Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

Introduction

Those Britons born in 1945 who came of age in the political upheavals that engulfed much of Europe and the Americas in 1968 would have been forgiven for thinking that social democracy was here to stay. They lived in a country that had never been as prosperous, where affluence was more evenly spread and where people were healthier, better housed and better educated than ever before. My parents’ generation, born in the 1930s, could raise a family on a single breadwinner's wage in a job that lasted a lifetime and provided a generous pension that sustained a lengthy retirement. They were able to send their children to school and even university, not to mention doctors and dentists, for free. In short, like the collapse of the Soviet Union, everything seemed forever, until it was no more. Unlike the Soviet Union, the end of social democracy in Britain did not come suddenly with the International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment programme in 1976. Instead, like coastlines, it was gradually eroded. In some places, that erosion was rapid, but in other areas, as with rocky headlands, it took longer. In exploring when and how social democracy came to an end, this chapter will also seek to explain why, despite its substantial achievements, its life was so brief.

Parts of the answer to that question lie in the previous chapters. We have already seen how social democracy was always compromised by a series of internal and external constraints. It grew around rather than eradicated the influence and persistent wealth of Britain's ancien regime. A system developed to generate economic growth and to spread its benefits more equitably among the population was designed and managed by a technocratic class of experts who increasingly became a target for criticism. The plans of these experts were rarely realized, for fighting two world wars had left Britain dependent on American loans and American Cold War ambitions. Rather than the bright, modernist, future envisioned in the Festival of Britain, much of the social democratic infrastructure of schools, hospitals and housing stock remained Victorian. This type of social democracy by gaslight would have sufficed for those colonial subjects struggling for independence, having exposed the empty promises of late imperialism to deliver colonial development and welfare.