ABSTRACT
The circumstances under which the new Ministry was born were very different from those which had produced the original reconstruction machinery in 1940. The entry into the war of the Soviet Union and of the United States in 1941, and Allied victories towards the end of 1942, had reduced somewhat the prevailing sense of crisis and made it easier for politicians to anticipate the return to normal party politics. The over-riding need for national unity, so keenly felt in the year of Dunkirk, was still a real force; but it bore down upon underlying political differences with a diminishing weight. When the House of Commons debated Sir William Beveridge’s report on Social Insurance, large cracks were revealed in the coalition, and a speech by Churchill on postwar reconstruction broadcast the following month did not conceal the Prime Minister’s reluctance to accede to any further stimulation of public expectations.1 Nonetheless, reconstruction issues could not be suppressed: pigeons despatched by Reith and Greenwood, in the persons of Scott, Uthwatt and Beveridge, had now come home to roost. There were in any case those among Conservative ministers who retained their appetite for such schemes. Those who did not found that initiatives which they had previously countenanced now possessed a political momentum of their own.
