegration.
The parapolitical dimension
The first point that has to be made is that this book is a good read. Porter has the gift of explaining complex events and ideas in simple language. There are sharp pen-pictures of the politicians who have dominated the period. The author is one of the first historians to acknowledge the parapolitical dimension in modern British history, from the formation of the Special Branch to the construction of the new MI6 headquarters over a century later. This is allied to a perception that covert forces, including in the 1970s the CIA, have generally worked to protect the interests of property and capital when these have been (or are imagined to have been) under threat from the Left. Notable examples are the anti-Bolshevik panics of the 1920s, the attempted destabilisation of Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s, and the surveillance of trade unionists (notably the striking miners) in the 1980s. This is an important historiographic breakthrough which Porter, in view of his previous works, is ideally placed to have made. (1) There are plenty of works detailing the activities of the security and intelligence services and their allies in the Forces, in the City and in industry at key moments in the development of contemporary Britain, but most of these are specialised studies whose findings have, as a rule, not yet percolated to the narrative of mainstream text-book read by today’s student. (2) If this book’s integration of the parapolitical into the mainstream sets a trend for the future, orthodox readings of modern British history might (with luck) be transformed during the next generation.
Core institutional nexus
None of this means that the argument convinces all the time. Its weaknesses stem from Porter’s analysis of the modern British Right, which he fails to connect to centres of political-economic power within the Treasury, the City and the Bank of England. There is a fair sized collection of material which analyses British development in the context of a split between the two fractions of capital, one linked to finance and services, centred on the City of London, and one linked to industrial production. On the whole it has been the former, connected to centres of power within the Treasury, Bank of England and the City, which has made the deeper impression on the history of modern Britain. (3)
Porter seems to be unaware of the literature concerning the role of what has been called the ‘core institutional nexus’. So he can argue that the Conservative Party’s right turn in the 1970s was a function of disappearing paternalism, a product in turn of decolonisation. This very sweeping post hoc ergo propter hoc argument is based on the highly individual career of Enoch Powell, an imperialist who turned to the free market when he realised India could not be reconquered. But would it not have been more plausible to make the case that modern Toryism was only occasionally interventionist and consensual in the first place? The half-hearted flirtation with planning in 1962-64 and Heath’s corporatist experiment a decade a later were deviations from a liberal norm. Given Toryism’s connections, by birth, marriage, inheritance and education, with the core institutional nexus, it was logical for the Party to prioritise the interests of the fraction of capital linked to finance and services. The pursuit of low inflation, open trade and the world-wide convertibility of sterling took precedence over the achievement of economic growth and employment. Of course the Conservatives did take a centrist, welfarist path in the 1950s – but this masked their determination to deregulate the external sector of the economy and liberate sterling from the system of controls which had helped Labour keep full employment and cheap money going after 1945. ‘Butskellism’ was nowhere near as consensual as Porter makes out, but its potential divisiveness was disguised by an international economic boom (and very favourable terms of trade) which arguably made the period 1952-55 the most trouble-free in Britain’s post 1914 economic history. (4)
The superficiality of the Tory commitment to the mixed economy became obvious in the 1970s. After 1974 it was increasingly apparent that reconciling low inflation with growth and full employment required an interventionist macroeconomic package centring on controls over the banking system, a policy for prices, wages and dividends and a dirigist approach to industrial policy of the kind familiar in France and, to a lesser degree, in Japan. Although opposed to some of the more radical plans of the Labour Left, industrialists collaborated with the Goverment through the NEDC and the ‘little Neddies’ established with a view to increasing the productivity of British firms. However, Labour’s tentative measures were enough to provoke ferocious opposition on the part of the City and some multinationals on the grounds that Britain was being herded down the road to East European style socialism. This hysteria fed a moral panic on the part of small scale property owners who came to form the bedrock of Thatcherism’s popular constituency over the subsequent fifteen years. consensus was abandoned in favour of a radical free market agenda whose project was to make the future of capitalism in Britain completely secure. The task could only be achieved by a deregulation so thoroughgoing that the collectivist tide would be rolled back to where it had stood a century earlier.
And what if…?
Was it all inevitable, as Porter’s thesis implies? Probably not: the outcome was one of two or three possible at the end of the 1970s. For example (as Porter acknowledges) Labour’s position in 1978 looked good. An October election was expected and Callaghan would in all probability have won it (narrowly no doubt). What would have happened to Thatcher in these circumstances? Would the free market agenda have survived such a defeat? Or would the Tory Party have embraced a Heathite Europeanism after an acrimonious quarrel whose impact, together with North Sea oil revenues, would have kept it out of power for much of the 1980s? This is not to deny the influence of freer international capital movements in the deregulatory climate of the 1980s (a development given a significant twist by Britain’s abandonment of exchange controls in 1979). But the policy differences between a post 1978 Labour government and the Conservatives after 1979 would have been profound. There would have been no wholesale liberalisation of the financial system, no regressive redistribution of income, little privatisation and no abandonment of tripartite planning (despite the difficulties involved). And would Labour have helped the Tories by splitting in 1982? 1964, 1966, 1974, 1978 – five electoral victories for the Centre-Left: how would the core institutional nexus have survived in a politico-economic climate which would have seemed so firmly committed to corporatism and political consensus?
It is also too simple to argue, as Porter does, that the electoral shift of the late 1970s was a natural by-product of the affluent society. The political consequences of personal wealth may well have helped a party committed to radical individualism – but they did so in England, where the historic power of the City and its interconnections with the land had long generated a cultural discourse in which property ownership was identified with liberty, independence, security and opportunity. Of course religious nonconfirmity, expressed in the doctrine that God helps those who help themselves, had a part to play, as Thatcher’s career demonstrated. Yet the same dissenting movements did not reinforce individualism as a popular culture in Wales or Scotland in the years after 1979. There, the age of affluence notwithstanding, the heritage of industry was expressed in a collectivist political tradition which stood the Labour Party in good stead as it withered in southern England. There was actually a pro-Labour swing of just about 1 per cent in 1979 throughout Scotland.
All this suggests a country whose political balance (and future) was a good deal more evenly poised than Porter allows for in his coverage of the 1970s and 1980s. This, in turn, implies that his version of Marxism, whereby the dystopia of the 1980s and 1990s is the logical outcome of forces at work since the 1850s, is in fact too determinist. Porter should be encouraged by this. He is clearly a humane and compassionate man driven to near despair by the course of British politics since 1979. The problem with his interpretation at a political (as opposed to historical and theoretical) level is its conduciveness to inaction and surrender. But another reading of British history over the same period would suggest that political intervention and activity in the cause of progressive change is not forlorn. Marx said:
Men make their own history, but not their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. (5)
In Porter’s interpretative sweep humanity appears almost completely at the mercy of uncontrollable economic forces. If Marx had believed this would he have bothered to co-author the Communist Manifesto or establish the First International?
Notes
- See Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State (London, 1987) and Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790-1988 (London, 1989).
- Thus Kenneth O. Morgan’s study, The People’s Peace 1945-1990 (Oxford, 1992), in many ways a fine book, barely refers to the plots against the Wilson Governments. Morgan discusses the Mountbatten incident but only on the basis of Cecil King’s diaries. There is no reference to the work of Dorril and Ramsay (Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, London 1991), of David Leigh (The Wilson Plot, London 1988), or of Paul Foot (Who Framed Colin Wallace?, London 1988). Smear! might have appeared too late for Morgan to take account of; the same cannot be said for the other works.
- See, for example, Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain (2nd edition, London 1981); John Scott, The Upper Classes: Property and Privilege in Britain (London, 1982); Geoffrey Ingham, Capitalism Divided? The City and Industry in British Social Development (London, 1984); Scott Newton and Dilwyn Porter, Modernization Frustrated: the Politics of Industrial Decline in Britain Since 1900 (London 1988); and P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism I: Innovation and Expansion 1688-1914 (London 1993) and British Imperialism II: Crisis and Deconstruction 1914-1990 (London 1993).
- See Newton and Porter, Modernisation Frustrated, chapter 5.
- From ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napolean’, in David Fernback (ed.) Surveys From Exile (London, 1973)