War, Reconstruction, and the Nationalization of Britain, 1939-1951

Abstract

The pairing ‘war and reconstruction’ is a central idea in the social democratic historiography of Britain between 1939 and 1951. 1 The linking reflects the implicit view that plans for reconstruction were important during the war itself, and indeed that society was being reconstructed before 1945. Reconstruction is taken to be about the building of a society very different from that of 1939, indeed one more like that of 1945. In this story the events of 1939, and especially of 1940, inaugurated a People’s War , which put Britain on the Road to 1945 and thus to the People’s Peace , to give the titles of relevant and famous books. 2 It is hardly surprising then that we have ‘the triumph of social democracy’, or the rise of the ‘benign state’ used as chapter headings for periods covering both the war and post-war years. 3 Tellingly, an account of the British state which took seriously the fiscal-military state of the eighteenth century gives Britain a ‘Social-Service State’ between 1880 and 1939, while the period 1939 to 1979 is covered in a chapter on ‘Total War and Cradle-to-Grave Welfare’. 4 Such ideas are of course linked to the suggestion that the 1940 coalition embodied a new consensus which persisted despite party government after the war; it has a political as well as a policy dimension, one in which the Left becomes more important as the welfare state was being forged in a new Britain where the People were central.