4 - A postwar consensus?

Summary

By the end of the war, Britain’s housing situation was in dire straits: 12.5 million homes had been damaged, 250,000 beyond the point of human habitation. Hundreds of thousands more were in desperate need of repairs (Timmins 2001). However, during the war years, house building had been halted. It was no surprise, then, that with a population buoyed by the promises of the Beveridge Report, housing became a cause of militancy across the country. Michael Foot, newly elected MP for Plymouth Devonport and future leader of the Labour Party, recalled that during these years “every MP and every local councillor was being besieged by the endless queue of the homeless” (quoted in Harding 2020: 55).

In 1945, the coalition government presented its Housing White Paper under intense scrutiny. This was the first official document to accept the principle that government should assure that every family could find a dwelling. To discharge such a duty, the government acknowledged that up to four million homes would need to be built immediately. Such acceptance was palatable to Labour, far less so to Conservatives. Nonetheless, having undertaken wartime planning, and having been in a wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, Tories could no longer easily claim that the state was an illegitimate vessel by which to secure public needs.

In 1954, Norman Macrae, a journalist at The Economist, coined the term “Butskellism” – an amalgam of the surnames of then Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer R. A. Butler, and his predecessor, the Labour politician Hugh Gaitskell. Macrae satirically used the term to denote an apparent postwar consensus between parties when it came to a comprehensive welfare regime, a mixed economy comprising an alliance between state, business and labour, and demand management in service of full employment. Butskellism quickly transformed from an amalgam to an explanatory term, which expanded to include defence policy and then extended forward to cover the entire period up until Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

In recent years historians have questioned the depth and strength of this consensus (see Rollings 1996). In this chapter we demonstrate that, when dealing with the giant of squalor, one can question whether a consensus ever existed.