New Deal at Dunkirk

When​ Neville Chamberlain declared war in September 1939, the Conservatives had been in power for a couple of decades, interrupted only briefly by the first two Labour governments. They had been in coalition for much of that time, but had always been the dominant party, and the government formed when the second Labour administration collapsed in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis was ‘national’ in name only. It was an example of the sinuous adaptability and capacity for reacting to circumstance that have made the Tories so effective at attaining and retaining power. There has been something called a Tory Party in England since the reign of Charles II, and though one would be hard put to find much resemblance between the ‘Church and King’ Tories and the rabble who contested the leadership of the Conservative Party last year, it is without question the most successful political party in modern European history.

Sometimes it has been a force of reaction, in the spirit of Lord Salisbury, a clever obscurantist who was prime minister three times late in Victoria’s reign and acted on his own principle: ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse, and it is therefore in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ But blind reaction wouldn’t have sustained the Tories indefinitely. During his meteorically brief political career in the 1880s, Lord Randolph Churchill, following Disraeli’s lead, organised the Conservative Party as a national force and propounded the idea of ‘Tory democracy’. Salisbury derided the phrase and Churchill himself said privately it was ‘mostly demagogy’. And yet, as Sebastian Haffner wrote in a short Life of Winston Churchill intended for German readers, Lord Randolph had in fact conjured up the mixture of patriotism and welfare that would sustain most European parties of the democratic right over the next century.

In the spring of 1940, the Germans invaded Norway and a disastrous British campaign was launched in response. The Norway debate in the House of Commons effectively ended Chamberlain’s premiership. Churchill became prime minister and created a genuinely ‘national’ government just as the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France. Churchill’s relations with the Tories were difficult, and for a moment he seemed to stand above party, with a cabinet that included the party leaders: Clement Attlee of Labour; Sir Archibald Sinclair of the Liberals; and Chamberlain himself, who was given a nominal post and remained Conservative leader until he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, resigning in October 1940 and dying a month later. Churchill succeeded him in the leadership, a position he wouldn’t have won in any other circumstances. Many Tories would have been astonished, or horrified, had they known that he would lead the party for the next fifteen years, into his dotage.

The national government resulted in the effective suspension of ordinary party politics. A ‘party truce’ meant that when a Labour MP died or resigned the Tories and Liberals didn’t run candidates at the subsequent by-election and vice versa, though there was nothing to stop independents from standing: many did, and quite often won. Parliament still held debates, and Churchill faced regular criticism and occasional confidence votes. But the decision by Parliament to carry on beyond its statutory five-year term, as it had also done during the First World War, led to the longest interval between parliamentary elections of modern times: nine and a half years. And so the ‘constellation of pressure groups, publications and informal political circles which orbited around the Conservative Party’, and which Kit Kowol calls the wartime ‘Conservative movement’, grew in size and importance ‘precisely because many of the party’s official bodies were mothballed and much of its activities were curtailed’. That movement is the main subject of Kowol’s absorbing and original Blue Jerusalem.

Churchill himself doesn’t play a large part in this story. His energies were devoted to the war, and he was usually deaf to any talk of what would follow victory, whether from his ‘hostilities only’ Labour colleagues Attlee and Ernest Bevin when they tried to discuss postwar domestic reconstruction, or from the Tories Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper, who told him that after the war Britain would find the leadership of Europe there for the taking. Over five years, Churchill’s abilities as a strategist were tested and he sometimes failed, but he was triumphantly successful in creating a narrative, the heroic story of an island people resisting an evil tyrant and leading Europe to glorious victory. This was later challenged by historians on the right such as Correlli Barnett and John Charmley, who claimed that the war was a calamity for Britain, with consequences from near national bankruptcy and humiliating dependence on American financial support to industrial decline, Soviet domination of much of Europe and the loss of empire.

But another narrative ‘remains remarkably dominant’, as Kowol says. In 1941 George Orwell published his socialist-patriotic essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, whose arguments were similar to those of J.B. Priestley in the Sunday evening radio broadcasts aired from June to October 1940 which so irritated Churchill that he exerted his influence in getting them cancelled. Paul Addison’s book The Road to 1945, published fifty years ago, argued that Orwell and Priestley’s rhetoric indicates that ‘the summer of 1940 saw a decisive popular shift to the left in Britain, a “new deal at Dunkirk”,’ and that military failure and the heroic rescue of the British Expeditionary Force ‘damned prewar Conservatives and Conservatism in the eyes of the public, who came to recognise the necessity of a “People’s War”’.

Kowol takes issue with that claim. He begins not with a politician but with John Baker White, a reserve officer in the London Rifle Brigade before the war and then a serving officer. Baker White kept a journal, a curious but fascinating document which was published in 1942 as A Soldier Dares to Think. He was exhilarated by the new wartime spirit, a selflessness and sacrifice that would, he thought, break down class barriers. He wrote an ‘open letter to Hitler’ in September 1940, telling him that ‘the soft easy-going Britain that you thought you knew and could destroy is dead; a new Britain that you will never understand, a new Britain that will destroy you is born.’

This might seem to chime with the Orwell-Priestley line, and ‘sounds in tune with the supposed “Spirit of ’45”’, what Kowol calls an ‘elated national mood’ that heralded the creation of the first ever majority Labour government, which ‘pledged to build a “New Jerusalem” after the war’ with a new National Health Service, full employment and the beginning of the process which would turn the British Empire into the Commonwealth. But, as Kowol notes, ‘Baker White was a Conservative, and a decidedly reactionary one.’

There was a large variety of competing visions on the right, calls for

a new age of industrial leadership and high technology, dreams of rural reconstruction and aristocratic revival, libertarian proposals for laissez-faire, free trade and global government, imperialist visions of highly regulated empires, as well as proposals for the creation of a new Christian state in Britain and a revived Christendom in Europe. They reflected the diverse range of political traditions that the Conservative Party contained.

For a few on the far right the coming of war was itself a defeat. One Tory MP, Captain Archibald Ramsay, was so nakedly Teutophile and antisemitic that he was interned in 1940 along with Oswald Mosley. Another fascisant MP, Sir Arnold Wilson, chose expiation by enlisting in the RAF. Having somewhat surprisingly been accepted as a tail-gunner at the age of 55, he was killed when his bomber came down in France, but his memory inspired the character of Pilot Officer Sir George Corbett in the 1942 Powell and Pressburger flag-waver One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.

Even if they had been appeasers, most Conservatives accepted the patriotic necessity of the war, but had many different ideas about what its outcome should be, some as optimistic as any socialist dreams of the future and some downright dodgy. The now forgotten Federal Union movement, which had begun before the war and advocated a federation of the world’s democracies, attracted the Tory MP Richard Law as well as supporters as diverse and unlikely as Bevin and the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek. Another groupuscule, Union and Reconstruction, foresaw a national rebirth which would end unemployment and hunger. This was outlined in the polemic Britain Awake!, published in April 1940, but the real meaning of its condemnation of ‘International Money Power’ was clear enough, particularly since its authors were the financier Henry Drummond Wolff, whose antisemitism was well known, and Arthur Bryant.

A successful author of patriotic potboilers, Bryant had been caught out by the war, which began within a few months of the publication of his book Unfinished Victory. This described how ‘the native Germans … were now confronted with a problem – that of rescuing their indigenous culture from an alien hand and restoring it to their own race.’ There was no doubt about the meaning of ‘alien hand’, and Bryant belatedly tried to suppress the book and to buy up copies from bookshops. It’s almost a relief to turn to Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office until his vehement opposition to appeasement led Chamberlain to kick him upstairs to the House of Lords, who proposed a different enemy: Prussia and Prussianism. He told Lord Halifax that the war had come about because of ‘a refusal to swallow the hard fact that 80 per cent of the German race are the political and moral scum of the earth’.

Some patriotic and bellicose musings had a religious flavour, from T.S. Eliot’s ‘History is now and England’ to Dorothy L. Sayers’s ‘Praise God, now, for an English war.’ After the fall of France, Britain no longer had troublesome allies to deal with, and George VI was only one of many who felt relieved by this, though Kowol points out that the country was very far from alone: Britain was sustained by the fighting forces as well as the exiled governments of the conquered European countries, as well as the human and material resources of a vast empire.

Later the embodiment of pragmatic Conservatism, R.A. Butler improbably pushed ‘for the very boldest types of reconstruction imaginable by proposing the creation of a new kind of Christian state’, which would combine what were claimed to be ancient national traditions of freedom ‘with the loyalty and discipline supposedly exhibited by totalitarian states’. In a BBC broadcast in December 1940, published in the Listener as ‘Establishing a Christian Civilisation’, Butler said that Christianity was not a ‘pious institutional exercise’ but a ‘way of living’, and that Christian morality could adapt itself to the modern state.

Some on the left dreamed of a ‘nation in arms’ or a popular militia, but this was never likely. As Stafford Cripps, the leader of the Labour left, put it, ‘you can’t fight total war and have a revolution on your hands at the same time.’ Although Kowol says that ‘the maritime approach to fighting a war of endurance ending in a negotiated peace was acceptable to more Conservatives for longer than has hitherto been recognised,’ this also seems irrelevant. After the heroic triad of Dunkirk, Battle of Britain and Blitz, and as Churchill’s rhetoric as prime minister makes clear – his first speech cited ‘the united and inflexible resolve of the nation to prosecute the war with Germany to a victorious conclusion’ – negotiated peace with Hitler was out of the question.

But how to reach that ‘victorious conclusion’? In practice, British grand strategy was a blend of Micawberite waiting for something to turn up and one of the songs the Tommies had sung in the last war, ‘We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere,’ notably in the Mediterranean. The question of allies was answered in 1941 when Hitler took the decision away from the British, and sealed his own fate, by invading Russia and declaring war on the United States. While many Conservatives were uneasy about Churchill’s immediate embrace of Stalin as an ally, communists began painting the slogan ‘Second Front Now’ all over London, and found an unexpected supporter in Lord Beaverbrook, whose position as a government minister didn’t stop him publicly advocating a second front or a British invasion of Europe – a complete fantasy at that point.

For half a century Beaverbrook was a malign force in British journalism and politics, a seducer, a flatterer and a corrupter, a bully, a liar and a crook. During the war he held an odd and uneasy position as a court favourite, and few things in Churchill’s life are stranger than his continuing fondness for Beaverbrook, even when Beaverbrook was betraying him, not only as a drama queen who flounced in and out of the war cabinet, but in his newfound affection for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Kowol suggests that this stemmed from his belief that ‘a close alliance with the Soviets and an early “second front” attack on Western Europe would in the long run protect the British Empire from excessive American influence,’ but this scarcely explains Beaverbrook’s praise of Stalin in a BBC broadcast as a great ‘judge of values’, or his assurance to the House of Lords that there was complete religious freedom in the USSR and no antisemitism. This wasn’t long after Beaverbrook had told an American associate that the London press was largely under Jewish control, and that ‘the News Chronicle should really be the Jews Chronicle.’

Far more important in the story of the war, however, was Social Insurance and Allied Services, always known as the Beveridge Report, an unlikely bestseller when it was published in November 1942. William Beveridge was and is much misunderstood. He was a lifelong liberal, briefly a Liberal MP, who detested the expression ‘welfare state’ and was dismayed by the Attlee government’s subsequent creation of such a state on managerial-centralist lines, which he hadn’t foreseen or intended as the means to conquer the ‘five giants’ described in his report: ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’.

During 1942 Churchill’s position sometimes seemed precarious, as two years of relentless defeat culminated in the fall of Singapore in February and Tobruk in June. This made his response to Beveridge trickier. He disliked Beveridge personally and was indifferent to his report, but others in the party ‘believed its emphasis on family and contribution made it an essentially Conservative document’, Kowol writes.

The pages of Conservative-leaning newspapers and journals were filled with discussions of its contents, a special internal committee was created to determine the party’s response to it, and a group of vigorous young Conservative MPs, in the shape of the Tory Reform Committee (TRC), made a name for themselves by attacking the government for their timidity towards its implementation.

Here the postwar Conservative Party can be seen taking shape. Alexander Macdonald, a union leader, claimed in 1879 that Disraeli’s government had done more for the working class in five years than the Liberals had in fifty. And a large part of the foundations of social security and public health legislation had been laid by Neville Chamberlain, much the most active and creative minister between the wars, as minister of health from 1924 to 1929. While many Conservatives lamented Churchill’s unwillingness to take the lead on postwar reconstruction, Kowol writes, ‘the ideological vacuum he created at the top of the party left those with a greater desire to remake Conservatism with a tempting opportunity.’ The ‘Individualist’ wing of the party, personified by the publisher Ernest Benn (uncle of Tony), for example, hoped that the country would now throw off the yoke of heavy taxation and tyrannical bureaucracy, but one result of the war was that the British had become accustomed to almost untrammelled state power.

After Churchill tried to prolong the wartime government and Labour rightly rebuffed him, the parties came back to life. Conservative officials such as the postwar party chairman Lord Woolton thought that their strongest card at the upcoming general election was Churchill himself, ‘the war winner’; the Tory manifesto, entitled ‘Mr Churchill’s Declaration of Policy to the Electors’, didn’t even mention the word ‘Conservative’. This had worked in 1918, when a coalition led by David Lloyd George, ‘the man who won the war’, and including the Tories, secured an electoral landslide.

Not this time. Churchill rendered Attlee a great service with his disgraceful broadcast warning that a Labour government wouldn’t allow free expression of ‘public discontent’ and would ‘fall back on some form of Gestapo’. The Tory manifesto stressed ‘the positive nature of private enterprise, the centrality of family to national life’ and the continuity of Britain’s institutions, but this wasn’t, Kowol says, because ‘Conservatives were short of transformative visions or radical policies. Rather, the Conservatives’ problem was the excess of radical options – from proposals for a new corporatist economic and social order to dreams of a new kind of Christian state – and the incompatibility between them.’

At the end of the book Kowol claims that though Labour won the election, ‘the Conservatives “won” the Second World War because the United Kingdom and British Empire that emerged at the end of the conflict were closer to their vision than that of their political rivals.’ Here he takes up an argument on the left, vigorously made as long ago as 1969 by Angus Calder in The People’s War: Britain 1939-45, which blamed the Attlee government for its caution and failure to effect truly radical change. While conceding that ‘Attlee’s decision to maintain party unity, to stick firmly to the electoral truce and to portray Labour as the party of practical patriotism paid enormous dividends in the 1945 general election,’ Kowol laments the fact that ‘the British Empire, the British army, the established church, the hereditary monarchy and the unreformed Parliament were still there in 1945 … Elite institutions and authority remained, sometimes weakened, but often strengthened.’ Those institutions and that authority, like the enormously increased power of the state, had been fortified by the war.

Not many of the conservative movements Kowol has unearthed had much subsequent relevance. There was no Federal Union of the world’s democracies, though there was a United Nations and the beginning of a union of European countries. Union and Reconstruction fizzled out, though if you strip away the antisemitism ‘International Money Power’ is more formidable than ever. While the 1944 Education Act, sometimes known as the Butler Act, made religious instruction compulsory in British schools, we don’t live in the ‘new Christian state’ Butler hoped for.

The Labour landslide of 1945 surprised Attlee and dismayed Churchill, and the next five years on the right involved a hysterical reaction to its victory. A National Union of the Middle Class challenged the trade unions and recalled the General Strike in minatory words: ‘What this Government does not realise is that the Manual Workers cannot do the jobs of the Professional Classes, but if the necessity arises, the Middle Classes can certainly do the jobs of the Manual Workers.’ Angela Thirkell’s Private Enterprise: A Novel (1947) was a cry of pain about the postwar decline of ‘civilisation’ in a country where ‘the more one’s a lady or a gentleman the less chance one has.’

Both radical hopes and reactionary fears were confounded by events, and the differences between Labour and Tory were often narrower than they seemed at the time. The Attlee government created the NHS, but Churchill had said in a radio broadcast in March 1943 that, after victory, ‘we must establish on broad and solid foundations a National Health Service,’ and the 1945 Conservative manifesto duly promised ‘a comprehensive health service covering the whole range of medical treatment from the general practitioner to the specialist … available to all citizens’. In 1947, the Conservatives’ Industrial Charter, which was again Butler’s handiwork, accepted the mixed economy and recognised the role of the unions. This was the spirit of Tory government after the party returned to office in 1951, at least until Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. Last July the Conservatives suffered one of their intermittent electoral collapses (1906, 1945, 1997), and with only 121 MPs, less than a quarter of the popular vote and Reform vying to be Labour’s main rivals, they may look as if they are finished for good, which Kemi Badenoch tells us will mean the end of Western civilisation. But history suggests that it would be a mistake to write them off.