The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War

"I read The Road to 1945 a long time ago. It’s an example of a history book that’s not about insider access, although he does a really thorough historian’s job looking through the archives and finding out things we didn’t know. Rather, what’s impressive about the book is its sweep and how it fits things together that aren’t obvious. What The Road to 1945 shows is the degree to which the triumphant—because it’s usually viewed as triumphant—1945 Labour government was the product of the war. Clement Attlee government is feted for the creation of the post-war consensus, of the welfare state, of the NHS, of Keynesian economic management. But in a sense that wasn’t appreciated at the time and hasn’t always been appreciated since, as Paul Addison writes in the preface: “When Labour swept to victory in 1945 the new consensus fell like a branch of ripe plums into the lap of Mr Attlee.” The pursuit of total war required an unbelievable mobilization of resources and planning. Churchill decided it required a coalition with Labour and the trade unions and they were given a significant say in government. There was also a feeling that in order to maintain public support for the war during some dark times, there would have to be a positive vision on offer for what would follow in peacetime. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The war changed everything and made the shift to the left in British politics the consensus from 1945. It was just there and waiting when Labour was elected. That was a massive shock at the time, expected by no one, but it was a sign of how much thinking within Whitehall had already changed. What would have once seemed utterly unthinkable had become, by 1945, the norm. For me as a modern historian, what’s interesting is the contrast with the economic crisis of 2008-2009. There’s a debate about whether we have learned lessons from the crisis and whether the world has changed. On the whole, it probably hasn’t. I’m not saying it’s the same scale of shock, because it isn’t, but you’ve got a neat contrast there with The Road to 1945 , and how the war did change everything and everyone’s thinking. There are two parts to the story. The Labour party to this day—and Jeremy Corbyn is a bit of a sucker for this one—tell the glorious story of 1945. It was a hugely important government. But it fell into utter exhaustion. The drive for exports, which that government deliberately used to push down home consumption, meant rationing was still a commonplace in the late 1940s. Some goods were more rationed in1949 than they had been during the war! People tired of that Labour government. Churchill and the Conservatives then came back into power in the 1950 election. But what’s important through the 1950s is the degree to which the Conservatives explicitly accepted the basic terms of Labour’s legacy from 1945. It didn’t mean they agreed with everything—there were big arguments around nationalization and around the role of trade unions—but the Conservative manifesto of 1945 looked very different from the Conservative manifesto of 1950 and 1955. So Churchill and the Conservatives come back, but only by accepting how much had changed."