ABSTRACT
Professional society thrived for over a quarter of a century after the Second World War, that is, for as long as full employment and a booming economy allowed it to meet all reasonable demands upon it for rising living standards and welfare services. For twenty-eight years it achieved a positive sum game, with almost everyone, including most of the poor in absolute if not relative terms, gaining, and very few losing. Such economic decline as there was was relative, and could only be perceived in comparison with the more rapidly growing economies of Western Europe, Canada and Japan. Governments worried over the failure of Britain’s economy to grow more rapidly had tried various measures, including Keynesian demand management and, from the early 1960s, some indicative planning of the French type to try to break through to higher rates of expansion. But as long as ‘most of our people had never had it so good’ there was no desire for fundamental change in the policies which were producing unprecedented material progress. Only with the return of hard times and world recession in the 1970s and 1980s did politicians and commentators of all shades of political opinion begin to question the basic tenets of the system. As so often before, in the 1830s-40s, the 1870s-80s, and the 1920s-30s, adverse economic trends brought a new questioning and rethinking of attitudes and policies, and old doubts and critiques which had long been suppressed or ignored came flooding back to the surface.
