Introduction

Ideas, we know, have consequences. When the vision of England as a green and pleasant land invaded by a somewhat alien industrialism was taken up by the children of Victorian industrialists, it could not help but affect the world of action. Politics and business in the twentieth century bore the imprint of a divided bourgeois consciousness. The nation that had been the mother of the industrial revolution was now uneasy with its offspring. The class that had reared industrialism almost seemed to wish to deny paternity. The result was two paradoxes, one in the world of politics and one in the realm of business.

The political history of Britain over the past century has usually been seen – in contrast with that of continental Europe – as one of a moderation deriving from what Adam Ulam has called the “saturation with industrial values” of all classes. According to this interpretation, all major political parties wholeheartedly accepted the framework of industrial society, clashing only over the details of its arrangements. No truly fundamental criticisms of this society were allowed into the political arena. Both Conservatives and Labour were moving toward “technocratic” rather than ideological stances.

An industrialist, or technocratic, political consensus has been seen as having established itself by the nineteen-twenties, under the premiership of Andrew Bonar Law, Stanley Baldwin, and Ramsay Macdonald. All of these leaders, it has been argued, believed that industrial advance would largely solve existing social problems. The first two were themselves businessmen.