ABSTRACT
The most significant political developments in Britain during the second world war followed the formation of a new coalition government under Winston Churchill in 1940. This coalition replaced the Conservativedominated national government which had been in power since 1931, thereby ending a decade of Conservative ascendancy. Labour returned to a share in government with fewer posts than the Conservatives, but historians have shown that the party used its place in the coalition to reshape the domestic agenda of British politics (Addison 1975; Jefferys 1991; Brooke 1992). At the administrative level, the functions of government simply grew to meet the demands of ‘total war’. The staff of central government almost doubled in wartime and new methods of economic management, industrial organisation and public administration were used, some of which lasted into the post-war period (see chapter 3). At the popular level, the common experience of war was seen by commentators to have promoted a new set of political values. It is generally agreed that the wartime ‘swing to the left’ contributed to the election of the first majority Labour government in 1945; as will be shown, however, the debate continues about the strength, timing and ideological content of this shift in political opinion (Mason and Thompson 1991; Fielding 1992). More controversial still is the thesis that cross-party co-operation in wartime gave rise to a political consensus, characterised by policy convergence on areas such as welfare reform, the operation of a mixed economy, conciliation of the trade unions and a commitment to full employment (Addison 1975; Kavanagh and Morris 1994; Dutton 1997b). This chapter will assess the political impact of the war, both at Westminster and in terms of popular attitudes. First, though, a brief discussion is required of high politics in the immediate pre-war period and the factors which led to the replacement of Chamberlain’s government with Churchill’s coalition.
