ABSTRACT
In 1954 the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, R. A. Butler, an exponent of enlightened Conservatism, put up the apparently chimerical idea that the country should aim at doubling its standard of living within the next twenty-five years. This was in 1954 when war-time rationing had just ended. Many people saw in this only a piece of politician’s bombast, yet three years later Harold Macmillan made his famous remark which everybody took seriously, that England ‘had never had it so good’. 1 Two years later, in 1959, the Tories won a resounding electoral victory and a cartoonist depicted Macmillan in the aftermath of battle talking to four of his agents, personified respectively by a refrigerator, a television set, a washing-machine and a motor-car, and thanking them in these terms: ‘Well, gentlemen, together we have fought the good fight.’
