Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

residual bitterness among some Conservative MPs towards Churchill which persisted even during the new premier's 'finest hour', and was compounded by accusations that he was unnecessarily generous towards Labour in the new coalition. The 1945 election is shown not to be the low-key and consensual affair it is frequently portrayed as, but a campaign characterized by both bitter recrimination and fundamental differences of political philosophy. There are some aspects of wartime politics which might have received more attention. Jefferys's analysis is essentially confined to the attitudes of ministers and MPs, with only limited reference to the role of Whitehall officials. Moreover, his discussion of developments outside Westminister is restricted to by-elections. This is a disappointment, since the political debate about reconstruction taking place at the centre can also be found at the municipal level, as recent research on Coventry has shown. Finally, Jefferys's treatment of the Conservatives is more sustained than that of Labour, and readers would be advised to use this book in conjunction with Stephen Brooke's forthcoming monograph, Labour's War. In the light of Jefferys's book, does the notion of 'consensus' have any future as a tool of historical investigation? It must not be forgotten that Addison not merely argued for a consensus among politicians, but among the wider public. Jefferys may have proved the absence of consensus in high politics, but the question of whether there was ever a wartime 'popular consensus' outside official propaganda remains unanswered. And of course it could be argued that just because consensus politics did not emerge in Britain in 1940-45, it does not necessarily mean they never appeared at all. Indeed Jefferys seems to endorse this very conclusion, arguing in an epilogue that there was a 'retreat to consensus' after 1947, when the Conservatives accepted the welfare state, and Labour embraced Keynesian economic management. This seems an over-simplification. The extent of 'Butskellism' in the 1950s should not be exaggerated, for Labour's new sympathy towards demand management was still accompanied by the more traditional Socialist prescriptions of physical planning and public ownership. It is surely not enough merely to shift the advent of consensus forward from 1940 to 1947. The necessity now is to move beyond the increasingly unhelpful notion of consensus altogether, and to develop a new conceptual framework for the study of this most pivotal decade in modern British politics. MARTIN FRANCIS Corpus Christi College Oxford RAYMOND WILLIAMS. By Tony Pinkney. Border Lines, Seren Books, 1991. Pp. 144. £ 5.95. This is an astringent and informative analysis of Raymond Williams's six novels It is also the best single study of a modern Welsh writer I have ever read. It appears in the excellent, new Border Line series which, as the general editor, J. P. Ward.