The Wartime State

Abstract

The needs of a nation fighting for survival, more than ideas about rational progress, have so far determined the main lines of state growth in modern Britain. Higher organisation of the war effort, reordered with amazing speed after the crisis of May 1940, lasted with few alterations until 1945 largely because it was both efficient and humane. It contrasted sharply with what had been achieved, haphazardly, during the First World War; but it owed its overriding symmetry to similar fears of invasion from Germany and chaos at home. In neither war did Britain indulge in total war planning from the outset. Long after 1940, indeed far into the post-war era, patterns of behaviour usually associated with the 1930s continued.