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Evans, Stephen, ‘The Not So Odd Couple: Margaret Thatcher and One Nation Conservatism’, Contemporary British History 23, 1 (2009), pp. 101-121.
Foot, Michael, ‘The Good Tory’, in Debts of Honour (London, Davis Poynter, 1980), pp. 42-76.
Freeden, Michael, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996).
Gamble, Andrew, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty (Cambridge, Polity, 1996).
Garnett, Mark, and Hickson, Kevin, Conservative Thinkers: The Key Contributors to the Political Thought of the Modern Conservative Party (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009).
George, Stephen, An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998).
Ghosh, Peter, ‘Style and Substance in Disraelian Social Reform, c. 1860-1880’ in P. J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain: Essays Presented to A. F. Thompson (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1987), pp. 59-90.
Gilmour, Ian, The Body Politic (London, Hutchinson, 1969).
Gilmour, Ian, Inside Right (London, Hutchinson, 1977).
Gilmour, Ian, ‘Tories, Social Democracy, and the Centre’, Political Quarterly 54, 3 (1983), pp. 257-267.
Gilmour, Ian, Dancing with Dogma: Britain under Thatcherism (London, Simon and Schuster, 1992).
Gilmour, Ian and Garnett, Mark, Whatever Happened to the Tories? The Conservatives since 1945 (London, Fourth Estate, 1998).
Green, Damian, ‘One Nation’ in Kevin Hickson (ed.), The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 214-18.
Hansen, Randall, ‘The Kenyan Asians, British Politics, and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1968’, Historical Journal 42, 3 (1999), pp. 809-834.
Harris, Jose, ““Contract” and “Citizenship”’ in David Marquand and Anthony Seldon (eds.), The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain (London, Fontana, 1996), pp. 122-138.
Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’, Marxism Today 22, 9 (September 1978), pp. 279-286.
Johnson, Paul, ‘The Welfare State, Income and Living Standards’ in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain Volume III: Structural Change and Growth, 1939-2000 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 213-237.
Kitson, Michael, ‘Failure Followed by Success, or Success Followed by Failure? A Re-examination of British Economic Growth since 1949’ in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain Volume III: Structural Change and Growth, 1939-2000 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 27-56.
Kowol, Kit, ‘The Conservative Movement and Dreams of Britain’s Post-War Future’, Historical Journal 62, 2 (2019), pp. 473-493.
Lattimer, Mark, When Labour Played the Racist Card, The New Statesman, 22 January 1999, <<https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/1999/01/when-labour-played-racist-card>>
Lowe, Rodney, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999).
Macleod, Iain, and Maude, Angus (eds.), One Nation: A Tory Approach to Social Problems (London, Conservative Political Centre, 1950).
Machin, Ian, Disraeli (London, Longman, 1995).
Maddison, Angus, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1992 (Paris, OECD, 1995).
Miliband, Ed, Speech to the Fabian Society - One Nation Labour: The Party of Change, 12 January 2013, <<https://web.archive.org/web/20140401081242/http://www.labour.org.uk/ed-miliband-speech-fabian-one-nation-labour-change>>
Neill, Edmund, ‘Conservative Thinkers and the Post-War State, 1945-79’ in Lawrence Goldman (ed.), Welfare and Social Policy in Britain since 1870: Essays in Honour of Jose Harris (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 162-177.
Neill, Edmund, ‘Intellectual Reactions to Thatcherism: Conceptions of Citizenship and Civil Society from 1990-2010’ in Antony Mullen, Stephen Farrall, and David Jeffery (eds.), Thatcherism in the 21st Century: The Social and Cultural Legacy (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 35-53.
Neill, Edmund, ‘Political Ideologies’ in Chiel van den Akker (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory (Abingdon, Routledge, 2022), pp. 397-413.
Oakeshott, Michael, ‘Rationalism in Politics’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis, IN, Liberty Fund, 1991), pp. 5-42.
Oakeshott, Michael, ‘On Misunderstanding Human Conduct: A Reply to My Critics’, Political Theory 4, 3 (1976), pp. 353-368.
One Nation Group, The Responsible Society (London, Conservative Political Centre, 1959).
Parry, J.P., ‘Disraeli and England’, Historical Journal 43, 3 (2000), pp. 699-728.
Parry, Jonathan, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1993).
Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 193-212.
Powell, Enoch, and Maude, Angus (eds.), Change is Our Ally: A Tory Approach to Industrial Problems (London, Conservative Political Centre, 1954).
Ramsden, John, The Age of Churchill and Eden, 1940-1957 (London, Longman, 1995).
Saunders, Robert, ‘ “Crisis? What Crisis?” Thatcherism and the Seventies’ in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 25-42.
Seawright, David, The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics (New York, Continuum Press, 2010).
Soffer, Reba, History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: The Great War to Thatcher and Reagan (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009).
Thompson, Andrew S., Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880-1932 (London, Longman, 2000).
Timothy, Nick, Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism (Cambridge, Polity, 2020).
Walsha, Robert, ‘The One Nation Group: A Tory Approach to Backbench Politics and Organization, 1950-55’, Twentieth Century British History 11, 2 (2000), pp. 183-214.
Walsha, Robert, ‘The One Nation Group and One Nation Conservatism, 1950-2002’, Contemporary British History 17, 2 (2003), pp. 69-120.
Willetts, David, Modern Conservatism (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992).
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Notes
For this kind of classic statement of One Nation conservatism, which approvingly quotes Ian Gilmour, see Damian Green, ‘One Nation’, in Kevin Hickson (ed.), The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 214-18.
Ed Miliband, ‘Speech to the Fabian Society - One Nation Labour: The Party of Change’, 12th January 2013, found at: https://web.archive.org/web/20140401081242/http://www.labour.org.uk/ed-miliband-speech-fabian-one-nation-labour-change consulted 15 December 2022; Nick Timothy, Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2020).
Just to give one example, Gilmour opposed the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which withdrew the right of Kenyan Asians to enter Britain as the appeasement of racial hysteria. This was very much a minority position within the Conservative Party at the time. See Randall Hansen, ‘The Kenyan Asians, British Politics, and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1968’, Historical Journal 42, 3 (1999), p. 810, n. 2, and Mark Lattimer, ‘When Labour Played the Racist Card’, The New Statesman, 22nd January 1999, found at https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/1999/01/when-labour-played-racist-card consulted on 15 December 2022, where Ian Gilmour’s recollection is that ‘the bill was brought in - to keep the blacks out. If it had been the case that it was 5,000 white settlers who were coming in, the newspapers and politicians who were making all the fuss would have been quite pleased’.
Ian Gilmour, The Body Politic (London, Hutchinson, 1969).
Ian Gilmour and Mark Garnett, Whatever Happened to the Tories? The Conservatives since 1945 (London, Fourth Estate, 1998), p. 228.
See, for example, Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain under Thatcherism (London, Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 26-27.
David Seawright, The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics (New York, Continuum Press, 2010), pp. 78-80.
See Mark Garnett and Kevin Hickson, Conservative Thinkers: The Key Contributors to the Political Thought of the Modern Conservative Party (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 135-7. It should be stressed, however, that these authors ultimately conclude that Gilmour should be labelled a conservative, despite his closeness to certain aspects of the liberal tradition, and indeed one who has a better claim to that title than his Thatcherite opponents.
To quote ‘One Nation’ itself: ‘No one saw more clearly than Disraeli the social duty that lay on statesmen … In 1874-80 the first great legislative programme of social reform … went through Parliament. The Public Health Act, the Artisans’ Dwellings Act, the Conspiracy Act which established the right of Trade Unions to strike, the Acts regulating the sale of food and drugs … caused a Liberal-Labour Member of Parliament in 1870 to exclaim, ‘Conservatives have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty’’. See Iain Macleod and Angus Maude (eds.), One Nation: A Tory Approach to Social Problems (London, Conservative Political Centre, 1950), p. 13.
Alan Clark, The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State, 1922-1997 (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), pp. 240, 353.
Michael Foot, ‘The Good Tory’, in Debts of Honour (London, Davis Poynter, 1980), p. 57.
The 15th Earl of Derby, Disraeli’s first Foreign Secretary, commented that he ‘detests the class of business which he is apt to call parochial’, and it is clear that Disraeli categorised social questions unfavourably with great historic problems and even with those of party-political squabble. See J. P. Parry, ‘Disraeli and England’, Historical Journal, 43, 3 (2000), p. 724, and p. 723, n. 137, and Peter Ghosh, ‘Style and Substance in Disraelian Social Reform, c. 1860-1880’, in P. J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain: Essays Presented to A. F. Thompson (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1987), pp. 59-90.
Ian Machin, Disraeli (London, Longman, 1995), pp. 132-34.
Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 237-41; 233.
Stephen Evans, ‘The Not So Odd Couple: Margaret Thatcher and One Nation Conservatism’, Contemporary British History, 23, 1 (2009), pp. 110-11.
Evans, ‘The Not So Odd Couple’, pp. 112-13.
Ibid., pp. 114-15. For a much cruder attempt to yoke ‘One Nation’ conservatism to Thatcherism, essentially by ignoring the more interventionist and corporatist aspects of the ideology, see David Willetts, Modern Conservatism (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992), pp. 36-38.
See Evans, ‘The Not So Odd Couple’, p. 105: ‘Thatcher’s commitment to One Nation Conservatism was not the product of sincere conviction. It was (and remained) an instrumental attachment pure and simple’.
See Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation; Enoch Powell and Angus Maude (eds.), Change is Our Ally: A Tory Approach to Industrial Problems (London, Conservative Political Centre, 1954).
For this, see Kit Kowol, ‘The Conservative Movement and Dreams of Britain’s Post-War Future’, Historical Journal, 62, 2 (2019) p. 486.
Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, pp. 14-16.
Ibid., p. 77.
Ibid., pp. 76-77.
Powell and Maude (eds.), Change is Our Ally, pp. 96-97.
The ‘One Nation’ pamphlet specifically declared that ‘the maintenance of full employment is a first responsibility of Government’ - see Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, p. 73.
Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, p. 74.
Ibid., p. 36.
‘Change is Our Ally’ explicitly sought to distinguish Keynesian arguments from the concept of ‘planning’ - see Powell and Maude (eds.), Change is Our Ally, p. 26.
Ibid., p. 96.
Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, p. 24.
As Iain Macleod memorably declared to the man who would become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1951, R. A. Butler, ‘we haven’t enough manure to do more than dribble it around the farm: so then we must tend those fields which will show us a fine yield’. Quoted in Robert Walsha, ‘The One Nation Group: A Tory Approach to Backbench Politics and Organization, 1950-55’, Twentieth Century British History, 11, 2 (2000), p. 194.
Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, p. 18.
For just one example, see John Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, 1940-1957 (London, Longman, 1995), p. 221.
For an insistence that a conception of history almost necessarily forms part of any fully fledged ideology, see Edmund Neill, ‘Political Ideologies’, in Chiel van den Akker (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory (Abingdon, Routledge, 2022), pp. 397-413. Despite a certain amount of work on the role of history and tradition in providing justifications for different ideological positions within the British conservative tradition - see for example Reba Soffer, History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: The Great War to Thatcher and Reagan (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009) - there is still ample scope for more exploration of the role contested views of British history played in the construction of British conservatism(s).
Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, pp. 12-13.
Ibid., pp. 14-15.
Ibid., pp. 15--16.
Ibid., p. 16; pp. 39-41.
See Ibid., pp. 21-6, especially at pp. 24-5.
Ibid., pp. 22-23. For a way into the Edwardian debates about imperial emigration, see Andrew S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880-1932 (London, Longman, 2000), chapter 6.
Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, pp. 23--24.
Ibid., pp. 30-38.
Ibid., p. 46. There was also, interestingly, criticism of current education policy for favouring the ‘pleasant frills’ over traditional methods of learning. ‘If education is more than the storing of knowledge, it is also more than the practice of hobbies’, ‘One Nation’ declared severely.
Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, pp. 47, 23.
Ibid., p. 19. On the special status of land in Burke’s thought, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 198-99; 204-205.
Michael Kitson, ‘Failure Followed by Success, or Success Followed by Failure? A Re-examination of British Economic Growth since 1949’, in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain Volume III: Structural Change and Growth, 1939-2000 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 31, Rodney Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999), p. 74.
Lowe, Welfare State, pp. 74, 76.
Paul Johnson, ‘The Welfare State, Income and Living Standards’, in Floud and Johnson (eds.), Cambridge Economic History, pp. 222-24.
The lack of clarity concerning the concept of social justice underpinning the post-war welfare state - and hence its intellectual vulnerability once the post-war economic boom was over - is well brought out in Jose Harris, ‘‘Contract’ and ‘Citizenship’’, in David Marquand and Anthony Seldon (eds.), The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain (London, Fontana, 1996), pp. 122-38.
One famous critique (from the Left) of the behaviour of trade unions in competing against one another - rather than shoring up genuine working-class solidarity was: Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’, Marxism Today, 22, 9 (September, 1978), pp. 279-86.
Another major reason for the erosion of government authority was the need to seek a loan from the IMF in 1976. Although the Callaghan government recovered from this debacle somewhat, before collapsing due to a wave of strikes in 1978-79 - usually known as ‘the Winter of Discontent’ - the episode clearly undermined government authority.
Economists inspired by Keynes had often argued that a rise in unemployment was the result of a lack of demand, which the government could often rectify by spending more money - so that the art of macroeconomic policy was to spend enough to stimulate demand, without spending too much to fuel runaway inflation. See Kitson, ‘Failure Followed by Success?’, pp. 48-9. In the earlier post-war period, confidence in the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment was so strong that many economists thought it could be plotted on a graph as the ‘Phillips curve’; the contradiction of this in the 1970s in practice was a real shock - see Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1992 (Paris, OECD, 1995), p. 84.
For a good account of how the Thatcherite position developed in the 1970s, see Robert Saunders, ‘‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ Thatcherism and the Seventies’ in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 25-42.
British entry into the EEC in 1973 represented a particularly major change in the orientation of the country’s foreign policy - since in the later 1940s and earlier 1950s both Labour and Conservative governments had been wary about engaging with the developing EEC, because of continuing economic links to the Commonwealth, and worries Western European democracies might not survive. For a good overview of the developing British relationship with the EEC, see Stephen George, An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998). More generally, for the new constitutional challenges facing conservatives by the 1970s, see Edmund Neill, ‘Conservative Thinkers and the Post-War State, 1945-79’ in Lawrence Goldman (ed.), Welfare and Social Policy in Britain since 1870: Essays in Honour of Jose Harris (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 162-77.
There were a few minor exceptions to this, notably ‘The Responsible Society’ (1959), which, in addition to re-emphasizing the importance of striking a balance between the powers of state and individual, also sought to address the social problems associated with the late 1950s, notably rising crime and juvenile delinquency by stressing the importance of self-help and moral responsibility. But its practical impact was negligible. See One Nation Group, The Responsible Society (London, Conservative Political Centre, 1959), pp. 5-6, p. 11; pp. 57-8. Robert Walsha, ‘The One Nation Group and One Nation Conservatism, 1950-2022’, Contemporary British History, 17, 2 (2003), pp. 87-89.
See, for just one exemplification of this idea the shift in Michael Oakeshott’s work in using the vocabulary of ‘tradition’ in Rationalism in Politics and other essays (1962) to that of ‘practices’ in On Human Conduct (1975). See Michael Oakeshott, ‘On Misunderstanding Human Conduct: A Reply to My Critics’, Political Theory 4, 3 (1976) p. 364.
Ian Gilmour, Inside Right (London, Hutchinson, 1977), p. 31.
Ibid., pp. 83-86.
Ibid., pp. 33-34.
Ibid., pp. 19-21.
Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma, pp. 164-5.
Gilmour, Inside Right, pp. 27-39.
See Ibid., pp. 37; 31-32.
Ibid., pp. 27-28; p. 33.
Ibid., pp. 31, 83, 127.
Ibid., pp. 127-29.
Ibid., p. 122.
Gilmour, Inside Right, pp. 133-39, and particularly Gilmour’s conclusions at pp. 139-40: ‘on the evidence of Mr Powell’s career, an ideological approach does not produce loyalty, consistency, Conservatism, or chivalry … consistency will paradoxically be best preserved by the absence of ideology not by its presence’. Gilmour’s argument here is strongly reminiscent of Oakeshott - see Michael Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in Politics’ in Timothy Fuller (ed.), Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN, Liberty Fund, 1991), p. 41: ‘unavoidably the conduct of life [for the ideological Rationalist] is a jerky, discontinuous affair, the solution of a stream of problems, the mastery of a succession of crises’.
Gilmour, Inside Right, pp. 114-15.
Ibid., p. 199.
Ibid., p. 206.
Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma, pp. 202-205; 207-11; 194-97; 212-20.
Ibid., pp. 216-17; 218-19; 214.
Gilmour, Inside Right, pp. 213-14.
Ibid., pp. 216-18.
Ibid., p. 220.
Ibid., p. 218-19.
Ian Gilmour, ‘Tories, Social Democracy, and the Centre’, Political Quarterly, 54, 3 (1983), p. 264.
Gilmour, Inside Right, p. 224.
This is a constant theme throughout Gilmour’s work - for just one of numerous examples, see his critique of Hayek: Gilmour, Inside Right, pp. 116-17.
See Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma, pp. 26-28. It is important to note, however, that Gilmour rejected cruder versions of ‘Keynesianism’. It was not enough simply to spend government money in the hopes of stimulating growth under all circumstances, in other words - since (for example) reflation without sufficient prior investment would simply lead to a large balance of payments deficit. See Dancing with Dogma, p. 61.
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 20.
Ibid., p. 62.
Gilmour’s justification for this was the (Keynesian) argument that by cutting spending on good and services, a government is liable to increase unemployment - which both reduces its tax take and necessitates more spending on unemployment benefit. (See Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma, p. 23) As a side note, is notable that he does not use another common argument against the equation of government spending with a household budget - namely that governments have to spend far more on future investments (such as infrastructure projects and education) than a household budgeter does.
Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma, p. 27.
Gilmour, ‘Tories, Social Democracy, and the Centre’, pp. 266-67. This argument should be partially qualified in two ways. First, Gilmour was far more inclined to be partisan in the 1970s, insisting on the superiority of the record of Conservative governments over Labour ones - and particularly over the administrations of Harold Wilson. (See Gilmour, Inside Right, pp. 153-54.) Second, even in ‘Tories, Social Democracy, and the Centre’, Gilmour insisted that the post-war consensus was at least as much the ideological child of Tories as of socialists. Nevertheless, the trend in his thought towards upholding the values of the post-war ‘consensus’ in general - rather than specifically the conservative contribution to it - is clear. I owe this point to Dr Dean Blackburn (Nottingham University).
For an insistence on the conservatism of Thatcherism on this basis, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 385-93, and Edmund Neill ‘Intellectual Reactions to Thatcherism: Conceptions of Citizenship and Civil Society from 1990-2010’, in Antony Mullen, Stephen Farrall, and David Jeffery (eds.), Thatcherism in the 21st Century: The Social and Cultural Legacy (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 36-37. The strong emphasis within Thatcherism on the importance of patriotism also distinguished it from Hayek, who, in common with many post-war intellectuals and ‘Cold War liberals’ was deeply suspicious of nationalistic impulses. See Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty (Cambridge, Polity, 1996), pp. 104-105.
Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma, p. 119.
Ibid., p. 125.
Ibid., p. 173.
Macleod and Maude (eds.), ‘One Nation’, p. 77.
Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma, p. 129.
Ibid., p. 157.
Ibid., p. 160.
Ibid., pp. 157; 167-70.
Ibid., p. 170.
Ibid., pp. 138-39.
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