ABSTRACT
The first two chapters pursued an analysis of two elements which underpinned the postwar British warfare state: on the one hand, the commitment to securing the people's peace involving the recasting of the British defence establishment, strategy and policy; and on the other hand, the attempts to embed Britain in overlapping military alliances in order to compensate for the country's reduced war potential. This twin strategy seemed to come to fruition in the first half of 1950 with the emergence of a closer working relationship with the American government in terms of western defence co-operation. However, in the event this conflation of British domestic and foreign policy interests with those of the Truman administration in strengthening western defences against the Soviet military threat lasted a matter of weeks only to be overtaken by events in the Far East. The outbreak of the Korean war convinced many American policymakers of the immanence of another global war and the need for the massive increase of western defence efforts. While British policy-makers accepted the importance of resisting the North Korean invasion, they nevertheless grew concerned that the Truman administration might be drawn into a protracted conflict in Korea which might distract its attention from the more important objective of preventing an invasion of western Europe by Soviet forces. At the same time, American pressure to rearm led to conflicts between the Labour government's domestic reform agenda and its foreign policy strategy. These disagreements over rearmament precipitated a major political crisis over the 1951 budget leading to the resignation of two senior government ministers, the Minister of Labour and National Service, Aneurin Bevan, and the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson in April. Given the government's slender majority, the resignations undermined the Labour government and forced the Prime Minister Clement Attlee to call an early general election. Against the background of the deepening economic and political crisis, the Labour Party lost the election in October. Despite pooling more votes than the Conservatives, the electoral defeat traumatised the Labour movement reinforcing the rift within the party. Moreover, the loss confined the Labour
Party to opposition for over a decade. In the search for an explanation, in previous research attention has therefore focused on the decision to embark on the Korean war rearmament programme and on the question of whether the split in the Labour Party could have been prevented.
