The Postwar Consensus Revisited

Reassessing Britain’s ‘Post-war consensus’: the politics of reason 1945–1979

“…As critics of this thesis have demonstrated (Kerr, 2001;Hickson, 2004), the Labour and Conservative parties were divided on a series of ideological questions. While the former began from the assumption that equality was desirable, the latter were suspicious of egalitarian activity.…”

Persistent Productivity Failure in the UK: Is the EU Really to Blame?

“…1 The concept of the 'post-war consensus' should be understood as the set of policies regarded as feasible by senior politicians and civil servants given presumed political constraints (Kavanagh and Morris, 1994). This implied a high degree of policy convergence but did not connote ideological convergence between the Conservative and Labour parties (Hickson, 2004). 2 The six founder members were Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Netherlands.…”

‘For We Shall Prejudice Nothing’: Middle Way Conservatism and the Defence of Inequality, 1945–1979

“…Indeed, few writers have sought to compare the ideological traditions of Labourism and Conservatism in any sustained way, and those studies that have attempted to do so have been insensitive to the morphological architecture of these two intellectual traditions. Some studies, in an effort to resolve the dilemmas posed by the concept of 'consensus', have drawn a distinction between the 'means' and 'ends' of political activity (Hickson, 2004). Within these accounts, it is argued that the Labour and Conservative parties utilised the same policy means to pursue very different ideological objectives.…”