Welsh Journals

underestimate the influence of permanent officials such as Sir Edward Troup. His memorandum in Ocober 1911 argued that if at any future time a state of things should arise affecting the maintenance of order throughout the United Kingdom, it is clear that the assistance to be given to the magistrates and the police must be organised under the direction and control of central government'. Pre-war Liberal governments may not have implemented the tactics this foreshadowed, but they had certainly achieved a position where they were ready to use them as occasion arose. JOHN STEVENSON Worcester College Oxford THE CHURCHILL COALITION AND WARTIME POLITICS, 1940-1945. By Kevin Jefferys. Manchester University Press, 1991. Pp. 242. £ 29.95. This is the first extended study of wartime politics to appear since Paul Addison's classic, The Road to 1945, in 1975. Addison asserted that the war created a new middle ground upon which the major political parties would thereafter compete for political power. In contrast to the negative antagonisms of the 1930s, there now emerged between Conservatives and Labour a definite 'consensus', a common approach to social policy. In 1945, in Addison's memorable phrase, this new consensus 'fell like a branch of ripe plums, into the lap of Mr. Attlee'. This thesis has remained remarkably resilient, even during the decidedly un- consensual 1980s. However, The Road to 1945 had itself, despite its general conclusion, included evidence of disagreements between coalition ministers over issues such as the Beveridge Report. In recent years Addison's conclusions have been questioned by both Jose Harris and Ben Pimlott, while Kenneth Morgan's authoritative study of the post-war Labour government demonstrated that Attlee and his colleagues frequently went beyond what had been agreed with their coalition partners before 1945. However, it is only now that Kevin Jefferys has provided an extended and detailed challenge to Addison's model of political development in the years 1939-45. Jefferys convincingly demonstrates that the war did not see the emergence of a new consensus between the political parties. Rather, these years were characterized by continued disagreements: over economic policy in 1940-41, over war strategy during 1942, and over reconstruction after 1942. Apart from the 1944 Education Act and family allowances, no major social legislation actually reached the statute book before the end of the war, while wartime white papers were sufficiently ambiguous to allow for very different interpretations by opposing political leaders. This, and the fact that most Conservative MPs remained unsympathetic, if not hostile, towards a dramatic extension of social reform, became all too apparent in the 1945 election campaign, Jefferys is to be commended for breathing some much-needed fire back into the Political history of the 1940s. He shows that Neville Chamberlain's fall in 1940 left a