Introduction: 1961

Abstract

The first volume of this study of modern British political processes was finished in 1985. My own reformulations since then, together with the requirements of undergraduate teaching and the comments of other historians and political scientists, have inevitably emphasised and sharpened some of its arguments in the intervening four years, so that a brief recapitulation is desirable before setting out to complete the narrative as far as the mid-1980s. But even if it were not so, an introductory chapter on the 1961 context would require some assessment of how perceptions of the 1944 agenda and postwar settlement had changed. What had once been seen as a political contract written in very general but enabling terms, was judged, seventeen years later, to be an inadequate rulebook for what had become the principal contemporary requirements: adjustment to change and economic growth. Wartime reconstructors had, of course, envisaged their agenda in different terms; of survival as a great power in a hostile postwar environment, whilst remedying the greatest evils of the 1930s. Their conception of what was to be done inevitably fell foul of the next generation’s tendency to rewrite the agenda in its own terms and to seek, in the idea of planned growth, a remedy for the failure of politics and of the politicians who preceded them.