ABSTRACT
By early 1963 Harold Macmillan saw the modernization of Britain as a theme with election-winning potential. In the month Reshaping was published he noted in his diary ‘I see quite an attractive policy developing around the main theme of “Modernising Britain” or “Britain in top gear” ’.1 The Beeching Report offered an opportunity to show the public that modernization was not simply a slogan, while modernization provided a positive context for a controversial policy. Whitehall’s new role in evaluating individual cases and assessing the impact of the closure programme provided a test of how modernization would work in practice, as officials tried to evaluate individual services in the light of policies on urban congestion and the future distribution of population and employment, while balancing the modernizing aim and its social side-effects. At the same time, the closure programme offered a test of ministers’ appetite for modernization as a policy theme. As Samuel Brittan recognized in 1964:
[t]he fashionable belief among Left and Right alike is that if a country is to get moving, it needs not a new financial policy but more fundamental changes in its industrial and business structure. . . . Yet whenever any such structural change is proposed all hell is immediately let loose.2
