Power, Competition and the State

The start of intense rivalry between industry, trade unions and the financial sector, to influence policy in postwar Britain, increased in the late 1950s. Macmillan's government succeeded briefly in restoring some of the original wartime consensus after 1961, only to see hopes for Conservative planning wither. Competition among interest groups to settle how the national interest should be defined made Wilson's attempt to create a Labour planned economy almost impossible. Despite the spur of relative decline, modernisation always fell far short of politicians' aims, putting in doubt the ability of even a modern state to achieve its ambitions. A series of crises exposed promises of breakthrough into growth, which governments blamed on the self-interest of institutions - without whose co-operation they still believed they could not govern. Search for an elusive tripartism, though justified in terms of the political ethos and organisations in which they almost all believed, led industrial politics to a messy conclusion in the late 1970s. The fall of the Heath government is described in detail. In the process, the postwar settlement's already-insecure foundations were eroded, and the ability of civil servants, industrialists, bankers and union leaders to ensure a longer view, dangerously weakened. A less deferential, more emancipated public outgrew old disciplines of political society, so that by 1974, in the middle of a profound crisis, it had to be asked: not could, but how should Britain be governed? This is a study of the period, covering each of the actors in the national game as they struggled to shape not only public policy but the nature of the state itself.