UK Tories don't lose their nerve, 1945

As it says on the tin. Let's say that the Tories don't panic and come to the conclusion that their loss was due to an excessively long incumbency, not because they governed conservatively prewar. Basically the "consensus" is stillborn. How do politics play out over the next few decades?
 

abc123

Banned
As it says on the tin. Let's say that the Tories don't panic and come to the conclusion that their loss was due to an excessively long incumbency, not because they governed conservatively prewar. Basically the "consensus" is stillborn. How do politics play out over the next few decades?

Very intresting.
But, do they get reelected in 1950 if they don't accept "consensus"?
:confused:
 
They get hit worse in 1950 than they did in 1945. Then they realise that people won't elect a party which is going to remove the NHS, and accept the consensus.

I wonder how British politics would be affected by another Attlee term (possibly two)?
 
They still would have to come up with an alternative vision for Britain, the pre-war model was clearly dead. The best way for them to hold their nerve is to limit Labour's majority in 1945. The fact that Labour won such an emphatic landslide made the Tories think that the only way back to power was to adopt just about all of Labour's agenda. With a narrow victory it's possible that Atlee's government could well have collapsed by it's mid term and if the Tories had produced "the vision thing," then they could have won the subsequent GE.

As to what happened next, it all depends on what they did. If they made the right calls then they could have been in power for a number of years afterwards. It's possible that a Tory government would have been more receptive to the formation of the ECSC as they wouldn't have been so worried about what the Durham Miners thought of it!

As I said on this evening's other thread I'm working on such a TL and I'll publish it if I ever get the time to finish it!
 
The NHS is not being repealed. However most of the rest is: most notably privatization ("denationalization" to use period lingo) of the nationalized industries, which should not be excessively controversial. Going by the maxim that governments defeat themselves, by 1950 Lab had become as bone-weary after 5 years as the Tories did after 19 years. It would only become controversial if they started fiddling with the entitlements that enabled the lower middle class to become "middle-middle-class" like the NHS' core services IMO. Privatizing steel and coal won't create that many problems, but what would be good is fixing the Trades Dispute Act 1906. If you do that then there's no need for the full-throttle neutering that Thatcher did in the '80s IOTL.
 
They get hit worse in 1950 than they did in 1945. Then they realise that people won't elect a party which is going to remove the NHS, and accept the consensus.

I wonder how British politics would be affected by another Attlee term (possibly two)?

What needs to be born in mind is that the Tories were commuted to the implementation of Beveridge and the creation of an "NHS." However what we know as the NHS isn't what Beveridge proposed, he advocated the creation of regional health authorities to administer the system but didn't recommend nationalising the hospitals, most of which were owned by local authorities, churches and charities. However Bevan nationalised the hospitals and put the system under direct Whitehall control basically because he could. A lot of the structural problems in today's NHS can be traced back to that decision.

So if Atlee had had a narrower majority perhaps he wouldn't have allowed Bevan to go as far as he did as he could have considered it a battle he didn't need to fight. The Tories would have voted for the legislation to create the system and would have subsequently kept it when they came back to power. As for what Bevan would have done next...
 
The NHS is not being repealed. However most of the rest is: most notably privatization ("denationalization" to use period lingo) of the nationalized industries, which should not be excessively controversial. Going by the maxim that governments defeat themselves, by 1950 Lab had become as bone-weary after 5 years as the Tories did after 19 years. It would only become controversial if they started fiddling with the entitlements that enabled the lower middle class to become "middle-middle-class" like the NHS' core services IMO. Privatizing steel and coal won't create that many problems, but what would be good is fixing the Trades Dispute Act 1906. If you do that then there's no need for the full-throttle neutering that Thatcher did in the '80s IOTL.

I think you're underestimating resistance to privatisations but even then I can't see the Tories doing as well as they did in 1950 with this anti-Social Democratic agenda.
 
If the Tories tried to roll back the achievements of the Attlee government they would merely strengthen the Labour Party. The idea that they could simply denationalise almost everything nationalised by Labour and maintain support by keeping the NHS is an extremely silly proposition. Nationalisation was not simply an economic issue but also one with great emotive appeal. Many workers will not want to give up their newly found position as stakeholders in industries for a return to a system associated with the exploitation and unemployment of the 1920s and 1930s, and I can't imagine that the unions will sit on their hands and take it. Nearly everyone except those deemed to be eccentric cranks was in favour of at least most of what Labour did.

It would discredit the Conservative Party by sustaining the old image of the party as the protector of the interests of the rich. The whole point of Labour's landslide majority in 1945, no matter how odious it may appear to right-wingers today, was that the vast majority of people did not want a return to what appeared to be a tainted system and to the class conflict of the past. If a Conservative government tried it they'd be thrown out and the position of more moderate Tories like Macmillan would be strengthened. It would probably also strengthen the case of the Bevanites, as the threat of an omnipresent capitalist enemy could not be dismissed by Gaitskellites like Crosland as "tilting at windmills."

So, the consensus would probably end up stronger as a result.
 
The UK Tories didn't 'lose their nerve' during the period after the landslide (I assume you're not asking us for speculation about something, anything, to occur before June, 1945).

What is that even meant to imply?

Churchill was an orthodox Opposition party leader, he ran a very loose, informally managed ship. There was no great emotional decision to make.

That's the thing: all the policy reforms and ideological changes, whether carried out by Butler at central office, or by the likes of MacMillan in the house, or even Cooper outside of Westminster, they all happened in a gradualist Conservative fashion.

Every notion of some great sellout is just revisionism from a later age.
 
Most people were cynical about nationalisation and opposition to further moves in that respect was one of the Tories' selling points in the 1950 and 51 elections. Indeed as far as we can see in the 1945 election most voters never really bought into Labour's plans for nationalisation, even the NHS - they just wanted jobs and houses (see David Kynaston's book Austerity Britain if you think I'm off my rocker). However once coal, the railways and so on have been nationalised you have to combat political inertia to get them privatised once more (in fact the Tories did actually denationalise steel but it took them a while).
 
I think the Conservatives would split over this sort of agenda, not a big split, but enough to do some damage.
 
To be fair nationalisation in itself wasn't the problem, more that Labour seemed to regard it as an end not a means towards achieving that end. The coal board and the railways received little new investment during the immediate post war period, heck BR was building steam locos up until 1960 when most railways were moving to diesel or electric traction.

If Labour had followed up nationalisation with a large scale modernisation plan then a lot of subsequent events would have been very different. The downside to modernisation is that more efficient working and production would have needed fewer workers something that Labour in particular would have found difficult to implement. For this to happen you need a much earlier POD, perhaps the Fabians don't come to dominate Labour in the post WW1 period?
 
The whole problem with keeping the Tories in power after 1945 for any meaningful period of time is that an alternative vision has to be offered. This was only the case to an extent and moreover as I said on the previous thread. I have my doubts as to whether or not the vast majority of the party, chiefly the "knights from the shires" was massively in favour of these changes.
 

Thande

Donor
They get hit worse in 1950 than they did in 1945. Then they realise that people won't elect a party which is going to remove the NHS, and accept the consensus.

This. Pledging to repeal the NHS in 1950 would be like a US candidate today pledging to repeal black civil rights in their election campaign.
 
This. Pledging to repeal the NHS in 1950 would be like a US candidate today pledging to repeal black civil rights in their election campaign.

What if they changed their policy slightly i.e. keeping the NHS but making it into a regional affair such as in the Beveridge Report.
 
Conservative Changes..

Oddly enough, the most Right-wing of the three main British political parties in the 1950s was or were the Liberals. A number of those who finished up in right-wing thinktanks such as the IEA and who were hugely influential in the philosophical development of Thatcherism, began their political lives in the 1950s Liberal Party.

The party under Clement Davies moved sharply away from some immediate post-1945 support for Labour and strongly opposed what they saw as huge State intervention. The Liberals were the party of small Government but were more internationalist than for example the pre-1940 Chamberlain Conservatives.

The post-1945 reform of the Conservative Party were led by Butler but were also steered by newer Tories such as Edward Heath and Iain MacLeod among others.

I sense in the thread title "losing their nerve" a very Right-wing perspective but the decisiveness of the rejection in 1945 and the much deeper cultural experience of how Governments did or didn't manage the social imact of the Depression and resulting unemployment were huge factors in the 1950s.

Indeed, many saw the social impact of mass unemployment as a catalyst for extreme politics and the tacit support of business for authoritarian Governments as reason enough to bring these large organisations under State control.

The Attlee Government pushed through huge change despite bankruptcy and the Shinwell winter and were exhausted by 1950-51. There was no appetite for turning the clock back and further upheaval so the Conservatives won on a platform of managing the new welfare system more effectively than Labour. As one of those born during the heyday of the NHS in the 1960s, I can assert that they succeeded.

Had the Conservatives gone into the 1951 election on a platform of turning the clock back to 1939, they would have done as well as Labour did with its famous suicide note in 1983. Political parties have, at some point, to be pragmatic and recognise the world has moved on. The Conservative Party is nothing if not pragmatic and it's no surprise the phrase Butskellism is used to emphasise the concensus which was supported by over 85% of the electorate until the late 1960s.
 
The whole point is that Conservative alternatives to what Labour proposed with its massive amount of state intervention existed and even still exist to a huge extent.

Pragmatism is indeed very important in politics and you should not go into battles which are lost in advance or where your participation is likely to reflect very badly on you later. Yet, the Conservatives did the opposite many times in the past actually, over Ireland, over the vote for women, over homosexual rights and even to an extent over race.

In 1945 the Labour Party had an overreaching vision for Britain and one a socialist Jerusalem. For better or for worse it got implemented as there was no Conservative alternative proposed. True the Conservative Party is the originator of the 1944 Education Act among other things, but did the party really believe in its creation? My gut feeling is that it did not considering that they turned their backs on it during the late sixties without a fight. Ideologically speaking the Conservative Party of 1945 was nearly a spent force and did not manage to offer a comprhensive vision until 1979 and even it was still far from complete.
 
The whole point is that Conservative alternatives to what Labour proposed with its massive amount of state intervention existed and even still exist to a huge extent.

Pragmatism is indeed very important in politics and you should not go into battles which are lost in advance or where your participation is likely to reflect very badly on you later. Yet, the Conservatives did the opposite many times in the past actually, over Ireland, over the vote for women, over homosexual rights and even to an extent over race.

In 1945 the Labour Party had an overreaching vision for Britain and one a socialist Jerusalem. For better or for worse it got implemented as there was no Conservative alternative proposed. True the Conservative Party is the originator of the 1944 Education Act among other things, but did the party really believe in its creation? My gut feeling is that it did not considering that they turned their backs on it during the late sixties without a fight. Ideologically speaking the Conservative Party of 1945 was nearly a spent force and did not manage to offer a comprhensive vision until 1979 and even it was still far from complete.

Erm - so the Conservatives should have ideally opposed women's suffrage if there were no consequences?
 
Erm - so the Conservatives should have ideally opposed women's suffrage if there were no consequences?

You did not get my point, which was that they should never have opposed all the things I mentionned in the first place since there was no rational arguments to support their own positions. In real life however that's precisely what they did.
 

abc123

Banned
My gut feeling is that it did not considering that they turned their backs on it during the late sixties without a fight. Ideologically speaking the Conservative Party of 1945 was nearly a spent force and did not manage to offer a comprhensive vision until 1979 and even it was still far from complete.

I agree completely.
Even today, Blair's third way is the common base for all political parties in UK.
 
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