We all know the story. The Second World War witnessed a profound shift in society, where everyday men and women fought a ‘people’s war’ against the blight of fascism and Hitler. Society came together for the common good, evidenced not only through the small boats rescuing the stranded Tommys at Dunkirk but also through the ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude of the person in the street. Different communities worked with each other, forging new, egalitarian bonds in the fires of war, sharing everything as they huddled in air raid shelters and underground stations, on the Home Front and on the battlefront. With the Labour Party shaping the state’s wartime domestic policy, their victory in 1945 and the social and economic restructuring thereafter were thus inevitable points on a continual line of progress, from a conservative, traditional, and tired past to the bright hopes for a better and more equal future.
This is the foundation myth of our modern social state. It explains everything from the National Health Service to the modernisation of the countryside, from the welfare state to the country’s international relationships. But as Kit Kowol decisively proves in his book Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War, it is also fundamentally wrong.
Across six carefully constructed chapters, Kowol picks apart the accepted narrative by arguing from a simple position: wartime Conservatism was not a spent force, an arid desert littered with the weathered, dry bones of dynamism and inspiration bleached to insignificance by the blazing Labour sun. Instead, it was a lush and fertile plain, fed by the many streams of Conservative thought. Across every area of foreign and domestic policy – agriculture, trade, welfare, warfare, education, religion, international relations – the Conservative landscape was awash with ideas. Indeed, the problem was not that the Tories were experiencing a drought, but the opposite: they were, simply, flooded by different solutions – not just for the present, but also for the postwar future. This was the reason why the Conservative manifesto for the 1945 general election was so weak: it wasn’t from a lack of sustenance, but from a surfeit of meat. In a nutshell, there were too many directions from which to choose.
Implicitly, therefore, Kowol offers a warning to our current political parties, both – and most obviously – the Conservatives, but Labour as well. The huge Tory losses at the 1945 election were not the result of an assumed Labour monopoly of the Home Front during the war – Kowol has illustrated beyond doubt that this is a mirage caused by an excess of hindsight – but instead were thanks to an inability to agree on a direction going forward. There was energy, there was motion, but no vector. The broad church of Conservatism that included ‘modernising industrialists to aristocratic landowners, the great City trader to the small-scale rentier’ had benefits but, when it came to determining policy, also significant dangers. When no thorough manifesto could be agreed upon, these dangers became realised in Labour’s landslide. Firm direction, given impetus by strong and unwavering leadership, is needed for electoral success. The Conservatives lacked that.
Leadership is, therefore, critical to this story. But despite the honourable mention in Blue Jerusalem’s subtitle, Churchill remains very much on the periphery – just as he did in many of the Conservative’s wartime domestic policy debates. There was, and is, method to this. Churchill the man looms large in popular readings of Britain during the Second World War, but his focus often was not on the domestic minutiae at home. This allowed a flowering of contradictory opinions, a bloom of radical ideas, that gave the Party such an invigorating, vibrant intellectual and philosophical burst. By removing Churchill from centre stage, Kowol allows these aspects to come to the fore. When so much focus continues to rest on Churchill, this is a bold move – and one that works. Nevertheless, it will not satisfy the Churchill obsession.
To those wishing to understand the dynamics of wartime Conservatism, Churchill’s almost cameo role shouldn’t matter. Kowol has done an outstanding job of proving that the Conservatives of the Second World War were not just about their leader. He has shown that, instead, the Party was teeming with radical ideas for a better future: about ways to rebuild Britain physically, socially, and ideologically, and about how to restructure the fractured global relationships to forge a new world. But he has also shown that, unless a leader is willing to take those disparate ideas and mould them into a cohesive, organised whole, then the best and grandest of intentions will be for nought. Politicians of today take note.
