(Harold Perkin) Rise of Professional Society, Revi

The Rise of Professional Society
THE RISE OF
PROFESSIONAL
SOCIETY
England since 1880
HAROLD PERKIN
LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1989
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
First published in paperback 1990
This edition first published 2002
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© 1989, 1990, 2002 Harold Perkin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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To Joan
—helpmate for over fifty years
Social and industrial movements of far-reaching importance are
now in progress, and what they portend no living man can say.
The immediate responsibility for guiding their development in
accordance with the welfare of the nation lies upon those to
whom the country has entrusted the conduct of its business.
Behind the Government is the unseen but irresistible force of
public opinion; it is difficult to ascertain with any degree of
precision what this opinion is, but—subject to the exigencies of
party politics—the Cabinet will always endeavour to carry out
what they believe to be the wishes of the Public. It is, therefore,
of the utmost importance that the power which thus controls
national policy, and indirectly the legislation which gives it effect,
should be as fully informed as possible about the conditions
upon which its opinion and its mandates are based. But our
social organisation is now so complicated, and the action and
reaction of forces within it so intricate and so difficult to
estimate, that public opinion is apt to be formed upon a very
incomplete understanding of existing facts.
Sir Arthur Clay, Syndicalism and Labour (1911)
vii
CONTENTS
Introduction to the 2002 edition xi
Preface to the first edition xxi
1 The meaning of professional society 1

1 Class versus hierarchy 2
2 Professional rivalries and the state 9
3 The culmination of the Industrial Revolution 17
2 The zenith of class society 27

1 The height of inequality 28
2 The climacteric of British capitalism 36
3 The decline of Liberal England 40
4 The fear of the poor 53
3 A segregated society 62
1 The rich and the powerful 62
2 The riven middle class 78
3 Lives apart: the remaking of the working class 101
4 Class society and the professional ideal 116

1 The professional social ideal 116
2 Professionalism and property 123
3 The defence of property 141
4 The professional ideal and the origins of the
welfare state 155
5 The crisis of class society 171

1 The aborted pre-war crisis 174
2 The supreme test of class society 186
3 The crisis averted 204
ix
CONTENTS
6 A halfway house: society in war and peace 218

1 The great divide, 1914–18 224
2 Social change between the wars 241
3 The old order changeth 251
4 ‘Money isn’t everything’ 258
5 Spiralists and burgesses 266
6 The road from Wigan Pier 273
7 Towards a corporate society 286

1 The corporate economy 291
2 The corporate state 315
3 The corporate society 331
8 The triumph of the professional ideal 359

1 The professional ideal and the decline of the
industrial spirit 363
2 Professionalism and human capital 377
3 The condescension of professionalism 390
9 The plateau of professional society 405

1 The Second World War and the revolution in
expectations 407
2 ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’ 418
3 The bifurcation of the professional ideal 436
4 The persistence of class 455
10 The backlash against professional society 472

1 Professionalism under fire 475
2 Rolling back the state? 483
3 The resurgence of the free market ideology 495
4 Britain’s economic decline and the political dilemma 506
Notes 520
Index 578
x
INTRODUCTION TO THE
2002 EDITION
This book was first published in 1989, a year before Margaret

Thatcher resigned as prime minister and eight years before Tony
Blair won his first landslide victory for New Labour. At first sight
it would seem that the political and social landscape has changed
completely since then. After a frustrating delay under John Major,
many hoped for the demise of Thatcherism and the triumphalist
‘free market’, and the resurgence of a less individualistic, more
community-oriented government and society. The backlash of
Thatcherism, it was hoped, would be a mere pause in the evolution
of a mature professional society, with a restored balance between
the public and private sector professionals and all the benefits of a
mutually supportive system based on education, meritocracy, social
responsibility on the part of the successful, and secure incomes and
conditions of work and life for the less fortunate.
Alas, it has not turned out that way. New Labour has turned out
to mean Thatcherism with a human face, even more freedom for
big business to dominate the national economy and world trade,
and the return of a more powerful private sector in disguise, that is,
public-private partnerships with guaranteed profits to the investor
and the risks carried by the taxpayer. Government, despite a half-
hearted devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, has
become even more centralized, with parliament sidelined to rubber-
stamp the executive’s decisions, local government all but irrelevant,
and even the central administration subordinated to a power-
hungry Downing Street where a presidential type of alternative
government through unelected advisers prevails over cabinet
ministers and civil service mandarins alike.
Paradoxically, however, the main trends of professional society,
not all of them intended or beneficial, have continued to advance.
These trends, road tested in a study of professional society in six
xi
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2002 EDITION
major societies across the developed world published in 1996, are

laid out in the following table.
THE MAJOR TRENDS OF PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY

(1) High living standards for (nearly) all
A dramatic rise in GNP per head affecting most of the population,
but with an uneducated underclass of the socially excluded.
(2) The swing to services

Most workers no longer in agriculture and manufacturing but in
services, some no more skilled than old manual labour but increasing
numbers in professional, intellectually demanding occupations.
(3) Class into hierarchy

Broad class divisions gradually replaced by professional
hierarchies, occupational ladders in diverse service occupations,
increasingly employed either by the state or by large corporations.
(4) Meritocracy
Recruitment and promotion by merit, professionally trained
expertise-though skewed because some can ‘buy merit’ more easily
than others, while some have ‘merit’ thrust upon them.
(5) Women’s equality

Professional society is the first society in history to offer women a
(limited) degree of equality, based on higher education and the
replacement of manual labour by mental, though at the expense of
a dual burden of work.
(6) Higher education as the key profession

Higher education expands dramatically as the creator of merit,
human capital, professional expertise in every major field,
including bureaucracy in the government and corporate sectors.
(7) The growth of government

Professional services (education, health, welfare, defence, and law
and order) all expand state administration, if not as a direct
provider then as regulator and contractor. Hence the continuing
rise in government expenditure, despite efforts to contain it.
xii
(8) State welfare

The welfare state, professionally organized, an essential support of
social cohesion and defence against political and economic
breakdown, continues expanding although under pressure from the
free market lobby.
(9) The rise of the giant corporation

Big sister to the state’s big brother, the professionally managed giant
corporation has become the dominant player in the national
economy, with contradictory effects on its employees and customers.
(10) Globalization
The global economy is increasingly dominated by the professional
executives of the TNCs (transnational corporations), the top 100 of
which are richer and more powerful than three quarters of the
member states of the United Nations, and use national governments
as their proxies in global policies and operations.
Source: Extracted from The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the
Modern World, Routledge, 1996, dealing with Britain, the United States,
France, the two Germanics, the Soviet Union, and Japan, since World War II.
Without changing the text below, in order to view professional

society without hindsight at its level under Thatcherism, it is
revealing to ask how the ten trends have fared in the dozen years
since Thatcher was abandoned by the Conservative Cabinet.
Surprisingly, most of the trends have continued to progress, if not
always in expected ways. Average living standards in Britain have
continued to rise, better than in many rival countries. In March
2002, the International Monetary Fund congratulated Britain on
‘nine years of sustained non-inflationary growth, the longest such
expansion in 30 years,’ averaging almost 3 per cent p.a., the fastest
of any developed country (Guardian, 8/3/02). Gross Domestic
Product per head (at purchasing power parities) advanced from
$12,340 in 1989 to $21,673 in 2000, a 75.6 per cent increase,
amounting after inflation to 36.1 per cent—an impressive gain in
living standards in a dozen years (OECD Economic Surveys:
Britain, 1989 and 2002). Allowing for other indices of quality of
life, this made Britain the fifth most prosperous country in the
world (United Nations Human Development Report, 2001).
Meanwhile, the gap in disposable income between rich and poor
remained much the same, though nearly one in five (18 per cent)
xiii
remained below the (relative) poverty line, with less than 60 per
cent of median income; while the richest 1 per cent own 23 per cent
of the wealth and half the population own only 6 per cent (OECD:
Britain, p. 65; Social Trends, 2002, pp. 87, 99).
The swing to services, not all professional of course, has gone
still further, from 68 per cent of the workforce in 1989 to 72 per
cent in 2000, reducing the share in manufacturing industry from
29.8 to 26.5 per cent, leaving consumers heavily dependent on
manufactured imports from the Third World. Agriculture now
accounts for less than 2 per cent of employment and even less of
GDP, making Britain one of the countries most dependent on food
imports. (OECD: Britain, Basic Statistics table).
Hierarchy has almost overwhelmed class: the trade unions have
been marginalized, despite threats of strike action by rail workers,
air traffic controllers, postal workers, teachers and others; and the
once (pre-dominantly) working-class Labour Party has been
replaced by New Labour, a self-styled pragmatic party without the
class roots of Old Labour, a worrying development for both unions
and party members.
Meritocracy has been transmogrified, as merit has come to be
defined in non-traditional ways, to include talents no longer
dependent on higher education: pop music, fashion modelling,
sport, Britart, television presenting, soap operas, and other
celebrity vehicles now yield huge incomes and greater wealth than
ever. Women have become yet more equal, both in higher education
(up from 46 to 55 per cent of the students) and employment (up
from 43 to 45 per cent of the work-force), and their hourly full-
time earnings have risen from 75 to 82 per cent of men’s (Social
Trends, pp. 60, 71, 92). But recruitment and promotion have been
less than feminists would like especially in the top echelons, and
modest advance has been at the cost of overburdening themselves
with double careers in the job market and in the domestic sphere.
Higher education, the chief creator of human capital, has been
broadened, largely by the upgrading of colleges and polytechnics to
university status, to cater for a third or more of the student age
group, although at the price of charging fees and abolishing
maintenance grants which the Tories avoided but New Labour
imposed at the risk of excluding the children of the least affluent.
Despite the boasted rolling back of the state, government has
continued to extend its influence over civil society; control by the
centre has gone further than ever before. Within government itself,
xiv
where democracy has declined still more and a species of elective

dictatorship, begun under Thatcher, central control has been
expanded. The welfare state, victim of attack and erosion by the free
market ideology, has been severely squeezed under the Major and
Blair governments, to the point where public services, especially the
National Health Service, education, public transport, and police and
prisons, have become the main target of political complaint.
Above all, the giant corporation has become more gigantic, with
mergers and takeovers increasing at a faster pace, undermining
some of the most beneficial trends of professional society, notably
the career ladder and secure conditions of work and retirement,
now guaranteed only for the top executives. Finally, the global
economy, run increasingly by the executives of the transnational
corporations, has become even more dominant, extending
increasingly unequal incomes and life chances across the world.
This has provoked a backlash from the Third World and the anti-
globalization movement, to which we should now add the threat of
terrorism against the affluent West.
There are other, less healthy trends, clouds no bigger than a
person’s hand in the 1980s, that are now threatening the world. A
by-product of affluence and economic growth, global warming,
denied by the United States government and the multinational
corporations, has become incontrovertible, with floods in Africa,
South Asia and the United States itself, forest fires in Indonesia,
California and Australia, rising sea levels in the Pacific islands and
other low-lying countries, and even encephalitis-carrying
mosquitoes in New York. Do-it-yourself terrorism of the Al-Qaeda
kind is a serious challenge to the very notion of the nation state,
and religious fundamentalism, not only by Islamists, is calling on
loyalties that override patriotic nationalism. What the American
government calls ‘rogue states’, many of them originally funded
and armed by the United States during the Cold War, have begun to
develop weapons of mass destruction, aimed at the West and the
global economy. Both terrorists with sophisticated techniques and
weapons and the scientists of ‘rogue states’ with nuclear, chemical
and biological devices have been trained in professional
institutions, often in the leading universities of the West.
All these trends, for good or ill, are at bottom driven by one
single factor: human capital, or professional, educated expertise.
That factor is still at work but with unexpected effects that belie the
older conceptions of educated merit. The cult of celebrity and the
xv
rise of huge incomes and capital accumulations have created a new

meritocracy of talent owing little to higher education in the
traditional sense. Sportsmen like David Beckham and Ian Wright,
pop stars like Madonna, and Paul McCartney, fashion models like
Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, artists like Damien Hirst and
Tracy Emin, have become millionaires and some owners of landed
estates, with success owing more to luck and media hype than to
formal training. They are the exceptional beneficiaries of ‘jackpot’
professions in which many are called but few are chosen, but have
the unlooked-for effect of giving hope to those who have missed
out in the orthodox educational stakes.
On the other hand, the high road for most professionals in search
of exceptional rewards has been corporate business, especially in
finance and electronic services, like the vulnerable City financial
traders and dot.com millionaires of the recent, now exploded, 1990s
boom. These are only a special case, however, of the private sector
professionals, now mostly MBAs trained in business schools, who
conform to the traditional meritocratic career pattern. Like the
celebrities, they are also in jackpot professions. The few who reach
the top of the major corporations or law, advertising and financial
firms can name their own rewards, in vast incomes and in share
options, bonuses, huge pensions and golden severance pay, that bear
almost no relation to success or failure.
They have had, however, a disruptive side effect on the mass of
their employees, and have overturned one of the most beneficial
trends of professionalism, the secure and progressive career. This has
been replaced in many cases by self-employed consultancy, with
bidding for uncertain work, no national insurance or pension
contributions, no unemployment benefit, and no redundancy pay.
These ostensibly freelance yet virtually dependent workers have
become a further layer in the hierarchy of corporate capitalism,
along with shareholders, sub-contractors and franchisees, whose life
chances are indirectly controlled by the executives at the head of the
corporations. The giant corporations are not individual entities
operating in solitary isolation but are locked into a hierarchy of
institutions—from holding companies, insurance firms, banks and
pension funds above to subsidiary companies, sub-contractors and
franchisees below—that emulates the feudal hierarchies of barons,
knights, squires, retainers, grand and petty sergeants, freeholders and
serfs of the middle ages. This system, of mutual dependency and
compulsory loyalty, I have called elsewhere corporate neo-feudalism
(see The Third Revolution, Routledge, 1996, pp. 42–7).
xvi
As such it exists, in accordance with capitalist ideology, to make

and extract profit from the layered dependants. Justified as long as
the exchange is mutually beneficial and the reward gap not
excessive, it can rapidly become exploitation. The corporate feudal
lords’ human capital is transformed into material wealth and fixed
capital and also into power over the feudal ‘tenants’. At the same
time the elite have outmanoeuvred the public sector professionals,
civil servants, local government officers, doctors, teachers,
professors, social workers, and other public servants, in income and
influence and, through the introduction of managerialism into the
health service, education, social services and the rest. They have
imbued the public sector with the free market view that it is a cost
to the taxpayer instead of a creative investment in human capital.
The one leg of the professional body politic has shrivelled at the
expense of the other and almost crippled the professional ideal.
One aspect of this distortion of the ideal is the degeneration of
the welfare state. The original welfare state of 1948 with its
universal provision of social security, medical treatment, equal
education, and pensions was gradually eroded by inflation but
retained its popularity even under Thatcher. Famously she declared
in 1982, ‘The National Health Service is safe with us.’ Her mentors
in the free market lobby, however, kept up a continuous campaign
against public provision with pamphlets like Wither the Welfare
State (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1981) and The Moral Hazard
of State Benefits (IEA, 1982) and aimed to replace it with private
health insurance, education vouchers, insurance-based pensions,
and the like. Although they never succeeded in abolishing it, they
encouraged erosion via the stagnation of benefits and the
substitution of private alternatives.
Nevertheless, they could not have expected that a New Labour
government would embrace their aims with more success than the
Conservatives. Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon
Brown began by accepting Tory limits on taxation for the first two
years, which had the effect of starving the public services and
limiting their growth thereafter. They ‘thought the unthinkable’ and
made cuts where the Tories feared to tread: in payments to the
disabled, in the real value of retirement pensions, grants for
university students, and so on. Although they have bowed to public
opinion since and allocated larger funds for them, even talking of
raising and hypothecating taxes, they are only playing ‘catch-up’ to
where they started. That a party which believed in equality of life
xvii
chances and treatment should desert its founding philosophy is a

measure of the decline of political credibility.
A second aspect is the extension of the Thatcherite drive towards
privatization, typically, however, in disguised ways. The ‘Third
Way,’ via private finance initiatives and public—private
partnerships, is a means of partial privatization by the back door.
Thatcher’s programme of privatiszation, intensified by John Major,
was hotly condemned by New Labour while in opposition. In
office, however, it accepted the Tory privatizations, like Railtrack
(the bankrupt railroad authority) and the public utilities some of
which have failed and sold their assets back to the customers. It
then went further and planned the partial privatization of vital
public services like the London Underground, Air Traffic Control,
and a number of NHS hospitals, against the wishes of their own
party members and the public opinion polls.
Privatization as such is ostensibly neutral, but the effect of the
Third Way has been to invite private enterprise in a one-sided
bargain, by which the investors take guaranteed profits of up to 30
per cent for 30 years and the taxpayer underwrites the risk of loss.
Already the system has begun to fail: in the case of Railtrack and
Air Traffic Control, both operations made massive losses within
months of their first crises, the Ladbroke Grove and Selby train
crashes and the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center, but that did not halt the government’s determination to
press on with their programme for the London Underground.
Meanwhile, one unintended effect has been the purchase of public
utilities like water and electricity by overseas corporations, mainly
American and French, that have no interest in British customers
except to maximize profit. The Third Way has become a milch cow
for private corporations, British and foreign.
A third distortion of the professional ideal is the subordination of
British business to the global economy. In principle, the global
economy is a beneficial movement, a further expansion of the market
that has been going on for centuries. However, in the current
acceleration of the trend, based on Anglo-American managerial or
shareholder capitalism (unlike the stakeholder capitalisms of Europe
and Japan) and controlled by the American-dominated World Trade
Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank,
Britain and Europe and, even more so, the Third World have become
dependent on rules that benefit the United States and its corporations
at the expense of the rest of the world. The American government
xviii
operates a double standard, insisting on free trade wherever they

have the advantage, as in bananas from the Boston Fruit Company’s
plantations in the Caribbean or genetically modified soya or rice
seeds, while slapping on protective tariffs where their own industries,
like steel and textiles, cannot compete. They also demand the right to
patent and copyright discoveries and inventions, even human genes
and medicines vital to mankind’s protection from epidemic plagues
like AIDS, which ought in natural justice to be free. Such a
manipulation of the otherwise benevolent global system for the
benefit of one country and its big business is a derogation of the free
market. That the British government, unlike the Europeans, should
go along with it is a betrayal of British interests.
The final distortion of the professional ideal is the further decline
of democracy adumbrated in Chapter 7 below (pp. 324–31). There
it is suggested that parliamentary democracy in Britain has been
inverted. Instead of the constituency party members selecting the
candidates and the voters choosing between them, the MPs electing
the Cabinet and the Cabinet choosing the Prime Minister, and both
he and they being answerable to the Commons, the Prime Minister,
once elected by the party, by a convoluted process becomes an
elective dictator. He chooses the Cabinet and junior ministers, they
control parliament through a draconian system of whips, and the
leadership increasingly controls the list of potential constituency
candidates and so the membership of the Commons majority.
New Labour has taken centralization several degrees further.
The Cabinet has been marginalized by a network of special advisers
centred on 10 Downing Street, where an alternative system of
government has been set up that parallels and overrides the
departmental ministers and civil servants. The Cabinet meets only
to hear what the Prime Minister has already agreed in preemptive
meetings with individual ministerial heads, often tripartite sessions
involving the chief special advisers, notably information chief
Alistair Campbell and chief of staff Jonathan Powell, who are far
more powerful than any departmental minister. It has become a
presidential system, where all decisions are made at the top and
delivered as diktats to the individual ministries. The special advisers
in the ministries liaise with their counterparts in No. 10, and are
protected by them in any conflicts that might arise between them
and the departmental civil servants. Even the election of the
Chairman of the Party is not by the MPs or the paid-up members
xix
but is imposed by the Prime Minister, and is the leading enforcer of

authority in the presidential structure.
Meanwhile, the House of Commons has been deprived of its role
of advice and consent to the government and has become a sounding
board for ministerial announcements, often already disclosed to the
press, and the automatic legislator of policies determined at the
autocratic centre. The House of Lords, the only element in the
structure with the guts to disagree, has been filleted of its (ironically)
only independent members, the hereditary peers, who are soon to be
replaced by a majority of government appointees in what will
become the most powerful quango in the land. This presidential
model lacks, however, the safeguards of the American Constitution,
the separation of powers that gives independence to the Congress
and prevents the President from acting without constraint. The
American system also prevents a temporary legislative majority from
unilaterally changing the constitution, as in the case of reform of the
House of Lords. The present incumbent, however, like Thatcher
forgets one critical thing: he has overwhelming power only so long as
he commands the acquiescence of the Cabinet. Absolute power
corrupts absolutely, Lord Acton said; what he did not say was that
absolute power sooner or later provokes rebellion. It took eleven
years for Margaret Thatcher to discover that overweening pride goes
before a fall. Tony Blair has yet to discover that humbling lesson, and
time is fast running out.
Professional society, like every human social system before it, is
subject to distortions and unintended consequences. It is Janus-faced:
it has a smiling face offering material gains and cultural benefits, and
an ugly one leading to exploitation, implosion and self-destruction.
The hope is that its benefits will outweigh its drawbacks. It is
potentially the most efficient and egalitarian system in the history of
humanity for delivering affluence and disseminating happiness. Yet,
like all human institutions, it is subject to the temptations of greed
and corruption that clever men and women, especially those trained
in professional skills without the ethics of the professional ideal, can
devise. ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever,’ Charles
Kingsley wisely counselled. This is good advice for professionals
everywhere, if professional society is to yield its unique meritocratic
and egalitarian potential.
Little Venice, W2
March, 2002
xx
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Two decades ago I wrote a book that set out to discover The
Origins of Modern English Society (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1969, Ark, 1985). It found them in the more than Industrial
Revolution of 1780–1880, ‘a social revolution with social causes
and a social process as well as profound social effects’, including
the demise of the old pre-industrial aristocratic society and the rise
of the viable class society of mid-Victorian England. Since all
history is a seamless web, it looked forward in the last paragraph,
as all unfinished histories should, to the next phase of the story, the
decline of Victorian class society and its replacement by the very
different society of twentieth-century England. The present book,
all too belatedly since most of my teaching, research and
publications have fallen in between, is the long-promised sequel to
that first one.
I do not regret the delay, for three principal reasons. Firstly,
contemporary history, in the sense of history that stops only at the
present and is still in large part remembered by people now living,
is for obvious reasons the most controversial and lacks the
corrective of a tranquil and healing hindsight. It therefore needs
more, not less, maturity than the older kind. Secondly, a historian
can never have enough experience, and the historian of
contemporary society is better qualified, or less unqualified, if he
has lived through a considerable part of his period. Teaching
grandparents to suck eggs, never a much appreciated endeavour, is
even less appreciated when done by youngsters. Thirdly, putting the
first two reasons together, the delay has enabled me to see more
clearly the trends which I perceived only dimly in my youthful
inexperience, and indeed the years since the first book was
published have brought a reaction against them which,
xxi
paradoxically, has given them greater substance and reality. The

owl of Minerva, Hegel shrewdly noted, flies at dusk; even if, he
might have added, the twilight, optimistically speaking, turns out
to be temporary.
The most important trend which I then discerned was the
continuing expansion of what in the first book was called ‘the
forgotten middle class’, the non-capitalist or professional segment
of the middle class which was neglected by contemporary
commentators including, most notably, the professionals
themselves, who played a role in the rise of Victorian class society
out of all proportion to their numbers. The professional class
produced most of the social thinkers who supplied the concepts and
terminology in which the three major classes, the landed
aristocracy, the capitalist entrepreneurs and the manual workers,
thought about themselves and achieved class consciousness. They
also mounted a critique of industrial society which began, even at
its height, to undermine the entrepreneurial hegemony and reform
its worst excesses, in the shape of factory legislation, public health
regulation, control of adulteration of food and drugs and pollution
of the environment, housing by-laws, state educational provision,
and the like. But the professional class was then only on the brink
of the massive expansion in size and influence which was to carry
it to domination in the twentieth century. Not only was it to
overtake the landed and capitalist elites in numbers and
importance; it was also to infiltrate all the major institutions of the
modern state and modern society, from the executive government
and parliament to the private capitalist corporations, and
eventually to take them over.
At the same time the professional class was to transform society
itself, not by replacing the plutocracy of landlords and capitalists as
the ruling class, but in a much more radical and subtle way.
Professionalism differed from land and capital as an organizing
principle of social structure in not being confined to the few, those
who owned the limited material resources of society and could
charge the rest, in rent, profits or a lien on their labour, for the use
of them. Based on human capital and specialized expertise, it could
become as extensive as there were human beings capable of skilled
and specialized service. In addition to the traditional, pre-industrial
professions and the new technological and welfare ones, there
could be professional managers of landed property and capitalist
xxii
companies and even professionalized manual workers. The

ownership of human capital was thus capable, at least in theory, of
reaching much further down the social structure than the
ownership of land or capital in amounts capable of supporting a
ruling class, and was thus able to transform society not from the
top down but from within. Instead of the horizontal layers we call
classes in vertical conflict with one another, the new society would
be constructed on a different principle, of professional career
hierarchies rearing up alongside one another, some rising higher
than the rest but each in competition to persuade society to yield as
much power, prestige and income as it could win. Vertical
structures, horizontal rivalries, replaced or, more accurately,
overlay the horizontal structures and vertical antagonisms of class,
which nevertheless, as old structures do, still survived in the
‘residues’ of language and, to a lesser extent, in politics.
Meanwhile, since great structural transformations reflect
profound changes in mental outlook, the professional social ideal—
the professionals’ ideal of how society should be organized and of
the ideal citizen to organize it—began to infiltrate men’s minds and
replace the entrepreneurial ideal on which Victorian society had
been founded. The latter was an ideal based on capital as the engine
of the economy, setting in motion the production of goods and
services and calling forth the other factors of production, land and
labour, and on competition as the fairest and most efficient way of
distributing its rewards. Its ideal citizen was the self-made man, the
entrepreneur who had made his way to success and fortune by his
own unaided efforts. The professional ideal was based on trained
expertise and selection by merit, a selection made not by the open
market but by the judgment of similarly educated experts. Its ideal
citizen was also a self-made man of sorts, who had risen by native
ability (with a little help from his educational institutions) to
mastery of a skilled service vital to his fellow citizens. The
difference was that the entrepreneur proved himself by competition
in the market, the professional by persuading the rest of society and
ultimately the state that his service was vitally important and
therefore worthy of guaranteed reward. The first called for as little
state interference as possible; the second looked to the state as the
ultimate guarantor of professional status.
Both ideals believed in equality of opportunity—in theory if not
always in practice—but only the professional ideal had any room
xxiii
for equality of outcome or treatment. This was because the best

guarantee of professional employment was as wide an access to
professional services as possible, preferably underwritten by the
state. Hence the special role of the professional ideal in the rise of
the welfare state, one of the major themes of this book.
Yet this rapprochement with the state, which was in any case
coming to play a much larger part in the economy and the life of
society under the same pressure of demand for ever more
specialized services which had expanded the professions, was to
become the Achilles’ heel of professionalism. The enormous
expansion of state expenditure and of government employment
which took place in all advanced twentieth-century societies,
tolerable in Britain as long as the economy continued to expand,
was to become a source of grievance and hostility when, in the
1970s and 1980s, the long-continuing relative economic decline
threatened to become absolute. Along with the accustomed
arrogance and condescension of the professions, the elephantiasis
of the state provoked a backlash which took the form of what
appeared to be, and was even claimed as such by its protagonists,
a resurgence of the free market ideology of Victorian England. On
closer analysis, however, it turned out to be not a revival of the
entrepreneurial ideal but a reaction of one part of the professional
class, the private sector managers of the great corporations and
their allies, who had never felt the same degree of need for state
support, against the other, the public sector professions largely
employed by the state.
The bifurcation of the professional ideal reflected the splitting of
the professional class into two warring factions. It also heralds the
political dilemma facing contemporary Britain and by extension
professional society everywhere: the unwelcome choice between the
two extremes of an authoritarian state run by powerful and
domineering professional bureaucrats and a more diffuse neo-
feudal system of great private corporations run by equally
dangerous and domineering professional managers.
Once again we stand at the threshold of what may become a
great transformation of society. Which way does the future lie? This
time we cannot say, ‘What that society was to be, and how it was
to evolve…, must await another book.’ What it is to be must await
another generation and, this time, another historian.
xxiv
*
Before or after he was impeached as a judge for taking bribes,
Francis Bacon wrote in his posthumous Maxims of the Law:
I hold every man to be a debtor to his profession, from which

as men do of course seek to receive countenance and profit, so
ought they to endeavour themselves, by way of amends, to be
a help and an ornament thereunto.
History is a profession of debtors, if not indeed of thieves, who

shamelessly borrow or steal from one another, and who in fact
could not trade upon their own capital alone. To change the
metaphor, we could not see even as far as we do without standing
on the shoulders of our predecessors. The history of a hundred
crowded years of modern English society would be impossible to
write without calling on the aid of scores, if not hundreds, of
scholars, by no means all of them historians, many of them friends
and colleagues, most of them unknown to me except through their
writings. My debts to them will be obvious from the notes to the
text, and I hope that they will take each reference as a grateful
thank-you for much needed help.
It would be almost impossible to list all the friends and
colleagues with whom, over the years, I have discussed some of the
ideas in this book, but there are a few who single themselves out by
their generous encouragement and support, whether or not they
agreed with me (and I fear they often did not). Among them Asa
Briggs, Theo Barker, Daniel Bell, Jack Hexter, Seymour Martin
Lipset, Lawrence Stone, Michael (F.M.L.) Thompson and Martin
Wiener deserve more thanks than I can say. My colleagues at
Lancaster and Northwestern Universities, notably Tim Breen, Eric
Evans, Bill (T.W.) Heyck and Austin Woolrych, were enormously
understanding and supportive. Eric Evans, Bill Heyck, Tony Morris
and George Robb read and commented on part or all of the
manuscript, to my gain which might have been greater but for my
stubborn adherence to my views.
I must also thank Lancaster University and its History
Department for the long years of camaraderie and endless
conversation, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton
University for a year of gestation and research in stimulating
company, the National Humanities Center for a year of research
xxv
and writing at that ideal intellectual retreat in the woods of North

Carolina, and Northwestern University for welcoming a refugee
from the British university system and making him feel at home in
a land which still appreciates education. Finally, my warmest
thanks go to my wife Joan, who gave unstintingly of her abundant
enthusiasm, sympathetic criticism and effervescent personality, read
the manuscript and saved me from endless slips of the pen (or the
computer keys), and paid me the handsomest compliment of all by
becoming a social historian herself.
Northwestern University
November 1987
xxvi
Chapter 1
THE MEANING OF
PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
After the unanswerable question whether human civilization will

survive for much longer or succumb to a catastrophe that may
destroy all sentient life on earth, the most important question
facing mankind today is: if we escape the holocaust, what sort of
society will we survive to live in? What sort of society is it that has
brought us to this brink, of unprecedented power both for creation
and destruction? All of us now in the more economically advanced
countries routinely enjoy material comforts far beyond the luxuries
of Cleopatra, Kubla Khan or even Queen Victoria. We travel faster
and more freely than Ariel, hear sounds and sweet airs more
appealing than Prospero’s, conjure living pictures out of the void at
the touch of a button, have instant access to grand opera, ballet,
classical and rock music, the Olympic Games and the World Cup,
and all the delights that our ancestors could only dream of. And
most of us live lives far longer, fuller and freer from pain than our
predecessors.
At the same time we live in greater fear, not just of those old
enemies famine, plague and war (the Sahel drought, the AIDS
epidemic and the Gulf War show that those enemies are still with
us), but of total extermination, if not by the instant horror of
nuclear holocaust then by the slow attrition of the environment. In
pursuit of the Nirvana of material bliss and avoidance of the
Inferno of nuclear destruction we also have to choose politically,
between a Western version of democracy that allows free play to
competitive forces but may end in the survival of anti-democratic
concentrations of economic power, and an Eastern version that
claims to put human welfare first but from the outset sacrifices
freedom to equality.
1
THE MEANING OF PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
What has brought us to this pass? Faced with such

overwhelming successes and dangers, we may well think with
Emerson that ‘Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.’1 It is
clear, however, that men and women working together in social
Organizations have produced these dilemmas. We ourselves,
wittingly or unwittingly, are the authors of our own prosperity and
potential destruction. Whole armies of experts—scientists,
technologists, industrial managers, highly skilled workers, medical
researchers, artists, writers, teachers, administrators and
politicians—have contributed to our promising and perilous
situation. The world we have gained and may be about to lose is
the consequence of a myriad human activities which have only one
thing in common: they are increasingly specialized, increasingly
diverse, increasingly skilled—in a word, increasingly professional.
The twentieth is not, pace Franklin D.Roosevelt, the century of the
common man but of the uncommon and increasingly professional
expert.
1 CLASS VERSUS HIERARCHY

We live, in fact, in an increasingly professional society. Modern
society in Britain, as elsewhere in the developed world, is made up
of career hierarchies of specialized occupations, selected by merit
and based on trained expertise. Where pre-industrial society was
based on passive property in land and industrial society on actively
managed capital, professional society is based on human capital
created by education and enhanced by strategies of closure, that is,
the exclusion of the unqualified. Landed and industrial wealth still
exerts power but is increasingly managed by corporate
professionals in property companies and business corporations.
The professional hierarchies cut across the horizontal solidarities of
class in the warp and weft of the social fabric. Both class and
hierarchy are an integral part of the fabric and neither ever quite
disappears from view. The ‘great functional interests’ of land, trade
and finance, each representing a vertical swathe from landlord
through farmer to labourer or merchant through putter-out to
craftsman, predominated over the latent class conflict of
eighteenth-century society.2 The organized antagonisms of the Anti-
Corn Law League against the landlords and of the Chartists against
both landed politicians and industrial employers brought class to
2
the face of the cloth in Victorian society. In late twentieth-century

Britain, despite the survival of class rhetoric and class-based
political parties, the warp of professionalism is beginning to show
through and overlay the weft of class.
A professional society is more than a society dominated by
professionals. The professionals are not just another ruling class,
replacing the landlords of pre-industrial society and the capitalists
of industrial society as in James Burnham’s The Managerial
Revolution—though there is the ever-present danger that some of
them might try to become so. Professionalism permeates society
from top to bottom, in two ways. Firstly, the professional
hierarchies—not all of them equal in status or rewards, or
stretching as far as the top—reach much further down the social
pyramid than ever landlordship or even business capital did, and
embrace occupations formerly thought beyond the reach of
professional aspiration. As more and more jobs become subject to
specialized training and claim expertise beyond the common sense
of the layman—and all professionals are laymen to the other
professions—their occupants demand the status and rewards of a
profession. In these days of increasingly employed professionals—
close to the original model of the clergy or the military rather than
medicine or the law, though even doctors and lawyers are now
mostly salaried employees—this means a secure income, a rising
salary scale, fringe benefits such as paid holidays and sick leave,
and an occupational pension. Such professional conditions of work
are increasingly within reach not merely of non-manual workers
but of increasing numbers of the manual working class.
Secondly, a professional society is one permeated by the
professional social ideal. A social ideal is a model of how society
should be organized to suit a certain class or interest and of the
ideal citizen and his contribution to it. Pre-industrial society was
permeated by the aristocratic ideal based on property and
patronage. Passive property, usually in land, provided the means
for the ideal citizen, the leisured gentleman, to offer his unique
contribution of political rule, moral leadership and encouragement
of art, literature and sport. Patronage enabled him to select the
recruits for those positions of power and influence not filled by
property alone. Industrial society was permeated by the
entrepreneurial ideal based on active capital and competition, on
business investment as the engine of the economy run by the active
3
owner-manager, ideally the self-made man who rose to wealth and

influence by his own intrinsic worth and won out in open
competition. The rival ideal of the working class, never achieved in
practice, was the collective ideal of labour and co-operation, of
labour as the sole source of wealth and co-operative endeavour as
the fairest means of harnessing and rewarding it, and of the
worker’s right to the whole produce of labour. The professional
ideal, based on trained expertise and selection by merit, differed
from the other three in emphasizing human capital rather than
passive or active property, highly skilled and differentiated labour
rather than the simple labour theory of value, and selection by
merit defined as trained and certified expertise. No more or no less
than the rest did it live up to reality. Not all landlords were
benevolent gentlemen, not all capitalists self-made men, not all
wage earners more concerned with rising with their class rather
than out of it. And not all professional men were prepared to let
merit rise without help from family wealth or privileged education.
Professional society is based on merit, but some acquire merit more
easily than others.
The ideals compete in a wider field than the economic market
for income and wealth. They compete in the societal market for
income, power and status. To complicate the metaphor and make
the social fabric three-dimensional, we can envisage society—any
society—as an equi-valent tetrahedron, a three-sided pyramid, its
faces labelled (with acknowledgments to Max Weber) class, power
and status.3 The faces are only three ways of looking at the same
social reality, from the economic, the political, and the socio-
ideological point of view. No face—pace Marx (or, rather, the
vulgar Marxists) with the economic interpretation of society, Ralf
Dahrendorf with the primacy of political authority in ‘coordinated
organizations’ (Herrschaftsverbanden—derived indeed from
Weber), or Weber himself with his emphasis on charisma, religious
belief and morality—is more fundamental than the other two. They
are equi-valent, of equal worth, at least until one of them wins out
in the competition. Talk of economic substructure and political or
cultural superstructure, as in the Marxist or Annales schools of
historiography, is premature until one examines empirically the
society in question.
Industrial society was of course based on the ownership of
capital, but capital itself was based on the concept of absolute
4
property, which was the product of law and politics. Ultimately it

derived from the victory of English landlords over the peasants, the
church and the crown which came to be enshrined in 12 Charles II,
cap. 24, the Act of 1660 which turned feudal tenures into
freeholds.4 The capitalists, who took no part in the struggle for
absolute property, were the fortuitous beneficiaries of laws enacted
for the benefit of landlords. Pre-industrial society was based on
landed property but ultimately on feudal conquest and the
continuous struggle between landlords and kings from the
Conquest to the Civil War, and thus on military force. The wealth
of the medieval church, by contrast, derived from its power to
persuade kings, barons and commoners to endow it with land and
goods in return for spiritual services, above all prayers for their
souls. When the doctrine of purgatory was rejected at the
Reformation, making prayers for the dead irrelevant, half of its
wealth was confiscated.
Thus wealth, power and status could derive from any face of the
pyramid. For the social fabric inside the pyramid has a fourth
dimension: change over time. It is not static but dynamic. The three
forces, economic, political and socio-ideological, are variant forms
of energy transmutable (with suitable transformers and inevitable
transmission losses) into either or both of the other two. Physical
force by feudal conquerors or Mafia-like, home-grown strong men
is readily transmutable into wealth (land tenure) and status
(lordship). Economic power is less readily transformed into status
and authority because purchasing power (claims on labour)
requires the pre-condition of symbolic property (currency or credit
instruments), both based on pre-existing law, and also the
agreement of the existing holders of power and status to honour it,
by, for example, the sale of feudal land or aristocratic titles—unless,
of course, these can be seized by revolution, in which case
capitalism comes to rest as much on force as feudalism.
More easily forgotten is that status, or socio-ideological,
cultural, intellectual or spiritual power, has often been transformed
into wealth and political authority. A good case could be made
(though it is unlikely to hold for all historical societies) for the
primacy of the socio-ideological face. The greatest conquerors from
Alexander to Napoleon and Hitler have used charisma to gather
followers and inspire their armies, and industrialists like Carnegie,
Ford and Nuffield have used propaganda and philanthropy to sing
5
the benefits of capitalism. More directly, charismatic power has

often been used to take over the wealth and authority of whole
societies: consider the careers of Savanarola, Eva Peron or the
Ayatollah Khomeini and their use of inspirational oratory to
command the obedience, wealth and military force of their
societies. Longer-lived political success has accrued to ideological
persuasion by priests and bureaucrats: to the Aztec and Inca priest-
kings who persuaded their subjects that daily human sacrifice
caused the sun to rise and the seasons to return; to the Bishops of
Rome whose wealth and power flowed from control of the keys of
heaven; and to the Chinese imperial bureaucracy whose monopoly
of administrative skill seduced wave after wave of less civilized
conquerors. Socio-ideological persuasion is an enviable form of
power (while it lasts, and its weakness is that it can fade as fast as
the belief in it) since its devotees give freely and enthusiastically
what they yield only grudgingly to military force or superior
purchasing power. Political and economic elites pay it the
compliment of emulation in propaganda and education.
The professions in general may not aspire to such heights of
charismatic persuasion but their modus vivendi starts from the
same face of the pyramid. They live by persuasion and propaganda,
by claiming that their particular service is indispensable to the
client or employer and to society and the state. By this means they
hope to raise their status and through it their income, authority and
psychic rewards (deference and self-respect). With luck and
persistence they may turn the human capital they acquire into
material wealth. In the pre-industrial past individual
professionals—royal favourites (in the oldest profession) like
George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham or Nell Gwyn, archbishops
like Wolsey and Sumner, judges like Lords Eldon and Scott,
generals like Marlborough and Wellington, and even lowly
solicitors with other incomes like Sir John Hawkins or Sir Walter
Scott—were able to buy land and try to found a family. In
industrial society even actors and playwrights like Sheridan, Ellen
Terry and Bernard Shaw turned human capital into visible wealth.
But only in post-industrial society have the professions as a whole
been able to establish human capital as the dominant form of
wealth. Whereas a hundred years ago, according to Peter Lindert,
human capital accounted for only about 15 per cent of national
income, it now accounts for about 52 per cent.5
6
Property is not, as is commonly believed, an object or a credit

instrument, which are just its outward signs. Leaving aside its lesser
meaning as the right to immediate use of tangible objects like a car,
a house or an owner-occupied farm (each of which, indeed, yields
an imputed rent), property in its major meaning of power over
resources, which creates relations between members of a society, is
a right to a flow of income: rent, interest, profits, labour service, or
goods in kind. It is an acknowledged and legitimated claim to other
people’s labour.
How could the professions transform a service into income-
yielding property? Gary Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, Alvin Gouldner,
Anthony Giddens and others have familiarized the concepts of
human, educational, cultural and intellectual capital, by which
investment in acquired knowledge and expertise yields a rate of
return commensurate with that of material capital.6 Such theories
tend to assume that investment in specialized training of itself
yields a differential return without any control of the market
(other than the fortuitous economic or demographic fluctuations
in supply and demand for specialized labour). Unfortunately for
that analysis, specialized training of itself yields only earned
income, payment for immediate services rendered, which may
even fall below the cost of production if the service is
oversupplied or undervalued. It cannot, except accidentally, create
property in the form of vested income without some device to
transform it into a scarce resource.
The transforming device is professional control of the market.
When a professional occupation has, by active persuasion of the
public and the state, acquired sufficient control of the market in a
particular service, it creates an artificial scarcity in the supply which
has the effect of yielding a rent, in the strict Ricardian sense of a
payment for the use of a scarce resource. Some part of the payment,
of course, will always accrue to the immediate work performed, but
its value will be enhanced by an amount proportional to the
scarcity of the service or skill. A natural or ‘accidental’ example, the
fortuitous result of a unique though professionally trained voice, is
that of Placido Domingo, who is paid a very large fee for each
performance, most of which is rent for the use of the scarce
resource, or a Henry Moore sculpture, which is a lump of stone
transformed in value by his signature. Monopoly is not a sine qua
non: scarcity may appear long before outright monopoly—the
7
landlords charged rent long before achieving a monopoly, if they

ever did—and the element of rent will be larger or smaller
accordingly. But some element of rent accrues from any degree of
control of the market, which is why organized professions are paid
more than equivalent unorganized occupations. Since the essence of
property is the right to (some portion of) the flow of income from
the resource owned, this professional capital, which is manifestly
more tangible than stocks or shares, less destructible than many
forms of material property (buildings burn more readily than
people), and capable of self-renewal by means of improvement in
skills and expertise, is thus in the truest sense a species of
property—albeit contingent property, contingent upon the
performance of the service.
The importance of such property to the professional is that it
gives him what all income-yielding property provides for its
possessors: independence, security, the right to criticize without fear
of the consequences, and so a secure position from which to defend
one’s place in society or, if he so wishes, a position of leverage from
which to change society or one’s own corner of it. Above all, it
gives him the psychic security and self-confidence to press his own
social ideal, his own vision of society and how it should be
organized, upon the other classes. And the gradual triumph of the
professional ideal over the last hundred years, as we shall see in this
book, paved the way for the hegemony of human capital and the
emergence of professional society.
There was a crucial difference, however, between the hegemony
of the professional ideal and that of the aristocratic or
entrepreneurial ideals in earlier societies. Whereas their ideal citizen
had been a limited concept, applicable to only one group in society,
however many amongst the rest aspired to it—only the landed few
could be leisured gentlemen, only those who acquired capital
entrepreneurs—the professional ideal could in principle be
extended to everyone. Every landlord and industrialist could be
transformed into a professional manager, every worker into a
salaried employee. Moreover, since the professional’s status and
income depend less on the market than on his power to persuade
society to set an agreed value on his service, the ideal implied the
principle of a just reward not only for the particular profession but
for every occupation necessary to society’s well-being.
8
Since, too, the ideal is justified by social efficiency and the

avoidance of waste, particularly the waste of human talent, it
implied a principle of social justice which extended to the whole
population the right to security of income, educational opportunity,
decent housing in a clean environment and, some professionals
would say, the right and obligation to work. As will be argued later,
the rise of the welfare state was a practical expression of the
professional ideal. It was initially an attempt to extend to those as
yet excluded from professional status the basic security and
conditions already enjoyed by the established professions.
It is this potential extension of ideal citizenship to the whole
community that differentiates professional society from its
predecessors. Although the ideal embraces equality of opportunity
and even equality of treatment in raising every citizen to the
minimum acceptable standard of life, it is not in the final analysis
an egalitarian society. To paraphrase George Orwell, all
professionals are equal but some are more equal than others. It is
not a class society in the traditional sense of a binary model with a
small ruling class exploiting a large underclass, but a collection of
parallel hierarchies of unequal height, each with its own ladder of
many rungs. In this way the inequalities and rivalries of hierarchy
come to predominate over those of class.
2 PROFESSIONAL RIVALRIES AND THE STATE

A professional society, therefore, is not merely the old class society
fitted out with a new ruling class. It is a society structured around
a different principle. The matrix of the new society is the vertical
career hierarchy rather than the horizontal connection of class, and
social conflict—no society being free from the struggle for income,
power and status—takes the form of a competition for resources
between rival interest groups. The doctors, the civil servants, the
military, the social workers and administrators, the university and
government scientific researchers are all manifestly in competition
for public resources. The managers of private corporations are
primarily concerned to limit those resources by keeping taxation
down, but they are also concerned to lobby government for
contracts, investment subsidies or tax breaks, favourable planning
legislation, development status for their own localities of operation,
tariff protection against foreign competition and, if all else fails,
9
direct government subsidies to support their invested capital and

employed workforce. Even the trade unions, whose rhetoric
remains proletarian and solidaristic on behalf of the whole working
class, are usually more concerned in practice with demarcation
disputes with rival crafts, and with maintaining employment in
their own industry by keeping open plants and mines, if necessary
with government subsidies.
In such a vertically structured system disputes between the
interests are increasingly mediated through the state. This is
inevitable, since the state, not just in Britain but in every
economically advanced country, collects and disposes of an
increasing share of the national income, commonly between 40 and
60 per cent of Gross Domestic Product. In Britain public
expenditure grew to about 50 per cent of GDP in 1970 and to no
less than 60 per cent in 1975, though more than half of this
consisted of transfer payments (social security, unemployment
benefit, pensions, and the like) which were returned to personal
expenditure for private consumption.7 Nonetheless, this means that
about half or more of society’s resources are managed by the
government and are therefore open to competition by the various
interests, including not only the state-funded professions and the
private corporations but the Claimants’ Union, the Child Poverty
Action Group, Shelter and all the other lobbies representing welfare
recipients.
The main struggle for society’s resources, therefore, is between
those who benefit directly from government expenditure and those
who see themselves as the source of that expenditure. It is true that
everyone pays taxes and everyone benefits from government
expenditure, but they do so unequally, not only because the rich
pay more individually (though not collectively) than the rest but
because state employees gain more by state spending than they pay
in taxes. Consequently, by far the most important division between
the interest groups is between the public sector professions, those
funded directly or indirectly by the state, and the private sector
professions, chiefly the managers of private corporations. As the
struggle between lord and peasant was the master conflict in feudal
society and the struggle between capitalist and wage earner the
master conflict in industrial society, so the struggle between the
public and private sector professions is the master conflict of
professional society.
10
This division leaves out a large and important group of

professional occupations, namely those employed neither by the
state nor by the corporations but by a host of not-for-profit
organizations such as universities, churches, charitable
foundations, voluntary organizations of many kinds, and so on.
These non-market professionals are employed by a wide range of
institutions, from those almost entirely dependent on government
funding, like the universities and many research institutes, to
bodies closely associated with industry, like the trade unions and
employers’ associations. Which side of the divide their officials
will lean towards will depend on their perception of how their
incomes are derived and where their interests lie. University
academics have since the First World War become increasingly
conscious of their dependence on public funds and have recently
had a sharp reminder of the dangers of that dependence. Officials
of employers’ associations, on the other hand, are equally
conscious of their dependence on the corporations, and would be
foolish to ignore the wishes of their master. In between there is
every variety of occupational interest, from those philanthropic
bodies which exist principally to lobby the state for larger
resources for deserving minorities, such as children in poverty, the
mentally or physically handicapped, the elderly, or the veterans of
past wars, to the officials of trade unions and political parties
whose interests do not always chime with those of their very
demanding employers. With obvious exceptions, however, the
non-market professionals, not being motivated by profit, tend to
lean towards the public side of the divide, partly because so many
of them see the state as the resource of last resort and partly
because they are perceived by the corporate sector as being the
same sort of ‘overhead’ as government itself, and therefore as a
‘cost’ which the private sector has to carry. For most purposes
they will be treated in this book as having more in common with
the public sector professions than with the private.
The clash of interests between the public or non-market and
the private sector professions helps to explain one of the most
puzzling questions about modern society. Why, in the late
twentieth century, in an economic system which bears little
resemblance to the industrial capitalism of the Industrial
Revolution, do we still talk about society in the early nineteenth-
century terms of Ricardo and Marx? Modern corporate
11
capitalism is run by professional managers who, though they

control far larger capitals than Victorian entrepreneurs, are
themselves for the most part salaried employees whose status and
income differ only in degree, not in kind, from those of their
subordinates and whose power over them ceases when they take
their pensions. Other professionals, notably government
bureaucrats, judges, generals, hospital consultants, town
planners, trade union officials, newspaper editors and television
producers, may be equally powerful in their own spheres, which
may impinge unwantedly on corporate decision making. Yet most
politicians, sociologists and commentators talk as if society were
still divided principally into a small employing class of individual
capitalists and an undifferentiated mass of wage-earning manual
workers. On the right, the neo-Ricardians preach the virtues of a
free market which, however appropriate to a Victorian economy
of small family firms and partnerships, is wholly irrelevant to a
corporate economy in which one hundred firms produce nearly
half the manufacturing output and three to five firms dominate
each separate industry, and the public sector employs over a
quarter of the total workforce.8 On the left, the Marxists, the
antithesis of the Ricardians, attack the same free market as if it
still consisted of individual capitalists extracting surplus value
from a supine and unaccountably non-revolutionary proletariat.
In between, the ostensibly class-based political parties, in reality
large coalitions of diverse professional interests as we shall see,
still pitch their appeals in class terms, with the exception (which
proves the rule) that the Conservative Party has to modify its
appeal to embrace a large minority of the working class.
The answer to the puzzle is that the old rhetoric of class happens
to suit the protagonists of the master conflict of professional
society. The ideology of the free market appeals to the professional
managers of great corporations and their allies because it protects
them from the accusation they most fear, that they themselves are
the major threat to competition and the freedom of the citizen. By
denying the incontrovertible fact that competition drives out
competitors and tends towards monopoly, it enables them to
present themselves as the guardians of the consumer and the
deliverers of the widest choice of goods and services at the lowest
prices. More significantly, by tying the concept of free choice in the
market to the idea of political freedom, it enables them to claim to
12
be the guardians of individual liberty against the tyranny of the

state. The irony of their position, the poacher acting the part of
gamekeeper, in no way detracts from its effectiveness. As long as
the state rather than the corporations can be vilified as the major
threat to freedom, then the corporate managers can pose as the
defenders of the common man against the encroachments of big
government.9
The ideology, of course, contains a contradiction. The free
market itself could not exist but for the state. Without regulation
to set the terms of the market, hold the ring between buyer and
seller, determine the meaning and transfer of ownership, and
uphold the law of contract, the market would collapse into chaos
and the strong could take whatever they liked from the weak.
Thus the state itself, far from being the enemy of freedom, is its
source and origin. Freedom can be positive as well as negative,
freedom to do and be without molestation or exploitation by
other citizens as well as freedom from state intervention. Freedom
from all state interference is freedom for criminals, thieves and
frauds. Civil society itself exists by reason of the state, without
which it would descend to a Hobbesian state of nature, the war of
all against all. By denying the positive role of the state the free
market ideology rests on a quicksand, a fictitious law of nature
which sets up the rules of the market prior to and separate from
the laws of society.
The same is true of political freedom. Without law there can be
no liberty, and without the state no law. Yet the free marketeers
claim that the state, which protects them and their property from
depredation, has no right to set limits to competition even when it
threatens to end in monopoly and the curtailment of freedom for
others. They wish, in short, to have their cake and eat it, the
protection of the state for themselves but not for others against
themselves. It is easy to see why the rhetoric of early nineteenth-
century liberalism should appeal to the private sector professionals.
It promises them a heroic stance against the state while they enjoy
the benefits of government.
On the other side, the class rhetoric of the left, the
doppelgänger of the classical economists, appeals almost as
strongly to the public sector professionals. The Ricardian
socialists, who anticipated Marx in the theory of ‘surplus value’
and ‘the right to the whole produce of labour’ which they
13
logically based on the Ricardian labour theory of value, diagnosed

competition as the source of inequality and exploitation and saw
cooperation and collectivism as the remedy. Though by no means
all enamoured of the state or of violent revolution as the means to
their ideal society, their socialist successors, whether Marxist or
Fabian, repudiated the free market and increasingly looked to the
state to redress its inequities. The motive force behind the
collectivist legislation of the Victorian age restricting the rights of
landlords and industrialists has been assumed to be the increasing
pressure of the working-class vote, but it has been demonstrated
elsewhere not only that the working-class voter showed little
interest in collectivist measures until they were already in
existence, but that the main challenge to the unfettered claims of
property came from the professional middle class.10
It is not surprising, therefore, that the public sector
professionals today should adopt the language of their anti-
Ricardian predecessors. Richard Titmuss complained that the
welfare state seemed to exist more for the professionals who
administer and service it than for the recipients of welfare. The
doctors, social workers, legal aid lawyers, town and country
planners, professors and teachers, civil servants and local officials
have a greater stake in maintaining and expanding the services
than anyone else. In what Titmuss called ‘the pressure group state’
the most powerful of the pressure groups are the welfare
professions.11 Whatever their party politics, the most vociferous
defenders of the National Health Service are the doctors, nurses
and ancillary hospital workers, the Law Society defends legal aid
as ‘an integral part of the British system of justice’,12 social
workers organize to preserve their autonomous relation with their
‘clients’, planners oppose free access by developers to green belts,
academics lobby Parliament against cuts in university grants,
teachers refuse non-classroom duties to protest against low pay
and lack of resources, and public officials dispute the need for
reductions in the central and local government establishment.
Even such conservative government professions as the military
and the police demand an ever-increasing expenditure on defence
and law and order.
All this can be argued in terms of social justice for every citizen
rather than the self-interest of each profession. The free market, it
is asserted, has manifestly failed to produce an equitable
14
distribution of resources or solve the social problems of (relative)

poverty, maldistribution of health care, unequal educational
opportunity, inadequate housing, a squalid environment, and
involuntary unemployment. In a complex, interdependent society
in which, it is argued, many vital services cannot be equitably or
efficiently provided by the market, state provision through publicly
funded professions is inescapable.13
The problem with such arguments, of course, is knowing where
to stop. There are undoubtedly services, like defence or law and
order, which are indivisible, collectively provided, and would be
dangerous to turn over to private enterprise. There are others, like
roads and public utilities, which are natural monopolies and, on the
face of it, safer in publicly accountable hands (though the more
extreme free marketeers naturally disagree). There are still others,
like health and education, in which the most needy clients, the sick
poor, the elderly, and most children, lack the resources to buy on
the free market. And there is a final group of essential services, like
poor relief cum social security and the incarceration of criminals,
which, with a few disastrous exceptions like Bentham’s Panopticon
scheme, private enterprise does not see a profit in. The difficulty
with public provision is the feedback principle: once a service
becomes professionalized under public auspices the professionals
discover further needs to be met and problems to be solved and a
host of reasons for extending their activities. Hence the self-
generating expansion of the state in all the advanced countries. This
expansion is not fortuitous but the logical consequence of
professionalism and the driving force behind it, the increasing
complexity of modern life and the increasing division of ever more
minutely skilled labour to meet its demands.
All this is not to say that all private enterprise professionals
support the unfettered free market without reservation or all the
public sector ones an interventionist state. There are corporate
millionaires who support the Labour Party and corporate managers
eager and willing to work for nationalized industries, and there are
civil servants, doctors and professors dedicated to the privatization
of government services, hospitals and universities. The role of a
social ideal is not to determine a person’s beliefs, which may indeed
clash with his interests, all the more so the more independent his
mind, but to provide strong motivation for inclining one way rather
than another. As David Hume said two hundred years ago,
15
‘Though men be much governed by interest; yet even interest itself,

and all human affairs, are entirely governed by opinion.’14 Whether
class or interest group predominates in a given society depends on
how men view their situation, as allying them more with those on
their own social level or with those above and below them in the
same occupation or industry. The existence of ‘social cranks’—men
with an ‘eccentric drive’ who espoused the cause of a class other
than their own—in the early nineteenth century, often professional
men like Malthus, James Mill or Bronterre O’Brien who spoke for
the landed, capitalist and working classes, helped the new class
society to come to birth.15
The professional ideal, as we shall see, motivated many
professional men to seek a new kind of society more suited to their
interests and social role. Since they existed to provide services
which were esoteric, evanescent and fiduciary—beyond the
knowledge of the laity, not (with some partial exceptions like
architects and civil engineers) productive of concrete objects, and
thus having to be taken on trust—they could not accept a market
valuation of their skill but demanded that society should accept
their own valuation, guaranteed by exclusive education and
certification. Not all achieved this enviable position but all aspired
to it, and the growing numbers of employed professionals
compromised by means of a negotiated salary scale and the stable
lifelong career. The objective was to create a framework for the
secure exploitation of human capital, defined as the investment in
personal skill so as to yield not just a reward for labour but a
differential return, in strict Ricardian terms a rent for the scarce
resource of their esoteric skill. The size of the rent, the difference
between the professional fee or salary and the price of common
labour, was the measure of the success of each profession in
claiming that scarcity value and establishing its status. Status rather
than market valuation determined their remuneration; or, rather,
their rewards were negotiated in the wider societal market of
prestige and the social value placed on their service rather than by
the sale of their labour in the economic market place.
This was especially true of those professions in the old class
society whose services were directed to society as a whole or
towards those who could not afford to pay their full cost: the
clergy, the military, the public health doctors and the increasing
number of private doctors who treated the poor in infirmaries and
16
dispensaries, the teachers in voluntary aided and state schools, the

academics in the less endowed university colleges, the social
workers, the bureaucrats in the early welfare state such as the
health and unemployment insurance divisions, and so on. It was
less urgent for the slowly evolving private sector professions, whose
ambitions might long be directed towards partnerships in family
businesses, directorships of corporations, and emulation of
traditional entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, despite the exceptional
managerial tycoon, most professional managers became more
dependent on a salaried career than on the windfall opportunities
of capital gains and they too came to be assimilated to the stable
career hierarchy. The difference was that, while the public sector
professionals for the most part focused on the non-monetary
rewards, on honour, fame or power rather than fortune, the
prestige of rising to the head of a government department, an army,
a church, an academic discipline, or a great profession, the private
sector professions still tended to measure success in terms of salary
and fringe benefits.
The modern bifurcation of the two rival groups of professions
rests, therefore, on the concrete foundations of incompatible
interests. Their divergent attitudes to the role of the state reflect
their different views of it as ally or antagonist. The public sector
professions see it as the origin of their incomes and resources and
guarantor of their status and prestige; the private sector
professionals as a threat to their incomes and capital base and a
constraint on their activities. Both groups wish to capture control
of government, the first to underpin and expand their work, the
second to ‘get government off our backs’ and escape its inhibiting
control. The nineteenth-century rhetoric of class conflict is for both
a weapon in their competition for income and status. That rhetoric
effectively disguises what is happening to modern society and the
part that both groups have played in its evolution.
3 THE CULMINATION OF THE INDUSTRIAL

REVOLUTION
Professional society is the culmination of the more than Industrial
Revolution in which modern English society had its origins. In the
earlier book to which this is the sequel that revolution, it was
argued, was characterized as
17
a revolution in men’s access to the means of life, in control

over their ecological environment, in their capacity to escape
from the niggardliness of nature. At the material level it can
be described as a rise in human productivity, industrial,
agricultural and demographic, on such a scale that it raised, as
it were, the logarithmic index of society, that is it increased by
a multiple (rather than a fraction) both the number of human
beings which a given area of land would support, and their
standard of life, or consumption per head of goods and
services … Such a rise in scale required, involved and implied
drastic changes in society itself: in the size and distribution of
the population, in its social structure and organization, and in
the political and administrative superstructure which they
demanded and supported. It was in brief a social revolution: a
revolution in social organization, with social causes as well as
social effects.16
It was, after a slow evolution lasting seven or eight millennia, the

logical continuation of the Neolithic Revolution, the beginnings
of settled agriculture, which freed a small minority of people from
the production of food to become full-time craftsmen, warriors,
priests and rulers, and so to found cities and the possibility of
civilization.17 Industrialism released a majority from agriculture
to work and live in industrial towns and cities, increased the
population of England and Wales nearly fourfold from about 8.9
million in 1801 and 32.5 million in 1901, and quadrupled living
standards per head from £12.9 per head (at mid-Victorian prices)
in 1800 to £52.5 in 1900.18 At the same time it produced a rise in
the scale or organization, from workshop to factory, stage coach
to railway train, sailing ship to ocean steamer, single country bank
to great joint stock branch banking, village and tiny country town
to great city and conurbation, and government from 16,000
‘persons in public offices’ in 1797 to over 100,000 civil servants in
1897. It also transformed society from a classless hierarchy of
interest groups, representing the ‘great functional interests’ of
agriculture, finance, commerce, and various manufacturers, and
so on into the conflict-ridden but viable class society of mid-
Victorian England.
Professional society is a logical continuation of industrial society.
It has increased population still further, if more slowly, from 32.5
18
million in 1901 to 49.1 million in 1981, almost completely

urbanized that population by bringing more than 90 per cent
within reach of the amenities of a town (practically all, if we
include the instant links of telephone, radio and television), and
nearly trebled average living standards, from £49.9 per head (at
1913 prices) in 1900 to £142 in 1981.19 The rise in the scale of
organization has outstripped anything the Victorians could have
imagined. The average factory workforce has scarcely doubled,
from eighty-six workers in 1871 to 155 in 1984, but the scale of the
leading plants has soared: nearly half of the manufacturing workers
(47 per cent) at the later date were in establishments with over 500
workers, nearly a third (31 per cent) in those with over 1,000.20
Since most of the large factories were owned by even larger
companies, the size of firms was still larger, and becoming more so
by almost continuous mergers and take-overs. The share of the
largest one hundred corporations in total manufacturing output
rose from 15 per cent in 1909 to 45 per cent by 1970. The 2,024
largest companies with assets of £500,000 or more in 1957 had
shrunk to 1,253 by 1964; of these the largest eighty in 1957 held 53
per cent of all company assets, in 1964 no less than 62 per cent. The
nationalized industries were even larger: eight public corporations
in 1968 employed 2.3 million workers, 8.5 per cent of the
employed population. In all, thirty-three enterprises, twenty-five
private and eight public corporations each with over 50,000
employees, employed a total of 4.1 million workers, 18 per cent of
the employed population.21 The high street deposit banks were
reduced from 121 in 1875 to twenty-eight in 1914 and to the ‘Big
Four’ plus a handful of smaller ones by the 1970s.22 The trend
towards concentration was not confined to any one industry but
spread right across the economy. In 1951 the three largest firms in
each of forty-two industries employed on average 29.3 per cent of
the workforce of each industry; by 1973 the largest three in forty
industries employed 42.2 per cent.23
On the other side of the industrial relations fence the trade
unions more than matched the employers in size and concentration.
The 1,325 trade unions of 1900 had less than 2 million members
(about 15 per cent of the workforce); by 1978 they had shrunk to
462 but increased their membership to 13.1 million (59 per cent).
Since most of the later unions had under 50,000 members, the
movement was dominated by the forty unions with more than that
19
number, which contained 88 per cent of the membership.24 Indeed,

the whole policy of the Trades Union Congress (and of the Labour
Party) could be determined by the eleven unions with over 250,000
members, which collectively disposed of 64 per cent of the total
votes. Employers’ associations, by contrast, were less concentrated:
from forty-three federations and national associations and 810
local associations in 1900 they grew to ‘some 1,350’ of both kinds
reported by the Donovan Commission on Trade Unions and
Industrial Relations to 1970.25 But they were no less organized and
active than their trade union counterparts, and a great deal better
funded.
Professional associations, although their memberships were
smaller, were in many ways more successful than trade unions in
uniting almost the whole of each relevant occupation. Despite their
proliferation during the Industrial Revolution there were still only
twenty-seven qualifying associations in 1880 (counting the four
Inns of Court for Barristers and the two Royal Colleges and the
Society for Apothecaries for medical doctors), but thereafter there
was an enormous expansion: another twenty-one associations by
1900, a further twenty-seven by 1918, between the wars forty-six,
and by 1970 another forty-six—a total of 140 since 1880.26 In
addition there were a host of non-qualifying bodies, plus forty-four
white-collar unions in 1977 with some 3.3 million members. These
included such obviously professional unions as the National
Association of Local Government Officers with 709,000 members,
the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs with
441,000, the National Union of Teachers with 296,000 and the
various Civil Service unions with 530,000 between them.27 These
professional organizations, along with the employers’ (increasingly
the professional managers’) associations and the trade unions, were
the harbingers of the new society.
Even schools and universities, which had already risen in size
during the nineteenth century, rose still further in the twentieth. In
1900 the average voluntary school had 163 pupils, nine times its
eighteenth-century counterpart, and the average state school 430;
by 1977 the average primary school had 210, and the average
secondary school 791, and both were far more complex
institutions than their predecessors.28 In 1913 there were 26,711
students, about 1 per cent of the age group, in twenty-two
universities and colleges in Britain, nearly half of them in Oxford,
20
Cambridge and London alone, the rest in England and Wales

averaging only 461 each; by 1978 there were forty-four
universities (excluding the Open University) in the United
Kingdom with 296,000 full-time students, about 7 per cent of the
age group, of whom over 40,000 were at London University,
14,843 at Manchester, 11,783 at Oxford, 10,978 at Cambridge,
and upwards of 4,000 at each of the others. There were also
223,800 full-time advanced students at the thirty polytechnics
and the colleges of higher education, a further 5 per cent of the
age group.29 Moreover, both the local education authority schools
and colleges and the universities were integrated into a system
financed and much more tightly controlled, directly or indirectly,
by the central government.
A similar story could be told of many other institutions, such as
hospitals—from voluntary hospitals and poor law infirmaries to
the large integrated units of the National Health Service with their
hierarchy of Regional, Area and District Hospital Boards—social
work and welfare agencies, prisons, borstals and remand homes,
army, air force and naval units, and so on. But this leads us on to
the most significant rise in scale of all, the twentieth-century rise in
the scale of government. In the past century the numbers employed
by local government have risen from the 83,000 workers (including
police) of 1881 to no less than 968,000 in 1979.30 Similarly, the
107,782 civil servants (excluding industrial grades) in 1902 had
increased to 547,000 by 1980 (plus 157,600 industrial staff).
Altogether, the state came to employ no less than 17 per cent of the
occupied population, 25 per cent if the nationalized industries are
included.31 More to the point, whereas down to the First World
War most civil servants were employed in London in comparatively
small central offices, and only the Customs and Excise staffs
worked in the provinces, since then government offices have sprung
up in every sizeable provincial town—employment exchanges (job
centres), social security and supplementary benefit offices, income
tax, value added tax and other taxation offices, and the like, in
addition to the great decentralized headquarters such as those for
Social Security at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for DES statistics and
teachers’ pay and pensions at Darlington, and for vehicle and
driving licences at Swansea—and they have impinged far more
visibly on the lives of most citizens.
21
One measure of this extraordinary growth of government is the

more than thirtyfold rise in national government expenditure in
real terms (nearly tenfold as a proportion of national income), from
£77.9 million in 1897–8 (£105.3 million at 1913 prices), about 4.9
per cent of the net National Income (at factor cost), to £66,800
million in 1978–79 (£3,389 million at 1913 prices), about 47.1 per
cent of the net National Income. Of course, a great deal of this
enormous increase consists of transfer payments, in pensions, social
security and supplementary benefits, and the like, most of which
are immediately spent again on consumption goods, and also of
personal service such as medical treatment, education, housing
subsidies and social work which directly benefit their consumers.
But this does not detract from the point that central and local
government (which spends a further £20,573 million at current
prices) together handle 61.6 per cent of the net National Income or,
to put it more fairly perhaps, 53.3 per cent of the Gross National
Product.32
The rise in the scale of organization is not the cause but the effect
and symptom of the rise of a much more complex, inter-dependent
society. The connecting link between industrial and professional
society is the familiar principle of the division of labour, which
Adam Smith saw as the key to the wealth of nations in 1776. In 200
years it has transformed Britain (and a large part of the planet)
from a predominantly agricultural system through an industrial
mass-production economy to a post-industrial society increasingly
based on services. Machines, as Smith was aware, are the by-
product of the division of labour, and enable the less skilled, like car
drivers and television watchers, to call up at the turn of a switch the
services of skilled engineers. Telecommunications and computers
have now done the same for office work, banking, entertainment,
and other services. A service-based economy is admittedly
ambiguous, and includes retail distribution, catering and hotel
work, hospital portering, bus driving, routine office work and other
low-paid jobs as well as high-paid law, medicine, finance and
administration, and the post-industrial society is a good deal less
upmarket than Daniel Bell’s ‘Knowledge rules, OK’, and some
critics think that many jobs are becoming ‘deskilled’. 33
Nevertheless, his prediction that fewer workers would be making
things and more doing things for others has turned out to be true.
What Colin Clark called ‘Petty’s law’ (after Sir William Petty, the
22
seventeenth-century pioneer of ‘political arithmetic’) is still in

operation: the movement of workers with economic growth from
agriculture to industry to services.34
What is happening to industry in post-industrial society is what
happened to agriculture during the Industrial Revolution.
Agriculture, with the aid of fertilizers and machinery, became more,
not less, efficient, and with a diminishing workforce was able to
feed a majority instead of a minority of non-agrarians. Now
industry is becoming so efficient, with the aid of robotics and
computers, that a small minority of the population are able to
produce the consumer goods for the non-manufacturing majority.
(With the ‘green revolution’ agriculture is becoming still more
efficient, and the most efficient agriculture is in the most
economically advanced countries in Western Europe and North
America, though not as yet in Japan.) Like the Industrial
Revolution this has produced major structural changes in the
economy, bringing unemployment for some as well as opportunities
for others. The choice is between deindustrialization and low-grade
service work on the one hand and highly automated, competitive
industry and high-grade services on the other. As in the Industrial
Revolution, when predominantly peasant agriculture lost out to
industrial mass production, those countries which take the first
road will lose out in the race for wealth and power to those which
have chosen the second.
There are, however, two aspects to the division of labour, one
of which Adam Smith neglected because he could take it for
granted: specialization and integration. Specialization leads
directly to professionalism. Specialists rapidly form guilds,
associations, clubs or unions to enhance their status, protect their
skills from competition, and increase their incomes. That some
become organized professions and others trade unions is due to a
trick of the English language, aided by English snobbery.
‘Profession’, as in French (or Beruf in German), originally meant
any occupation, and the more prestigious trades were
distinguished by the adjectives ‘liberal’ (meaning gentlemanly)
and ‘learned’ (meaning institutionally educated) professions.35 By
dropping the epithets the more prestigious occupations, chiefly
the clergy, law and medicine, laid claim to the exclusive label of
‘profession’, which came to mean an occupation which so
effectively controlled its labour market that it never had to behave
23
like a trade union. Trade unions, meanwhile, never quite

abandoned the same aim: the Rule Book of the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers in 1864 declared that the journeyman
engineer had the same right to protect the value of his skill as the
physician. Over the years more and more occupations have made
this claim, and increasingly with justice: the civil engineer whose
constructions may fall down, the pharmacist whose healing drugs
may kill, even the car mechanic whose slightest mistake may be
lethal, can claim to be as vital to their clients’ welfare and survival
as any doctor or lawyer. The increasing complexity and
interdependence of the modern world automatically generates
specialization and organized professions.
Before specialization can complete its work, however, it has to be
integrated into the finished product or service. Even Adam Smith’s
pin makers had to be organized to make completed pins. The ten
separate operations were useless unless they came together in
packets of pins ready for sale, and that required an organizer to
oversee the whole enterprise. Smith refused to take the organizer’s
contribution seriously and argued that, even in many great works
like the Carron iron foundry, his work could be left to ‘some
principal clerk. His wages properly express the value of this labour
of inspection and direction.’36 The more divided the labour,
however, the larger the enterprise and the more complex the task of
fitting all the specialized operations together.
The rise in the scale of organization was not only an effect of the
increasing division of labour; it was also the cause of a further
division of labour as management itself became more complex and
was further divided into production, purchasing of materials,
accounting, design and engineering, quality surveying and,
eventually, industrial relations. Honest, competent managers
outside of the owner’s family and partners were hard to find, and
while ‘there were well-defined groups of managers in many
industries: there was, by 1830, as yet hardly a managerial
profession as such’. 37 Yet with the growth of large-scale
undertakings like railways, steamship lines, steel, engineering and
chemical works, all of which depended on large numbers of
specialist workers and careful integration of their work,
management became not only a profession but, with the import of
Taylorism from the United States, a science.38 The surge of
defensive amalgamations, mergers and take-overs which began in
24
the Great Depression of 1874–96 and have continued ever since

made it impossible for owners to do more than a fraction of their
own managing. Although it took until the new business schools of
the 1960s for it to acquire its own academically certified training,
company management became one of the two pivotal hierarchies of
As the business schools have discovered to their gain,
management is not confined to private industry. Public
administration, hospitals, universities, research establishments,
the armed forces, trade unions and employers’ associations, even
charitable foundations, all employ diverse collections of
specialists and need to be organized. The rise in the scale of their
organization was, as we have seen, as much a feature of industrial
society as industrial concentration itself. Post-industrial society,
with its swing to services, has accelerated the trend. The
enormous expansion of government has been powered by the
demand for more and more specialized services, from the
inspection of factories, mines, food and drugs, slum housing or
financial markets’ operations to the provision of pensions, social
security, secondary and tertiary education, or sophisticated
weapons research. Many of these professions have acquired their
own self-governing associations and training, like the mine
engineers, the medical officers of health, the actuaries, public
accountants, social workers, public analysts, nuclear physicists,
and so on. But like corporate management, public administration
as such, traditionally trained on the job like any traditional craft,
took until the 1960s to acquire, in the Civil Service College at
Sunningdale, a recognized training of its own, and even yet few
civil servants are required to attend there and most are still
recruited from university graduates in classics, history, law or
political science. Nevertheless, it would be naive not to recognize
the administrative Civil Service as one of the key organizing
professions, the central core of the public sector which forms the
second pivot on which the professional society turns.
The rise of the professions to permeate and, some more than
others, dominate modern society stems, then, from the logic of the
division and reintegration of labour which inspired the Industrial
Revolution and every large-scale development that has sprung
from it. Yet how did professionalism as an organizing principle
come to supersede class, and in particular supersede the
25
plutocratic landed and capitalistic ruling class which dominated

Victorian and Edwardian society? This is a long story which
embraces the whole social history of the last hundred years and
will occupy the rest of the book. We must begin that story by
examining industrial class society at its zenith, between 1880 and
the First World War.
26
Chapter 2
THE ZENITH OF
CLASS SOCIETY
Between 1880 and 1914 class society in Britain reached its zenith.
During this period the major classes achieved their advanced
capitalistic form, most clearly based on the flow of wealth from the
modern industrial system and therefore on their relation to the
capitalist means of production, distribution and exchange. In the
process they became more sharply differentiated from one another
than ever before. The rich, both great landowners and millionaire
capitalists, drew together in a consolidation of that new plutocracy
which was already beginning to emerge during the mid-Victorian
age.1 The middle classes, ever more graduated in income and status,
came to express those finer distinctions in prosperity and social
position physically, both in outward appearance, in dress,
furnishings and habitations, and even in physique, and in their
geographical segregation from one another and the rest of society
in carefully differentiated suburbs. So too did the working classes,
in part involuntarily because they could only afford what their
social betters left for them but also, within that constraint, because
those working-class families who could chose to differentiate
themselves equally, by Sunday if not everyday dress, and by better,
and better furnished, houses in marginally superior areas. Only the
poorest of the poor, the ‘residuum’ as Charles Booth and Alfred
Marshall called them, had no choice at all, and were consigned to
the darkest and dreariest slums, the most segregated class of all
because they and their dens were shunned by all the rest.
Segregation, by income, status, appearance, physical health, speech,
education, and opportunity in life, as well as by work and
residential area, was the symbolic mark of class society at its
highest point of development.
27
THE ZENITH OF CLASS SOCIETY
The distances, too, between the segregated classes were greater

than before, both in physical and in economic terms. Geographical
separation, a trend at work ever since the Industrial Revolution,
was now reinforced by new means of transport, the horse-drawn
tram and the ‘people’s carriage’, the cheap electric tram, the
suburban railway, and towards the end of the period the motor car.2
These enabled the inhabitants of towns and still more of great cities
to sort themselves out by what they could afford in terms of time
and transportation as well as house rents and local rates into
largely concentric rings of graded residential districts. Except in
London, where some of the very rich still chose to live in the West
End, the city centres were given up to the poorest, who had to live
near the daily and sometimes twice-daily markets for casual labour,
the unskilled but regularly employed lived a little farther out, the
skilled up to a tram-ride or workmen’s train ticket away, the lower
middle-class clerks and the shopkeepers and smaller business men
at the end of a horse-bus or short suburban railway trip, and the
well-to-do middle class at the distance of a railway season ticket.
Even the well-to-do were graded by ability to pay, so that Highgate
and Hampstead on their salubrious hills were socially superior to
Camden Town and Maida Vale, just as the Manchester suburbs of
Altrincham and Alderley Edge were a cut above Wilmslow and
Hale. There were exceptions, of course: inner suburban enclaves
like Victoria Park, Manchester or Edgbaston, Birmingham kept
their desirable status by determined private planning controls; and
the circles were often eccentric, bulging on the western side and up
the hills to take advantage, for those who could pay for it, of
fresher air and cleaner water. But it was undoubtedly the late
Victorian age which, with its trams and buses and suburban
railways, began the commuter age of modern times, and with it the
height of inequality between the classes.3
1 THE HEIGHT OF INEQUALITY

Despite the enormous rise in the national income and in average
living standards during the Industrial Revolution, inequality was
probably at its height between 1880 and 1914. The distribution of
income was more skew and the economic distance between the
classes was greater than ever before. For the beginning of the
period we can still use Dudley Baxter’s fairly reliable estimate of
28
the distribution of the National Income of England and Wales in

1867, modified to take into account Sir Josiah Stamp’s more
accurate statistics of income taxpayers.4 Table 2.1 shows that the
upper and middle classes, under 2 per cent of all families, with
upwards of £300 a year per family (nearly three times the average
family income), received well over a third (36.9 per cent) of the
National Income—nearly as much as the whole manual working
class (39.1 per cent), who constituted three quarters of the
population.
Towards the end of the period Sir Leo Chiozza Money made a
similar but less detailed estimate of the distribution of the
National Income of the United Kingdom for 1904, summarized in
Table 2.2.
29
He concluded that ‘the United Kingdom is seen to contain a great

multitude of poor people, veneered over with a thin layer of the
comfortable and rich’. Those in ‘riches’ with over £700 a year, less
than one-thirtieth (2.9 per cent) of the population, received over a
third (34.2 per cent) of the National Income, those in ‘comfort’
with between £160 and £700 (8.7 per cent) received one-seventh
(14.3 per cent), while those in ‘poverty’—by which he, a Fabian
banker, meant simply those below the income tax level—eight-
ninths (88.4 per cent) of the population, received only just over half
(51.5 per cent) of the National Income.
Baxter’s and Money’s figures are of course both very rough, and
static, estimates and are not on a comparable basis. Sir Arthur
Bowley, the distinguished pioneer of income and wage statistics,
30
calculated that, although the wage-earning class increased their real

wages between 1880 and 1913 by a third (34 per cent), their share
of the National Income declined significantly, from 41.3 to 35.6 per
cent. Surprisingly, so too did the share of the wealthy (the same
percentage of the occupied population taxed on over £160 per
annum in 1880 and over £225 per annum in 1913), from 47.1 per
cent to 44.5 per cent. The reason for this divergence is that the
estimated number of wage earners had shrunk from 83.3 per cent
of the population to 73.4 per cent, and the slack had been taken up
by the ‘intermediate’ class, expanding both in numbers (from 12.2
to 22.4 per cent) and in income (from 10.4 to 19.4 per cent).
Allowing for this shift, which benefited those children of the
working class who moved up into the lower middle class, Bowley
concluded that the general increase in the National Income had
been shared with remarkable equality between the classes.
Although this was true relatively speaking, the absolute gap
between the classes had widened considerably. While the average
wage had risen from £37.8 to £50.6 per annum (prices being little
different, having fallen and then risen again), the average income of
his higher taxpaying group (with over £700 p.a.) had increased
from £855 to £1,120 per annum, an increase equal to more than
five times the average wage in 1913.5
Although Bowley was impressed by the constancy of the class
shares, he nevertheless believed that the economic system had not
produced a satisfactory livelihood for the bulk of the population.
This was confirmed by the great pioneers of the poverty survey
during this period, of whom Bowley himself was one. For reasons
we shall see later, the late Victorians had become disturbed about
the problem of poverty, as such sensational publications as the Rev.
Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) and
William Booth of the Salvation Army’s In Darkest England and the
Way Out (1890) bear witness. The concern was not new, as any
number of commentators and philanthropists demonstrate, from
Malthus and Thomas Chalmers in the first three decades of the
century through Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, Baroness
Burdett-Coutts, and F.D.Maurice and the Christian Socialists in the
1840s and 1850s, to Canon Barnett, Octavia Hill and the Charity
Organization Society of 1869.6
What was new from the 1880s was determination to get at the
statistical facts, to quantify the precise extent of poverty and its
31
causes. The originator of the comprehensive social survey was

Charles Booth, the Liverpool shipowner and amateur statistician,
who had served his apprenticeship in the Liverpool and London
Statistical Societies which, along with the Manchester Society
(founded in 1833) and the Society for the Promotion of the Social
Sciences (founded in 1859), were the pioneers of empirical
sociology in Britain.7 His motives in undertaking the vast survey of
Life and Labour of the People of London in seventeen volumes,
from 1889 to 1902, are still debated,8 but his estimate that no less
than 35.2 per cent of the population of the East End and 30.7 per
cent of that of London as a whole were in poverty struck a chord
in the hearts of contemporaries and has become accepted ever
since. It seemed to be confirmed by Seebohm Rowntree’s social
survey of York in 1899, which found 43.4 per cent of the wage-
earning population, 27.8 per cent of the total population of that
much smaller city, in poverty.9
These were appalling figures which were, quite rightly, to have a
powerful effect on contemporary perceptions and on social reform.
But sympathy for the poor, however well justified, must not be
allowed to obscure the meaning of the figures. By ‘poverty’ Booth,
who thought that his results were ‘not so appalling as sensational
writers would have us believe’, meant much the same as Bentham
and his disciple Patrick Colquhoun long before in 1806: the state of
‘having no surplus’ and therefore having to work for one’s daily
bread.10 Most of Booth’s ‘poor’, classes C and D, ‘though they
would be much the better for more of everything, are not “in
want”. They are neither ill-nourished nor ill-clad, according to any
standard that can reasonably be used. Their lives are an unending
struggle and lack comfort’.11 What we normally mean by poverty,
and what many of his contemporaries took him to mean by it, he
called ‘want’ or still worse, ‘distress’. Booth himself believed
therefore that only his classes A (the ‘lowest class of occasional
labourers, semi-criminals and loafers’) and B (the ‘very poor’) were
in what was commonly meant by poverty, and these together
constituted 12.4 per cent of the East Enders and 8.4 per cent of all
Londoners.12 In other words, not ‘nearly a third’ but a much lower
figure, one in twelve of the population, were in ‘want or distress’.
Rowntree’s figures were similarly misunderstood. Although his
definition of poverty was more scientific than Booth’s, based as it
was on careful calculation of the income needed to maintain
32
families of varying sizes in health and physically fit enough for

work, his figures of 43.4 per cent of the working population and
27.8 per cent of the total population of York in poverty included
27.9 per cent and 17.9 per cent respectively in ‘secondary poverty’,
with barely sufficient income but, because of misspending on
inessentials, showing signs of undernourishment, as judged by his
investigator. The proportions in ‘primary poverty’—comparable
with Booth’s classes ‘in want’ and ‘distress’—were 15.5 per cent of
the working class and 9.9 per cent, or about one in ten of the
population of York.13
The seemingly mathematical accuracy of the figures which so
impressed contemporaries was also dubious. Booth’s statistics were
not of people at all, but of impressions of particular houses and
whole streets extracted by his proud but inaccurate technique of
‘mass interviewing’ by the new school attendance officers, his ‘eyes
and ears’. Rowntree’s statistics were also impressionistic, and
collected by his anonymous (and enormously hard-working) paid
investigator who called at every working-class house, inquired
about the wages, earners and dependants and, where the income
was deemed barely sufficient, noted the signs of ‘secondary
poverty’.
None of these caveats proves that poverty was negligible in late
Victorian England—on the contrary, the Interdepartmental
Committee on Physical Deterioration, which reported in 1904
after General Sir Frederick Maurice’s complaints of the unfitness
of many army recruits in the Boer War, amply confirmed the poor
food, overcrowded housing and terrible living conditions, though
not the alleged progressive mental and physical degeneration,
amongst the slum dwellers of the great cities14—but they do
suggest that the proportion in poverty by the standards of the
time was smaller than Booth’s and Rowntree’s estimates were
taken to mean.
This was confirmed by Bowley and Burnett-Hurst’s much more
scientific and accurate four towns survey, Livelihood and Poverty,
though this was not published until 1915, too late to affect public
opinion in the period.15 This random sampling of working-class
households in Northampton, Reading, Stanley and Warrington in
1912–13, using a new and somewhat higher poverty line, showed
that an average of 16 per cent of the working class, or about 12 per
cent of the total population, ranging from 4.5 per cent in Stanley (a
33
small coalmining town) to 19 per cent in Reading, were living in

(primary) poverty. It was no consolation to those actually suffering
from want and distress that their suffering was shared with fewer
rather than larger numbers than was commonly believed. Indeed,
as today, ‘relative deprivation’ compared with the affluent many
may lead to a greater sense of social injustice.
The causes of poverty were of three overlapping kinds. Firstly,
there were the unavoidable exigencies and misfortunes of life,
illness or death of the main breadwinner, old age or unemployment.
Secondly came the ‘life-cycle’ of poverty discovered by Rowntree,
in which most of the children were born into poverty brought on by
their very coming and the loss of the wife’s wages, most married
after a brief period of prosperity into childbearing and poverty
again, and then, after an interval of affluence supported by the
older children’s wages, sank into the poverty of old age. Thirdly,
the most important at the time, was the poverty of low wages and
large families. The first kind, illness, widowhood, old age and
unemployment, accounted for 23 per cent of the poverty in York
(of which unemployment and irregular work, in a boom year,
caused 5.1 per cent), and from 13 per cent in Warrington to 31 per
cent in Reading and 35 per cent in Northampton (of which
unemployment and irregular work caused about 6 per cent). The
second kind can best be measured by the proportion of children in
poverty, far larger than the average for the whole population: 35.7
per cent of all children under 15 were in (primary or secondary)
poverty in York (as compared with the population average of 27.8
per cent), and 27 per cent of the children in (primary) poverty in
Bowley and Burnett-Hurst’s four towns (as compared with 16 per
cent overall). But by far the major cause of poverty was low wages,
usually combined with large dependent families: no less than 74 per
cent of those in poverty in York, and 71 per cent in the other four
towns.16 Of agricultural labourers, whose wages were the lowest of
any major occupation, ranging from an average of 14s. 11d. a week
in the worst county, Oxfordshire, to 22s. 6d. in the best, Durham,
most were in poverty. According to a survey in 1913 by Rowntree
and May Kendall, ‘the wage paid by farmers to agricultural
labourers is, in the vast majority of cases, insufficient to maintain a
family of average size in a state of merely physical efficiency’17—
and most farm labourers’ families were above the national average
in size. Bowley and Burnett-Hurst concluded from their survey:
34
It is thus proved that a great part of the poverty revealed by

our enquiries…is not intermittent but permanent, not
accidental or due to exceptional misfortune, but a regular
feature of the industries of the towns concerned. It cannot be
too emphatically stated that of all the causes of primary
poverty which have been brought to our notice, low wages are
by far the most important. We could go further and say that
to raise the wages of the worst-paid workers is the most
pressing social task with which this country is faced today.18
To that extent, capitalist society had succeeded in segregating not

just the immensely rich from the rest, or the middle from the
working class, but also the ordinary working class, Booth’s 52 per
cent of wage earners living in comfort and indeed his 74 per cent
living above the level of want or distress, from the ‘residuum’, the
‘outcast poor’ who lived out their lives in the pariah-world of the
slums.
Nevertheless, since far more children passed through a phase of
poverty and malnutrition than lived permanently in poverty as
adults, the segregation of the classes was physiological as well as
economic and locational. Between 1880 and 1910 13-year-old
working-class boys in London and Glasgow were on the average
2½ inches shorter than their middle-income group contemporaries,
and 4 inches shorter than upper-class boys, and there was little
evidence of much increase in average height or narrowing of the
gap between the two dates.19 The chances of living at all were twice
as great in the highest as in the lowest class: infant mortality rates
in the upper and middle classes as late as 1911 averaged 77 per
thousand compared with 113 per thousand for skilled workers’
children and 152 per thousand for the unskilled.20 In 1917 the
National Service Medical Boards found that only three in nine
conscripts (all born before 1900) were
perfectly fit and healthy; two were on a definitely infirm plane

of health and strength…; three were incapable of undergoing
more than a very moderate degree of physical exertion and
could almost (in view of their age) be described with justice as
physical wrecks; and the remaining man was a chronic invalid
with a precarious hold on life.21
35
When class could make so much difference not merely to

material possessions and cultural advantages but to the very fibre
of one’s being, we can truly say that class society was at its zenith.
Segregation was reinforced by growing class hostility. Although
after passing through the relatively socially harmonious Viable
class society’ of the mid-Victorian age, England did not return to
the violent class antagonism and fear of revolution of the Regency
and Chartist periods, there was in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century and beyond a decided upswing in the tempo of class
conflict. It took the form of an intensification of the struggle for
income which showed itself, firstly, in prolonged outbursts of
industrial strikes, bitter denunciations of landlords and
millionaires, demands for parliamentary and local government
reform, proposals for land taxes, social reform, and changes in the
method of incidence of taxation, and, secondly, in challenges to the
status quo by various kinds of socialism and incipient working-
class alternatives to the existing political parties. This recrudescence
of class hostility might appear surprising in a period of rising living
standards for most people, including a majority of the working
class, and when most of the English, including a large part of the
working class, were content to keep an increasingly plutocratic
Conservative Party in power for most of the time. To understand
this age of contradictions we must explore the impact of the so-
called ‘Great Depression’ of 1874–96 and the climacteric of British
capitalism.
2 THE CLIMACTERIC OF BRITISH CAPITALISM

British capitalism reached its zenith in the late Victorian age in yet
another sense. At some point between the 1870s and the 1890s the
rate of economic growth began to slacken, first in industrial
production, then in National Income, and Britain began to be
overtaken in both by foreign competitors, notably the United States
and Germany. The annual rate of growth of industrial production
(excluding building), having reached a peak of 3.6 per cent per
annum in the decade from the early 1860s to the early 1870s,
slackened to 1.6 per cent per annum between the late 1870s and the
late 1880s, 1.8 per cent per annum between the late 1880s and the
early 1900s, and finally to 1.5 per cent per annum between the
early 1900s and 1913. In per capita terms the fall was still more
36
spectacular, from 2.4 per cent per annum in the first of those
decades to 0.2–0.4 per cent per annum through most of the period
and to a negative 0.2 per cent per annum in the last decade before
the Great War, an actual decline in production per head.22 The
figures are slightly defective since they tend to exaggerate the old
declining industries and understate the new expanding ones, and
they do not include the new and burgeoning services like education,
health, transport, and local and central government which now
began to enter more largely into the National Income. Allowing for
these, real National Income per head (at 1913 prices) went on
growing, with occasional setbacks, fairly steadily from an index
(1913–14=100) of 58.6 in 1880 to 80.6 in 1890 and 89.4 in 1900,
before levelling out in the 1900s in the low 90s, with a final
upswing to 101.6 in the boom of 1913.23 Much of the striking
improvement in average living standards in the late Victorian age,
a rise of over 50 per cent in twenty years in the face of decelerating
industrial production, was due to favourable terms of trade and the
falling prices of imported food and raw materials.24 Retail prices
fell from an index of 96 in 1880 to 68 in 1895 before rising again
to 100 in 1911–13.25
In the same way, much of the stagnation of production and
National Income per head in the Edwardian age was due to rising
prices and adverse terms of trade. The ‘climacteric of the late
1890s’—the beginning of a long-term fall in the rate of growth of
National Income—was partly due to this swing from falling to
rising prices, especially of imports, although this only dramatized
the real change in Britain’s dominant economic position and
leading role in world trade, which reached its apogee in the late
1890s.26
To contemporaries the long period of falling prices between
1873 and 1896 was known as the ‘Great Depression in trade and
industry’. Its existence was doubted by the great economist Alfred
Marshall before the Royal Commission on the Depression in 1886,
and further doubt was thrown on it by H.L.Beales in 1934, before
the ‘myth’ was finally demolished by S.B.Saul in 1969.27 All three
were of course right in rejecting the notion of permanent depression
in a period which saw not only spectacularly rising real incomes
together with high and, except for a few particularly bad years like
1879, 1884–87 and 1892–95, rising employment. Yet
contemporaries were not self-deluded, knew that something was
37
amiss, and had reason to believe that their discontents, political as

well as social and economic, had something to do with
contemporary economic trends.
There was of course a real depression in the arable agriculture of
the fertile, corn-growing south and east, as cheap grain came
pouring in from North America, carried by the new bulk tramp
steamers at unprecedentedly low freight rates. Cheap refrigerated
meat from Australia and South America did not have the same
effect, since it was shunned by all but the poorer classes (who
undoubtedly benefited by it), and the pastoral farmers and
landlords of the north and west did much better, particularly those
who used cheap imported feeding stuffs. While Cambridgeshire
farm rents, for example, fell between 1871 and 1896 by 35 per
cent, Lancashire rents fell by only 1 per cent, and the Earl of
Derby’s Lancashire rents from farms supplying the cotton towns
with milk, butter, cheese and meat actually rose by 18 per cent.28
The falling prices hit the traditional mixed farmers and their
landlords hard, however, and the majority of landowners who had
no other rents from mines or urban property found themselves
overtaken in income—and still more in wealth as the capital value
of rural land declined even faster than rents—by their industrial
and commercial rivals, and they were left standing by the great
urban and mine-owning aristocrats who alone could keep up with
the new millionaires.
Other industries suffered from time to time from the short
slumps within the ‘Great Depression’, and all no doubt suffered
unknowingly from the favourable terms of trade that reduced the
purchasing power of Britain’s overseas customers, which in turn
helped to cause the downturn in British rates of industrial growth.
But the real paradox of the so-called Great Depression and the
cause of its discontents lay in the impact of the falling prices
themselves. For falling prices have a direct effect upon the struggle
for income between the classes. Just as the rising prices of the mid-
Victorian period eased the struggle for income, making it easier for
landlords to obtain and farmers, business men and householders to
pay higher rents and for workers to demand and employers to grant
wage increases, so the falling prices of 1873–96 exacerbated that
struggle, squeezing rents, profit margins and interest rates, and
making it more difficult for landlords to resist rent concessions,
business men to grant wage increases, and wage earners to defend
38
themselves against wage cuts.29 Whereas in the middle decades of

the century mild inflation made the economy seem more buoyant
than it really was and the system appear to be working to
everyone’s advantage, so in the later decades price deflation made
the system appear less successful, and people in all classes came to
question whether it ought not to be modified or radically changed.
Business men, farmers, and working-class leaders became interested
in a revival of land reform in a variety of nostrums, from Joseph
Chamberlain’s ‘free trade in land’ through Henry Broadhurst’s
leasehold enfranchisement to Henry George’s ‘single tax’ and
Alfred Russel Wallace’s land nationalization.30 Some business men
and landowners began to question the generation-old policy of free
trade and founded the Fair Trade League in 1881. Some working
men with the middle-class sympathizers began to resurrect the
socialist ideas which had been so prominent in the last great price
fall in 1817–48, and to found new socialist organizations like the
Social Democratic Federation (1881), the Socialist League (1884)
and the Fabian Society (1884). Others engaged in major strikes,
most often against wage cuts, but sometimes, especially in the short
recoveries within the ‘Great Depression’, for wage increases like the
match girls’, gas workers’ and dockers’ strikes of 1888–89. Finally,
groups of working-class leaders began to challenge the old two-
party political system, to say ‘a plague on both your houses’, and to
move towards the separate parliamentary representation of the
working class.
Falling prices were not of course the only factor in the increased
class hostility of the late Victorian age, any more than rising prices
were the only cause of the relative class harmony of the previous
generation. There were, as we shall see when we come to deal with
the more fundamental differences of outlook between the classes,
much deeper-seated causes of conflict in the competing and
incompatible class ideals which underlay the struggle for income.
But the timing of the upsurge in the 1880s and 1890s was certainly
affected by the swing from rising to falling prices.
Curiously enough, the return swing in the late 1890s from falling
to rising prices did not have the counterbalancing ameliorative
effect, and this illustrates how the underlying class antagonisms
overrode the more superficial effects of price change. In the
Edwardian age the economic factor which proved to be far more
influential than inflation—although steepening inflation between
39
1910 and 1914 certainly added its quota of aggravation to an

already critical situation—was the stagnation of industrial growth
and of National Income per head and, most provocative of all, the
decline for the first time in living memory of real wages. If
anything, an inflation which fails to produce increasing money
wages (and other incomes) is even more frustrating and provocative
than a deflation which threatens wage (and other income) cuts. The
record strike waves of 1910–14 were only partly related to the
inflation of those years, as we shall see, but it certainly sharpened
the bitterness of an already bitter situation.
3 THE DECLINE OF LIBERAL ENGLAND

The most far-reaching effect to which the ‘Great Depression’ and its
associated class conflict contributed was a permanent shift in what
may be called the geological structure of politics. The ‘earthquake
of the 1880s’—the landslip in the bedrock of politics which was
epitomized by the permanent split in the Liberal Party in 1886—
was only the most dramatic of a series of movements in the social
structure of politics which may be called the long decline of Liberal
England. By this is meant more than the decline of the Liberal
Party. Liberal England was the consensus by which a harmonious,
viable class society such as existed in the mid-Victorian age could
support a political system based on the assumption that all classes
could be accommodated within either of the traditional parties. In
practice they were unequally accommodated, and from Peel’s
splitting of the Conservative Party in 1846 until its recovery of a
majority government under Disraeli in 1874 the ‘natural governing
party’ to which most people looked to maintain the consensus was
the Liberal Party. Its long, slow decline was the major symptom and
effect of the more general decline of Liberal England. The main
features of this major restructuring of British politics, which began
in a small way in the 1860s and ended after the break-up of the
Liberal Party in the First World War, were the drift of both the old
Whig landlords and the new corporate capitalists from the Liberal
to the Conservative Party and the rise of the new Labour Party
which was to replace it as one of the two major governing parties.
This remarkable redrawing of the social map of politics,
although abetted in its timing by the increased class antagonism of
the ‘Great Depression’ and its Edwardian aftermath, was rooted in
40
the logic of capitalist society at its zenith. Indeed, one of the most
surprising aspects of the rise of modern class society during the
Industrial Revolution is that it took so long to express itself in class-
based political parties. The delay was largely due to the
construction of the Liberal consensus, by the skill and success with
which the English landed ruling class accommodated itself to the
demands of the rising new classes, both to the emerging values of
the entrepreneurial ideal and to the extremely moderate claims of
the working class. But it was also due to the built-in constitutional
constraints, which prevented for most of the century the formation
of separate middle- or working-class political parties with any hope
of effective electoral success or a parliamentary majority.
The 1880s were to undermine those constraints. The Parliament
elected in 1880 was the last in which the landowners had a clear
majority, that elected in 1885 the first in which they were out-
numbered.31 They could no longer afford the luxury of dividing
their forces between two majoritarian parties (although the new
dispensation, confused by what only gradually came to be seen as
the halfway house of Liberal Unionism, took a generation to clarify
itself). Meanwhile the landed majority in the Cabinet lasted down
to 1905, that in the House of Lords until the inter-war period,
when it ceased to matter as a force separate from the rest of the
wealthy peers.32 The lifting of the constraints on class politics—
foreshadowed by the Second Reform Act of 1867 and the Ballot
Act of 1872—began a transition whose significance was much
greater than it appeared to contemporaries. The most obvious
landmark was the Third Reform Act of 1884 which, unlike its
predecessors, gave the working-class voters for the first time the
possibility of constituting a majority of the electorate. Less obvious
was the accompanying Redistribution Act of 1885, whose mainly
single-member constituencies allowed concentrations of working-
class electors like the coalminers and textile workers to dominate
particular seats and others like the cotton workers to hold the
balance between the major parties. The Corrupt Practices Act of
1883, by limiting the amount per elector which each candidate
could spend, had a larger effect than the Ballot Act on the
independence of voters. The three acts together also brought into
existence as a third force in British politics the overwhelmingly
Nationalist block of eight-six Irish MPs, which was perceived as a
threat to property owners in Ireland and by analogy in Britain.
41
Finally, there were the County Councils Act of 1888 and the
London Government Act of 1889 which, by extending democracy
to the counties (previously run by the non-elected JPs) and to
London and the larger cities, gave new political groupings like
London’s Progressive Party and local working-class parties
everywhere the opportunity to practise their skills and build up
local power bases. The same could be said of the later District
Councils Act of 1894, the London Government Act of 1899 which
created the twenty-eight metropolitan borough councils below the
LCC, and indeed of the earlier School Boards (1870) and Poor Law
Guardians (1834), which now began to be targets for the new
electors and their representatives. In little more than a decade
(1883–94) not only the game but also the allegiance of many of the
players had been completely changed.
The two most salient features of the decline of Liberal England
were the drift of large and increasing numbers of landowners and
business men from the Liberal to the Conservative Party and the
rise of Labour as an independent political force. Neither of these
developments was inevitable, and if any well-informed political
observer had been told in 1880 that twentieth-century politics
would be dominated by a predominantly capitalist and an
ostensibly anti-capitalist party, he would have automatically
assumed them to be the Liberal versus a new working-class party.
The astonishing reversal by which the Conservative Party, the
traditional bastion of the rural landed gentry and the Church of
England, replaced the Liberal Party, the traditional home of the
Great Whig, and often urban propertied and entrepreneurial,
aristocracy and of the industrial middle class and the Dissenters, is
only surpassed by the total replacement of the Liberal Party as the
alternative governing party by the Labour Party. The astonishment
is tempered, of course, by the knowledge that the stereotypes were
oversimplified even in 1880, and that there had long been,
particularly in London and the great ports, many traditionally
Conservative merchants, bankers, brewers and government
contractors, and also, particularly in the Lancashire and Yorkshire
textile areas and across the south of England, those large numbers
of, mainly Anglican, working-class Tories whom Disraeli had
discovered ‘like the angel in the marble’.33 But the fact remains that
between 1880 and 1914 the Liberal Party, which had been the
‘natural party of government’ for the previous half-century, lost the
42
permanent allegiance of the landowners and many of the business

men, especially the bigger, corporate capitalists, and failed to hold
on to the almost automatic support of organized (as distinct from
unorganized, deferential or individual ambitious) labour.
The first of these haemorrhages from Liberalism began before
1886, in the defection of individual landlords like Sir James
Graham and the Duke of Argyll, of bankers like Lord Overstone, of
corporate business men like Richard Potter, chairman of the Great
Western Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railroad, Sir Edwin
Watkin of the Midland Railway, and Sir Richard Moon of the
London and North Western Railway, and of most of the great
brewers, like Lord Ardilaun, the first of the Guinness peers, and
Lord Hindlip of the Allsop family. As Lord Salisbury noted in the
Quarterly Review in 1883, ‘The uneasiness is greatest among those
whose property consists in land,’ but ‘publicans, manufacturers,
house-owners, railway shareholders, fundholders are painfully
aware that they have all been threatened: that their most vital
interests are at the mercy of some move in the game of politics.’34
The City of London changed from rocklike Liberal to diehard
Tory.35 The metropolis as a whole changed sides: in 1865 every
London parliamentary seat was held by the Liberals; by 1900 they
held only eight out of seventy-two.36 From 1886 there was a
veritable flood, often via the Liberal Unionist Party like the
Marquess of Hartington and his Whig followers and Joseph
Chamberlain and his Midland business colleagues, but with most of
them finishing their political careers in the Conservative and
Unionist Party.
Peerage creations are another indication. Except for those
businessmen like Lord Overstone and Edward Strutt, Baron Helper,
who passed through the metamorphosis of landownership, business
peerages were almost unheard of before the 1880s, when Gladstone
and Salisbury began to vie with each other in capitalist creations as
the business class began to come into its own in status as well as
wealth. Of the 200 or so non-royal peerages created between 1886
and 1914, some seventy, more than a third, represented new wealth
from industry, commerce and finance. Another third represented
the traditional professional routes into the peerage, chiefly via the
law and the judges’ bench and other service to the state of
diplomacy, colonial service or the armed forces, even though such
service now more rarely led to landed wealth. Only about a quarter
43
came from that once traditional source of nobility, the landed

gentry. More to the present point, although both governing parties
sought to honour and gain the support of the business interests, it
is significant that the Tories ennobled more of the big corporate
bankers, brewers and newspaper owners, the Liberals more from
traditional manufacturing industry.37
This tendency, for the financial and corporate interests, plus
the brewers, to drift disproportionately towards the Conservative
Party while more of the merchants and manufacturers stayed
Liberal to the end, can be seen in the House of Commons. This
period saw the greatest overlap between non-landed wealth and
membership in Parliament: in 1895, for example, sixty of the 200
non-landed millionaires were MPs, and many of the rest in the
House of Lords.38 The class interests of MPs are therefore a better
measure than they were before or later of the drift of the wealthy
from the Liberal to the Conservative Party. The known statistics
of MPs’ economic interests show that, while the Liberal share of
landed MPs plummeted from nearly one half in 1880 and 1885 to
a quarter or less thereafter (apart from the aberration of more
than half in the great Liberal landslide of 1906), the Liberal share
of business MPs fell from two-thirds in 1880 and three-fifths in
1885 to less than half until the temporary recovery of 1906. Only
amongst MPs from the professions did the Liberals maintain,
especially when in office, an overwhelming share of the interest in
the House. This becomes much clearer if we cancel out ‘the swing
of the pendulum’ by adjusting the raw percentages to allow for
the rise and fall of party representation in the House. An
44
associative index (AI; 1.0=the same share of the occupation’s MPs

as the party’s share of MPs in the Commons), as shown in Table
2.3, indicates how much greater or smaller the Liberal Party’s
share of each interest was than its share of the MPs of the two
parties.
This shows that the Liberals maintained (with the slight and
surprising exception of 1906) more than their proportionate share
of the business interest among MPs, although a declining one,
down to the First World War. A more refined analysis shows more
clearly what was really happening. If we separate out the financiers
(bankers, insurance and finance company directors) and the
merchants, to represent the extremes of the rising corporate
capitalists and the traditional individualists, we get the picture
shown in Table 2.4.
Thus while the Liberals maintained an overwhelming share of the

merchants, twice or more their ‘proper’ share, their lesser but still
clear majority of the financiers down to 1885 steadily dwindled to
an equally clear minority.39
At the electoral level the drift was reinforced by the greater
geographical segregation of suburban class society. The migration
of the well-to-do middle class from the industrial towns and
commercial cities into the surrounding countryside had been feared
by the traditionally Conservative landed gentry as a threat to their
domination. In fact it proved, as far as the party if not the gentry
was concerned, to be the opposite. The ‘villa Toryism’ of the new
outer suburbanites in the county constituencies became a pillar of
the Conservative Party organization, and appeared at exactly the
right time to counter the newly enfranchised agricultural worker,
45
who was claimed to have won the 1885 election for Gladstone. In
the inner suburbs, too, the growth of the lower middle class of
clerks, teachers and small business men, with their morbid fear of
the working class, reinforced that division into Liberal/Labour
inner-city islands in a suburban and county Tory sea which became
the major feature of twentieth-century political geography.40 In
London the Liberals and the Fabians blamed the middle-class
suburbs for wresting control of the London County Council from
the ‘Progressives’ in 1907 and transferring it to the ‘Moderates’. As
Charles Masterman put it, ‘In feverish hordes the suburbs swarm to
the polls to vote against a turbulent proletariat.’41
None of this proves that the Liberal Party before the First World
War was doomed to extinction. What it does suggest is that a large
number of business men, and particularly the new rising plutocrats,
were becoming disillusioned with traditional Liberalism and
finding a more congenial home in the Conservative Party. The
reasons for this have been discussed at length in my study of ‘Land
Reform and Class Conflict in Victorian Britain’.42 By the 1880s the
great Gladstonian Liberal Party had done its work of
democratizing and reforming Britain along the lines of a purely
political radicalism which could unite, for different but not yet
competing reasons, the progressive forces amongst Whig landlords,
Cobdenite business men and the organized working class alike.43
From then onwards Liberalism came to represent, for all
landowners and for those business men who disliked landlordism
less than they feared attacks on any kind of property, a threat to
property itself.
Land reform, which became an increasing obsession with
‘advanced Liberals’, was the link between the Irish land policies of
Gladstone—and here the Third Reform Act as applied to Ireland
seemed to many English property owners to have thrown the Irish
landlords to the wolves—and the costly social reforms demanded
not only by the radical wing of the party but also by their socialist
and trade union allies outside. Some of the latter went further, to
demand Henry George’s ‘single tax’ on landed property,
particularly urban or potentially urban property, and even the
nationalization of mines, railways and the land itself. The threat to
property will appear in its proper place, in Chapter 4. Suffice it to
say here that they all represented a creeping threat to property
which no longer, as in the days of Cobden and Bright, was thought
46
to be aimed only at the irresponsible power of the landlords,

leaving the business class unscathed. As Lord Salisbury so tellingly
put it in 1884, ‘We are on an inclined plane leading from the
position of Lord Hartington to that of Mr Chamberlain and so on
to the depths over which Mr Henry George rules supreme.’44 At
various points on this slippery slope most of the landowners and
increasing numbers of business men chose to jump off and abandon
the Liberal Party to its fate.
The fate they assumed for it was increasing domination by the
‘advanced Liberals’ or radicals, who were thought to be ‘soft on
property’ whenever it clashed with the interests of the underdog,
whether the underdog was Irish peasant, Scottish crofter, English
slum dweller, East End docker, the ‘sweated worker’ in the
surviving domestic trades, the elderly worker, the widow, the
orphan, the unemployed, the poor generally, the colonial peoples,
the ex-slaves in the West Indies, the Boers in South Africa, or the
Chinese indentured labourers in the South African mines. For all of
these, advanced Liberalism as it was called in the 1880s or the New
Liberalism as it became in the late 1890s raised the high moral ideal
of social justice for all men everywhere. This moral idealism, which
some of his opponents labelled ‘humbug’, had been the banner
under which Gladstone had created the party and passionately
bound idealists of all classes to himself as ‘the people’s William’. In
the early 1880s its destiny still seemed to be that of a great party of
reform but now, if the more radical wing had its way, it would
become increasingly a party of social reform. For the failure to
maintain the momentum of reform Gladstone himself cannot be
absolved from blame, perhaps more because of his opportunism in
allying himself with the new Irish Nationalist balancing force than
because of his well-known dislike of government intervention.
From the viewpoint of Chamberlain and many radicals he chose the
‘wrong’ underdog for special treatment, and thus missed the
opportunity of maintaining for the Liberal Party the allegiance of a
large part of organized labour.
What might have happened to the Liberal Party if Gladstone had
irrevocably resigned and left Chamberlain to lead it, with or
without the Marques of Hartington and the Whigs, in a great
programme of social reform and, perhaps, imperialism—a
combination of proven appeal to the working-class voter—it is
impossible to guess. It is not, however, beyond reasonable
47
speculation that the Liberals might have become, in the fullness of

time and beyond the death of Chamberlain, not very different from
the twentieth-century Labour Party, a reformist coalition of middle-
class intellectuals and organized labour with perhaps a social
democratic instead of a socialist label to mark the difference—
much indeed as the Liberal Party appeared to be in process of
becoming between 1906 and 1914.
The rise of Labour and also—not by any means the same thing—
of modern socialism can also be traced to the geological shift of the
1880s. Disappointment with the lost leaders, first Gladstone and
then Chamberlain, and the ‘wrong’ directions in which they led,
played a large part, along with the class antagonisms of the ‘Great
Depression’, in the new awakenings of the 1880s, the socialist
revival and the New Unionism. If this was the immediate
provocation, the socialist societies of the 1880s had their roots
further back, in the land reform movement, Christian Socialism,
and the fugitive political socialism of the mid-Victorian period. The
upsurge of land reform in the late 1860s and 1870s, which in 1880
caused the two elder statesmen John Bright and Disraeli one to
welcome and the other to fear an imminent ‘assault upon the
constitutional position of the landed interest’, belonged to that
earlier phase of class conflict in which individual capitalists of the
Anti-Corn Law League variety were ranged against Ricardo’s
monopolists of the soil.45 It was still alive in 1885 with the founding
of the Free Land League and Joseph Chamberlain and Jesse
Collings’s claim to have won the election for Gladstone on the cry
of ‘three acres and a cow’ for the newly enfranchised farm
labourers.46
What was surprising about the movement was its ability,
paradoxically based on the consensus of Liberal England, to unite
the middle and working classes as in 1832 and 1846 in one final
attack on the landed aristocracy. This was symbolized by the
founding in 1870 of the English Land Tenure Association by John
Stuart Mill and his friends, together with George Odger, one of the
famous trade union ‘junta’, and five members of the (first)
International Working Men’s Association (founded in 1864). It was
this Association, in the persons of Helen Taylor, Mill’s
stepdaughter, and George Odger, which welcomed Henry George
on his first tour of England in 1881.47 His sixpenny editions of
Progress and Poverty, with their attack on the land monopoly and
48
advocacy of the ‘single tax’, are often credited with stimulating that
concern with the economic connections between wealth and
poverty which led so many to socialism. If that is so, Henry George
was exceedingly fortunate both in his message and in his timing.
The 1870s and early 1880s were seething with attacks on landed
property—Alfred Russel Wallace’s Land Nationalization League of
1881 (which objected to the confiscatory nature of George’s single
tax), the Land Reform Union (later the English Land Restoration
League) which split off from it in 1883 to organize George’s second
tour of Britain, the Free Land League of 1885, Henry Broadhurst’s
Leasehold Enfranchisement Bill of that year, and so on. The
importance of land reform was that, in illustration of Lord
Salisbury’s ‘inclined plane’, it could so easily slide, via the
nationalization of mines, railways and other natural monopolies,
into full-blown socialism.
Christian Socialism contributed its mite to secular socialism via
Stewart Headlam, founder of the Guild of St Matthew (1887), a
society of Anglicans concerned with social problems, who hailed
Henry George as a ‘man sent from God’, helped to found the Land
Reform League and edit its symbolically named journal, the
Christian Socialist, and was associated with the Fabians in such
good causes at the Bryant and May match girls’ strike of 1887 and
the elections to the London School Board in 1888.48
The final mid-Victorian ingredient was Marxism itself, hardly
known in England before the 1880s, which was thrown into the pot
by H.M.Hyndman, the rich city man who founded the (Social)
Democratic Federation in 1881, and by his friends William Morris
and Marx’s favourite daughter, Eleanor, who broke with Hyndman
to found the Socialist League in 1884.49 Bernard Shaw, too, and a
few other Fabians were influenced by Marx, especially after the
English translation of Capital appeared in 1887. But on the whole
English socialism, as Tawney was to say, ‘owed more to Methodism
than to Marxism’, and it was the third socialist society, the Fabian,
which despite its intellectual elitism was to represent the main line
of development.
Characteristically founded as ‘the Fellowship of the new Life’ by
a group of admirers of Thomas Davidson, a charismatic itinerant
philosopher, including the Quaker idealist Edward Pease, Helen
Taylor of the land reform movement and the SDF, and H.H.
Champion, editor of the SDF’s Justice, the renamed Fabian Society
49
was soon taken over by the ‘little band of prophets’ led by Bernard
Shaw, Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier, and Annie Besant, who
believed in a very un-Marxist evolutionary socialism to be achieved
by persuasion of public opinion and ‘permeation’ of the two major
political parties.50 Part of their technique was to blow their own
collective trumpet, to exaggerate their influence, and to claim any
example, however spontaneous, of municipal or central
government enterprise as a victory for Fabian ‘permeation’. This
was often counterproductive at the time, and has certainly given
them a bad name with recent historians, but they were brilliant
propagandists who undoubtedly did a great deal to question the
contemporary economic system and to popularize discussion of
socialist remedies.51 Their chief drawback, from the point of view
of the rising Labour movement, was their intellectual arrogance,
their scarcely disguised contempt for the working-class leaders they
had to deal with, and their rejection until 1900 and half-hearted
acceptance thereafter of a separate working-class party in favour of
their own permeation of the two parties whose possession of power
they admired and wished to manipulate.52
All three main socialist societies had connections with organized
labour and were prepared to help with speeches, advice, organizing
strikes, demonstrations of the unemployed, and so on. On the face
of it, the SDF, with powerful working-class orators like John Burns
and Tom Mann and more experience of organizing strikes in the
provinces in 1884–86 and demonstrations of unemployed in
London in 1886–87, culminating in ‘Blood Sunday’, a fracas with
the police in Trafalgar Square on 13 November 1887, was in the
best position to influence the trade union movement. Yet its direct
influence on the unions, who repudiated its revolutionary socialism,
was as negligible as its success at the polls. Although SDF and
Fabian members, including Annie Besant, Herbert Burrows,
Stewart Headlam and Bernard Shaw, gave some assistance to the
Bryant and May match girls’ strike of 1888 which is the traditional
starting point of the New Unionism, most strikes in the period were
begun by the workers themselves, even when the leaders were
committed members of the SDF. This was often under provocation
from employers who, themselves under pressure from falling profit
margins, wished to cut wages, extend hours, increase workloads,
and speed up machinery. This was certainly the case with the
gasworkers’ strike of 1889 led by a gas stoker, Will Thorne, and the
50
great dock strike of the same year led by Ben Tillet, also of the
SDF.53 Again and again, the strikes began spontaneously, and only
then did the socialist leaders move in, often in response to appeals
from the strikers. It was the struggle for income in a deflationary
period, and the struggle for control of the workplace between
masters and men, not the agitation of the socialists, which
fomented the New Unionism, and increased the number of
unionists from under 1 million in the mid-1870s to over 1½ million
by 1892, 2 million by 1900, and to 4 million by 1914.54
For the same reason, the poorly paid unskilled and poorly
organized pioneer unions of the New Unionism could be defeated
and crushed out of existence as rapidly as they had sprung up.
Within twelve months of the winning of the ‘dockers’ tanner’
Tillet’s union had been squeezed out of the London docks; and the
provincial dockers’ and seamen’s unions fared no better, as the
defeat of the last great dock strike, at Hull in 1893, demonstrated.
Socialist exhortation was no protection against the employers’
counteroffensive in the 1890s, and most of the unskilled unions
faded into insignificance. The New Unionism survived much more
amongst the traditional skilled unions, the engineers, miners, textile
workers, railwaymen and so on, whose unions had expanded partly
in response to the new enthusiasm for industrial organization but
much more in defence against the employers’ counteroffensive. Its
main legacy within the movement was a running battle for control
of the Trades Union Congress and the larger unions, but this was as
much a battle between the old and the new generations as it was
between old Liberals and new socialists, between the ‘old gang’ of
Broadhurst, Fenwick and company, and Keir Hardie, John Burns,
Havelock Wilson and their allies. In 1894 this led to a pyrrhic
victory by the ‘old gang’, a resolution excluding non-workers and
nonunion officials from membership of the TUC, intended to
exclude the middle-class socialists, which had the effect of expelling
both Hardie and Broadhurst as non-working MPs. The same
Congress excluded the more politically based trades councils (the
‘local TUCs’) and introduced the undemocratic block vote giving
power to the big union officials.55
Keir Hardie and his fellows regarded the TUC as the ineffective
tail of the Liberal Party, and aimed at separate working-class
representation in Parliament. To this end he founded the Scottish
Labour Party in 1888 and, at a meeting in Bradford in 1893
51
attended by delegates from the Fabians, the SDF, the Scottish

Labour Party and some trade unions, the Independent Labour
Party. 56 The TUC and the larger unions stood aloof. What
eventually changed their minds was the employers’ offensive, which
in the later 1890s, in addition to the industrial conflicts which will
be discussed later, also took a litigious turn. A series of court
actions designed to curb the power of unions limited the right of
strikers to picket and, finally, the Lords’ decision in the famous Taff
Vale case of 1900 made the unions liable to the extent of their
whole funds for damages to employers and their customers arising
from industrial disputes.57 Even before this happened it had become
clear that neither of the main political parties was willing to restore
the legislative protection granted by the 1871 and 1875 Acts, and
Congress in 1899 passed the resolution that, in collaboration with
the ILP, the SDF and the Fabians, set up the Labour Representation
Committee (1900), which after the 1906 election became the
Labour Party.58
Thus, out of the class conflict of the later Victorian age and the
intransigence of the employers and both existing major political
parties, emerged the first intentionally class-based party of
capitalist society. Although, with its twenty-nine MPs in 1906 and
forty-two in 1910, it represented only a minute fraction of the
working-class electorate, most of whom continued to vote for the
traditional parties, it was nevertheless the clearest sign of the rise of
a class-based party system. As such, and along with the increasingly
capitalist Conservative Party, it marked the imminent decline of
Liberal England.
Apart from the remaining Liberals themselves, who enjoyed a
remarkable revival of their fortunes in 1906–14 but continued to
agonize over their situation, caught between the devil of a
seductively capitalist party on one side and the deep blue sea of
labour on the other, there were few to weep over that decline. To
the class-based parties it looked more like a belated acceptance at
the political level of the facts of modern economic life and a
clearing of the ground for the real political battle, the struggle for
income between the classes. There was, however, another decline
which was bound to worry everyone concerned: the threatened
decline of England itself. This decline, of England’s, the United
Kingdom’s and the British Empire’s economic place at the head of
the world economy and, indeed, of the military capacity of Britain
52
as a great power, had much to do with the fragmentation of class

society at its zenith. Behind this apprehension of decline lay the fear
of the segregated working class, particularly of its poorer sections,
and of what they might do to undermine the strength and unity of
the nation.
4 THE FEAR OF THE POOR

Far more important to the rich and the middle classes even than the
decline of Liberal England was the threatened decline of Britain
itself as a great power and as a nation. This perception was not yet
based on the fear of revolution—in the last few years before the
Great War a crisis in class society was to raise alarmist fears of a
collapse of industrial relations and the threat of economic
breakdown. It was a much more immediate fear stemming from the
mere existence of a segregated working class and of poverty on a
massive and nationally debilitating scale. The threat was twofold:
an overt, conscious threat to Britain’s competitive position in the
world economy from the insistent demands of labour for a larger
share of the product and for expensive social reforms paid for by
the rich, and a more covert and insidious threat from poverty itself
to the physical, intellectual and moral fitness of the nation. The first
was a threat to profits, to investment, and ultimately to Britain’s
competitiveness in world markets. The second, while reinforcing
the first by undermining the workers’ capacity to produce, was a
more direct threat to the nation’s capacity to defend itself in war,
and therefore to Britain’s very survival. The first accounts both for
the emotional intensity of the employers’ counteroffensive against
the new unionism in the 1890s and 1990s and also for the equally
emotional alienation of the landed and capitalist classes from a
Liberal Party whose cautious social reforms seemed to them to be
the thin end of an enormous wedge. It was the second threat,
however, which was the more powerful and effective, since it could
not yet be met by mere political opposition, and it created
dilemmas for the politicians and the propertied classes which split
them in complex and contradictory ways.
The problem, compounded from a mixture of undoubted
demographic facts, more dubious interpretations of them and still
more dubious theories, notably ‘Social Darwinism’ as interpreted
by Herbert Spencer and his followers,59 seemed simple enough.
53
Industrialism had created an enormous working class isolated in

the smoke and dirt of the manufacturing towns and commerical
cities, unhealthy, badly fed, badly housed, ill educated, often (it was
believed) drunken, hedonistic and feckless, whose teeming children
were likely to grow up still weaker, sicklier and more ignorant than
their parents. As the sympathetic New Liberal Charles Masterman
put it in 1902, ‘the crowded quarters of the working classes’ had
produced ‘a characteristic physical type of town dweller: stunted,
narrow chested, easily wearied, yet voluble, excitable, with little
ballast, stamina or endurance—seeking stimulus in drink, in
betting, in any unaccustomed conflicts at home or abroad.’ By 1909
he was writing about the middle-class ‘suburbans’ gazing darkly
‘upon the huge and smoky area of tumbled tenements which
stretches at [their] feet’ and anticipating ‘the boiling over of the
cauldron.’60
Because the birth rate, which had been declining since 1877, was
much lower amongst the undoubtedly healthier and supposedly
more moral and intelligent classes above them, the poor were not
only deteriorating themselves but disproportionately lowering the
average physical, moral and mental capacity of the nation. In the
1890s Karl Pearson, pioneer of statistics and the eugenic
movement, calculated that the poorest one-fifth to one-quarter of
existing married couples would produce one-half of the next
generation; by 1909 he thought that one-half would be produced
by less than one in eight (12 per cent) of marriages.61 In an
increasingly competitive world in which both commercial and
military success was granted to the strongest and cleverest nations,
Britain, with the largest and longest-established working class most
concentrated in industrial towns and cities, was the most vulnerable
to stagnation and decline. Using the Social Darwinian language of
the day but raising it from the Spencerian internal struggle between
individuals to the external imperialist struggle between nations,
Pearson wrote in 1904:
When the extra-group struggle with inferior races abroad has

run to its end; then, if not sooner, the population question will
force on a severer struggle for existence between civilized
communities at home. Whether this struggle takes the form of
actual warfare, or of still keener competition for trade and
food-supply, that group in which unchecked internal
54
composition has produced a vast proletariat with no limit of

endurance, or with—to use a cant phrase—no ‘stake in the
State’, will be the first to collapse.62
A socialist himself, he believed that this extra-group competition

would force the nations of Europe in the direction of socialism, but
his was only one prognosis amongst many. Almost everyone,
Imperialists and Little Englanders, Conservatives and Liberals,
‘Limps’ (Liberal Imperialists) and Pro-Boers, individualists and
socialists, Social Darwinians and religious fundamentalists,
believed his diagnosis to be true.
Firstly, it rested on some undoubted facts. The birth rate had
declined from a peak of 36.3 per thousand in 1876 to 28.5 in 1901
(and to about 24 on the eve of the First World War), but in the East
End of London in 1901 it was still 35.6 per thousand, nearly double
the 18.6 of the West End. 63 Meanwhile, foreign economic
competition had been increasing, Britain was being overtaken in
steel and other vital production by the United States and Germany,
with some others not far behind. The struggle for markets was
growing, most other industrial countries were shutting out British
exports by means of high tariffs and invading Britain’s traditional
markets even inside the empire. The colonial and military
competition was hotting up with the scramble for Africa, the
partition of China, the rape of the South Pacific and other still
incompletely colonized parts of the world, and Britain’s control of
around one-quarter of the world’s land area and population was
beginning to come under challenge, with French and German
claims to parts of East and Southern Africa, Asia and Melanesia,
and American resentment of European, especially Spanish,
colonialism in the Western hemisphere, all sparking off diplomatic
incidents if not actual wars. At the same time the vast, conscripted
peasant armies of continental Europe compared with the tiny,
volunteer army of mainly unemployed industrial workers mounted
by Britain suggested a very unequal contest if it came to a great war
between the powers.
These fears were confirmed by the statistics of poverty produced
for London and York by Booth and Rowntree, and although, as we
already have seen, their figures did not mean what they were taken
to mean—the percentages in ‘want and distress’ and in ‘primary
poverty’, 8.4 per cent in London and 10 per cent in York, were much
55
lower then the overall figures of general and secondary poverty

(ignoring their careful definitions), 30.5 and 27.8 per cent
respectively—it was these overall figures, rounded to ‘a third of the
population’, which were quoted sensationally in the press and widely
accepted. They were put to the test in the Boer War, when large
numbers of army recruits were found to be unfit for service. The
Surgeon-General Sir William Taylor reported to the War Office on
the ‘growing deterioration of the physique of the working classes’
and General Sir Frederick Maurice in articles in the Contemporary
Review claimed that no less than three in five of those wishing to
enlist were turned down on medical grounds or failed to complete
their first two years of service.64 The actual army returns for 1893–
1902 showed that 34.6 per cent were rejected at the initial inspection
and a further 3 per cent during the first two years of service, but the
army supported Maurice’s figures with the claim that the recruiting
sergeants weeded out before inspection those who were likely to be
rejected. In fact, nearly half of those rejected were so because they fell
below the arbitrary army standards of height, weight, chest
measurement and vision required. These defects may admittedly
have been due in many cases to undernourishment and lack of
exercise and medical treatment, but those accepted responded
wonderfully to good feeding and physical training. Even the
corrected official figures were undoubtedly bad, and the belief spread
that they were getting worse.
Such fears of the poor and their ‘unfortunate propensity’ to
breed faster than was good for them or the nation were not new at
the time of the Boer War. They had a much longer pedigree, going
back at least to the New Poor Law of 1834 and the segregation of
paupers by sex in the union workhouse ‘for their own good’ in an
overstocked and underpaid labour market. They were given a boost
by the Charity Organization Society from 1869 onwards with its
demand for the revival of the principles of 1834 and its
recommendation of ‘labour colonies’ for the adult male
unemployed which would separate them from their families for as
long as possible. Even such kindly and well-meaning social
reformers as Canon Barnett, founder of Toynbee Hall, William
Booth, creator of the Salvation Army, and Alfred Marshall, the neo-
classical economist who wished to see the workers become
‘gentlemen’, all believed that the ‘residuum’ should be removed to
‘labour camps’ far from London.65 Charles Booth recommended
56
‘the entire removal of this very poor class’, one-twelfth of the

population of London, ‘out of the daily struggle for existence’ so as
to free the labour market for the rest of the working class: To the
rich the very poor are a sentimental interest; to the poor they are a
crushing load.’ He did not believe that ‘the hordes of barbarians’
would one day ‘overwhelm modern civilization’; the barbarians
were ‘a handful, a small and decreasing percentage: a disgrace but
not a danger’. But Booth was still a Social Darwinist and a believer
in the ‘invigorating influence’ of ‘cycles of depression’: ‘As to
character, the effect, especially on the wage-earner, is very similar to
that exercised on a population by the recurrence of winter as
compared to the enervation of continued summer.’66
At the other extreme, even Hyndman, the Marxist leader of the
Social Democratic Federation, agreed with the deteriorationists:
Everywhere, no doubt, there is a certain percentage who are

almost beyond hope of being reached at all. Crushed down
into the gutter, physically and mentally, by their social
surroundings, they can but die out, leaving it is hoped no
progeny as a burden on a better state of things.67
Some of the philanthropic Fabians went further and recommended

with Sydney Ball ‘a process of conscious social selection by which
the industrial residuum is naturally sifted and made manageable for
some kind of restorative, disciplinary, or, it may be, “surgical
treatment” ’. The surgery required was spelled out by Bernard
Shaw and H.G.Wells, who recommended ‘sterilization of the
failures’.68 That such remedies for the poor of ‘outcast London’
were based on fear rather than simple charity can be gauged from
the declaration of a self-styled philanthropist, Samuel Smith, in
1885:
I am deeply convinced that the time is approaching when this

seething mass of human misery will shake the social fabric,
unless we grapple more earnestly with it than we have done…
The proletariat may strangle us unless we teach it the same
virtues which have elevated the other classes of society.69
The difference which the economic ‘climacteric’ of the 1890s and

the Boer War made was that they added the fear of industrial
57
decline and military defeat to fears for the social fabric. The army’s
complaints about the ‘progressive physical deterioration’ of the
recruits led to the appointment in 1903 of the Interdepartmental
Committee on Physical Deterioration ‘to make a preliminary
enquiry into the allegations concerning the deterioration of certain
classes of the population’, with a view to setting up a Royal
Commission. This Committee of sane and sceptical bureaucrats,
backed by evidence from the Royal College of Physicians and
Surgeons, forced the Surgeon-General of the Army Medical Service
to admit that there was no evidence of actual ‘physical
degeneration’. They quoted Professor D.J.Cunningham of
Edinburgh University and the British Association for the
Advancement of Science to the effect that, while poor food and bad
housing depressed the physical standard of the individual, it did not
depress the inheritance of the race, and that to restore the classes
below it to the mean standard of national physique, ‘all that is
required is to improve the conditions of living’.70 Dr Eicholz,
Inspector of Schools to the City of London and a medical doctor,
agreed. There was undoubtedly among the slum population ‘a most
serious condition of affairs’, brought on by poor food, bad housing,
overcrowding, atmospheric pollution, unhealthy conditions of
work, drunkenness, and parental apathy. But this was a minority of
the school population of London, which included an upper part,
well-to-do and well cared for, ‘not excelled by any in this country
or in any other’, and a majority ‘consisting of the average industrial
artisan population in which the breadwinners are in regular
employment’. Even the slum population, ‘ill-nourished, poor,
ignorant, badly housed’ as they were, showed little real evidence of
inherited deterioration, or of ‘degeneracy’ which could not be
reversed by removing the causes of their poverty. ‘In fact, all the
evidence points to active, rapid improvement, bodily and mental, in
the worst districts so soon as they are exposed to better
circumstances…’71
As for the intellectual deterioration of the nation by reason of
the differential fertility of ‘the good and bad stocks’, Karl Pearson’s
view in his 1903 Huxley Lecture that ‘we are ceasing as a nation to
breed intelligence as we did fifty to hundred years ago’, and that the
uneducated were outbreeding ‘the intellectual classes’, was
dismissed by Professor Cunningham as
58
a pure assumption… I do not think there is a single solid fact

in support of such a view… [I]t is stocks not classes which
breed men of intellect. These intellectual stocks are found in
all classes, high and low. No class can claim intellect as its
special perquisite.72
His colleague in the anthropological survey proposed by the British

Association, Mr Gray, however, thought that the concentration of
population in large towns and the increase of wealth appeared to
have the effect of reducing the birth rate of the superior classes and
of decreasing the death rate of the inferior classes. And Sir John
Gorst, the Conservative education minister, thought that, because
restraints on marriage disappeared as you reach the most unfit, the
race was chiefly propagated by the least fit part. The Committee
reported that only a full statistical investigation could decide the
issue, which was not forthcoming until the 1911 Fertility of
Marriage Census and not published until after the war.73
The Report on Physical Deterioration was one of the most
influential social documents of the age, and many of its
recommendations, including school meals for poor children,
medical inspection, physical education for both sexes, cookery and
domestic science for girls in schools, tighter control of the milk
supply and food adulteration, social education of mothers by
midwives and health visitors, juvenile courts, and a ban on the sale
of alcohol and tobacco to children, all passed into law before the
war. Others, including better building regulations to prevent slums
and overcrowding, town planning and garden suburbs, green belts
and open spaces, and control of smoke pollution, came in more
slowly. Yet even this Committee of enlightened bureaucrats could
not resist the contemporary desire to put the poor out of sight in
‘labour colonies on the lines of the Salvation Army at Hadleigh’:
It may be necessary, in order to complete the work of clearing

overcrowded slums, for the State, acting in conjunction with
the Local Authority, to take charge of the lives of those who,
from whatever causes, are incapable of independent existence
up to the standard of decency which it imposes.74
Nor were the Social Darwinians, néo-Malthusians and Social

Imperialists convinced by the Committee’s demolition of physical
59
and mental deterioration. When the Fabian Society, concerned

about the growing class antagonism provoked by the neo-
Malthusian scare of ‘race suicide’, initiated its own enquiry into
The Decline of the Birth Rate (1907), it accepted that the
imprudent and the feckless, who were either poor or likely to
become so, were outbreeding the rest. The author, the cautious
Sidney Webb, reported, ‘It looks as if the birth-rate was falling
conspicuously, if not exclusively, not among the wealthy or the
middle class as such, but among the sections of every class in which
there is the most prudence, foresight and self-control.’75 Francis
Gallon, cousin and misinterpreter of Darwin, founded the eugenics
movement to give ‘the more suitable races or strains of blood a
better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable’ (showing
a curious lack of faith in the unaided survival of the fittest). He had
already endowed a Eugenics Laboratory for Pearson in 1904,
became president of the new Eugenics Education Society of 1907
(from whose ‘high-strung, enthusiastic quacks’ Pearson himself
held aloof), and left money to endow a chair of eugenics at the
University of London in 1911, which Pearson held until 1933.76
How widespread the fear of the teeming poor remained down to
the First World War can be seen from the continuing debate in the
press and the flood of books and pamphlets on differential class
fertility as well as from the call for the first census of fertility in
marriage in 1911. David Heron, a student of Pearson’s and a fellow
of the Eugenics Laboratory, in an innovative comparison between
prosperous and impoverished London boroughs in 1906, found a
high correlation between unchecked fertility and overcrowding,
disease, mental illness and high death lates. Dr Alfred Tredgold, a
neurologist and authority on feeble-mindedness, argued in 1911
from his researches that the declining birth rate was ‘practically
confined to the best elements; and that the worst elements, the
insane, the feeble-minded, the diseased, the paupers, the thriftless,
and in fact the whole parasitic class of the nation, are continuing to
propagate with unabated and unrestricted vigour’. Ethel Elderton,
author of an otherwise objective Report on the English Birth-Rate
in 1914, reached the ‘unassailable truth’ that ‘the healthy, careful
and thrifty are having smaller families than the unhealthy, careless
and thriftless, and the selective death rate no longer weeds out the
children of the least fit’. This ‘truth’ was even harnessed to the
hostility to Lloyd George and his progressive taxation of the rich.
60
Dr W.R.Inge, Dean of St Paul’s, London, wrote to The Times in

1912 that ‘the best men and women’ were limiting their families in
response to the growing burden of taxation to support the
irresponsible, unemployed wastrels whose numbers proliferated
irrespective of the economy, while another clergyman wrote to The
Daily Telegraph in 1913 to warn on the same grounds against the
mounting local taxation for their support.77
Those who condemned the poor for reproducing themselves
were anything but unified in their remedies for the problem, which
ranged from the Charity Organization Society’s proposals for the
revival of the workhouse test or consignment to a labour colony all
the way to the Fabian and other socialist schemes for municipal
socialism and nationalization. In between, in pursuit of the new
working-class vote, there was every kind of proposition for social
reform, as mutually incompatible as Chamberlain’s ‘social
imperialist’ tariff reform to provide funds for old age pensions and
other welfare measures and Asquith and Lloyd George’s budgets to
tax the rich for the benefit of the old, the sick and the unemployed.
Fear of the poor was not the only reason for the welfare measures
of the period, as we shall see in Chapter 4, but it was the one which
aroused the most intense emotions.
Meanwhile, before we come to the factors making for the
decline of class society from its zenith, we must look more closely
at each of the major classes, the rich and powerful, the much-
divided middle classes, and the disaggregated working class, in their
increasingly segregated lives.
61
Chapter 3
A SEGREGATED SOCIETY
Class society at its zenith was, as we saw in the last chapter, marked
by a growing segregation in income, status and geographical
location between the classes. What was still more striking was the
segregation within each class. Not only did the rich, the
comfortable, and the poor, in Chiozza Money’s terminology, live
utterly different lives (see Table 2.2 on page 30). Each of these great
divisions of society was further divided by lines of cleavage which
were not merely horizontal, between different layers of wealth and
prestige, but also vertical. There were vertical divisions between the
old rich and the new, the landed aristocracy and the new
millionaires; between the business and the professional middle class
and between the petty bourgeoisie and the new white-collar class,
which at both levels were growing more apart; and in the working
class between the ‘respectable’ and the ‘roughs’, which by no means
corresponded to the difference between the skilled labour
aristocracy and the lesser or unskilled. At the highest level, where
landed and business wealth were drawing closer together, the rich
and the powerful of both kinds were drawing away from those
immediately below them. As Frank Harris, the journalist and rake
who moved in the highest circles of the Marlborough House set as
well as in some of the lowest of the demi-monde, noted, ‘Snobbery
is the religion of England.’1 We shall find that to be true not only
between the major social classes but within them as well.
1 THE RICH AND THE POWERFUL

The rich, the most variegated class in terms of differential wealth,
62
power and status, were, paradoxically, becoming more unified. The

most obvious effect of the ‘Great Depression’, especially in its
agricultural aspect, and of the drift of great landowners and
business millionaires from the Liberal into the Conservative Party,
was to endorse and accelerate a transformation at the top end of
society which would almost certainly have happened anyway as a
result of the rise in the scale of organization and the top levels of
wealth: the emergence of a new plutocracy. The rich and powerful
amongst both the landowners and business men—together with a
few exceptionally successful lawyers, engineers, architects, authors,
journalists, artists and other professional men—raised themselves
above the common herds of their kind and drew together in what
Karl Marx and The Queen magazine labelled the ‘upper ten
thousand’ and what they themselves called ‘society’. This was a
well-informed guess. In 1913–14 there were about 1,500 peers and
baronets and another 1,700 non-hereditary knights. They
overlapped with the 4,843 persons with incomes of £10,000 or
more (including about 300 over £50,000 and seventy-five over
£75,000), and perhaps 2,000 other members of the elite—bishops,
judges, leading barristers, fashionable physicians, editors, writers,
artists, academics, and so on—with the entrée to London ‘society’,
so that there were certainly no more than 10,000 who could
confidently claim to belong to the highest group in English society.2
London ‘society’ and ‘the season’, with its round of social
engagements, balls, soirées, dinner parties, formalized social calls,
and presentations at court, and the parallel annual round of social
life in the counties had existed as national and local institutions for
the landed aristocracy and gentry since at least the seventeenth
century. It had served the enormously important functions, for
them, of uniting the governing elite, providing an arena for the
political struggle for power, influence and patronage at court and in
parliamentary and local politics, and—by no means the least of its
sociological functions—acting as a marriage market for the all-
important pursuit of family alliances which were an integral part of
the game of wealth and power.3 Although there had always been
rising men and women, royal favourites and mistresses, successful
politicians and public servants, generals, judges, bankers and
merchants—provided always that they bought the necessary ticket
of entry, a landed estate—and, of course, heiresses of any variety of
wealth, it was only in the late Victorian age that wealth alone
63
rather than land and titles became the chief claim to membership of
‘society’.4
This was because, for the first time in history, non-landed
incomes and wealth had begun to overtake land alone as the main
source of economic power. Between 1850 and 1880 Schedule D
incomes from business and other profits of over £3,000 a year had
risen from under 2,000 to over 5,000, compared with the 2,500
landowners with rentals (excluding London property) of over
£3,000 in the ‘New Doomsday’ returns of the 1870s; business
incomes of over £10,000 had grown from 338 to 987, compared
with 866 landed rentals at that level; and those of over £50,000
from twenty-six to seventy-seven, compared with 76 such rental
incomes.5 By 1914 landed incomes had scarcely grown at all, so
that most of the 4,843 incomes over £10,000 were from business
sources. The rentals were gross, and net incomes after repairs and
rates would be less in each case, but many landowners, especially
the rich ones, had other sources of income, including London
property, mines, stocks and shares, a few company directorships,
and so on. After 1880 most landlords faced declining agricultural
rents, especially in the south and east, and if they could not increase
their income from other sources they faced falling rentals and even
greater falls in the capital value of their land.6 At the same time,
non-landed wealth burgeoned as never before. This was the age of
the millionaires. Compared with a declining number of millionaire
landlords (capitalizing their landed incomes) from 118 in 1858–79
to thirty-six in 1880–99 and thirty-three in 1900–19, non-landed
millionaires in the probate returns rose from twenty-seven in 1860–
79 to sixty in 1880–99 and 101 in 1900–19.7 Such immense wealth,
overtaking all except the greatest landlords, could not be ignored
by the aristocracy and London and county ‘society’.
As Beatrice Webb, who acted as hostess for her international
railway magnate father, Richard Potter, for two years in the 1880s,
observed of ‘this remarkable amalgam, London Society and
country-house life’:
There were no fixed caste barriers; there seemed to be, in fact,

no recognized types of exclusiveness based on birth and
breeding, on personal riches or on personal charm; there was
no fastidiousness about manners or morals or intellectual gifts.
Like the British Empire, London Society had made itself what
64
it was in a fit of absentmindedness. To foreign observers it

appeared all-embracing in its easy-going tolerance and
superficial good nature… But deep down in the unconscious
herd instinct of the British governing class there was a test of
fitness for membership of this most gigantic of social clubs,
but a test which was seldom recognized by those who applied
it, still less by those to whom it was applied, the possession of
some form of power over people. The most obvious form of
power, and the most easily measurable, was the power of
wealth.
Hence any family of outstanding riches, if its members were not

actually mentally deficient or morally disreputable, could hope to
rise to the top, marry its daughters to Cabinet ministers and
noblemen, and become in time itself ennobled.8 And she remarked
of a dinner party at Sir Julius Wernher’s, the South African
diamond millionaire’s Bath House, ‘There might as well have been
a Goddess of Gold erected for overt worship—the impression of
worship, in thought, feeling, and action, could hardly have been
stronger.9
The aristocrats were equally censorious. George Russell, radical
cousin and critic of the business-oriented Duke of Bedford, wrote in
1907 of the change in ‘society’ since 1880, the more materialism, a
growing love of titles, and more ostentation: ‘the rushing flood of
ill-gotten gold has overflown its banks, and polluted “the crystal
river of unreproved enjoyment”.’10 In 1906 Lady Dorothy Nevill
(1826–1913), daughter of the (Walpole) Earl of Orford, contrasted
the mid-Victorian ‘Society’ of her youth and middle years with the
wealth-obsessed plutocracy of her old age:
In the old days Society was an assemblage of people who,

either by birth, intellect or aptitude, were ladies and gentlemen
in the true sense of the word. For the most part fairly, though
not extravagantly, dowered with the good things of the world,
it had no ulterior object beyond intelligent, cultured and
dignified enjoyment, money-making being left to another class
which, from time to time, supplied a select recruit for this
corps d’élite. Now all this is changed, in fact, society (a word
obsolete in its old sense) is, to use a vulgar expression, ‘on the
make’.11
65
We must not overstate the change, or its rapidity. Even in pre-

industrial England, status followed wealth rather than wealth
status, and the knowledge that anyone who made money by
whatever means could buy an estate and join the landed gentry was
one of the main driving forces of industrial and commercial
enterprise.12 During the Industrial Revolution itself, industrialists
like the Peels, bankers like the Smiths (Lords Carrington) and
adventurers like Hudson the ‘railway king’ had been admitted to
‘society’ and even to royal circles. But down to the 1880s the
purchase of land with at least part of one’s wealth had been the
prerequisite of full admission to London and county ‘society’. From
the 1880s, although some of the nouveaux riches continued to buy
country houses and landed estates, however small, for themselves,
it was now a matter of choice and style, not a social necessity.
Wealth by itself was enough to gain entry, not only to ‘society’ but
to the peerage and even to the royal entourage, as financiers like Sir
Ernest Cassel and chain shopkeepers like Sir Thomas Lipton
became intimates of the Prince of Wales.
One reason for this change was well summed up, if somewhat
exaggerated, by Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance
of Being Ernest (1895):
What between the duties expected of one during one’s

lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death,
land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one
position and prevents one from keeping it up.13
The ‘Great Depression’ in agriculture had indeed reduced money

rents from arable land, and land values even more steeply. Between
the early 1870s and the early 1890s agricultural rents had fallen by
an average of 26 per cent, still more (by 41 per cent) in arable south
and east, somewhat less (by 12 per cent) in the pastoral north and
west. At the same time land values fell from thirty to forty years’
purchase to twenty to twenty-five years’, so that an estate worth
£10,000 a year in the mid-1870s whose rents fell by the average
percentage (26 per cent) could fall in capital value from, say,
£350,000 to £167,000 in twenty years.14 Both rents and capital
values were to rise again from about 1900 but not to the record
levels of 1876. Lord Heneage remarked of his Lincolnshire
neighbours in 1886 that ‘landowners are in such a panic that they
66
are letting at any price and giving 30 and 40 per cent reductions’;
and a Kentish squire wrote to a neighbour about 1895, ‘Land is no
longer an amiable possession unless coupled with a good income
from other sources.’15 Even for the rural gentry this was somewhat
exaggerated: prices were declining too, encouraging customers to
buy more expensive products like meat and dairy produce, and
lessening landlords’ costs, including the cost of repairs and
maintenance of farms and houses. But the depression and the
greater competition between the rich in high living drove a larger
wedge between the gentry and the greater landowners, who
normally had other sources of income, particularly from mines,
urban property, and increasingly, company directorships and
shareholdings, not to mention greater opportunities of marrying
rich heiresses, whether landed or capitalist, British or foreign.
The rich, even when in financial difficulties, certainly had greater
staying power. With such huge gross incomes, there was more room
for retrenchment on great houses and household expenditure, sport,
horses and gamekeepers, entertaining and travel, more hope of
windfalls like the death of jointured dowagers, of legacies and rich
marriages, and more opportunities to sell outlying and unprofitable
lands and invest in better and more exploitable ones or in business
companies at home and abroad. The second Earl of Verulam, already
overspending in the 1870s by about £2,000 a year, found his income
fall from £17,000 to £14,000 a year by 1889. He therefore reduced
his housekeeping expenses in London and St Albans from £2,300 to
about £1,600, paid off his brothers’ and sisters’ portions with an
unexpected legacy of £100,000 in 1884 thereby saving several
thousand pounds a year, reduced the annual consumption of wine,
champagne and brandy by hundreds of bottles, cut down his stable
and game-keeping staff and gave up the hand-rearing of pheasants,
increased his income from London’s New River water company and
from stocks and shares—and still could not live within his income.
His son, the third Earl from 1895, continued his father’s
retrenchment, let the main house and the shooting, and not only
invested in the City but took an active part in business, coming by
1913 to hold directorships in thirteen companies, from brewery,
insurance and housing companies to overseas railroads, gold and tin
mines, and rubber plantations. To round off the family’s financial
success, one of his daughters married a barrister nephew of Sir Ernest
Cassel, the greater financier.16
67
The Duke of Bedford, who complained publicly in A Great

Agricultural Estate (1897) that he was making a heavy annual loss
from his agricultural estates in Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and
Buckinghamshire, did not mention the capital gains he was making
from his huge London estates in Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, St
Pancras, and the East India Docks, or the profits of the sale of the
Cambridgeshire Thorney estate to the tenants at mortgages which
yielded far more than the rent, or (later) of Covent Garden to Sir
Joseph Beecham in 1914 for £2 million!17 The Earl of Shrewsbury
and Talbot, founder of the Talbot motor manufacturing company
and chairman of two other companies, wrote in 1903 to his sister,
‘Everyone has his Role in Life. I have taken up the commercial side
8c I venture to say there is no Landlord or Colliery Proprietor who
knows more about his own business in their respective districts
than I do.’ He had his own commercial outlets in Paris, Brussels,
Turin, Milan and Nice, two factories and four retail houses in
London, and a company in Manchester: ‘and as in London alone I
had sales of Forty Thousand Pounds in July… I am not quite idle.’18
Viscount Peel’s son and heir, descendant of the cotton manufacturer
and the prime minister, married Ella Williamson, daughter and
heiress of ‘Li’l Jimmy Williamson’, Lord Ashton, linoleum maker to
the world and until recently the seventh richest man in the probate
returns (leaving £10.5 million in 1930).19 Earl Peel later became a
director and ultimately chairman of Williamsons of Lancaster. Of
Viscount Churchill, chairman of three railways including the Great
Western, his son said, ‘business was his real interest… My father’s
associates seemed to have found out he had ability, and that as well
as his name he himself was an asset.’ 20 Lord Rayleigh, the
Cambridge Nobel Prize physicist and a considerable landowner in
Essex, was the most ingenious of landed entrepreneurs: after his
Terling estate rents fell from £9,212 in 1882 to £3,091 in 1893, he
opened a chain of shops in London called Lord Rayleigh’s Dairies,
from which by 1913 he was making a profit of £9,000 a year to
add to his now more than £6,000 in rents.21 Others married
heiresses, as Lord Rosebery married Hannah Rothschild (against
the wishes of both families) and the Duke of Marlborough
(unhappily and not permanently) Consuelo Vanderbilt, but so did
new men like Lord Leith of Fyvie whose fortune and peerage
derived from his marriage to a St Louis steel heiress and from
building up the great US Steel Company.22 Others moved into
68
business either by selling land, which became much easier under the
Settled Land Acts of 1882 and 1890, and investing in stocks and
shares, and/or by themselves becoming company directors.
There had long been landed business men, like the coalmining
Marquesses of Londonderry, the third Duke of Buckingham,
chairman of the London and North Western Railway in the 1850s,
or the 7th Duke of Devonshire, principal in the development of
Barrow-in-Furness and its great iron works, but these were unusual
before 1880. By 1896, 167 peers, over a quarter of the peerage,
held directorships, most of them in more than one company, and
some in half a dozen or more; by 1920 there were no less than
232.23 Some of these were the new industrial and commercial peers
who began to be created by Gladstone and Salisbury from the
1880s: of the 200 or so new peers (excluding members of the royal
family) created between 1886 and 1914, seventy, more than a third,
represented new wealth derived from business, another third came
from the professions, mainly law lords and other public servants in
the foreign and colonial service and the armed forces, and only
about a quarter from the traditional sources of the nobility, the old
landed gentry.24 But many of the business peers, like Lord Joicey
and Lord Wimborne (Sir John Guest, the great iron master) were
already considerable landowners, over half the new non-landed
peers bought a landed estate between 1886 and 1914, and most of
the rest bought ‘a country house without surrounding it with
property extensive enough to be called an estate’.25
What was important was not the invasion of ‘society’ by non-
landed wealth or the infiltration of the business world by great
landowners, but the fusion of the two in a new plutocracy of the
rich and powerful. As Lady Dorothy Nevill perceptively observed
in 1906:
When this incursion first began, English Society, shrewd and

far-seeing enough in its way, easily perceived that, unless it
swallowed the new millionaires, the millionaires, keen-witted,
pushing, clever and energetic, would engulf it in their
capacious maw. So everywhere doors were flung open for
Croesus to enter; his faults were overlooked, his virtues (and
many a one really had virtues) lauded; historic houses passed
into his hands, whilst the original possessors besought his
good offices for their sons embarking on City careers. On the
69
whole, the result has not, perhaps, been bad, for everything
must change and pass away, and there is no reason why
‘Society’, a relic of aristocratic days, should have proved an
exception to this rule.
The new conquerors have taught their willing serfs many of
the arts by which they themselves rose to wealth and power,
and I am told that there are now many scions of noble houses
who exhibit nearly as much shrewdness in driving bargains in
the City as a South African millionaire himself; whilst, on the
other hand, the sons of millionaires in several instances do not
conceal their dislike for business, and lead an existence of
leisured and extravagant ease, which would not compare
unfavourably with that of a ‘blood’ of the eighteenth
century.26
The leading historian of English landed society has confirmed this

‘partial but definite transformation of the titled upper class’:
The old nobility remained dominant, in numbers and in social

standing if not always in wealth, but they were fused with a
significant group thrown up by the new industrial England.
Many of the new men, following a familiar path from fortune
through land to title, rose in a single generation at a pace
unprecedented since the sixteenth century. Many others
disregarded the territorial foundations of the aristocratic way
of life, and in their rise demonstrated in even more emphatic
fashion the arrival of a monied nobility. In this way the
peerage offered a reflection of the real distribution of power in
society, and recorded the transition from an aristocracy of
landowners not to a democracy but to an aristocracy of
business and professional talents.27
That the great landowners were not in danger of their possessions

hurrying them to the workhouse (as George Russell said of his
complaining cousin, the Duke of Bedford)28 can be seen from the
wealth which they left at death, which reached a peak in real terms
in the early twentieth century. The probate valuations, adjusted to
include the value of their land, of the great landowners with rentals
of £50,000 or more (according to Bateman in 1883), reached their
highest level in the cohort who died betwen 1900 and 1919. At
70
current prices their median estate rose from £281,500 in 1880–99

to £633,000 in 1920–39. Adjusting for the rise in retail prices, the
median estate rose from £282,300 in 1900–19 to £311,300 in
1900–19 before declining to £274,000 between the wars. This may
be compared with the millionaires, selected solely for their wealth
at death (who overlap with both landowners and company
chairmen) and with the chairmen of the 200 or so largest
companies (too few to be significant before 1900). The millionaires’
median estate rose at current prices from £1,283,000 in 1880–99 to
£1,356,700 in 1900–19 and to £1,385,000 in 1920–29; in real
terms it declined, from £1,563,300 to £1,265,300 and to £856,200
(the decline being in part the statistical effect of inflation embracing
‘poorer’ millionaires in smaller pounds). The great company
chairmen’s median estate declined in current terms from £208,600
in 1900–19 to £186,400; and in real terms from £118,300 to
£79,800 (these figures were affected by the rise of new managers
with less capital of their own, to which we shall return).29 From
these figures it is clear that in wealth as well as prestige the great
landowners reached their zenith in this period and were more than
holding their own with the business men down to the First World
War and beyond.
If there was an all-too-obvious difference between the great
landowners and the new millionaires it was in their social origins
and education. Over 93 per cent of the great landowners came from
landed families, 98 per cent from the upper class of landed, business
and higher professional men. Similarly, over 96 per cent had been
to private schools and most, 81 per cent in 1880–99, 73 per cent in
1900–19, to one school alone, Eton; about 18 per cent in both
cohorts to other Clarendon schools (mostly to Harrow); and 36–40
per cent went on to Oxford, Cambridge or a military academy. Of
the probate millionaires (who included some landowners who left
that much in personalty) 71–75 per cent came from the upper class,
but only 13–18 per cent from landed families, as against over 56
per cent from rich business families; 25–30 per cent were self-made
men in the sense of coming from families below the upper class, as
against only 2 per cent of the large landowners (presumably from
the same group as the self-made millionaires). A surprising number
of millionaires had been educated at public or other private schools,
53–62 per cent, of whom 25 per cent in each cohort had been to
Eton and about 18 per cent to other Clarendon schools; and over
71
26 per cent had been to university, mostly to Oxbridge but a few

(unlike the landowners) to London or the Scottish universities. The
non-landed rich, if the millionaires are a typical sample, were
drawn from a much wider spectrum of society than the great
landowners, but still predominantly from the well-educated upper
class. Despite some historians’ claims that more of them came from
commerce and finance than from industry, there is no sign in the
probate returns that this was the case: if we include food and drink
manufacturers, there were roughly as many industrialists as there
were merchants, bankers and insurance underwriters. 30 The
nouveaux riches, the South African gold and diamond mine
owners, the soap and chemical manufacturers, the newspaper
tycoons, the foreign-born merchant bankers, and so on, though
highly visible, were less numerous than the sons and daughters of
the already wealthy.
The non-landed wealth holders who now claimed their place in
London and county ‘society’ were an extraordinary mixed group.
Some represented traditional industrial and commercial wealth,
like Beatrice Webb’s father, Richard Potter, son of a cotton
merchant and the first Lord Mayor of Manchester—the son
recouped his dwindling inheritance by becoming a timber
merchant, Chairman of the Great Western Railway and President
of the Canadian Pacific Railroad; the Guest family Lords
Wimborne, ironmasters and landowners; Samuel Cunliffe-Lister,
Lord Masham of wool-combing fame; Lord Armstrong of
Cragside, pioneer engineer and armaments king; John Hubbard,
Lord Addington, Russia merchant and Governor of the Bank of
England; the rival brewers Henry Allsop, Lord Hindlip and
Michael Bass, Lord Burton, and the Guinness peers, Lords Ardilaun
and Iveagh; and, to include some of the rare ‘new women’, Lady
Hambledon, widow of W.H.Smith the bookseller, and Margot
Asquith, the sharp-tongued society hostess and daughter of the
Tennant family, chemical manufacturers of Glasgow. Others
represented brand new wealth, some of it not very appealing to the
old: the South African diamond and gold millionaires Beit, Barnato,
Rhodes and Wernher; the new yellow press Lords Northcliffe and
his brother Rothermere, the soap manufacturer Lord Leverhulme,
Baron de Stern the merchant banker, and so on.31
It has been suggested that new wealth from the commercial and
financial worlds, traditionally based on London and ‘cleaner’ and
72
more respectable than manufacturing industry, was socially less

distant and more readily absorbed into ‘society’ than industrial
wealth.32 This view is based on a misunderstanding of the way
English society operated. It was not wealth as such which gave the
entrée but what you did with it. The two richest men of the period,
Charles Morrison, warehouseman and merchant banker, who lived
a bachelor life outside the public gaze and left £10.9 million in
1909, and the richest of all, Sir John Ellerman, shipowner and
financier, ‘as vulgar and ignorant a nouveau-riche as has ever lived’,
who left £36.7 million in 1933, could no doubt have bought their
way into ‘society’ many times over, but preferred private avarice to
public display.33 Sir Julius Wernher, on the other hand, a brash and
vulgar diamond millionaire from South Africa, who left £10 million
in Britain and untold millions abroad, made himself instantly
acceptable by purchasing Bath House, Piccadilly and Luton Hoo,
Bedfordshire ‘to please his “society”-loving wife—a hard,
vainglorious woman, talkative and badly bred’, as Beatrice Webb
noted in her diary, and by entertaining on a lavish scale.34 It can
scarcely be argued that either royalty or ‘society’ drew a distinction
between London Jewish financiers like Lord Rochschild or Sir
Ernest Cassel and Glasgow shopkeepers and chemical
manufacturers like Sir Thomas Lipton, royal yachtsman, or the
Tennant family of Margot Asquith, greatest of the Edwardian
hostesses. If intermarriage is the ultimate test of acceptability, the
Guests, the ironmaster dynasty who married successively daughters
of the Earl of Lindsay and the Duke of Marlborough and a niece of
the Duke of Westminster, were as acceptable as Hannah
Rothschild, wife of Lord Rosebery, Gladstone’s successor as prime
minister. But then nineteen peers between 1884 and 1914 married
actresses, Edward VII took Lillie Langtry to the royal bosom, and
the bankrupt Earl of Rosslyn became an actor himself.35 It was not
money but the power and pleasure it could buy that won ‘society’s’
heart.
This mixture of powermongering and pleasure can be savoured
from Lady Tweedsmuir’s (Mrs John Buchan’s) later recollection of
the ideal country house party before the First World War.
In a gathering of people selected by a really clever hostess,

there might be one or two Cabinet Ministers who welcomed
the opportunity of quiet conversation, or there might be a
73
Viceroy or high official from a far-off corner of the Empire,

anxious to make someone in the government of the day realize
a little more the difficulties of a particular experiment that
Britain had delegated him to carry out. These parties often
included a diplomat home on leave, a painter, and almost
certainly a musician who played to some of the company in
the evenings. Beside these eminent people there was usually a
sprinkling of women famous for their beauty or wit, or both,
who either gave the conversation a sparkling turn, or were
wise enough not to interrupt good talk, and who accordingly
sat statuesque or flowerlike.36
Amongst these witty and beautiful women might be royal

mistresses like Lillie Langtry, daughter of the Dean of Jersey, turned
actress to recoup her fortunes, and Lady Warwick, the socialist
countess who introduced Keir Hardie to Bertie, Prince of Wales.
There was even a place for intellectuals, whether the aristocratic
and self-consciously brilliant ‘Souls’—Arthur Balfour and his
‘particular friend’ Lady Elcho, Lords Curzon, Lyttleton and
Wyndham, Lady Frances Horner, Margot Asquith and her sister
Lady Ribblesdale—or those who had genuinely made their way by
their brains, like Haldane, Milner, and the Webbs, who frequently
dined with Balfour, Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, the Bertrand
Russells, and anyone else they thought they could ‘permeate’ with
Fabian collectivist reforms.37 This was to give the professional class
more influence with the rich and powerful than might have been
expected from their lack of wealth, as we shall see in the next
chapter.
Meanwhile, only those were admitted who possessed either
power, political or economic, or the capacity to entertain, socially,
culturally or intellectually. Even for them there were rules to be
learned and elaborate rituals to perform. As the magazine The
Lady (itself a symptom of the way society was changing so as to
require printed guidance) put it in 1893:
It is a good thing for everyone that there are rules by which

Society, now that it has become so vast and complicated a
machine, is held together and enabled to work so smoothly
and easily…it changes very fast and you must keep up with it
74
or you will stand out and no gentlewoman wants to attract

observation or comment or she is no gentlewoman.38
This was not wholly correct. The well-born, the rich and the
powerful could get away with almost anything, as the careers of the
Marlborough House set around the Prince of Wales (Edward VII)
go to show—though even there a scandalous divorce or a tiff with
the Prince could spell social disaster, as Lord Randolph Churchill
discovered. Lord Selbourne remarked of the ‘smart set’ he stayed
with at a house party at Cragg Hall, Cheshire that, except for one
couple, it was ‘exclusively a party of wives without husbands and
husbands without wives, most characteristic of the set’, which had
‘a decidedly nasty taste to me’.39 But for more ordinary mortals and
those trying to get in, the elaborate rules about whom you had to
call on or invite and when, how to dress for various occasions,
present yourself or your daughter at court, and so on, had to be
learned. Fortunately, there were plenty of well-connected ladies
anxious to earn a little spending money, who (anonymously)
advertised their services as chaperones at as much as £1,000 a year,
to show the nouveaux riches the ropes and arrange suitable
introductions. 40 Without such tutoring even the wealthiest
newcomer would be lost, and might be ‘cut’, ostracized and frozen
out, like the vast majority of man- and womankind.
The same was true of ‘county society’, despite the new
democratic county councils of 1888 and parish councils of 1894.
T.H.S.Escott, one of the most perceptive observers of late Victorian
society, commented in 1893:
Socially, ‘the county’ continues to exist. The wives or
daughters of the county gentlemen who are County JPs set the
fashion in their neighbourhood and are still regarded as
moulded out of clay slightly superior to that of which their
neighbours consist. But as an object of fetish worship, the
County has in most districts disappeared. The tradesman may
be less deferential now that he is a colleague of the squire and
the magistrate.41
As it turned out, however, the tradesman was in fact more
deferential, he habitually elected his landed and moneyed betters to
the councils of most counties, was grateful for a condescending nod
of acknowledgment, and was still not invited to the Hunt Ball.42
75
Counties differed greatly according to their distance from

industry and the great cities, but in a county like Cheshire, near
enough in the railway age for commuting to Liverpool and
Manchester and with its own great chemical, textile and
shipbuilding industries, the same amalgamation of the great
landowners and the new capitalists was going on as in London
‘society’.
Common interests and activities soon encouraged the merger

of the landed and business interests. The few landed families
who had control of the politics of the shire quickly found a
great deal of common ground between themselves and the
new industrialists and merchants. The squires who depended
for their income on small county estates were the chief
members of the governing class to suffer.43
When the thirteen great landowners who controlled Cheshire

politics included the Duke of Westminster, the Marquess of
Cholmondeley, and Lords Crewe, Delamere, Combermere, Egerton
of Tatton, Legh of Lyme, Stanley of Aderley, and Tollemache, and
the rich business men included W.H.Lever, the soap manufacturer,
Sir John Brunner and Sir Alfred Mond (later Lord Melchett),
predecessors of Imperial Chemical Industries and John Laird and
David Maclver, the Birkenhead shipbuilders, amalgamation on the
magistrates’ bench and in county and parliamentary politics was
comparatively straightforward. They and their relatives at first
dominated the new county borough councils of 1888 as they
dominated the bench.44 Below their level changes were going on,
however, notably the rise of great suburbs and a middle-class
hegemony, and eventually caused most of these ‘social leaders’ to
leave the field to elected ‘public persons’. Some, like Lord Delamere
of Vale Royal and Lord Egerton of Tatton, withdrew as far as the
Kenya Highlands, others, like many of the Manchester cotton men
and Liverpool merchants, merely to the south of England. But this
was a trend only incipient before the First World War. Until then
the ‘social leaders’ associated with ‘public persons’ only in politics
and on public occasions. In social life an invisible fence, marked
only by the raised eyebrow or the blank stare of non-recognition,
separated the rich and the powerful from the common herd even
more in the country than in town.45
76
For those inside the fence it was the ‘lordliest life on earth’
(Rudyard Kipling), a life of ‘superb ease’ (Hilaire Belloc) and
‘majestic leisureliness’ (John Galsworthy), of ‘prepared security and
unconscious insolence’ (Henry James), of ‘careful modesty, good
manners, and a kind of aristocratic humbleness, but innate
superiority was the underlying assumption’ (Viscount Churchill).
Lady Ottoline Morrell, sister of the sixth Duke of Portland and
lover of Bertrand Russell, remarked that the ‘unquestioning
arrogance of it all had a power of impressing itself on me as “The
Thing”, that it was “the supreme life” and that all other existences
were simply insignificant and unimportant’. Lord Willoughby de
Broke, leader of ‘the diehards’ who opposed the Parliament Act of
1911 which cut back the powers of the House of Lords, saw the
Edwardian Age for his class as ‘the high-water mark of creature
comforts…. Whatever was happening to the Empire, comfort and
convenience, and everything that makes for luxury, steadily
increased until the outbreak of the War.’46
Yet that very comfort and convenience were at the expense of
others, and the rich were beginning to feel themselves under attack.
Charles Masterman, himself from inside the magic circle, warned in
1909 against the effects on the poor of the ostentation of the rich
in their great houses, grand hotels, steam yachts, and, the most
visible and aggressive toy of all, the rich man’s motor car:
Wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate of

speed, scramble and smash and shriek along all the rural
ways…. You can see evidence of their activity in the dust-
laden hedges of the south country roads, a grey mud colour,
with no evidence of green; in the ruined cottage gardens of the
south country villages.47
Their demand for road improvements seemed to The Economist in

1908 a plea to tax the many for the benefit of the few: ‘Here public
expenditure is calmly suggested in order to please the richest class
of pleasure seekers.’48
The ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 with its supertax and special taxes
on land, together with Lloyd George’s attacks on dukes—‘A fully
equipped Duke’, he said in a speech at Newcastle in October 1909,
‘costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts; and Dukes are just
as great a terror and they last longer’—and on the ‘beerage’, the
77
new industrial and commercial peers symbolized by the ennobled

brewers, supposedly triggered ‘the landowners’ panic’.49 This flight
from the land beginning in 1910 culminated after the First World
War in the greatest permanent transfer of land since the dissolution
of the monasteries. 50 In fact, as Michael Thompson has
demonstrated, the landed class had consciously merged with the
capitalist business world and was ready to treat land like any other
investment, to hang on to it if it paid a profit and to get rid of it
when it did not: ‘The apparently stable Edwardian society had in
fact resolved upon a social revolution, the liquidation of the landed
interest, whose full accomplishment was but deferred by the First
World War.’51 This final act of abnegation by the landlords merely
set the seal on the amalgamation of the rich and the powerful, at
the zenith of class society, into one great capitalist plutocracy, cut
off from the rest of society by the pride and arrogance of wealth
itself.
2 THE RIVEN MIDDLE CLASS

Below the rich and powerful stood the serried ranks of the
comfortable middle classes. By ‘the comfortable’ Chiozza Money
meant the taxpaying families with income between £160 a year (the
income tax threshold in 1905) and £700 a year.52 This would
certainly cover the vast majority of those who, while not being able
to afford the troops of domestic servants demanded by a life in
‘society’, were known in Booth’s and Rowntree’s phrase as ‘the
servant-keeping class’. A few senior civil servants, clergymen,
lawyers, doctors, local manufacturers and wholesalers, high-street
shopkeepers, and so on, might rise to as much as £1,000 a year, but
the average was perhaps a quarter of that figure. At the lower end
the ‘petty bourgeoisie’, most shopkeepers, school teachers, clerks
and white-collar workers, generally earned a good deal less than
£160 a year but still stoutly claimed middle-class status. All who
could kept servants, since in the labour-intensive Victorian middle-
class home, with its still large if diminishing family, coal fires and
kitchen range, heavy laundry work, and overfurnished rooms,
comfort depended on service. Even clerks and commercial
travellers, some of whom earned less than skilled workers, shrank
from reducing their wives to ‘drudgery’; there were twenty-nine
servants per 100 clerks’ and commercial travellers’ households,
78
compared with 103 for merchants and brokers, and only five for
printers, among the best-paid of manual workers.53 Those who
could not afford a live-in servant compensated by not allowing the
wife to go out to work, by hiring non-resident help, by sending out
the laundry, and by ‘keeping up appearances’ as best they could.
(The working class solved the problem by overworking the wife,
and by keeping the older girls off school on washdays, when
mother was sick, or a new baby arrived, and at any other time of
crisis.) Since labour, especially women’s labour, was still cheap and
the middle class could afford to buy more of it than ever before or
since, domestic service was by far the biggest single occupation, and
reached a peak at this time, with about one in six of the total labour
force in 1891, rising to an army of over 2 million servants in
1911.54 This confirmed once again the widening of the gap between
the classes at the zenith of class society.
The middle class as a whole was expanding, as new and more
varied businesses came into existence, the rise in the scale of
business and government required more managers, administrators,
office workers and supervisors, and the professions and would-be
professions increased in size and numbers. According to Bowley,
the non-manual classes increased from 16.7 per cent of income
receivers in 1880 to 26.6 per cent in 1913. Other estimates (on a
different basis, allowing for more earners per family in the manual
class) suggest a growth from 23 per cent of the population in 1867
to 30 per cent in 1900.55 Within this overall expansion there were
important changes: the original capitalist class of ‘employers and
proprietors’ was nearing its peak, at 1,232,000 in 1911 or 6.7 per
cent of the occupied population (nearly a fifth of them women), but
was being supported by a rapidly growing class of managers and
administrators, 3.4 per cent of the occupied population in 1911 (of
whom a fifth were women).56 Some of the professions, notably
clergymen and lawyers, were growing much less fast than the rest
of the middle class and the occupied population, but ‘male
professional occupations and subordinate services’ grew from 2.5
to 2.7 per cent of the male occupied population, while male non-
manual workers were increasing much faster than average, from
21.5 to 25 per cent of the total, in line with the swing from
agriculture and industry to services, as Table 3.1 shows.57
Women’s professional and white-collar occupations were also
growing, especially elementary school teachers, clerks and other
79
office workers, particularly typists and telephonists. By 1911 they

formed only 6 per cent of higher professionals but nearly two-thirds
(62.9 per cent) of the lower professionals and technicians, over one-
fifth (21.4 per cent) of the clerks, and over one-third (35.2 per cent)
of the sales and shop assistants.58 Since comparatively few of them
were heads of households they do not fundamentally affect the
trends in social structure in that unemancipated society. For the
moment it is the enormous range in income and status of the non-
manual employees which is important, not only in the class as a
whole but within each subdivision and occupation.
At the top the middle class merged with the fringes of ‘society’,
which some tried desperately to enter. At the bottom they overlapped
80
in income, though not in lifestyle, with the prosperous working class,

from which many of them had been recruited. They were in some
ways more segregated and exclusive than ‘society’ itself, because they
could not afford to be so tolerant of infiltrators and ‘freeloaders’; or,
rather, its various layers and segments were mutually and plurally
exclusive, with minutely refined gradations of status, expressed not
only in dress, style and location of house, number of servants, and
possession of personal transport in the form of a riding horse,
carriage and pair or pony and trap, and other visible possessions, but
in the intangible rules about who spoke or bowed to, called on, dined
with or intermarried with whom. As Kathleen Chorley, born in 1897,
the daughter of a Manchester electrical engineer and niece of the first
vice-chancellor of Manchester University, observed of the upper
middle-class railway suburb of Alderley Edge:
Snobbery was also geographical; it was almost an axiom for

instance that, socially speaking, no good thing would be likely
to come out of Wilmslow, the neighbouring village nearer
Manchester. On the other hand, Peover, a village deeper in
Cheshire than Alderley Edge, where the manager of the
Manchester branch of the Bank of England lived in semi-
county state, was regarded by most of our ladies with equal
though different scorn as the preserve of people who like to be
‘in with’ the county. The people who lived round about Peover
reciprocated, of course, and suspected a good many of us as
we suspected the Wilmslow families. The complications were
endless. Mother and Mrs Schill [a neighbour, wife of a
Manchester cotton merchant], for instance, both got on
admirably with ‘the lower classes’ because these they could
meet without any fear of being drawn into or needing to draw
them in to their own entourage. It was the people immediately
below and immediately above that caused the trouble. The
‘aboves’ were as troublesome as the ‘belows’ for mother and
Mrs Schill had twisted their sturdy self-respect into a
ridiculous pattern of inverted snobbery…. I recall my mother’s
positive annoyance when Lady Sheffield of Alderley Park
called upon her as a preliminary to an invitation to lunch….
And the social path was always a good deal wider for men
than for women. Wives with the views of mother and Mrs
Schill had to walk a social tight-rope.59
81
She went on to note that the social path was much wider in
Didsbury and Withington, suburbs much nearer Manchester where
many of the residents were younger professional men, teachers at
the university, members of the Manchester bar, doctors—‘a less
local and more intellectual society than ours and consequently
freer’.60 But the professions were distinguished by more than a
difference in geography and income, as we shall see.
Towards the bottom end of the middle class, the demarcations
and snobberies were equally divisive. On the northern, less
fashionable side of Manchester Stella Davies, born in 1895, was the
fourteenth of fifteen children of a mill girl’s illegitimate son, who
rose from warehouse boy to co-op store manager, private shop
owner and, after a bankruptcy, to successful commercial traveller
for a clothing firm. She recalls living in the Edwardian age in Moss
Bank, an end-terrace (i.e. superior) house in Crumpsall with a large
garden, a summer house and a tennis court, and their maid-of-all-
work, Fat Ellen’. A street of working-class houses with lots of
children ran the length of their garden: ‘We were not allowed to
speak to them. Next door lived the son of a wealthy Manchester
merchant, her older brother Frank’s employer, with, amongst other
servants, a nursemaid in cap and apron to look after the three
children: ‘They were not allowed to play with us’. She used to stand
on the flat roof of the summer house looking at both lots of
children and dream of a game of rounders.61
From top to bottom the middle class was riddled with such
divisions and petty snobberies, not only of income and geography
but also of religion—Church of England (in some country villages
the Roman Catholic squire) at the top, the Quakers and Unitarians
next, followed by the Congregationalists and Baptists, the
Methodists, and finally, by a curious inversion, the Anglicans and
the Catholics again at the bottom, mostly in the working class; of
education—boarding schools at the top, followed by private day
schools, and only amongst the lowest white-collar worker the non-
fee paying church or local board school; and of leisure—exclusive
West End or provincial city clubs (men only) and country tennis
and golf clubs at the top, Sunday school teaching, men’s Christian
societies and mother’s unions at the bottom. Every activity, from
visiting the poor in Ancoats, Manchester like Kathleen Chorley’s
mother, with sympathy, advice or material help, or sitting in the
rented pews of the church or chapel, to going to the Hallé Concerts
82
of Miss Horniman’s Repertory Theatre and avoiding the music hall

and the pub, or going on holiday to Southport or Bournemouth
rather than Blackpool or Skegness, was carefully graded and
segregated. One spent one’s time always in the company of one’s
equals, except of course when directing the labours of servants or
workers or patronizing the city slum dwellers or the village poor.
Segregation at every level and in every occupation and pastime was
the hallmark of the middle class.
Yet the middle class was divided along both dimensions,
vertically as well as horizontally. Running through the many layers
was an important vertical barrier, not always conscious or
watertight, but in some ways more significant than the division
between upper and lower middle class: the division between the
business and the professional classes. Marx was groping for this
distinction when he recognized a middle class beneath the
capitalists, without noticing that it undermined his theory that the
intermediate classes would be crushed between ‘the upper and
nether millstones’ of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat:
What he [Ricardo] forgot to emphasize is the constantly

growing number of the middle classes, those who stand
between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and
the landlord on the other. The middle classes…are a burden
weighing heavily on the working base and increase the social
security and power of the upper ten thousand.62
Matthew Arnold clearly recognized it, and brought it to the

attention of the Taunton Commission on middle-class schools in
1869:
So we have among us the spectacle of a middle class cut in

two, in a way unexampled anywhere else; of a professional
class brought up on the first plane, with fine and governing
qualities, but without the idea of science; while that immense
business class which is becoming so important a power in all
countries, on which the future so much depends and which in
the leading schools is, in England, brought up on the second
plane, cut off from the aristocracy and the professions, and
without governing qualities.63
83
This sense on the part of the professional middle class of their

superiority to the business class and their close alliance with the
aristocracy and gentry stemmed, for those at the upper end, from
their common education at the public boarding and endowed
grammar schools and, to a less extent, at Oxford and Cambridge.
There the idea of moral and intellectual superiority was being
linked to a new concept of the gentleman, no longer the aristocratic
code of militaristic honour to be defended by duelling but the
notion of a ‘gentle man’, educated, courteous, well-spoken, and
considerate of others.64 As a guide to professional careers had
expressed it in 1857:
The importance of the professions and the professional classes

can hardly be overrated, they form the head of the great
English middle class, maintain its tone of independence, keep
up to the mark its standard of morality, and direct its
intelligence.65
And as Anthony Trollope put it more cynically in The Bartrams

(1867), a profession was ‘a calling by which a gentleman, not born
to the inheritance of a gentleman’s allowance of good things, might
ingeniously obtain the same by some exercise of his abilities’.66 (He
might also have added of his own second profession of novelist that
from the experience of his mother it was one of the few callings by
which a lady left with a family without means could respectably
obtain the same benefits.) The sense of superiority to mere tradesmen
and business men was echoed at the local level, especially in the
smaller towns where big business was less dominant. In Guildford
before the First World War, according to the son of a small trader,
professional men were at the top, monopolizing the leading golf club,
high street traders one stage lower, occupying leading positions in the
chapels and local politics and meeting in the Tradesmen’s Club; both
excluded the smaller traders and clerks, who took to cycling and
other private leisure pursuits.67 In Woodstock, according to another:
the professional people always held themselves a little aloof—

from the trades people. And especially trades people that were
uneducated…but—if a person was well-educated and a
tradesperson of course—you had the entrée into what we call
the professional people.68
84
The ancient professions of the clergy, law and medicine could still
obtain a gentleman’s allowance of good things, though with the
decline of ‘Old Corruption’ since the 1832 Reform Act the
enormous fortunes and estates made by some bishops, judges and a
few physicians serving royalty and the nobility had declined or
disappeared. There were no equal successors of Lord Eldon, the
Lord Chancellor, who left £707,000 plus large landed estates in
1838, or of Lord Arden, brother of prime minister Spencer Percival
and a judge of the Court of Admiralty, who left £200,000 in
1827.69 There were still successful individuals in, or perhaps from,
the professions and the public service, however. The richest of all
the millionaires, the shipowner and financier Sir John Ellerman,
began as an accountant; W.T.Lewis, Lord Merthyr, the half-
millionaire coal owner, began as estate agent to the Marquess of
Bute; Lord Leith of Fyvie, the American steel millionaire, was a
British naval officer who on a Royal Navy visit to San Francisco
met and married the daughter of a St Louis industrialist.70 More
directly, one-fifth of the new peers of 1886–1914 came from the
professions, mostly law lords like Lord Cairns, ennobled generals
like Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, or journalists like John
Morley and Lord Northcliffe. 71 But these were individual
exceptions, and the professions were now rising in a different way.
Firstly, as we have seen, they were growing with the accelerating
expansion of service occupations during the Victorian Age. By
1911, if we add the lesser professionals and technicians to the
higher ones, the professions were 4.1 per cent of the occupied
population, not much short of the 4.6 per cent who were
‘employers’ in the census of industrial status, and if we add
‘managers and administrators’ the figure rises to 7.5 per cent, larger
than the category of ‘employers and proprietors’ (6.7 per cent).72
More significant was the growing collective organization of the
professions. To the seven qualifying associations of 1800—four
Inns of Court for barristers, two Royal Colleges and the Society of
Apothecaries for medical doctors—the first eighty years of the
nineteenth century had added only twenty more, for solicitors,
architects, builders (not successful as a profession), pharmacists,
veterinary surgeons, actuaries, surveyors, chemists, librarians,
bankers (another unsuccessful attempt), accountants, and eight
types of engineer. From 1880 down to the First World War there
appeared no less than thirty-nine, from chartered accountants,
85
auctioneers and estate agents, company secretaries and hospital

administrators to marine, mining, water, sanitary, heating and
ventilating, and locomotive design engineers, insurance brokers,
sales managers, and town planners. To these we should add the
non-qualifying associations, such as the National Union of
Teachers, the Association of Headmasters, and the Association of
Teachers in Technical Institutions, the National Association of
Local Government Officers, the Civil Service Clerical Association,
and the Institute of Directors, which often combined professional
aspirations with something of the character of trade unions or
employers’ associations. 73 Since most of the non-qualifying
associations represented salaried, employed professions, while the
qualified still for the most part aspired to independent or self-
employed status, this illustrates a critical division within the
professional class which was to become increasingly important, and
to which we shall return in Chapter 9.
There were also the anarchic or individualistic professions which
either defied organization altogether or organized themselves for
intellectual and cultural rather than professional purposes. These
included what some historians and sociologists have called ‘the
intellectual class’ which they see as coming into existence, along
with the word ‘intellectual’ as a noun, from the 1880s.74 It
embraced three overlapping groups: what had formerly been called
‘men of letters’, ‘men of science’, and university teachers, to which
we might add a fourth category, practitioners of the fine and
performing arts, principally painters and sculptors, and musicians
and actors. Some of these children of the free play of mind and the
feelings began to seek professional ends and status at this period.
The Society of Authors was founded in 1883 to defend the writer’s
property in his copyright.75 The natural scientists had begun to
organize as early as 1831 in the British Association for the
Advancement of Science and the Royal Society began to restrict
membership to active men of science in 1847, though the true
professionalization of science was to take place mainly in the late
Victorian age with the foundation of such bodies as the Physical
Society in 1876 and the Institute of Chemistry in 1877 and the
establishment (later than in London and the newer universities) of
laboratories at Oxford (the Clarendon, 1872) and Cambridge (the
Cavendish, 1874).76
The invasion of the ancient universities by natural science was
86
an aspect of the professionalization of university teaching, which

had been pioneered in the Scottish universities in the eighteenth
century and in London, Durham and the new civic universities from
their beginnings in the early nineteenth, but did not much affect
Oxford and Cambridge until their reform and secularization by the
Royal Commissions of the 1850s and 1870s. As a result the average
Oxford and Cambridge don was transformed during the late
Victorian age from a celibate clergyman awaiting a college living in
the church on which he could marry to a career-oriented, and
usually married, teacher and scholar or scientist.77 One of the
leading reformers, Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College,
Oxford wrote, somewhat optimistically, in 1875:
A university is the organ of the intellectual life of the nation;

it is a school of learning, the nursery of the liberal arts, the
academy of the sciences, the home of letters, the retreat of the
studious and the contemplative.78
It was also to become in the late Victorian and Edwardian age a

source of new ideas on how society should be organized, preserved
and reformed, and of young men eager to put those ideas into
practice. Through them, as we shall see in the next chapter, the
universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, were to become
among the main articulators of the social ideal of the professional
class.
Something of the social origins and economic success of a
superior sample of higher professional men can be gained from the
study of elites cited above in connection with the great landowners,
millionaires and company chairmen.79 The professional sample
consisted not of the most financially successful but of all those who
had reached the head of their profession either by being elected
president of their association or institute (the Institute of Chartered
Accountants, the Royal College of Physicians and of Surgeons, the
Institutions of Civil and of Mechanical Engineers, the Law Society,
and the Royal Institute of British Architects) or had become senior
judges, vice-chancellors of universities, Clarendon school
headmasters, national newspaper editors, or permanent heads of
Civil Service departments. Of the professional presidents the
cohorts in office in 1880–99 and 1900–19 were drawn
overwhelmingly from the middle and upper classes, and more from
87
the middle (about 18 per cent of the population) than from the
upper class (about 3 per cent of the population): 64.6 per cent and
56.3 per cent respectively from the middle and 32.9 per cent and
42.5 per cent from the upper class. Most, as one would expect,
came from professional families (57.0 per cent and 66.3 per cent),
but slightly more from the lower than from the higher professions.
Only one in each cohort, a civil engineer and an architect, came
from the manual working class. This finding is confirmed by their
education, which was predominantly at private schools, including
at that time grammar schools (76.5 and 65.0 per cent); only a
handful (14.6 and 16.7 per cent) came from elementary schools.
The majority had not been to university, reflecting the
apprenticeship training of most professions before the twentieth
century, and of those who had (44.9 and 34.5 per cent), only a
handful had been to Oxford or Cambridge, most to London and a
few others to Scottish or Irish universities. Their fathers were
mostly not rich (though a very few were, leaving estates up to a
maximum of £180,000 and £220,100 in successive cohorts), and
the median estates in the two cohorts were no more than £5,000
and £9,000, while a quarter left less than £900 and £2,700
respectively. They themselves were upwardly mobile and in
financial terms modestly successful, their own median estates for
the two cohorts being £47,800 and £32,000. One president of the
civil engineers was a millionaire, but he was Lord Armstrong of
Cragside, whose fortune came from his engineering and armament
works, and one of the mechanicals was Sir Lowthian Bell the great
ironmaster, who left £796,000 in 1904, each of them elected to do
their Institutions honour. The average successful self-employed
professional man might make a modest fortune, but scarcely
enough to join the rich and powerful.
Senior judges, drawn exclusively from successful barristers, the
classic ‘jackpot’ profession in which a few struck it rich and most
did not, were in a different category. A half or more in the two
successive cohorts (50 and 54.6 per cent) came from the upper
class, a few were sons of landowners, and more came from the
higher professions (especially the law—one-sixth and one-fifth
respectively) than from business families. None was from the
manual working class, and only a handful (five out of ninety in all)
were the sons of white-collar workers (mostly law clerks). They
were mostly educated at public or other private schools (76.5 and
88
75 per cent), many of them at Eton, Harrow or another of the

Clarendon schools, and all had been to university (mostly Oxford
or Cambridge) and (as was essential for the bar) to one of the Inns
of Court. Their fathers were somewhat wealthier than those of the
professional presidents, leaving median estates of £16,000 and
£11,400, and they themselves were more successful accumulators,
leaving median estates in the two cohorts of £65,500 and £66,600.
But then the senior judges were almost ex officio, like the bishops,
members of ‘society’, and only passed through the middle class on
their way up.
Vice-chancellors were at the head of the newly developing
profession of university teaching, and before the First World War
were mainly recruited from academics themselves. All the Oxbridge
vice-chancellors, who were heads of colleges in rotation, were
Oxbridge graduates, most had been to Clarendon or other private
schools, most came from the upper and middle classes (83.3 and
100 per cent in the two cohorts), and only two had come from the
non-manual and one from the manual working class. The more
permanent vice-chancellors of the newer universities were similar in
origin, mostly educated at public and private schools and at
Oxford, Cambridge or London Universities, though rather more
came from the upper than from the middle class (50.5 and 51.7 per
cent as against 36.4 and 41.4 per cent), and only three came from
the non-manual and none from the manual working class. Taken
together, most vice-chancellors were the sons of modestly endowed
fathers who left median estates of £6,000 and £8,000, and
modestly increased the family fortunes themselves, leaving median
estates of £12,700 and £15,200. One, however, was a millionaire,
but he was Sir Julius Goldsmid the financier, honorific vice-
chancellor of London University (which also had an executive
Principal) in 1895–96, whose father left £800,000 and he himself
£1,021,000.
The Clarendon school headmasters, at the head of the teaching
profession, were very similar in origin to the Oxbridge vice-
chancellors—not surprisingly, since at this time they were charged
with the education of exactly the same narrow social group. They
were overwhelmingly educated at public schools, though not
necessarily at Clarendon schools, and all were Oxbridge graduates.
They were all from the upper and middle classes, again more from
the middle (70.6 and 76.2 per cent) than from the upper (29.4 and
89
23.8 per cent), though a few, like the son of Lord Lyttleton, the Rev.
Edward Lyttleton, Master of Eton in 1905–16, were of rich and
noble birth. Most came from backgrounds of modest wealth, their
fathers’ median estates being £11,000 and £8,200, and most of
those in the lower half left little or nothing; and they themselves left
moderate fortunes, with median estates of £27,300 and £9,300.
National newspaper and periodical editors were leaders of one
of the few professions in which a poor boy could rise from the
bottom, like J.L.Garvin of the Observer, son of an Irish labourer, or
Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, office boy who rose to the
editor’s and proprietor’s chairs, but this too was rare before the
First World War. Only four out of eighty-three editors came from
the non-manual and seven from the manual working class. Most
came from the upper and middle classes, though once again more
from the middle class (55.8 and 55.1 per cent as against 32.4 and
28.6 per cent), nearly two-thirds (66.5 and 65.9 per cent) had been
to public or other private schools and a sizeable group (50 and 34.1
per cent) to Clarendon schools, and most (64.8 and 51.7 per cent)
had been to university, mostly Oxbridge. Their fathers were not
poor, leaving median estates of £10,000 and £6,000, and nor were
they themselves, leaving median estates of £23,000 and £9,300. A
few were rich, like the only woman editor, Rachel Beer of The
Sunday Times, wife of the proprietor, or Henry Labouchere, radical
MP and editor of Truth, who left £550,000 in 1912, but then his
mother was a Baring, of the banking family.80 Newspaper editors as
well as proprietors were influential figures in that society, much
courted by politicians and ‘society’ hostesses, but since they were
mostly neither rich nor, in the direct sense, powerful they can be
properly placed at the top of the professional middle class.
The final profession for which we have figures is the Civil
Service, represented here by the permanent heads of departments.
In this period they were only just beginning to be affected by the
competitive entrance examination introduced in 1870, whose
effect, paradoxically, was to increase the predominance of the
products of the major public schools and Oxbridge, who replaced
the much more varied and haphazard beneficiaries of the old
patronage system. The great majority had been to public or other
private schools (87 and 80 per cent), a large if declining proportion
of these to Eton or Harrow (47.8 and 20 per cent), and the share of
Oxbridge graduates was increasing (from 47.5 to 57.2 per cent). At
90
the same time, the new recruitment system gave more chance to the
bright, well-educated sons of the middle class, whose share of the
top jobs in executive government (rising from 26.3 to 48 per cent)
caught up with that of the upper class, whose share declined
sharply (from 71.9 to 48 per cent). Out of 132 top civil servants
only three came from the non-manual and one from the manual
working class. Overall, their fathers’ wealth was on a par with most
other professions, with median estates of £16,300 and £10,400,
and they themselves were modestly affluent, leaving median estates
of £25,900 and £14,900.
There are hints here, however, of the beginnings of a
considerable change in the character of the higher Civil Service
which will become clearer later, from a predominantly upper-class,
major public school-educated elite to a predominantly middle-class,
minor public and grammar school-educated cadre recruited
typically from the sons of small business men and the lesser
professions. In other words, scholarship boys (and later a very few
girls) from modest backgrounds were beginning to make their way
in, which accounts for the paradoxically increasing predominance
of Oxford and Cambridge graduates. Top civil servants, though
they earned only from £1,000 to £1,200 a year, mixed socially with
the rich perhaps more readily then than today, and the occasional
one leapt out of his sphere into imperial government and a peerage.
Such a one was Frederick Milner, chairman of the Board of Inland
Revenue in 1892–97, who by way of colonial government in South
Africa rose to a viscountcy in 1901 and, later, membership of Lloyd
George’s War Cabinet.
Below the level of the elite of each profession, wealth and
lifestyle were less exalted. According to Charles Booth in 1902,
who was as interested in the servant-keeping class as in the poor,
some London clergy (leaving aside the bishops and others amongst
the rich), including a few dissenting ministers, could earn up to
£1,500 a year, though curates might earn as little as £90, and a
Salvation Army officer, if single, a meagre 16s.–18s. a week, and
27s. plus 1s. per child for a married couple. Barristers’ earnings
were notoriously chancy and could range from nothing for a
briefless beginner to many thousands a year for a great QC like
H.H.Asquith or F.E.Smith (Lord Birkenhead), while their clerks
could earn from £200 to £400 and occasionally £800–£1,000.
Booth could not give a figure for successful medical practitioners,
91
but he found qualified resident assistants earning £60–£100 a year

and non-residents £80–£150; while staff nurses earned pittances of
£22–£40 a year, and even a head matron only from £70 to £150,
rising to £200–£250 in a very large and rich hospital. Fleet Street
journalists could earn £200–£500 a year as reporters, £400–£600
as sub-editors, and £1,000–£2,000 as editors. Local government
officers in a London parish vestry (replaced by the municipal
borough by the London Government Act, 1899), could earn from
£110 a year for a third office clerk, or £130 a year, with uniform,
for a sanitary inspector, to £450 a year for the Vestry Clerk or the
Medical Officer of Health. Civil servants in the upper division
could rise through three scales from £200–£600 to £1,000–£1,200
a year, in the second division through four scales from £70–£100 to
£250–£350 a year. Below these there were assistant clerks on £80–
£150 a year, and boy clerks on 14s. a week, rising by 1s. a week
each year.81
How to live on such incomes—and higher ones, from £1,000 to
£10,000 a year—the Cornhill Magazine set out to show in a series
of articles in 1901.82 Amongst those on £150–£200 a year would be
found, G.S.Layard thought, bank clerks, managing clerks to
solicitors, teachers in board schools, younger journalists on the best
papers and senior ones on local papers, second division clerks in the
Colonial, Home and India Offices, many local government officers,
police inspectors, organists, curates, and certain skilled mechanics.
He advised those who worked in the City or Westminster not to live
in cramped accommodation nearby, but to find an inexpensive
house in one of the nearer suburbs, Clapham, Forest Gate,
Wandsworth, Peckham or Finsbury Park. This would be cheaper,
far more healthy, and ‘his neighbours will be of his own class, a
matter of chiefest importance to his wife and children, the greater
part of whose lives will be spent in these surroundings.’ After
paying the rent at 10s. a week, rates and taxes, rail fares, and ‘the
very considerable expenditure on dress’—since ‘the bank clerk who
looks needy, or the solicitor’s clerk who is out-at-elbows, will find
that he has little chance of retaining his position’—there was
nothing for hiring domestic help, the wife had to make most of her
own and the two children’s clothes, to buy the food carefully and
even get her husband to buy cheap New Zealand lamb or a parcel
of tea in the City. Although there was money for a summer holiday,
birthday and Christmas presents, newspapers, books and tobacco,
92
there was none for alcohol or for the children’s education, who
were wisely sent to the public elementary school, which was
‘incomparably better than any private teaching within their means’.
On £800 a year—‘to the toiling clerk it seems unbounded
wealth, to the woman of fashion a poor thing in pin money’—
according to G.Colmore in the next issue, ‘the professional man, or
the younger son with a narrow berth in the Civil Service’ could
make ends meet ‘with comfortable success or inconvenient
uncertainty’. On this a house could be taken at £130 a year in a
healthy if not very fashionable street, two servants could be kept, a
cook at £20 and a house parlourmaid at £18, though the wife must
be willing to supervise them. £4 a week could be spent on food and
washing, £30 a year on alcohol and tobacco, £70 on the husband’s
club and pocket expenses, and £40 on his clothes, £20 on the wife’s
pocket money and £50 on her clothes, £50 on holidays and travel,
and £25 on entertaining, amusements and charities. ‘Playgoing
must be strictly limited’ though ‘real lovers of music can indulge
their taste at little cost,’ but ‘a pretty home, comfortably kept, and
an easy mind…are better worth having than a large acquaintance,
much entertaining, and many amusements,’ since ‘for most people
who live on eight hundred a year these things are incompatible.’ As
an afterthought, ‘the addition of a child, or even two children,
would necessitate but little alteration in the figures.’
Even on £1,800 a year, according to Mrs Earle, economy was
still necessary, and ‘the young couple’, apparently childless, could
afford three or four servants—if the fourth were a good lady’s maid
who would partly pay for herself by the saving of dressmaker’s
bills—but personal transport (a pony carriage and groom) could be
budgeted for only in the country, not in London, where cabs, buses
or the Underground would be used.
On £10,000 a year (which takes us even further beyond the ken
of the middle class), according to Lady Agnew, a good London
house on the south side of Eaton Square (not ‘an enchanting house
in Grosvenor Square’) could be afforded together with a medium-
sized ‘mansion’ in the country, ‘ten or twelve servants and a really
good cook’, and the couple could even afford three children, two
boys to be sent to prep school and Eton at a cost of £3,600 over ten
years and a girl who will cost £100 a year for twenty, surprisingly
more expensive than her brothers. But what with moving the
household twice yearly, £900 for clothes and, ‘the final twist of the
93
torture screw’, £500 in rates and taxes, the poor rich family would
be lucky to have a margin of £1,000 a year left over.
If the rich on £1,800 or £10,000 a year felt thus squeezed, how
much more did the middle classes below them. There were constant
complaints, particularly in the ‘Great Depression’, from the middle
classes about falling profits, rising house rents, the high wages of
servants, the cost of education, and so on. Yet for half the period
prices were falling and those whose incomes did not fall so fast,
which meant the majority, especially those on salaries which rarely
if ever declined, were enjoying a rising standard of living. There
were several reasons for this paradox. Many small business men
and shopkeepers were not only acutely aware of the falling prices
and their effect on their cash flow and profits; they were also
increasingly afraid of the competition of the new large-scale firms
which threatened them with bankruptcy. Shopkeepers in particular
faced the competition of the large new department stores like
Selfridges, Whiteleys, Maples and the Army & Navy Stores, and of
the new chain stores, such as Liptons, the Maypole, Eastmans, and
the ABC. What alarmed the smaller shopkeeper most of all was the
rapid growth of the retail co-operative movement, which became
the scapegoat for the petty bourgeoisie who were ideologically
committed to private enterprise and resentful of a working-class
movement which threatened to undermine their existence.83 The
Grocer campaigned from the 1870s to the early 1900s for a boycott
of the wholesalers who supplied the co-op stores, but without
success.84 Their problems stemmed from the rise in the scale of
organization in the shape of the multiples, with their economies of
scale, of which the co-op stores and the Co-operative Wholesale
Society, with its factories, ships and tea plantations, were only a
symptom.
More important for them and the professional and salaried
workers was the rising standard of living itself which increased the
competition for status in every field, in dress, housing and
furniture, education, leisure and entertainment, and the like. This in
turn raised the costs, against the trend of prices, of keeping up
appearances, of renting a good house in a better-class suburb, of
educating children privately, of going to the theatre or concerts, of
holiday-making, and of every effort to keep up with the ever-
receding Joneses. Education became increasingly desirable and
expensive as a means of fitting one’s children for those expanding
94
middle-class occupations, in professional and office work of all

kinds, which required little capital but for that very reason
attracted competition from bright boys and girls of the working
class, now beginning to benefit from the board schools of the
1870s, the higher grade and secondary schools of the 1880s and
1890s, and the secondary schools and the scholarship ladder of the
1900s. The competition for status for oneself and even more for
one’s children, rather than any decline in material resources, was
the major reason for the decline in the middle-class birthrate which
began in the late 1870s, though its remoter origins can be traced to
the decline in family size which began in the 1850s.85 The new
outlook can clearly be seen in such popular journalism as the Corn
hill family budgets, which expected ‘middle-class’ couples at any
level of income, from £160 right up to £10,000 a year, not to be
able to ‘afford’ more than two or three children (though they
scrupulously avoided saying how this limit was to be achieved).86
The final reason for the paradox of middle-class discontent in
the midst of rising standards of comfort was the all-pervading sense
of insecurity which was the inevitable concomitant of class society.
While security based on a cushion of capital or a permanent job
was the main distinction that separated them from the gross
insecurity of the manual worker, most middle-class families knew
how precarious that security was, and many lived in fear of
bankruptcy or loss of a salaried position, of sickness of either
partner or the children, or of the death of the breadwinner, any of
which could plunge the family into debt or actual poverty. No
amount of saving or insurance—and the family budgets from the
period all show that middle-class families saved little and were
underinsured—could prevent unexpected disaster, and there were
endless stories of bankrupt, unemployed or widowed families
falling into desperate poverty. When her husband died, Mrs Levy,
the widow of a speculative builder and surveyor in Manchester
before the First World War, had to give up her home, withdraw her
three sons from a Margate boarding school, and open a small
grocer’s shop, which failed, and she was reduced to factory work.87
For the middle-class man and still more his wife, once their main
income failed, were unskilled, unfitted even for the physical work
which labourers or laundry women performed, and were almost
unemployable.
How much more true was this of the ‘marginal men’ of the lower
95
middle class, where insecurity was endemic. The lesser clerks,

corner shopkeepers, elementary school teachers and shop
assistants, many of them newly emerged from the working class,
often lived in or on the margins of working-class areas and on
similar incomes. They might by their dress, speech and housing be
‘a cut above’ the manual workers, but only they knew how
precarious their position was. One of the main reasons for low-paid
clerks and other white-collar workers ‘keeping themselves to
themselves’ was that they did not want their friends and neighbours
to know how modestly they had to live. The wife of a Manchester
clerk told her son:
No use being poor and seeming poor, always put on a good

face outside…. She would say, I must have the windows right
because more pass by than come in. We had to dress to the
public…. Always give people a good impression.
The son of a Potteries insurance agent came from the social stratum
of those who ‘would never go out without they was dressed up’; the
local working people mocked such people with the phrase ‘a fur
coat but no breakfast’.88
For the same reasons, except for those who threw themselves
enthusiastically into voluntary work for the Sunday School, the
Salvation Army, the Tory Party or even the Independent Labour
Party, they were frustrated and lonely.89 A Hammersmith vicar told
Charles Booth about the new clerks invading his parish:
The newcomers are quite quiet, respectable and inoffensive,

but on warm evenings they will sit at their open windows in
their shirt-sleeves, drinking beer out of a pot, and though they
do it quite quietly it is not what I am accustomed to.90
That expresses perfectly the precarious position of the lower middle

class; too genteel to go to the pub, not genteel enough to pass
muster as ‘proper’ middle class.
The gulfs which separated the lower middle class from those
above and below were not the only demarcations troubling them.
The vertical cleavage between the business and professional men
above them extended to them too. The thousands of small
‘employers and proprietors’—workshop owners, small wholesalers
96
and warehousemen, jobbing builders, shopkeepers, and garret

masters in the sweated trades—were more than counterbalanced by
the salaried or wage-earning clerks and foremen, salesmen and
shop assistants, lower professionals such as teachers and nurses,
and technicians such as draughtsmen and laboratory assistants.91
By 1911, when the census first took into account industrial status,
there were 2,618,000 white-collar workers, 14.3 per cent of the
occupied population. Increasing numbers of these were women:
29.8 per cent of all white-collar workers (including management
and higher professions), 21.4 per cent of the clerks, 35.2 per cent of
the salesmen and shop assistants, and no less than 62.9 per cent of
the lower professionals and technicians, who included school
teachers and nurses.92 Women school teachers had increased from
144,393 (out of 195,021) in 1891 to 183,298 (out of 251,968) in
1911, while women clerks had increased from 18,947 (out of
389,380) to 124,843 (out of 687,998).93 This was a corollary of the
‘service revolution’,94 which at the lower levels provided more new
jobs for women than for men.
Amongst the men even more than the women it produced a
distinct difference of outlook between them and the traditional,
small capitalist petty bourgeoisie. If the small business man was
concerned with security from competition and bankruptcy, the
white-collar worker feared the loss of a regular fixed income.
Richard Church, who was forced to give up an art college
scholarship by his father, a Post Office sorter (then a junior Civil
Service appointment) in Battersea, and become a Civil Service clerk
instead, wrote of him:
No doubt the poverty and hardship which he had known in

childhood had fixed in his character an obstinacy born of
hunger and degradation. He was too innocent and too lacking
in intellectual self-confidence to contemplate going out to fight
for himself in the open market. He had a curious belief that
money making was a dirty game, something not even talked
about, and all he asked was that he be assured of a regular
income, no matter how small. He saw the Civil Service as the
only way for himself and therefore his sons must follow
him…. Like most people at that time and in that walk of life
they [his parents] were grateful for small assurances: a safe
job, a respectable anonymity, and local esteem.95
97
Whereas the small business man was always an individualist who

thought of himself as a potential self-made man, the white-collar
worker looked firstly for a secure income, secondly for a pension,
and thirdly for promotion within a stable framework of
employment. For some, such as the bank, insurance, and
commercial clerks, the ladder might lead to branch management or
even a partnership, though this was becoming increasingly rare for
those without capital or connections. For others, in the largescale
environment of government, central and local, the Post Office, and
large private corporations like the railways, the best to be hoped for
was promotion to a modest senior clerkship or office manager.
Those who identified more closely with the employer and looked to
a career in the higher reaches of the middle class and those who
were resigned to a future on much the same level might co-exist in
the same office, the first being those with connections, ability or
confidence, the second those who knew their limitations. The first
tended to be commoner in small offices affording direct contact
with the employer or his surrogate manager, the second in large
offices or large organizations like the railways with a long chain of
command.96 The difference showed itself in their salaries and
prospects of promotion. In 1909 the proportion of male clerks in
the taxpaying bracket (over £160 a year) was highest in insurance
(46 per cent) and banking (44 per cent), moderate in central and
local government (37 and 28 per cent) and local industry and trade
(23 per cent), and lowest in the railway companies (10 per cent).97
It also showed itself in the organizations they joined. The first
kind joined the YMCA or formed semi-professional guilds like the
Manchester Warehousemen and Clerks’ Provident Association of
1855 or the Liverpool Clerks’ Association of 1861, which provided
death and sickness benefits for their members, and which led on for
a militant few to a feeble and unsuccessful trade unionism. The
National Union of Clerks, founded in 1890, had only 200 members
by 1906, and in the upsurge of trade unionism just before the war
grew from 2,350 in 1910 to 12,680 in 1914. The second kind took
slowly but more solidly to trade unionism: the Railway Clerks’
Association, established at Sheffield in 1897, had by 1906 recruited
only 4,000 out of a possible 60,000 members, but then grew from
10,000 in 1910 to 30,000 in 1914. The National Association of
Local Government Officers, founded with 5,000 members in 1905,
grew to over 20,000 by 1914. In the Post Office the Postal
98
Telegraph Clerks’ Association (1881), the Provincial Postal Clerks

(1887) and others, which included women, had some 20,000
members by 1914. The woman workers, with little chance of
promotion, seem to have led the way in the Civil Service, with the
Civil Service Typists’ Association in 1903, the Association of
Women Clerks in the Board of Trade in 1911, and the Federation of
Women Clerks in 1913. But with very few exceptions neither kind
of clerk, male or female, showed the least interest in aligning
themselves with the manual workers in the TUC or the Labour
Party.98
The lower middle class, whether clerks and shop assistants or
shopkeepers and other business men, have had a poor deal from
their chroniclers. They have been mocked or patronized, from Bob
Cratchett in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to Mr Pooter in the
Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody or Mr Polly in H.G.Wells’s History.
And they have been accused of being far more jingoistic in the
imperialist movement of this period, climaxing in the Boer War in
their precipitate volunteering for the army and their violence and
bullying towards the Pro-Boers.99 Yet they were often the backbone
of the burgeoning Sunday schools and other church organizations,
sports clubs, youth clubs, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, and the
Boys’ Brigade, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, of the university
extension lectures and vocational evening classes, of the new
constituency organizations of both major political parties, and even
of the cadres of the Fabians and the ILP.100 They also produced
probably more self-made men than the much larger working class,
such as Sir Thomas Lipton, shopkeeper turned royal yachtsman,
Lord Leverhulme, commercial traveller turned international soap
and fats tycoon, Lord Northcliffe, office boy turned press baron,
Lloyd George, solicitor’s clerk turned statesman, Charles Booth,
Liverpool shipping clerk turned shipowner and social investigator,
Bernard Shaw, estate agent’s clerk turned playwright, and
H.G.Wells, pupil teacher and shop assistant turned novelist and
pioneer of science fiction. At a less spectacular level, many were
upwardly mobile in a more modest way. They seized every
educational opportunity, formal or informal, even those intended
for the working class, from the mechanics’ institute to the new
polytechnics like Regent Street and Woolwich, and the university
tutorial classes started in 1907 by the Workers’ Educational
Association (one of the students in Tawney’s first class at Rochdale
99
was A.P.Wadsworth, a young journalist who was to become editor

of the Manchester Guardian). For the lower middle class, both the
self-employed petty bourgeoisie and the employed white-collar
division, was the traditional first step towards higher status for the
ambitious sons and, increasingly, daughters of the working class.101
This, paradoxically, is why they distinguished themselves so
obsessively from the working class. They were, literally, trying to
get away from them, in income, status, appearance, and physical
residence. They did not always find it easy. Their incomes,
especially in their early years, were often less than skilled workers’
wages and if on the one side they had ‘prospects’ and more security,
on the other side bankruptcy or unemployment could plunge them
into poverty and unemployability more rarely experienced by the
skilled manual worker. Their obsession with status, necessary for
their work, often drove them to spend more on dress, rent and
children’s education than they could afford, sometimes to the
detriment of their own and their families’ health, to have smaller
families than the manual workers, and to shun the overt hedonism
of large sections of the working class. Most of all, it drove them to
try to segregate themselves and their children, if they could, in
suburbs of their own, such as Fulham, Kilburn or Ealing in London,
Saughtonhall or Spring Valley in Edinburgh, Broughton or
Chorltonville near Manchester, and their like. They rarely quite
succeeded. Artisans, especially if there was more than one earner in
the family, could often outbid them and share the same suburbs,
but even there they tried to monopolize certain streets.102 For
Frederick Willis, an apprentice silk hatter, who was born in
Burdock Road in a south-east London suburb, ‘the working class of
the neighbourhood had a great prejudice against the City swells of
Burdock Road and, accordingly, the Burdock Road residents kept
the rest of the district at arm’s length.’103 In mixed artisan and
lower middle-class suburbs in North London, noted Charles Booth,
‘We are told that contingents from different streets never mix,’ and
they had separate gymnasia, summer outings, and so on.104
It was this increasing desire for segregation and the mutual
dislike of the white-collar and manual workers which reinforced at
the level of the voting masses the decline of Liberal England.
Gladstonian Liberalism was predicated on the assumption that all
men of good will and progressive outlook would want to work
together to improve the whole community, morally and socially.
100
This belief, though with different notions of what constituted

improvement, equally inspired the New Liberals and the Fabians.
Liberal England foundered on the rocks of class prejudice. The
Liberals could not keep the rich or the comfortable and at the same
time satisfy the working class since as a rich, well-meaning but
baffled Liberal, Charles Masterman, put it in 1909, ‘The Rich
despise the Working People; the Middle Classes fear them….’105 On
their part, the working people could scarcely be blamed for
increasingly feeling the same way about the rich and the middle
classes.
3 LIVES APART: THE REMAKING OF THE

WORKING CLASS
As class society reached its zenith the working class, after the
relative quiescence of the mid-Victorian social peace, rose once
again in a resurgence of class consciousness and class conflict. The
late Victorian age saw what Gareth Stedman Jones has called,
echoing Edward Thompson, ‘the remaking of a working class’:
The distinctiveness of a working-class way of life was

enormously accentuated. Its separateness and impermeability
were now reflected in a dense and inward-looking culture,
whose effect was both to emphasize the distance of the
working class from the classes above it and to articulate its
position within an apparently permanent social hierarchy.106
This new or newly intensified working-class culture focused, to

quote Charles Booth, not on ‘trade unions and friendly societies,
co-operative effort, temperance propaganda and politics (including
socialism)’, but on ‘pleasure, amusement, hospitality and sport’.107
It was a culture which could embrace imperialism, jingoistic music
hall songs, and ‘mafficking’, but also comic satire of the upper and
middle classes, the police, and the inevitability of the workhouse. It
was ‘a culture of consolation’.108
At the same time there was an upsurge of political and industrial
unrest which culminated in the ‘New Unionism’ and the Labour
Party, the industrial and political confrontation between the
intransigent employers and the equally determined unions in the
late 1890s and 1900s, and the massive wave of strikes between
101
1910 and 1914. At this level working-class consciousness finally

achieved class-wide, permanent institutional form. Stedman Jones
argues persuasively that the two levels are interconnected: ‘The rise
of new unionism, the foundation of the Labour Party, even the
emergence of socialist groups marked not a breach but a
culmination of this defensive culture.’109 In the sense that the
working class had already come to accept capitalism and practise
class conflict within the framework of a viable class society, this
was undoubtedly true. The New Unionism, at least until the last
few years before the First World War, was a struggle for income
within the capitalist system (under aggressive provocation from the
capitalist side, as we shall see), not an attempt to overthrow it. The
Labour Party, as the political arm of the trade unions (it did not
admit individual members until 1918), was an extension of the
working-class culture which, Stedman Jones argues, ‘accepted not
only capitalism, but monarchy, Empire, aristocracy and established
religion as well’, and looked only for social reform, not
revolution.110
Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that class conflict was any
less real because it took place within an accepted social framework,
or seemed any less threatening to the rich and middle classes
because it was not overtly revolutionary. As we have seen in
Chapter 2, there were reasons other than revolution to fear the
poor. The struggle for income, backed by organization and
numbers, might lead via industrial action to a redistribution of the
product of industry in favour of the workers. Hence the employers’
counterattack on the New Unionism and their resistance not only
to strikes and the means of waging them (the legality of picketing
and the invulnerability of union funds) but to the recognition of
trade unions at the bargaining table. It might equally lead via
political pressure to a redistribution of income through taxation of
the rich and middle classes to pay for social reform or, still worse,
to a redistribution of property through municipal socialism,
confiscatory land taxes, or nationalization of land, mines, railways,
and other sources of capitalist wealth. The reaction to these threats,
the defence of property and the counterattack on the unions, will be
dealt with in the next chapter. A more insidious threat, as we have
already seen, was that of national and imperial decline, brought on
by the ‘fear of the poor’, as urbanization, poverty and the
differential birth rate made the working class appear to be
102
outbreeding their healthier and supposedly more moral and

intelligent ‘betters’ and lowering the economic and military
efficiency of the country. The reaction to the fear of the poor, in the
shape of a demand for national efficiency and for ameliorative
social welfare, will also be dealt with in Chapter 4.
For the present, the importance of these threats and fears is that
they stimulated an enormous interest in what the working classes
were and how they lived. From Andrews Mearns’s The Bitter Cry
of Outcast London (1883) and William Booth’s In Darkest
England (1890) through to the surveys of Charles Booth,
Rowntree, and Bowley and Burnett-Hurst, from the Royal
Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes (1884–85) to
the Committee on Physical Deterioration (1903–04), the Board of
Trade inquiry into the Cost of Living of the Working Classes in
Large Towns (1905), the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and
the Relief of Distress (1905–9), and the 1911 Census of Fertility of
Marriage, there was a deep concern with working-class living
conditions and their implications for the health and security of the
higher classes. 111 A plethora of private investigations and
impressionistic accounts, like R.Howe’s How the Working People
Live (1882), Helen Bosanquet’s The Standard of Life (1898), Lady
Florence Bell’s At the Works (1911), and Mrs Pember Reeves’s
Round About a Pound a Week (1916), described working-class life
from the outside, but (until the oral historians came in recent years
to let the workers, or rather their children, speak for themselves),
only a handful of sources, like Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the
Jago (1904) and Robert Tressell’s novel The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists (c. 1911, but not published till 1926), described it
from the inside, from the working-class point of view. Fortunately,
since the Second World War both the oral historians, led by Paul
Thompson, Thea Vigne, Raphael Samuel and Elizabeth Roberts,
and memorialists like Flora Thompson, Stella Davies, Robert
Roberts and Mabel Ashby have opened up a veritable treasure
house of new knowledge not merely about how the working class
lived but how it felt to live that way.112
What such sources show is that the working classes lived not so
much ‘a life apart’, to quote the evocative title used by a sensitive
American, Standish Meacham, as a whole series of different lives
apart.113 As Robert Roberts remembers it in early twentieth-century
Salford,
103
No view of the English working class in the first quarter of this

century would be accurate if that class were shown merely as a
great amalgam of artisan and labouring classes united by a
common aim and culture. Life in reality was much more
complex…. Inside the working class as a whole there existed, I
believe, a stratified form of society whose implications and
consequences have hardly been fully explored.114
Their world was not only segregated from that of the rich and the
middle classes, it was broken up into thousands of tiny communities.
In the still pre-industrial countryside, this was known and expected,
given the lack of time and the cost of travel. To the rural labourers
who lived in Flora Thompson’s hamlet Lark Rise, little Candleford
nine miles away was a great town, and Oxford twenty miles distant
was a fabulous city to be seen once in a lifetime. But at the other end
of the scale of urbanization the same, surprisingly, was true. Even the
greatest city, from the working-class point of view, was a collection
of little Villages’ in each of which everyone knew everyone else, and
knew very little beyond it. Robert Roberts’s Village’ in Salford, the
‘classic slum’, was a gridiron of some thirty streets of terraced houses
bounded by two railway lines and two main roads, whose
inhabitants rarely went to the twin cities’ centre in neighbouring
Manchester, a little over a mile away.115 Sometimes we ought to
speak of urban hamlets rather than villages, since there were
differences of status between single streets or between two ends of
the same street, like that between the City clerks of Frederick Willis’s
Burdock Road and their working-class neighbours.116 Segregation
was as strong within the working class as between them and those
deemed to be above. In some streets, ‘Every house possesses a bow-
window, and every curtained bow-window a palm, and every palm
emerges from the centre of a china pot. Each door glistens with
varnish, at any rate for a time, and boasts an immaculate letter-box
surmounted by an immaculate brass knocker.’ Not far away there
might be courts and alleys with earth closets and ash pits where ‘very
often the flags were broken and loose, and…the clothes became
bespattered with sludge’ from the housewives who threw out their
‘fluid refuse onto the yard floor’. In between there would be every
graduation of prosperity and status: in Poplar, ‘East India Road was
very nice. Commercial Road began to get poor and then further
along got more Jeweyfied. [West India Dock Road] got the rough
104
part—the Chinese and all that.’117 But it was not only in the
cosmopolitan cities that the working class practised segregation. In
the salubrious seaside resort of Hastings in Robert Tressell’s novel,
the residents were as status-conscious and hierarchical as those of
Kathleen Chorley’s Alderley Edge:
Lord Street…like most other similar neighbourhoods, supplied

a striking answer to those futile theorists who prate about the
equality of mankind, for the inhabitants instinctively formed
themselves into groups, the more superior types drawing
together, separating themselves from the inferior, and rising
naturally to the top while the others gathered themselves into
distinct classes, grading downwards, or else isolated
themselves altogether; being refused admission to the circles
they desired to enter, and in their turn refusing to associate
with their inferiors.118
Even in the countryside, where the old feudal relationship between

farmer and labourer had not completely disappeared, according to
Rowntree and Kendall in their interviews of 1913, ‘the conflict of
interests is becoming more acute, and this is one of the causes
underlying the labourer’s discontent’ and his flight to the town. As
one old farmer put it, ‘I used to take an interest in my men; but now
I don’t seem to care a snap about them, and I don’t think they care
a snap about me.’119
In the towns segregation was based partly, but only partly, on
the economic distinctions between the skilled craftsmen, the skilled
and semi-skilled factory workers, and the unskilled labourers.
These counted a great deal, since the skilled worker might be paid
from 50 to 100 per cent more than a labourer (25s.– 40s. as against
15s.–20s.), which would put some craftsmen on equal terms with
clerks and school teachers if not better, and they could afford to
live, to the clerks’ chagrin, in the same kind of houses. It was also
a matter of status on the job:
The craftsman always held himself aloof—sort of a little bit

above the labourer. The labourer…can only do what he’s told,
but the craftsman, well he’s responsible for it’s being turned
out…. They looked up to you as somebody responsible …they
knew you had full authority.120
105
The craftsmen were more regularly employed, better fed and

clothed, and often physically larger, as John Burns noticed in 1890
of the old craft unionists at the TUG as compared with the
delegates of the unskilled ‘New Unionism’, though he put it down
to the increasing tempo of the work:
Physically, the ‘old’ unionists were much bigger than the

‘new’. And that no doubt is due to the greater intensity of toil
during the last twenty or thirty years… [T]he ‘old’ delegates
differed from the new not only physically but in dress. A great
number of them looked like respectable city gentlemen; wore
very good coats, large watch chains and high hats—and in
many cases were of such splendid build and proportions that
they presented an alderman’s, not to say a magisterial dignity.
Amongst the new delegates not a single one wore a tall hat.
They looked workmen. They were workmen.121
A skilled workman’s average wage of 30s. a week (allowing for

slack times and unemployment), according to Arthur Morrison in
the Cornhill Magazine in 1901, would support a wife and three
children living in three rooms in a humble though decent
neighbourhood in London within walking distance of his work.
Most of this labour aristocrat’s wage went on food (12s 7½d.),
clothes (2s.), and club and insurance (1s.), leaving less than 4s. for
all other expenditure on pleasure and contingencies, including beer
and tobacco, newspapers, travel, children’s toys, education, etc.122
Most workers were not so fortunate and had to live, often
including the wife’s and children’s earnings, on ‘round about a
pound a week’, in Mrs I ember Reeves’s poignant phrase. In her
report on the Fabian Women’s Group’s study of the ‘ultra-
respectable’ families of unskilled and semi-skilled workers living in
Lambeth on 18s.–30s. a week between 1909 and 1913, she shows
that after paying rent, burial insurance, heating and lighting, and
cleaning materials, families with two children usually (when the
man was in full work) had sums from under 6s. to slightly over 10s.
a week, often 3d. a day or less per head, to spend on food, much
less than was allowed in the workhouse, and almost nothing except
cast-offs for clothing and footwear. Their diet was a monotonous
one of bread and margarine, with tiny quantities of meat, bacon or
fish, mainly as a ‘relish’ for the father and breadwinner. Contrary to
106
popular opinion, the men scarcely drank, smoked very little, and
gave up their whole wages except for 2s.–3s. a week, out of which
they often had to pay for their dinners, club or union dues, and
sometimes tram fares. The LCC teachers of domestic science could
not instruct girls on how to bring up a family of six on less than
28s. a week, and Mrs Reeves challenged the critics of the
‘improvident poor’ to show how ‘providence’ could stretch a pound
a week to provide an adequate standard of living without a legal
minimum wage or the state child’s allowance which her Fabian
group advocated.123
The farm labourers of Rowntree and Kendall’s 1913 survey had
to live on even less, from 10s.–18s. a week in Oxfordshire to 15s.–
22s. in Yorkshire, plus occasional vegetables or milk, and in a few
cases a cottage or garden worth 2s. a week. Those who had free or
rented gardens to provide potatoes and green vegetables lived as
well, or as badly, as the Lambeth labourers, and their children were
certainly healthier. But they were all underfed, with an average
protein deficiency of 24 per cent (ranging from 19 per cent for
those with family earnings over 20s. to 35 per cent for those with
less than 15s.) and even an average 10 per cent deficiency in
calories (ranging from 5 to 42 per cent). ‘On average the forty-two
families investigated are receiving not much more than three-
fourths of the nourishment necessary for the maintenance of
physical health.’124 And this was at the end of a generation of rising
real wages for labourers and for farm labourers in particular.
It was not only a matter of income, occupational status and
appearance, however. The most important distinction within the
working class was that between the ‘respectable’ and the ‘roughs’.
This was not a horizontal division between the affluent and the
poor; it was a diagonal frontier running right through the working
class from top to bottom but taking in more at the top and
progressively fewer towards the bottom. To some extent it
coincided with the division between the chapel- and churchgoing
(chapel for the urban working class was usually superior to church,
which was for the more abject, dependent poor, and the Catholic
Irish were automatically classed as rough), but this distinction was
beginning to wear thin as religious attendance declined, though the
children of the respectable were still sent to Sunday school. A
craftsman or well-paid coalminer who drank to excess would soon
place himself and his family amongst the roughs, since his spending
107
would reduce the rent and nourishment his wife and children could
afford. A labourer who abstained from alcohol, especially if his
wife and children worked, might raise himself by his bootstraps to
respectability, but it demanded character and willpower. As a
Keighley labourer said, ‘It takes something to be poor and
respectable.’125
Most of all it depended on the character and skill of the
housewife. If she was a ‘manager’ who could keep the house clean
and tidy and cook nourishing dishes from a few bones and
vegetables (and many of them could, as Elizabeth Roberts has
shown)126 and also a disciplinarian who prevented her children
from playing with the ‘roughs’ around the corner (as one daughter
put it, ‘I think it’s the way we were brought up…. We never got in
with the rough people’; ‘If I saw them outside I always spoke to
them, just to say hello…. But I never went down into the street and
had any connection with them’), then the family could ‘keep
themselves to themselves’ and maintain their respectability.127 The
children of the ‘roughs’, on the other hand, would play on the
street, mix with anybody, and sometimes terrorize the
neighbourhood, for gang life and gang warfare (not always so
savage as its sounds) were for many of the boys the only substitute
for the supportive family life they sorely missed—though even
‘rough’ parents might fight over children or threaten revenge on
teachers who were too ready with the cane.128
There were important differences between regions and between
individual towns in the same region. In coalmining and other areas
of heavy industry with high wages for men but little work for
women, the prosperity and respectability of the family would
depend not only on the sobriety of the breadwinner and the
housekeeping skill of his wife but on the number of children which
such patriarchal cultures tended to produce, and whether the
children were still dependent or had begun to contribute to the
family budget. In the textile, pottery, and other areas with much
employment for women where, either by the market mechanism or
simply through the employers’ opportunism, men’s wages tended to
be too low to support a family, the family’s happiness might depend
more on the wife’s health, the willingness of the husband to share
the chores, and the availability of childminding relatives or
neighbours. But as Elizabeth Roberts shows for high-wage steel-
making and shipbuilding Barrow, low-wage linoleum-making
108
Lancaster, and medium-wage cotton and engineering Preston, all in

north Lancashire, you could find every kind of family pattern and
household management in all three, but with more domestic and
culinary skill and more home-centred family life than the working
class were often given credit for. One of her Preston respondents
sums it up neatly:
My mother, their life, well they had no life. It must have been
a terrible life. It was all work. It was really drudgery. But they
enjoyed it. It was their family and they lived for their families.
It wasn’t drudgery to them.129
Given their fragmentation and narrow communal horizons at the

zenith of class society, how, then, did it come about that the
working class ‘remade itself in the institutional sense of creating
afresh, or on a larger scale, class-wide institutions, such as friendly
societies, working men’s clubs, the co-operative trading movement,
the burgeoning trade union movement and the infant political
labour movement, through which to express their class-
consciousness and defend their threatened interests? For the ‘fear of
the poor’ on the part of the rich and the middle classes was returned
with interest by the working class, and with good reason. For what
to the employing class was merely the legitimate defence of wealth
and privilege often appeared to the working class a fight for a living
wage and survival.
The answer, paradoxically, is that the class-wide institutions
grew directly out of the fragmented community experience of the
working class. It was the local branch of the friendly society, the
Oddfellows or the Ancient Foresters, the local co-op store and the
quarterly meeting of its society, the local working men’s club,
affiliated as it was to the national Club and Institute Union, the
local shop-floor trade union, and in due course the local ILP or
constituency Labour Party, that drew their support and
commanded their loyalty. The number of working men active in
such institutions was small, the number of women even smaller, but
the numbers who looked to them as the first line of defence of their
‘defensive culture’ and their standard of life were immense, and the
loyalty they could command in a crisis, if sometimes only briefly,
was fierce and tenacious.
We must be careful, with our intellectual predilections for tidy
109
institutional history, not to take a ‘top-down’ view of how things

happened in the working class, and try to see instead how they saw
it themselves. Until they were overtaken by the trade unions during
the First World War, the friendly societies were much the most
numerous and well-supported working-class institutions, with a
total membership approaching 4 million as early as 1872; but most
were merely burial or sick clubs which, though they became crucial
for survival in the crises of life, loomed in normal times no larger
than the collector’s weekly knock at the door for his few pence.130
The co-operative movement was one of the great success stories of
the Victorian working class, with a membership (which meant
families, not individuals) rising from 350,000 in 1873 to 1,169,000
in 1893 and to 2,878,000 in 1913, and through the two wholesale
societies, with its own factories, ships, overseas depots, and tea
estates.131 To most working-class wives, however, it simply meant
the local store where you could buy sound, reliable goods and save
money from the ‘divi’ at the same time, but was out of reach of the
very poor because it would not give credit.
The working men’s club, belonging to a national movement
founded by the temperance reformer the Rev. Henry Solly in 1862
with about 900 clubs and 321,000 members by 1903, was a place,
more ‘your own’ than the pub, where you would drink cheap,
wholesome beer, play a game of cards or billiards, take your wife to
hear a professional singer or comedian and, if you were really
serious, listen to the occasional outside speaker.132 A national crisis
like the Boer War might produce good audiences but the clubs, once
revered by Gladstone and Bradlaugh, were by then generally non-
political or apathetic. Most clubs gave a hearing impartially to pro-
war and pro-Boer speakers, but refused to take sides. Their striking
feature was an absence of jingoism. One middle-class observer from
Toynbee Hall complained in 1908 that ‘certain words which had
always seemed to him signified clear and worthy ideas, such as
honour, patriotism, justice, either form no part of the working-
man’s vocabulary or are grossly and malignantly perverted from
their true sense’; the mere mention of the British empire ‘excites
laughter as a subject to which no sincere man would dream of
alluding.’133 There were of course some Radical and Tory working
men’s clubs which took sides on the Boer War and imperialism as
they did on other political issues, but these were for those small
committed minorities who took politics seriously. Only on
110
occasions of great national excitement, like Mafeking night or the

relief of Ladysmith, did working-class jingoism break surface, and
then it was an opportunity for a ‘bang-up’ binge of drinking and
roistering as well as genuine joy at the saving of ‘our boys’. Similar
if somewhat more political attitudes permeated the trades councils,
the ‘local TUCs’ of the trade union movement. Here there was
great readiness to condemn the Boer War in general, but great
resistance to condemning the British working-class soldier for ‘the
brutalities now being perpetrated in South Africa’.134 The war, like
most foreign policy issues, was a matter for ‘them’, the propertied
and governing classes whose interests were involved; it came home
to the working class when it was ‘us’, ‘our boys’, our relatives and
neighbours who were being killed or, with great rejoicing, saved.
The rejoicing was always greater for reliefs, retreats out of danger,
or the ending of wars than for ‘famous victories’. When it came to
a real war, of course, as distinct from a colonial one far from home,
working men volunteered as readily as their ‘superiors’, as they did
in 1914.
In the same way, the great resurgence and expansion of trade
unionism in this period, rising from under 759,000 members in
1888 to 1.6 million in 1892, 2 million in 1900, 2.5 million in 1910,
and 4.1 million by 1914,135 is best seen not only as a movement
from below, amongst the unorganized unskilled workers (which it
was only in part), but as a series of local confrontations beginning
in the workplace itself, which only then led to wider organization.
To take the three classic strikes which inaugurated the New
Unionism in 1888–9, the London match girls, the gas stokers, and
the dockers were all previously unorganized workers reacting
spontaneously to intolerable conditions and wages in particular
places, the Bryant and May factory in the East End, the Beckton
Gasworks in East Ham, and the South West India Docks.136 It was
only when they realized they needed organizational help that they
called in Annie Besant and the Fabians to form the match workers’
union, Eleanor Marx, John Burns, Tom Mann and Ben Tillett of the
ILP to establish the gasworkers’ union, and Burns, Tillet and Mann
again to organize the Dockers’ Union and its street demonstrations.
It is also significant that, when the excitement died down and either
quiet returned to the workplace or was imposed by the employers
weeding out the ringleaders, the new unskilled unions declined and
very nearly, though not quite, disappeared.137
111
That the New Unionism survived and went on expanding was

due in part to the stimulus it gave to union membership in the more
traditional areas of skilled craft and factory work; but it was
provoked still more by the struggle for control of the work process
in the workplace itself which marked industrial relations in the
1890s and 1900s.138 The tradition amongst craftsmen and most
factory workers was that they rather than the employer controlled
the pace of production and, to a surprising extent, the way in which
the work was done. During this period the employers tried to
reimpose their control of the workplace and the work process. This
was in part a reaction to what they saw as the ‘insubordinate’
challenge of the new or more aggressive unions, but far more
important was the introduction of new machinery, new methods
and new techniques of control, which speeded up the work and
tried to take direct control back into the hands of management. The
new machinery included, for example, new automatic gas-stoking
equipment (‘iron men’) which did not allow the men time for rest,
capstan lathes and other simplified machine tools which could be
operated by less skilled engineers, new ‘closing’ machines in the
boot and shoe industry which replaced hand workers, new printing
machines which threatened the hand pressmen, new and more
complex railway signalling equipment, pneumatic ship rivetting
machines, and so on. The new methods included new systems of
payment, piecework and output bonuses, which increased the
pressure on the workers, and the new techniques of control, the
time clock, supervised team work, and the beginnings of time and
motion study and ‘scientific management’ which came to be called,
after its American exponent F.W.Taylor, ‘Taylorism’. 139 The
‘employers’ offensive’ was, for obvious reasons, associated with an
intensified attack on the unions, a refusal of recognition wherever
possible, and a series of challenges in the law courts to established
trade union rights and immunities, such as picketing and freedom
from actions for restraint of trade.140 To the employer’s point of
view we must return in the next chapter, in the section on the
defence of property. For the moment, from the worker’s point of
view it looked like an attempt to wrest control of the work process
for the purpose of screwing more work out of him for less pay.
Thus the industrial unrest and confrontational relations from
1889 onwards came down at the bottom to a struggle for power in
the workplace. This was true of the gas stokers’ strike of 1889, the
112
unrest on the railways, and, most famous of all, the 1897–98 lock-
out in the engineering industry to impose dilution by unapprenticed
machine operators. It must be said that not all employers thought
the new trends good in themselves or worth the cost of imposing
them. Some opposed Taylorism as not worth the bad feelings, low
morale and, perhaps, lost output which it provoked.141 Many
engineering employers, for example, came to value their apprentice-
trained engineers and co-operated with them in supervising
unskilled ‘dilutees’ in exchange for maintaining their higher level of
wages.142 But enough employers rushed into the fight, using
blacklegs and ‘free labour’, to protect what they saw as the right of
capital to exercise control over its property, the machinery and
materials, to upset the traditional balance between craft control
and employers’ general oversight in the workplace. Even old craft
unions like the engineers came to feel outraged and responded with
militant aggression, which began in the local workplace and
escalated into national disputes.
In the same way, such local guerrilla warfare led to the legal
battles which finally forced the unions to accept the need for
separate parliamentary representation for labour. The ‘industrial
offensive’ in the courts, as John Saville has called it, was part of the
defence of property to which we shall return. The series of actions
brought by employers against unions or their members against
picketing, ‘intimidation’, interference with contracts, and ‘restraint
of trade’, nearly all had their origins in disputes over how the work
should be carried on, with what materials, or by whom (unionists
or non-unionists)—all of which the employers claimed as their
prerogative. The most famous and damaging case of all, the Taff
Vale judgment of 1901, grew out of an unofficial attempt by a
group of railway workers in South Wales to improve conditions
and obtain recognition of their union by the Taff Vale Railway
Company. 143 It was the railway company’s actions which
generalized the dispute. Its suit for damages and costs for loss of
trade, finally awarded at £42,000 by the House of Lords, so
threatened the funds of all unions engaging in strikes that the TUG
finally determined to take seriously the need, already acknowledged
by the establishment of the Labour Representation Committee in
1900, for trade union MPs in Parliament. No doubt there were
committed unionists and working-class politicians like Keir Hardie
and Ramsay MacDonald who had been pressing for this all along,
113
but it was not until the TUG saw the employers’ forensic offensive
as a threat to their very existence that they did anything concrete
about it.144
Thus, as Stedman Jones argued though from a different
standpoint, the institutional remaking of the working class was
indeed compatible with the apparently localized, isolated,
fragmented culture of the working class. Their lives apart, however
pleasure-oriented, conservative, occasionally jingoistic and
apparently in ward-looking—and reservations must be made about
all these epithets—were also defensive, in the strict sense that they
were not left alone to enjoy their few and simple pleasures and
endure their numerous burdens and sorrows but were badgered by
patronizing moralists, investigators and reformers, wooed by
wheedling politicians, and bullied by masterful employers and their
hired strike-breakers in the workplace and the law courts. Every
such encounter with the representatives of their ‘betters’ was a
personal confrontation with the class society. As Robert Roberts
perceptively observed from the depths of the classic slum,
the upper and middle classes, self-confident to arrogance, kept

two modes of address for the poor: the first was a kindly de
haut en bas form in which each word, of usually one syllable,
was clearly enunciated; the second had a loud, self-assured,
hectoring note. Both seemed devised to ensure that, though
the hearer might be stupid, he would know enough in general
to bow at once to breeding and authority…. It was a tactic,
conscious or not, that confused and ‘overfaced’ the simple and
drove intelligent men and women in the working class to
fury.145
Those two voices belonged not only to those obvious class

antagonists, the factory manager, the Poor Law relieving officer
and the magistrate, but even to the workers’ self-styled friends,
philanthropists like Charles Loch or Helen Bosanquet and socialists
like H.M.Hyndman and Beatrice Webb.
Far from accepting (like the Labour Party, according to Stedman
Jones) ‘not only capitalism, but monarchy, Empire, aristocracy and
established religion as well’,146 the working class had from their
defensive and segregated culture learned how to react, to laugh
irreverently at empire and the aristocracy, to vote with their feet
114
against established religion, to reduce monarchy to mere sentiment

for high days and holidays, and to fear and distrust capitalism to
the point of challenging it head-on. They did so in enormous waves
of national strikes rising to a crescendo in 1910–14, and by
establishing a political labour movement which gave notice that the
trade unions would either have to be taken into partnership with
industry and government or would hold in reserve the vague but
menacing threat of a national industrial crisis. The class-ridden
society of Edwardian England was becoming less and less
acceptable to a large part of the working class. One symptom was
the rise of the Labour Party, especially in the localities, where it
scored more victories than at Westminster; another was the
resentment at the Poor Law and its callousness towards the old, the
sick and the unemployed; and a third was the great wave of
industrial unrest that rose to a crescendo in the last few years before
the First World War. This last was the start of the crisis of class
society that marked the years on either side of the war. To that crisis
we must turn in Chapter 5.
First, however, we must note that there was another party to the
social contract besides the property owners and the manual
workers. The non-capitalist, professional middle class,
patronizingly conscious of their own moral superiority to both
sides, had ideas of their own about how society should be run, its
benefits allocated, its disputes settled and its problems solved, and
they were already beginning to bring them to bear at the very zenith
of class society.
115
Chapter 4
CLASS SOCIETY
AND THE PROFESSIONAL
IDEAL
Class society in Britain, at its zenith between 1880 and 1914,

already contained the seeds of its own decay. These took the form
of the values and beliefs of the professional social ideal, which were
beginning to infiltrate and change from within the moral outlook of
the three major classes. Those classes, too, possessed their own
powerful ideals of what society should be and how it should be
organized to recognize and reward their own unique contribution
to the welfare of the community. Each class believed that its
contribution was the most vital one, and should be rewarded
accordingly. The landowners and the capitalists saw themselves as,
providing the resources and the organizing ability which drove the
economic system to provide the goods necessary both for survival
and for a civilized life for the whole community. Those in the
working class who thought about it saw themselves as providing
the labour, the sole source of value, without which the resources
and their management would be in vain. The increasing class
conflict of the late Victorian and Edwardian period was the struggle
for income, status and power arising out of this clash of
incompatible ideals. Into this tripartite conflict came a maverick
fourth class, which contributed both to the struggle and to the
means of resolving it.
1 THE PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL IDEAL

This fourth class was less directly related to the struggle for a share
of material production, and depended on persuading the other
116
CLASS SOCIETY AND THE PROFESSIONAL IDEAL
classes to voluntarily part with a surplus to pay for the vital, non-
material services which they claimed to provide. While all classes
try to justify themselves by their own concept of distributive justice,
the professional class can only exist by persuading the rest of
society to accept a distributive justice which recognizes and
rewards expert service based on selection by merit and long,
arduous training. Professional people, rightly or wrongly, see
themselves as above the main economic battle, at once privileged
observers and benevolent neutrals since, whichever side wins, they
believe that their services will still be necessary and properly
rewarded. In this they may well be mistaken for, as was argued in
Chapter 1, they are just as dependent on their bargaining power in
the societal market for people as the richest capitalist or the most
unskilled labourer. The difference with the professional is that,
offering a service that is, as we have seen, esoteric, evanescent and
fiduciary—beyond the layman’s knowledge or judgment,
impossible to pin down or fault even when it fails, and which must
therefore be taken on trust—he is dependent on persuading the
client to accept his valuation of the service rather than allowing it
to find its own value in the marketplace. His interest, therefore, is
to persuade society to set aside a secure income, or a monopolistic
level of fees, to enable him to perform the service rather than
jeopardize it by subjecting it to the rigours of capitalist competition
in the conventional free market. It is the success of such persuasion
which raises him (when he succeeds) above the economic battle,
and gives him a stake in creating a society which plays down class
conflict (in the long if not in the short term) and plays up mutual
service and responsibility and the efficient use of human resources.
As long as professional men were comparatively few and
depended mainly on the rich and powerful for their incomes, they
tended to temper their social ideal to the values of their wealthy
clients, as some of them still do. With the coming of industrial
society, however, the professions proliferated, their clients
multiplied and, in certain cases, for example in preventive medicine,
sanitary engineering, and central and local government generally,
the client became in effect the whole community. They became
much freer to act as critics of society, apologists for the emerging
classes of the new industrial system, and purveyors of the
terminology in which people came to think about the new class
society. It was this mediation of the terms and concepts in which
117
people thought about society which gave the ‘forgotten middle

class’—forgotten because they left themselves out of their largely
tripartite analyses of the class system—their special role in the
emergence of class.
As was argued in the earlier book, professional men were the
theorists, apologists and propagandists for the three major classes
of the new industrial society.1 Professors Malthus of the East India
College at Marlowe and John Wilson (‘Christopher North’), editor
of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and professional authors
such as Coleridge, Southey, Sir Walter Scott and Disraeli revived the
moribund aristocratic ideal of paternalism and social
responsibilities of property. Professor Adam Smith and public
officials James Mill, J.R.McCulloch, Nassau Senior and Edwin
Chadwick, among others, armed the new capitalist class with
arguments against idle wealth (instead of active capital) and
patronage, which they labelled ‘Old Corruption’ (instead of
competition and selection by merit, as determined by the market or
by competitive examination). And Charles Hall, medical doctor,
Thomas Hodgskin, professional lecturer, Richard Carlile, radical
journalist, and Bronterre O’Brien, Chartist lawyer, turned Locke’s
political philosophy and Ricardo’s political economy, both based
on the labour theory of value, upside down to forge ‘the right to the
whole produce of labour’ which underlay the working-class ideal of
co-operative labour.2
Yet although they ‘forgot themselves’ as a class, nearly all of
them as individual analysts of society reserved a special place for
their kind as the guides and mentors, the Platonic guardians of
society: Shelley’s poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the
world’, Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ of secular intellectuals leavening every
area of society, Carlyle’s ‘ancient guides of nations’ now becoming
the new ‘aristocracy of talent’, James Mill’s ‘middle rank exempt
from labour, …the chief source of all that has exalted and refined
human nature’, Hodgskin’s ‘mental labourers, literati, men of
science’ who were innocent of the charge of exploiting the manual
labourer, John Stuart Mill’s ‘learned class’ who ought to be
endowed by the community for the sake of scientific discovery and
speculative knowledge, and so on.3
Only occasionally did a professional man recognize the separate
existence of his own class, and then only to emphasize its ineffable
superiority. Matthew Arnold, who in 1869 divided society into the
118
usual three classes, the barbarians, the philistines and the populace,
only to criticize them for their anarchy and lack of culture, had
distinguished the previous year (as we saw in Chapter 3) between
‘the professional class, brought up on the first plane, with fine and
governing qualities’ and the ‘immense business class, brought up on
the second plane, cut off from the aristocracy and the professions,
and without governing qualities.’4 He was speaking before the
Taunton Commission on the Endowed Schools, part of that great
reform movement that, through men like his father, Thomas
Arnold, at Rugby and Oxford, was in the process of converting the
public schools and the ancient universities, the ‘first plane’ of
education, into institutions designed to inculcate professional ideals
and values into the sons of the aristocracy and gentry and,
increasingly but not enough for the reformers, those of the business
middle class
The supposedly pre-industrial, aristocratic, anti-industrial
attitudes propagated by the public schools and Oxbridge, which
some historians, like Martin Wiener, have blamed for the decline of
the industrial spirit in England, were in fact the newly emergent
social values of the reforming schoolmasters and dons whose
disdain for industry and trade stemmed from their conviction that
professional service was in every way superior both to endowed
idleness and to what they regarded as ‘money grabbing’.5 The
English landed class has never scorned profit making, whether in
agriculture, mining urban development, transport undertakings
such as roads, canals, railways and docks, or even in cotton mills,
ironworks or brick fields whenever they could make them pay, and
without their economic opportunism the Industrial Revolution
could scarcely have begun when and where it did. Moreover, as we
saw in Chapter 3, many of them, like the Dukes of Devonshire in
Barrow steel-making and shipbuilding, the Dukes of Buckingham
and Sutherland in railways, the Earl of Shrewsbury and the Hon.
Charles Rolls, son of Lord Llangattock, in motor cars, not to
mention the quarter of the peerage holding company directorships
in 1896, were to continue to ‘soil their hands’ with commercial
investment, whatever their public school masters and university
tutors told them. It was the latter, not the aristocracy, who
popularized anti-industrial values and held up the ideal of selfless
public service in the professions and in government at home and in
the empire, and it was the sons of the middle class, both
119
professional and business men, who most fully imbibed these values
from them. Tom Brown in Thomas Hughes’s novel (1857) was
upbraided by his Rugby tutor:
You talk of ‘working to get your living’ and ‘doing some real
good in the world’ in the same breath. Now you may be
getting a good living in a profession, and yet not doing any
good at all in the world…. Keep the latter before you as a
holy object, and you will be right, whether you make a living
or not; but if you dwell on the other, you’ll very likely drop
into mere money making.6
The Taunton Commission in 1868 defended the exclusive teaching

of classics and mathematics, rather than more immediately useful
sciences and modern languages, on the grounds of the high value
assigned them in English society. The professional men and poorer
gentry
have nothing to look to but education to keep their sons on a

high social level. And they would not wish to have what
might be more readily converted into money, if in any degree
it tended to let their children sink in the social scale.7
And the Clarendon Commission extolled the top nine public

schools and their imitators for taking ‘men of all the various classes
that make up English society, destined for every profession and
career’ and moulding them in ‘the character of English gentlemen’.8
Beginning in the early Victorian age through their reformation of
the public schools and universities, members of the professional
class deliberately set out to impose their own social ideal (which at
that stage they assumed to be a national and cultural, not a class
ideal) upon the sons both of the landed class and, in so far as they
could reach them, of the business class as well. Their method was
to start from the existing ideals of those classes, the concept of the
English gentleman and the gospel of work, and to transform them
into variants of their own professional ideal. Both concepts had
undergone a sea change during the Industrial Revolution, that of
the gentleman from the chivalrous aristocrat touchy about his
honour and prepared to defend it in a duel, to the ‘gentleness’ of
Samuel Smile’s ‘true gentleman’, ‘honest, truthful, upright, polite,
120
temperate, courageous, self-respecting, and self-helping’.9 Work,

from being the curse of Adam to be shunned by the aristocratic
leisured gentleman, had become a gospel and replaced the cult of
leisure as the main justification of wealth, power and success in life,
so that landed politicians like Gladstone and the Earl of Derby
never stopped working, either at politics, writing or tending their
estates. As Professor Alfred Marshall expressed it, ‘every man,
however wealthy he may be, if he be in health and a true man, does
work and work hard.’10 Both concepts had been transformed from
aristocratic into middle-class concepts, and ones which sat easily
with both middle classes, the professional and the business class.
But from then onwards, especially in the reformed public schools
and universities which formed the next generation of hardworking
gentlemen, the professional and entrepreneurial ideals began to
diverge. The gentleman came to be defined by his ‘fine and
governing qualities’, his cultured education, intellectual interests
and qualities of character, which rose above mere money making,
while the work permissible to him was narrowed down to
professional or public service to society, the state or the empire, to
the exclusion of ‘money-grabbing’ industry and trade.
This divergence between the professional and entrepreneurial
ideals within the upper- and middle-class education system found
reverberations in the outside world, particularly in relation to
public policy and social reform. The principles of competition,
individualism and laissez-faire, which for the capitalist class and
the early classical economists had achieved the status of laws of
nature as inexorable as the law of gravity, came progressively to be
questioned by professional social thinkers, civil servants and even
by economists, and their restrictions and reservations found their
way into legislation, over the protests of the business class. The
Factory and Mines Acts from the 1830s and 1840s, the public
health legislation from 1848 onwards, the Food and Drugs
Adulteration and Alkali (anti-pollution) Acts of the 1860s, and the
state’s increasing support of education culminating in the 1870 Act,
can be seen as one long campaign orchestrated by (though not
confined to) the professional class against the vested interests of the
propertied classes. On the radical, utilitarian side the change was
symbolized by the conversion of the greatest of the Benthamite civil
servants, Edwin Chadwick, to the view that ‘laissez faire means
letting mischief work and evils go on that do not affect ourselves’,
121
and by the transition in John Stuart Mill, Bentham’s godson, from

Benthamite individualism to Benthamite collectivism. While
continuing in successive editions of The Principles of Political
Economy to say that ‘letting alone should be the general principle’,
he added in later ones that ‘there is scarcely anything, really
important to the general interest, which it may not be desirable, or
even necessary, that the government should take on by itself. He
ended by claiming in his Autobiography (1873) that he and his
wife, Harriet Taylor, had long been ‘socialists’.
While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of

society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are
supposed to involve, we yet look forward to a time when
society will no longer be divided into the idle and the
industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not
eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all;
when the division of the produce of labour, instead of
depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident
of birth, will be made by concert on an accepted principle of
justice, and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to
be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously
in procuring benefits which are not exclusively their own, but
to be shared with the society they belong to.11
Nor was the professional critique of competition and industrialism

confined to the radical utilitarian wing. It was just as pronounced
on the conservative idealist wing, where Coleridge’s ‘greatest
producible sum of happiness of all men’ played the same
transitional role as Bentham’s ‘greatest happiness of the greatest
number’. Carlyle, the Christian Socialists and Ruskin all attacked
‘the Mammon gospel’ of making money.12 Ruskin specifically
demanded that the merchant or manufacturer should have a
function similar to that of the liberal professions, to ‘provide for the
nation’:
It is no more his function to get profit for himself out of that

provision than it is a clergyman’s function to get his stipend.
This stipend is a necessary adjunct, but not the object of his
life, if he be a true clergyman, any more than his fee (or
honorarium) is the object of life to a true physician.13
122
That both the utilitarian and idealist streams of professional

criticism of industrial society could converge in the socialism of the
Fabians, whom Beatrice Webb recognized as spiritual descendants
of Bentham and Mill, in the Christian Socialism of Stewart
Headlam, and even in the Marxism of William Morris, Ruskin’s
most prominent disciple, the leading passion of whose life was a
‘hatred of modern civilization’, is no accident but a logical
extension of the professional critique to the abolition of capitalist
society altogether.14
In all its manifestations, liberal, conservative or socialist, the
professional social ideal consistently applied the tests of
justification by service to society and, in one form or another, of the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, to the analysis and
criticism of contemporary society. Down to about 1880, however,
such criticisms were a disconnected series of individual correctives
to the excessive materialism of the capitalist system while in no way
threatening its continued existence. From the 1880s by contrast,
concomitantly with the accelerated growth of professional
occupations of all kinds, it began to take shape in a form that
appeared to many landowners and business men to be an organized
threat to the rights if not indeed to the security of private property
and to the foundations of capitalist society.
2 PROFESSIONALISM AND PROPERTY

Between 1880 and 1914 the professional social ideal took a further
step, from ad hoc criticism of capitalist society to a series of
organized assaults on the concept of absolute property. Most
professional men were not opposed to private property as such. On
the contrary, the great majority not only accepted its existence but
looked to their own expert service as in itself a property right which
would in turn yield income and material property for themselves.
What they were opposed to was functionless, irresponsible
property, not justified by some kind of service to society. This belief
in what we shall call contingent as opposed to absolute property,
that is, in property rights contingent upon the performance of some
justifying service, was held by thinking members of the professional
class right across the whole political gamut, from the most extreme
laissez-faire individualists to the most extreme collectivists.
At one end of the spectrum, C.S.Loch, Bernard and Helen
123
Bosanquet, Octavia Hill and the Charity Organization Society, who

were so wedded to the individualism of the free labour market that
they proposed to revive the undiluted principles of the 1834 Poor
Law and the deterrent workhouse for the undeserving poor, those
they preferred to call the ‘helpless cases’, stood nevertheless for a
revival in the city slums of the traditional paternalism of the country
squire. Beatrice Webb, who had begun her career in social work as a
paternalist rent collector for Octavia Hill, observed of the COS that
although ‘in their opinion, modern capitalism was the best of all
possible ways of organizing industries and services, …yet these
devoted men and women, unlike the mass of property owners, were
yearning to spend their lives in the service of the poor’. She praised
the three principles upon which this organization was

avowedly based: patient and persistent service on the part of
the well-to-do; an acceptance of personal responsibility for the
ulterior consequences…of charitable assistance; and finally, as
the only way of carrying out this service and fulfilling the
responsibility, the application of the scientific method to each
separate case of a damaged body or a lost soul; so that the
assistance given should be based on a correct forecast of what
would actually happen, as a result of the gift, to the character
and circumstances of the individual recipient and to the
destitute class to which he belonged.15
In other words, the COS combined the paternal responsibility of

property with the professional treatment of poverty, which was to
lead on, despite their dislike of state intervention, to the
development of the professional, and eventually state-employed,
social worker.16
Many members of the COS and their associates in the new
university settlements of the 1880s, notably Canon Samuel Barnett,
founder of Toynbee Hall, and Arnold Toynbee himself, were
products of the reformed universities of Oxford and Cambridge,
where the professional ideal was being developed in a more
systematic, theoretical manner. At Balliol College, Oxford, from
which so many of the young residents of Toynbee Hall came, the
most influential figure was a new type of don, secular, career-
oriented, married and, and in close contact with the world outside
the ivory tower. Thomas Hill Green, the idealist philosopher, was
124
the first member of the university to be elected to the Oxford

borough council. Green, who died in 1882 at the early age of 46,
had an immense influence on generations of young men down to
the First World War who, though ranging from extreme
conservatives to advanced liberals and from high churchmen to
outright atheists, nevertheless carried over his ideas into the COS,
the New Liberalism, the social thinking of the church, and even,
with Hobhouse and Hobson, into the Fabian Society.17
Green was a philosopher with a deep belief, derived from Kant
and Hegel, in property as the necessary condition for the individual
to realize himself and develop his individual character. For Kant,
property was not, as it was for Locke, a natural right of acquisition
prior to the existence of the state; it was the foundation of civil
society. For Hegel it was a necessary creation of the state, since only
through property and the state could the individual achieve free will
and rationality. ‘In his property a person exists for the first time as
reason.’18 Green’s concern as a philosopher of rights was how to
reconcile the conflicting claims of different citizens, particularly the
claims of those with and without property. In this he belonged to the
tradition of English idealism deriving from Coleridge, conduit of
German philosophy, who argued against the factory owners opposed
to the elder Peel’s bill to protect child factory workers in 1818: ‘The
principle of all constitutional law is to make the claims of each as
much as possible compatible with the claims of all, as individuals,
and out of this adjustment the claims of the individual first become
Rights.’19 For Green there was no absolute freedom to do whatever
one liked with one’s property regardless of the harm to others. Rights
were to be measured as means to a single end, the common good:
That end is what I call freedom in the positive sense; in other

words, the liberation of the powers of all men equally for
contributions to a common good. No one has a right to do
what he will with his own in such a way as to contravene this
end. It is only through the guarantee which society gives him
that he has any property at all, or, strictly speaking, any right
to his possessions. This guarantee is founded on a sense of
common interest.20
This did not mean that Green was an out-and-out state

interventionist or, as some have claimed, the father of the welfare
125
state. His notion of the state’s intervention was strictly limited to

correcting injustices perpetrated by property owners against the
propertyless, such as child labour or the oppression of the Irish
peasant:
It is the business of the state, not indeed directly to promote

moral goodness, for that, from the very nature of moral
goodness, it cannot do, but to maintain the conditions without
which a free exercise of the human faculties is impossible.21
But his considerable influence was all thrown on the side of the
responsibilities of property rather than its rights, and of the duty of
the community to override those rights when they conflicted with
the needs of persons.
His disciples were of many political and religious persuasions,
but they applied his notion of the limited rights of property in all
their spheres of influence. Arnold Toynbee applied it to the Old
Liberalism to justify the Irish Land Act of 1881 which overrode the
rights of Irish landlords to evict Irish tenants in the name of
freedom of contract, on the grounds:
First, that where the individual rights conflict with the

interests of the community, there the State ought to interfere;
and, second, that where the people are unable to provide a
thing for themselves, and that thing is of primary social
importance, then again the State should interfere and provide
it for them.22
The London Ethical Society was founded in 1886 by a group of

Green’s more rationalist or agnostic students working in and
around Toynbee Hall, and came to include the Oxford idealists
Edward Caird and William Wallace, the Cambridge utilitarians
Henry Sidgwick, Leslie Stephen and Sir John Seeley, as well as the
COS individualists C.S.Loch and Bernard Bosanquet, and the
Fabians J.A.Hobson and Graham Wallas. They applied his teaching
to the social problems of the day, which they regarded as moral
problems concerning the duties of property.23 The Christian Social
Union, formed amongst Green’s high church followers led by
Charles Gore and Scott Holland after the publication in 1889 of
Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation,
126
applied it to the social teaching of the church. The CSU was

founded, according to Bishop Gore, as ‘a tardy act of repentance’
by the Christian church in a situation in which ‘a widespread
rebellion of Labour was organizing itself against the economic
slavery of the workers, and against a condition of the law which
seemed to regard property as more sacrosanct than persons’.24 And,
as late as 1902, Herbert Samuel, a Balliol man and founder of the
Society for the Study of Social Ethics, was applying it to the New
Liberalism, and the need for the Liberals, if they wished to lead the
nation, to regard ‘men’s lives and happiness of higher importance
than the rights of property’.25
That such divergent secular and religious followers of Green’s
philosophy of contingent property should express themselves in
such convergent terms was due less to his personal charisma—long
after he was dead—than to his clear expression of the professional
ideal, which put persons and their needs before property and its
rights. Green’s message of the moral responsibility of property and
privilege ‘spoke to the condition’ of middle-class men and women
brought up in Evangelical and often professional homes who, like
him, were losing their religious faith and looking for an ethical
substitute in the service of humanity. It reached for a wider
audience through the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward,
granddaughter of Thomas and niece of Matthew Arnold, especially
Robert Elsmere (1888) and Marcella (1894). Robert Elsmere, of
which about a million copies were sold worldwide, concerns an
Oxford student of ‘Professor Grey’ who, after becoming a country
clergyman and losing his faith, goes under Grey’s influence to work
in the East End and, like Arnold Toynbee, wears himself out in the
service of the poor. The heroine of Marcella, who at first bears a
striking resemblance to Beatrice Webb, gives up a brilliant life in
‘society’ to become a social worker, joins the ‘Venturists’,
recognizably the Fabians, and finally retires to her country estate
and an idyllic marriage to do good works as a model Lady
Bountiful.26 Through such popular media Green’s ‘politics of
conscience’ had an influence far beyond Oxford and Toynbee Hall.
Nothing could be further from the organic social theory of the
Oxford idealists than the rational utilitarianism which thrived
unalloyed at Cambridge. Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall were
the self-appointed intellectual heirs of John Stuart Mill, the first in
political and moral philosophy, the second in political economy. Both
127
rejected the cloudy metaphysics, as they saw it, of the Oxford

idealists, and thought Bentham’s principle of utility (the ‘maximum
pleasure, minimum pain’ principle) ‘a universally applicable standard
for selecting and regulating our activities’.27 Yet utilitarianism was a
deeply ambiguous theory and, as we have seen in Mill himself, could
as easily justify socialism as it could individualism. The greatest
happiness of the greatest number could lead as readily as Green’s
communal theory of rights to the notion of the ‘positive freedom’ of
the many propertyless, to be achieved by limiting the freedom of the
few property owners. From the beginning Bentham and James Mill,
watchdogs of the taxpayers’ property against the peculations of ‘Old
Corruption’, had not blenched at state interference with the rights of
inherited property. Bentham’s doctrine of ‘escheat’ would, after a
stated number of inheritances confined to immediate descendants,
have returned land into the hands of the state (a sort of creeping
nationalization), while James Mill’s proposal for the taxation of the
unearned increment of land values, which his son took over and
made the main tenet of his Land Tenure Reform Association of 1870,
anticipated Henry George’s ‘single tax’.28 While Sidgwick studiously
ignored or brushed aside John Stuart Mill’s collectivist tendencies,
attributing them to the aberrant influence of his wife Harriet Taylor,
Alfred Marshall, the founder of neo-classical economics, frequently
expressed sympathy for socialism but thought it impracticable; he
even declared himself a socialist in so far as this meant that some of
the work of social amelioration could be better performed by the
state than by the individual. He merely drew the line, like Mill, at the
bureaucratic tyranny which might ensue from the wholesale transfer
to the state of the ownership of the means of production.29 He was
no less concerned than Green to educate his students to go forth and
improve the world outside the university. As he said in his inaugural
lecture in 1885:
it will be my cherished ambition, my highest endeavour…to

increase the numbers of those, whom Cambridge, the mother
of strong men, sends out into the world with cool heads and
warm hearts willing to give some at least of their best powers
to grappling with the social suffering around them; resolved
not to rest content until they have done what in them lies to
discover how far it is possible to open up to all the material
means for a refined and noble life.30
128
His hope for the future of the working classes was in effect to
professionalize them, to make their work consistent with being an
industrious ‘gentleman’:
The question is not whether all men will ultimately be equal—
that they certainly will not—but whether progress may not go
on steadily if slowly, till the official distinction between
working man and gentleman has passed away; till by
occupation at least, every man is a gentleman. I hold that it
may, and that it will.31
Marshall’s views of property were superficially orthodox but
fundamentally radical. He believed that private gain was necessary
for industrial progress, to induce men of enterprise to exert
themselves to the utmost, but that the enormous fortunes which
successful men now made and passed on to their heirs were
counterproductive and tended to prevent human faculties from
being turned to their best account. ‘So far as the rights of property
have a “natural” and “indefensible” basis, the first place is to be
attached to that property which any one has made or honestly
acquired by his own labour. But the right does not automatically
pass on to his heirs….’ Taxes levied on the rich, especially
graduated death duties, were ethically justified, not only to pay for
war but to provide a good and varied education and open-air
recreation for working-class children, who might do more in open
competition than less motivated inheritors to increase the national
wealth.32 Here too we can glimpse the professional ideal of social
efficiency as the test of taxation policy, and of property as
contingent upon its use for socially beneficial purposes.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find Marshall’s pupils, despite
their apparent economic orthodoxy, proposing policies worthy of
Robin Hood, robbing the rich to feed and clothe the poor. The
greatest of them, John Maynard Keynes, was to turn capitalism
upside down by making spending on the poor its salvation from
depression and bankruptcy. But that was to be between the wars.
Meanwhile, another Cambridge man with a social conscience,
Charles Masterman, helped Lloyd George and Winston Churchill
to prepare the People’s Budget of 1909 and the National Insurance
Act of 1911, as well as numerous other social reforms.33 Finally, A.
C.Pigou, Marshall’s successor and the pioneer of ‘welfare
economies’, declared in 1914:
129
The position from which I start is this. It is the duty of a

civilized state to lay down certain minimum conditions in
every department of life, below which it refuses to allow any
of its free citizens to fall. There must be a minimum standard
of conditions in factories, a minimum standard…of leisure, a
minimum standard of dwelling accommodation, a minimum
standard of education, of medical treatment in case of illness,
and of wholesome food and clothing… The standards must be
upheld all along the line, and any man or family which fails
to attain independently to any one of them must be regarded
as a proper subject for state action.34
This demand by a neo-classical economist for a ‘national minimum’

to be paid for out of taxes levied on the rich, with its echo of the
Fabian socialist Webbs’ Industrial Democracy (1902),35 must have
sounded to the landed and capitalist classes like a more immediate
threat to the security of property than the metaphysical theorizing
of Green and his idealist disciples.
The Webbs and Fabian socialism bring us to the third and by far
the most conscious and deliberate attack on the concept of absolute
property. The rise of socialism from the 1880s down to 1914 has
usually been treated either as an autonomous development in the
history of political ideas or as an aspect of the rise of labour. The
extent to which it was a self-interested movement of marginal
members of the professional middle class has been almost
completely overlooked, except by Peter Clarke and Eric
Hobsbawm.36 With a few exceptions like H.M.Hyndman, the
rentier founder of the Social Democratic Federation, and Keir
Hardie, the coalmining leader of the Independent Labour Party, the
great majority of the leading members of the various socialist
societies of the period were professional men and women, rarely, at
first at any rate, at the head of their professions: William Morris the
artist-craftsman, Sidney Webb and Sydney Olivier the civil
servants, Bernard Shaw and H.G.Wells the professional authors,
J.A.Hobson, Graham Wallas and L.T.Hobhouse struggling
academics, and so on.37 Although they espoused the cause of the
working class and in facetious moments thought of themselves in
Bernard Shaw’s phrase as ‘intellectual proletarians’, they were not
motivated by the working-class ideal of a society based on
egalitarian labour but by the professional ideal of an elitist society
130
run by professional experts. All their solutions to the social

problems of the day were professional and bureaucratic: industrial
democracy would be a corporatist economy mediated on the
management and union sides by ‘equally expert negotiators, acting
for corporations reasonably comparable in strategic strength’,
overlooked by expert representatives of the High Court of
Parliament for the community as a whole; the bumbling amateurish
Poor Law would be replaced by separate bureaucracies of social
workers for every category of social need; municipal socialism
would take care through local government officials of all local
services from gas and water to public transport; grants-in-aid to the
municipalities would bring them under the bureaucratic control of
the central government; and the major industries like coal, the
docks and the railways would be run by nationalized
bureaucracies.38 The workers were to have little or no part in the
management of these concerns, since all experiments with the self-
governing workshop were bound to fail because ‘its essential
feature, the union in the same persons of manual workers and
managers, hardly ever endures’.39 Expert managerialism was the
key to success; H.G.Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905) was to be run
by bureaucratic samurai; Bernard Shaw’s future world of the
Ancients in Back to Methuselah (1931) by the ultimate
professionals, the long-lived Ancients.
Even the idealistic benevolence of the young men from the
universities, like William Beveridge, R.H.Tawney, Clement Attlee
and Hugh Dalton, who thronged to Samuel and Henrietta Barnett’s
Toynbee Hall and other university settlements, were imbued with
professional ambition. As George Lansbury, the East End Labour
politician, remarked of them in 1928:
The most important result of the mixing policy of the

Barnetts, has been the filling up of the bureaucracy of
government and administration with men and women who
went to the East End full of enthusiasm and zeal for the
welfare of the masses, and discovered the advancement of
their own interests and the interests of the poor were best
served by leaving East London to stew in its own juice while
they became members of parliament, cabinet ministers, civil
servants….40
131
Yet it would be cynical to imagine that the professionals were

attracted to bureaucratic socialism merely by the prospect of jobs
for the boys. Much more importantly, it appealed to their in-built
professional ideal of social efficiency and the professional concept
of property. The Fabians were the first to define professional
property in terms foursquare with land and capital. Sidney Webb in
1887 referred to the ‘rents’ of land, capital and labour.41 Graham
Wallas translated this into the doctrine of the three rents, ‘the Rent
of Land, of Capital and of Ability’. The Fabians, Wallas believed,
were distinguished from the Ricardians, who recognized only the
rent of land, and from the Marxists, who added the rent (profit or
‘surplus value’) from capital, by their perception of all three:
We therefore came into the Society ready-made Anti-Marxists,

and at once began that insistence on the Ricardian Law of
Rent as applied to Capital and Ability, as well as to Land
which made William Morris say ‘These Fabians call their
noddles their Rents of Ability.’42
Wallas, a sceptical socialist who eventually abandoned the Fabian

Society for the New Liberalism, nevertheless consistently believed
in the ‘greatest happiness’ principle: ‘every step which leads to
increased happiness, education and leisure, for our fellow-men is a
step forward for our Cause.’ It followed that it was the ‘personal
duty’ of the professional man to devote his rent of ability to social
purposes, though, true to professional self-interest, ‘he must see
that he gets his full pay.’43 The rent of ability would of course
outlast the abolition of the rents of land and capital, and the
professional, bureaucratic and managerial services which yielded it
would be just as necessary after the social revolution or the gradual
transition to socialism as before. As H.G.Wells put it of Wallas,
Morris and the Kelmscott House circle, ‘They took the idea of
getting a living as something by the way; a sort of living was there
for them anyhow.’44 From the point of view of land and capital,
professional property was a threat precisely because it could
contemplate with equanimity their abolition.45
The idealist, utilitarian, and socialist threats to absolute property
were summed up in 1909 by J.A.Hobson, the unorthodox economist
who seemed to unite in himself the idealism of Green, the welfare
economics of Marshall, and the interventionism of the Fabians:
132
a clear grasp of society as an economic organisation

completely explodes the notion of property as an inherent
individual right for it shows that no individual can make or
appropriate anything of value without the direct continuous
assistance of society. So the idea of society as a political
organism insists that the general will and wisdom of society,
as embodied in the State, shall determine the best social use of
all social property taken by taxation, without admitting any
inherent right of interference on the part of the taxpayer.46
The threat was initially abstract and theoretical, and would become
dangerous only to the extent that it took concrete form in practical
proposals for legislation. Between 1880 and 1914 this is precisely
what it did, in an interconnected series of movements which looked
to property owners like a concerted and progressive attack on the
rights of property. These were the land reform movement, the
campaign for municipal socialism, and the drift towards collectivist
social reform.
The land reform movement was a perfect example of the
divergence of the capitalist and professional social ideals. It began
as a united middle-class attack in the name of active capital and
professional service on the ‘idle wealth’ and ‘unearned rent’ of the
landlords, led by the two Mills and the Benthamites on one side,
and by Cobden, Bright and the Anti-Corn Law League on the
other.47 After a chequered career from the 1840s to the 1860s, it
reached a crescendo in the 1870s, and by 1880 Disraeli could say:
If I were asked to mention the two subjects which most

occupy the thought of the country at the present moment, I
should say one was the government of Ireland, and the other
the principles upon which the landed property of this country
should continue to be established.
The Irish question, which turned on the relations between alien

landlords and Catholic peasants, was always with us, but it was his
‘profound conviction—that the politics of this country…will
probably, for the next few years, mainly consist in an assault upon
the constitutional position of the landed interest’.48 He was right.
The Irish Land Act of 1881, forced on the British government by
the plight of the Irish peasants under the agricultural depression
133
and the consequent evictions and threat of violence, made the

deepest breach since feudal times in the landlord’s absolute right to
do what he wished with his property. Its ‘three F’s’, ‘fair rent’,
‘fixity of tenure’ and ‘freedom of sale’ of the tenant’s interest, in
effect transferred part of the beneficial ownership of the land from
the landlord to the tenant. It was the first example of what may be
called modern ‘subinfeudation’, the slotting-in of new claimants to
a place in the hierarchy of permanent tenures on the lines of
medieval ‘subinfeudation’ in the first centuries after the Norman
Conquest. It was bound, as Lord Salisbury later complained, to
lead to parallel demands from Scottish crofters, Welsh farmers and
English tenants, all of whom suffered from falling agricultural
prices and had similar grievances against their landlords, such as
lack of compensation for ‘unexhausted improvements’ and for the
game birds and animals which ate their crops.49 The Ground Game
Act of 1880 enabled British farmers to take hares and rabbits
concurrently with their landlords, though the far more damaging
pheasants, partridges and deer still brought the landlords a ‘double
rent’ from the same land. Meanwhile the Agricultural Holdings Act
of 1883 prevented landlords from contracting out of their
obligation under the 1875 Act to compensate outgoing tenants for
improvements. The Scottish highlanders gained the same security of
tenure and controlled rents as the Irish peasant under the Crofters
Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886, though the Royal Commission on
the Occupation of Land in Wales in 1896 was split on the method
of applying the same principles to the Welsh farmers, with the result
that nothing was done there.
What set the land reform movement alight, however, and drove
a fire lane between its capitalist and professional middle-class
versions, was the publication of Henry George’s Progress and
Poverty, in America in 1880 and in England in 1881, with its theory
of rent as the sole cause of slums and poverty and its remedy of the
‘single tax’ on land, designed to take back for the community most
of what in Ricardian theory the landlords took from the
community in unearned rent. The book sold 60,000 copies in
England by 1885, was eagerly read by people as diverse as
H.M.Hyndman and Herbert Spencer, John Morley and Joseph
Chamberlain, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, Arnold
Toynbee and Frederic Harrison, Lord Salisbury and Tom Mann,
and led the Christian Socialist Steward Headlam to talk of ‘a man
134
sent from God whose name was Henry George’. 50 He was

welcomed to England on his triumphal lecture tour in 1881 by
Helen Taylor, Mill’s stepdaughter and co-founder of the Land
Tenure Reform Association, and Alfred Russel Wallace, founder of
the Land Nationalization Society. Georgism was the catalyst which
transformed many moderate land reformers, believers in ‘free trade
in land’ (the abolition of primogeniture, strict settlement, entail,
and other hindrances to the free sale of land) into root and branch
opponents of private property in land and, sometimes, into
socialists believing in the public ownership of the mines, railways
and other means of production.51
At the same time, Georgism was the wedge which separated
those reformers who believed in the absolute sanctity of property
from those who believed that the rights and needs of the
community overrode those of the private proprietor. The line was a
fine one, which could leave many Liberal business men, and
especially urban councillors who had no doubts about the
Tightness of the capitalist system, to support the growing Liberal
programme (from 1888 onwards) for the special taxation of land
values, but it could also lead the fastidious Alfred Russel Wallace
and his Land Nationalization Society to repudiate the single tax as
confiscatory, whereas land nationalization respected property
rights enough to pay compensation for them. This distinction led to
the breakaway of the Land Reform Union (later the English Land
Restoration League, the main Georgist organization) in 1883 to
organize George’s second lecture tour of Britain. George himself
was no socialist, and his nostrum, the taxation of site values, was
a method of separating the local government taxation of the
ground landlord from that of the residential or business occupier.
This was to become the main objective of Sir Albert Kaye Rollit,
leader of the powerful Association of Municipal Corporations, who
saw in it the possibility of financial independence for the towns by
expanding the tax base and of an escape from the bureaucratic
control of the central government.52 At the same time, socialists like
Wallace could think George’s disregard for property rights too
extreme for them.
Nevertheless, Georgism was seen, especially by the defenders of
property, as the main slide on the slippery slope which led from the
tampering with the integrity of property in Ireland, via the
restrictions on the landlord’s rights represented by ‘free trade in
135
land’, through to outright confiscation. As Lord Salisbury put it in

1884, ‘We are on an inclined plane which leads from the position of
Lord Hartington to that of Mr Chamberlain and so on to the
depths over which Mr Henry George reigns supreme.’53
It would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that only
business men favoured moderate land reform and professional men
the Georgist single tax and more extreme forms of expropriation of
land and land-based resources. Class ideals do not operate in that
mechanical manner. There were business men like Rowntree and
rentiers like Josiah Wedgwood who played a leading role in the
Liberal land campaigns down to the First World War and beyond,
and there were professional men likeW. H.Mallock, Sir Alfred
Milner and Lord Chancellor Haldane who played a leading role in
outwitting them, not to mention Lloyd George who
characteristically played it both ways.54 Moreover, there was one
group of professional men, the conveyancing lawyers and the estate
agents, who had a vested interest in maintaining the old land law
and for whom reform, as the Law Society saw it, would be suicidal.
Avner Offer has perceptively observed that for the legal profession
the law of property itself had become a species of corporate
property, which supported some scores of thousands of black-
coated workers. Like any professional or other occupational group
threatened with extinction they fought with fury and ingenuity
against one instrument of free trade in land, the registration of title,
which could have made dealing in land as cheap and simple as
dealing in stocks and shares. 55 In that purpose they have
substantially succeeded down to the present day.56 This illustrates
perfectly the concept of professional property based on a persuasive
monopoly and the fact that its defence will always take priority
over attacks on other kinds of property.
Nevertheless, there is a very real sense in which the professional
concept of contingent property, legitimized by some form of service
to the community, informed the land reform movement and at the
same time alienated those who came to see in it the first step
towards the abolition of property altogether, including the capital
of the business man. The Economist in 1885 rebuked Chamberlain
after his Birmingham speech linking land reform to social reform:
Mr Chamberlain, of course, knows perfectly well the value of

the institution of private property, and he is not going to
136
commit political suicide by joining the movement for

nationalization of the land, which will, sooner or later,
incorporate among its aims the nationalization of…capital.57
Lord Salisbury complained in 1894 that ‘The landlord is assuming

the position of the Jew of the Middle Ages or the pariah of India.
He is an outcast…who has no rights’, and went on to warn business
men that ‘other contracts besides those of land will be subjected to
the same idea’.58 The alliance of land and capital against the
common threat was institutionalized as early as 1882 in the Liberty
and Property Defence League.59 Long before Georgist taxation of
land values entered into Liberal policy in 1899 and Liberal
legislation with the People’s Budget of 1909, many business men
had begun to jump off the slippery slope and take refuge behind the
safer ramparts of property in the Tory Party.60
‘Municipalism’, as the Association of Municipal Corporations
called it, or ‘municipal socialism’, as it came to be called under the
combined influence of the individualists and the Fabians, also began
as a proud achievement of the united urban middle class and only
gradually divided those who came to fear it as a threat to private
enterprise from those who welcomed it as a step on the way to public
ownership and the socialist state. As Asa Briggs has explained, the
splendid town halls of the Victorian age were monuments to a civic
pride which rejoiced in municipal enterprise, with borough water
and sewage works, town gas and electricity supplies, municipal
trams and buses, and so on.61 Liverpool and Manchester had
pioneered slum clearance and the rebuilding of working-class
housing. Birmingham under Joseph Chamberlain had become a
byword for efficient civic trading. For Chamberlain and his kind this
was not socialism but capitalism, of the best public-spirited kind. As
late as 1896 he told a Birmingham banquet of like-minded citizens:
I have always compared the work of a great corporation like

this to that of a joint-stock company, in which the directors
are represented by the Councillors of the City, and in which
the dividends are to be found in the increased health and
wealth and happiness and education of the community.62
In these sentiments he was warmly supported by the Association of

Municipal Corporations and its commanding president, the
137
Conservative MP Sir Albert Kaye Rollit, who preached civic

spending on welfare as the best safeguard against socialism.63
The Fabians undermined their own efforts at permeation by
proclaiming the principle of trading by borough corporations a step
on the way to socialism. ‘Municipal socialism’ seems to have been
invented by W.C.Crofts, secretary of the Liberty and Property
Defence League, in a pamphlet of that title in 1885, but it was the
Fabians’ flaunting of it as a deliberate threat to private enterprise
which gave its enemies a handle. In 1890 Sidney Webb wrote,
‘municipal socialism has…the effect of absorbing in “rates” a share
of the rental of the country. Our progressive municipalization of
rent by increase of local rates, is clearly an unconscious form of
Land Nationalization’. 64 Between them the Fabians and the
individualists of the LPDL turned a bipartisan policy of
encouraging the towns to do for their inhabitants what the latter
could not do, or do so well, for themselves into a political threat to
property and enterprise. This threat was inflamed when the
Progressive Party, a combination of New Liberals and Fabians,
came to dominate the London County Council in the 1890s and
early 1900s and to press not merely for self-supporting municipal
trading ventures but for high spending on technical education and
other welfare measures. Ratepayers’ associations, an old and often
Cobdenite or Gladstonian Liberal device for checking municipal
extravagance, were now revived, beginning with the London
Ratepayers’ Defence League in 1894, an offshoot of the LPDL, to
oppose high spending and the taxation of ground values.65 In
London Lord Avebury of the LPDL formed the Industrial Freedom
League in 1902 to combat municipal socialism, and the new right-
wing Municipal Reform Society, strongly supported by the national
press, wrested control of the London County Council from the
Progessives in 1907. The agitation was exacerbated by the collapse
of the property boom in the mid-1900s and the concurrent steep
rise in London rates.66 By 1909 the Property Owners’ Journal was
complaining of ‘a depression like Egyptian Darkness’, of the word
‘site values’ as ‘a quivering shaft in the heart of ground rent
owners’, ‘a savagery suggestive of cannibals’ in medical officers of
health who prosecuted house owners for breaches of ‘ridiculous
bye-laws’, of unrentable empty houses, and of ‘rates ascending to
the giddy heights of Everest’.67 George Head, a leading surveyor,
responded in 1910 to the land tax clauses of the People’s Budget:
138
Socialistic schemes are in the air which…tinge and colour the

policy of the great party with which they are most nearly
allied. Some discern in the bills brought before the Houses of
Parliament by H.M.Government more than a mild flavour of
socialist confiscation.68
By then most of the ratepayers’ associations which used to be a

pillar of the Old Liberalism had in their resentment of the New
gone over to the Conservative side.69 Municipal trading, once a
vehicle of capitalist civic pride, had become one more example of
the social service demanded of property
The tinge of socialism which Head had discovered in the Liberal
welfare measures of the later Edwardian age was a reflection of
that drift towards collectivism which A.V.Dicey complained of in
his Lectures on Law and Opinion in 1905. The puzzle is why the
blame for collectivism, which played an increasing, if somewhat
ambivalent, role in the social legislation of both major parties from
at least the 1830s onwards should have been laid, not by Dicey
alone but by the propertied classes generally, at the door of the
Liberal Party. Although both parties were committed to factory
legislation, public health expenditure and inspection, prevention of
food and drug adulteration, state education (including secondary
and technical education), workmen’s compensation, old age
pensions, and a range of other welfare measures, the Liberals came
to be more associated with high expenditure on social reform than
were the Conservatives, and were therefore blamed by property
owners for the ‘crippling burden’ on the rich and middle classes
which this was held to represent. The immediate reason for this lay
in the manner of paying for social reform. The Liberals sought
increases in direct taxation of the well-to-do, by means of higher
rates, taxation of land values, graduated death duties (first
introduced by Harcourt in 1894) and graduated income tax (first
introduced with differential rates for earned and unearned income
by Asquith in 1906, and more overtly with the supertax in Lloyd
George’s 1909 Budget), while the Tories preferred indirect taxes,
notably tariff reform, which would spread the burden more widely
and regressively amongst the non-rich. Thus it was that Liberal
social reform, already tarred with the brush of land reform,
Georgist land value taxation and municipal socialism, as well as
with their overt connections with the Lib-Labs and covert alliance
139
with the Labour movement, came to present itself as the final step
on the slippery slope to ‘socialism’.
Behind this immediate cause, however, lay a more deep-seated
one. It can best be described as an approach to social justice and
national efficiency. Whereas the Conservatives tended to see social
reform as a belated and reluctant means to social stability, the
prevention of discontent and revolution, the ‘ransom’ which
property had to pay for its security, and one of the main ramparts
of property, the Liberals increasingly saw it in moral and
technocratic terms, as the right of every citizen to the basic
necessities of life, to protection from at least the most harmful
effects of industrialism and urbanization, and even to a somewhat
fairer start in life in terms of health and education, not merely for
the sake of fairness but also for the sake of the economic, political
and military efficiency of the nation. The actual social reforms
which they passed were a pragmatic melange of many factors and
compromises, as we shall see, but running through them all were
the politics of conscience and the demand for social justice and
efficiency.
Whence came this transition from the Old Liberalism, which
stressed the political and legal equality of citizens in the free
competition for income and wealth, to the New Liberalism, which
concentrated on the social rights of citizens to minimum
subsistence, more equal opportunity, and a fitter and more effective
nation? It was in fact a paradigm of the divergence of the
professional from the capitalist social ideal, the separation of the
professional view that the rights of persons and the welfare of the
community came before the rights of property, from the capitalist
view that free and unfettered competition between political and
legal equals led to prosperity for all. It was not merely that the
politics of social responsibility preached by T.H.Green, Alfred
Marshall, the Christian Socialists and the Fabians had more
successfully infiltrated the ranks of the Liberal Party. It was also
that those same principles, perceived as a threat to property, both in
land and in capital, had by the Edwardian age driven out nearly all
the landowners and a large proportion of the business men
including, it would seem, a majority of the big corporate and
financial capitalists. Who had replaced them in the domination of
the party? In the 1905 Cabinet for the first time land and capital
were outnumbered, and (if we count John Burns as a professional
140
trade union leader) by a professional or at least non-propertied

majority. By 1911 when, for the first time, the Conservatives chose
a business man, Bonar Law, as Leader, the Liberal Cabinet was
dominated by lawyers, Asquith, Haldane, Lloyd George, McKenna
and Birrell. Although there were other influences still at work in
Edwardian Liberalism—the fear of most merchants and some
industrialists of tariff reform, the dwindling role of the
Nonconformists, the need to placate and retain the Lib-Labs and to
outflank the new Labour Party—the influence of the professional
ideal, with its championship of social justice and efficiency and its
perceived threat to property, was the most critical for its survival.
We can best see this if we examine, firstly, the reactive movement
for the defence of property and, secondly, the role of the
professional ideal in the origins of the welfare state.
3 THE DEFENCE OF PROPERTY

The attack on absolute property was bound to provoke an
energetic and spirited defence, not only from the directly threatened
landlords and capitalists but also from those professional men who
supported them and were still wedded to traditional ideas of
property and laissez-faire. The defence was not simply a war of
words but an organized counterattack with its own institutional
armies. It was led by great landlords like the Earl of Wemyss and
Earl Grey and capitalists like Sir George Livesey of the South
Metropolitan Gasworks and G.A.Laws, first general manager of
the Shipping Federation, both scourges of the New Unionism. Yet
the heat and burden of the battle was borne by the professional
men who inspired the defence or worked as organizers and
propagandists for the organizations through which it was mounted.
Their participation came to have a curious and paradoxical effect.
Although in the short term they were effective in arresting the
decline of property rights and slowing down the progress of
collectivist legislation, in the long term, as we shall see, the
arguments which they mounted in defence of property and against
state intervention, based as they frequently were on the same
professional ideal, helped almost as much as those of their
professional opponents to undermine the absolute rights of
property. This they did by emphasizing its responsibilities and
promoting ideas of a wider distribution of property, extended social
141
reform, and co-partnership with the wage earners, which paved the
way for a new relationship between capital and labour.
The guiding spirit of the defence of property in this period was
that old Bourbon of individualism, Herbert Spencer, spokesman of
the undiluted entrepreneurial ideal. Spencer was an Adam Smithian
rather than a Benthamite individualist, believing in the natural
rather than the artificial or state-contrived harmony of interests.70
This accounts for his shrill attack on Bentham’s belief that rights,
including property, were created by society, and that government
therefore had the power to modify them for the benefit of the non-
propertied.71 Spencer raised the natural harmony of interests to a
higher and terrifying power. By adopting a crude form of ‘Social
Darwinism’ (strictly pre-Darwinian, Lamarckian evolution, which
appeared in Social Statics in 1851, eight years before The Origin of
Species), he extended ‘the survival of the fittest’ from the jungle of
carnivores and herbivores to the civilized garden of human society,
in a passage of such cold-blooded callousness that it is worth
quoting at length:
Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline,

which is a little cruel that it may be kind. That state of
universal warfare maintained throughout the lower creation…
is at bottom the most merciful provision which the
circumstances admit of.
Carnivores weed out the old, sickly and malformed among the
herbivores, and so ‘happiness is derived for a tribe of predatory
creatures’. In the name of free competition human predators must
therefore be allowed to perform the same benevolent function in
civil society.
It is in the human race that the consummation is to be

accomplished. Civilization is the last stage of that
accomplishment… [T]he well-being of existing humanity and
the unfolding of that perfection, are both secured by that
beneficent, though severe discipline to which the animate
creation at large is subject: a discipline which is pitiless in the
working out of good: a felicity-producing law which never
swerves for the avoidance of partial and temporary suffering.
The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon
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the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those

shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so
many ‘in shallows and in miseries’, are decrees of a large, far-
seeing benevolence. It seems hard that an unskilfulness which
with all his efforts he can not overcome, should entail hunger
upon the artizan. It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated
by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should
have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that
widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life and
death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately but in
connection with the interests of universal humanity, these
harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence—
the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children
of diseased parents, and singles out the intemperate and the
debilitated as the victims of an epidemic.72
This far-seeing benevolence was endorsed, he claimed, by

Christianity, which in Spencer’s view allowed the idle poor (but not
apparently the idle rich) to starve:
The command ‘if any would not work neither should he eat’,
is simply a Christian enunciation of that universal law of
Nature under which life has reached its present height—the
law that a creature not energetic enough to maintain itself
must die: the sole difference being that the law which in one
case is to be artificially enforced, is, in the other case, a
natural necessity. And yet this particular tenet of their religion
which science so manifestly justifies, is the one which
Christians seem least likely to accept. The current assumption
is that there should be no suffering, and that society is to
blame for that which exists.73
This curiously un-Christian view of Christianity bore little

resemblance to the teachings of Christ, or even for that matter to
his hero Adam Smith’s well-known sympathy for the poor and
unfortunate.
In the long term, it is true, Spencer believed that civilized men
would develop and transmit by the Lamarckian inheritance of
acquired characteristics an altruistic gratification in the pleasure of
others, but in the meantime the rich were responsible for
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pauperizing the poor by indiscriminate charity and poor relief,

which merely encouraged ‘these swarms of good-for-nothings,
fostered and multiplied by public and private agencies’.74 While
voluntary charity might help the deserving poor to help themselves,
compulsory poor laws and indiscriminate charity only took money
from the employment of the fit and deserving to expand the
number of unfit and undeserving. If the state attempted to limit the
operation of this law of the jungle, it could only make matters
worse, by encouraging the unfit to survive and breed, thus lowering
the average economic and military capacity of the nation.
In The Man versus the State (1884) Spencer was unrepentant—
‘the lapse of a third of a century…has brought the no reason for
retreating from the position’—but more pessimistic. The old, strong,
wise Liberalism, based on the regime of contract and voluntary co-
operation, had been replaced in the Liberal Party by the ‘New
Toryism’, based on the quasi-feudal regime of status and ‘that system
of compulsory co-operation which accompanied the legal inequality
of classes’, and was preparing the way for ‘the coming slavery’ of
socialism.75 By socialism he meant state intervention of any kind,
from factory acts or the banning of ‘coffin ships’ to state education
or nationalized telegraphs. Like Lord Salisbury, he saw these as the
declension into the state control of everything:
the changes made, the changes in progress, and the changes

urged, will carry us not only towards State-ownership of land
and dwellings and means of communication, all to be
administered by State agents, but towards State-usurpation of
all industries… And so will be brought about the desired ideal
of the socialists.76
Democratic control of the state only exacerbated the new

despotism. ‘All socialism involves slavery’. Slavery to the majority
was worse than slavery to the few.77 The propertied legislators who
were perpetrating these ‘confiscating Acts of Parliament’ were
preparing their own nemesis:
For what is the tacit assumption on which such Acts proceed?

It is the assumption that no man has any claim to his
property, not even to that which he has earned by the sweat
of his brow, save by permission of the community; and that
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the community may cancel the claim to any extent it thinks

fit. No defence can be made for this appropriation of A’s
possessions for the benefit of B, save one which sets out with
the postulate that society as a whole has an absolute right
over the possessions of each member. And now this doctrine,
which has been tacitly assumed, is being openly proclaimed.
Mr George and his friends, Mr Hyndman and his supporters,
are pushing this theory to its logical issue.78
Spencer was not alone in his reaction to the Land Acts and the
‘empirical socialism’ of Gladstone’s second government, or to the
threats to property of Henry George, H.M.Hyndman and the
Fabians. In fact, he was being pushed from behind by a group of
disciples who called themselves ‘individualists’ and had formed an
anti-collectivist pressure group, the Political Evolution Society, as
early as 1873, which became the State Resistance Society in 1880.79
This group, led by a Rugby- and Oxford-educated journalist,W.
C.Crofts, who claimed to have coined the term ‘individualism’ in
his lectures to working men’s clubs in 1883, and Wordsworth
Donisthorpe, a mine-owner and lawyer whose anti-statism
bordered on anarchism, formed the brains of the Liberty and
Property Defence League founded in 1882 by Lord Elcho (who
succeeded as Earl of Wemyss and March in 1883). Originally a
Tory turned Peelite and ‘Liberal-Conservative’, Elcho, the self-
styled friend of the working class and patron of Alexander
MacDonald, the miner’s leader, had introduced the partial repeal of
the Master and Servant Acts in 1867, which saved 10,000 workers
a year from imprisonment (though not from fines) for striking
without notice. Despite his belief in good relations between trade
unions and employers, as a great landowner and mine owner (with
a rental of £57,000 a year according to Bateman in 1880) he was
an outspoken opponent of political democracy and of industrial
strikes and picketing. Converted to extreme laissez-faire by what he
saw as the Liberal, Georgist and Socialist attacks on property in the
early 1880s, he set out to form an alliance of moderate Liberals and
Tories, first against Gladstone’s land legislation, and then, partly
under the influence of the Spencerian individualists, on behalf of
the whole propertied interest against ‘socialism’.80
At a crowded inaugural meeting in 1882 the Liberty and
Property Defence League attracted the support of those who saw
145
property, both landed and capitalist, as under threat. Members

came to include Earl Grey, the Duke of Somerset and over sixty
other peers, Sir Edwin Watkin, Lord Brabourne, H.D.Poching and
other railway magnates, Sir George Elliot for the mining engineers,
and representatives of the shipowners, bankers, brewers, and other
great corporate industries, besides some 210 federated trade groups
and twenty London livery companies.81 One curious group of
adherents was ‘the right wing of the women’s rights movement’,
including the Personal Rights Association which grew out of
Josephine Butler’s campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts,
and Helen Blackburn and Jesse Boucherett’s Society for Promoting
the Employment of Women which, with the LPDL’s help,
successfully opposed Thomas Burt and the mining union’s attempt
to ban the employment of some 8,000 ‘pit-brow lasses’ in 1886–87.
Others were the Van Dweller’s Protection Association which
opposed state interference with gypsies, tinkers and other
‘travelling people’, and the London Association for Opposing Early
Closing (of shops), which even opposed the compulsory provision
of seats for women shop assistants.82
But the main concern of the LPDL was the purely negative defence
of the absolute rights of property, opposing to the state a flat ‘hands
off. In pursuit of this it acted as a parliamentary watchdog,
circulating pamphlets, memoranda and weekly tables of bills to be
rejected or amended on behalf of its affiliated organizations, and
claiming to have opposed with ‘more or less success’ nearly 800 bills
by 1900. Amongst these were the series of bills from 1883, held up
until 1897, attempting to prevent employers from ‘contracting out’
of their responsibility for workmen’s compensation for industrial
injuries under the Act of 1880; the Shop Hours Regulation (Early
Closing) bills first introduced in 1873 by Sir John Lubbock (later as
Lord Avebury a pillar of the LPDL) and delayed in part until 1902;
bills to restrict the employment of women in the coal industry,
domestic nail and chair making, and commercial laundries, and of all
factory women within a month of having a baby; Plimsoll’s bills to
require load lines on ships; bills restricting drinking hours and the
numbers of pubs; and many more.83
Spencer himself, growing old, neurasthenic and reclusive, took
little direct part in the League, but he supported it with donations,
and he was instrumental in persuading Lord Wemyss to begin in
1894 the long crusade against municipal trading. But his
146
ideologically committed followers, particularly the League’s first

secretary, W.C.Crofts, Donisthorpe the mine-owning protagonist of
‘absolute philosophical anarchy’ (who broke with Spencer and the
LPDL in 1888 over an article of his on that theme), Thomas
Mackay, historian of the poor law and ideologue of the Charity
Organization Society, Frederick Millar, Crofts’s successor as
secretary, and the brilliant propagandist W.H.Mallock, provided an
endless flow of books, pamphlets, articles, periodicals (Jus and the
Liberty Review), leaflets and popular lectures, attacking state
intervention in all its forms.84 The League’s most influential
production was A Plea for Liberty, published in 1891 as an answer
to Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889). Edited by Thomas Mackay
with an introduction by Spencer himself, it contained a surprising
plea by George Howell, the Lib-Lab MP and ex-Secretary of the
Parliamentary Committee of the TUC, for ‘Liberty for Labour’.85
Free labour’ was one of the main obsessions of the League, and
its concern to protect non-union workers from the ‘tyranny of
trade-unionism’ brought it into the forefront of the employers’
counterattack on the New Unionism. Although William Collison,
the ex-trade union leader who founded the National Free Labour
Association, the main strike-breaking organization, in 1893 was
not associated with the League until 1897, when it established the
Free Labour Protection Association to help the Engineering
Employers’ Federation break the engineers’ strike, the LPDL played
an active role in advising employers engaged in the legal battles of
the 1890s which limited trade union rights and culminated in the
crippling Taff Vale judgment. Another offshoot of the League and
its auxiliary, the FLPA, was the Employers’ Parliamentary Council,
launched in 1898 to encourage legislation restricting trade union
picketing, the closed shop and sympathetic strikes, and to oppose
any reversal by Parliament of anti-trade union judicial decisions. It
came to play a successful role, until the return of the Liberals in
1906, in maintaining the Taff Vale decision.86
The final campaign of importance by the League was that
launched against municipal socialism in 1899. Although Spencer
had long warned against the steady growth of state ownership and
control of industry through ‘its local lieutenants, the municipal
governments’ and the enormous rise in annual local expenditure
(from £36 million in 1867–68 to £63 million in 1880–81), the
League had done little about it until one of its prominent members,
147
Joseph Savory, Lord Mayor of London and a large shareholder in

the City of London Electric Company which was caught out in
corrupt dealings, lost a libel suit against the weekly London, organ
of the LCC majority Progressive Party. The League’s petitions
‘against the dangers of municipal trading’ were
signed by railway, tramway, gas, engineering, electric lighting,
water, etc. companies, by Chambers of Commerce, and by
associations of employers, traders, property owners and
ratepayers throughout the United Kingdom, [and] presented in
the House of Commons by Sir John Lubbock, in the House of
Lords by the Earl of Wemyss.87
Lubbock, created Lord Avebury in 1900, led the campaign against
municipal reform and launched the Industrial Freedom League in
1902, backed by a wide range of companies headed by the Electric
and General Investment Company and the British Electric Traction
Company, which hoped to share in the profits from municipal
electricity supply, tramways, and similar urban utilities. It found an
ally in Gerald Balfour, President of the Board of Trade, nephew of
the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, and brother to the next, Arthur
Balfour. Unfortunately for the League and the IFL, this brought
them into direct conflict with the powerful Association of
Municipal Corporations headed by the rock-like Sir Albert Kaye
Rollit, who fought the companies to a draw: the towns provided
more electric power and tramway mileage, but ‘municipal trading
was blunted for a generation.’88
The Liberty and Property Defence League began to fade during
the Liberal Government of 1906–10. By 1909 it had become no
more than a token organization, and in February of that year the
last issue of the Liberty Review appeared. Although the League
outlasted Wemyss’s death at the age of 96 in 1914 when he was
succeeded as President by the Duke of Somerset, it had become an
anachronism.89 The reasons for this were ironical. It had come to be
recognized even by the Conservative Party as too rigid and
aggressive, and it was overshadowed by the more flexible and
social reforming Anti-Socialist Union, founded by delegates from
the London Municipal Society, the Industrial Freedom League, the
Middle Classes Defence League and the (Tory) Primrose League in
1907. The chairman of the Union, Claude Lowther, an ex-
Conservative MP, attacked the LPDL in 1911:
148
We regard the Liberty and Property Defence League as a

dangerous reactionary group which engenders more socialism
in one week than it prevents in a year by its wholesale
opposition to all proposals which make for the people’s
welfare. Here is the secretary [Frederick Millar] of an
organization which exists to fight socialism actually
proclaiming…a policy of negation. All logical minds must
recognize that the extreme individualist is as absurd a member
of the community as a pure collectivist. The latter is a
socialist, the former is an anarchist.
Social reform and class reconciliation were, he claimed, more

intelligent and effective ways of weaning the working class from
socialism than confrontation and abuse.90
Within the LPDL, W.H.Mallock, its most far-sighted
propagandist, had defended capitalism on the elitist grounds that the
capitalists provided the incentive and managerial ability which,
rather than labour, was the true source of value, and the social
leadership for solving industry’s and society’s problems. In 1888 he
recommended not only better industrial relations, high wages, and
consultation between employers and workers, but also a government
Labour Department to gather statistics on unemployment, state
provision of public works and other help for the unavoidably
unemployed, voluntary unemployment insurance, and even a
statutory right to work. Instead of the ‘present bickerings or
smouldering war between labour and capital…we should have a
dispassionate conference between equally necessary estates.’91
Whether consciously or not, many paternalist employers like
Thomas Bushill, David Dale, Cadbury, Rowntree, George Thomson,
W.H.Lever and John Lockie followed this advice and tried to create
joint organizations of employers and trade unionists like the
Industrial Union of Employers and Employed (1894) and the
National Industrial Association (1900) which, though short-lived,
were a step on the way to mutual recognition and negotiation.
Others sought a way to industrial peace which they picked up from
Thomas Hughes, E.V.Neale, and the Christian Socialist tradition of
co-operative workshops.92 Amongst these the most surprising
experimenter was Sir George Livesey, anti-unionist and main
financial support of the Liberty Review, who crushed Will Thorne’s
Gasworkers’ Union at the South Metropolitan Gasworks in 1890 but
149
became the greatest advocate amongst employers of profit sharing,

as well as paid holidays, sick pay, pensions, and widows’ and
orphans’ funds, from then until his death in 1908. In Labour Co-
partnership in 1906 he quoted Mazzini:
Industrial workers were at one time slaves, then rising a little

higher were serfs, and are now wage servants, so, still rising in
position, they are destined to become partners with those who
now provide the capital and directing power.93
Although participation in management through workers’

shareholding remained ‘almost negligible in all but a few cases’
down to the First World War and the average bonus paid by all
profit-sharing firms between 1910 and 1918 was only 5.5 per cent
of wages, and although the trade unions mostly opposed such
schemes as attempts to weaken their own influence with the
workers, such policies represented a genuine attempt by the more
enlightened employers to defend their property by means which
amounted to a departure from absolute, irresponsible ownership
and a movement, however small, towards its justification by good
stewardship and accountability.94
What a minority of enlightened employers voluntarily accepted,
mutual recognition and negotiation between trade unions and
employers’ associations, a larger number were driven to accept by
growing pressure of opinion and government intervention. Given the
increasing scale of organization, not only of industrial units and firms
but of national employers’ federations and trade unions, the whole
nation came to have a vital interest in industrial disputes in such
industries as coalmining and the railways. As Ramsay MacDonald,
the archetypically moderate Labour Leader, expressed it in 1912:
We are too fond of imagining there are only two sides to a

dispute. There is the side of capital, there is the side of labour,
and there is the side of the general community: and the general
community has no business to allow capital and labour, fighting
their battles, to elbow them out of consideration.95
The government had begun to recognize this in the turbulent 1890s

by setting up the Labour Department of the Board of Trade in 1892
with its succession of gifted civil servants, Llewellyn Smith,
150
Vaughan Nash and Arthur Acland, and its growing expertise in

conciliation procedures. It had further involved itself in 1907 with
Lloyd George’s appointment of Sir George Askwith as a roving,
non-departmental conciliator, who skilfully settled the Belfast
transport strike and the threatened railway strike of 1907. Lloyd
George himself intervened in 1911 to force the obdurate railway
companies, after long years of refusal, to recognize and negotiate
with the railway unions. And prime minister Asquith personally
intervened to settle the national coal strike of 1912 by offering by
statute (on a regional basis) the minimum wage which the miners
demanded (much to Sir George Askwith’s anger at the bypassing of
himself and the new National Industrial Council). 96 These
interventions were reluctant and much criticized, but this does not
detract from the fact that the government and its expert
bureaucrats were now inexorably involved in what, with hindsight,
can be seen as the beginnings of ‘bargained corporatism’.97 In this
essentially bureaucratic system, the ‘corporations’ of employers and
workers bargain not only with each other but with the bureaucratic
representatives of the state, the latter at first as mere referees but
increasingly as active partners (as in the Coal Mines Minimum
Wage Act of 1912). At the risk of carrying the issue too far ahead
of the present chapter, we may say that professional expertise and
solutions based on the professional ideal were, because of the
failure of other alternatives, already imposing themselves upon the
relations between labour and capital before the First World War, a
trend which was increasingly to dominate industrial relations down
to the late twentieth century.
In a similar way, enlightened landowners came to see that a
broadening of property ownership to include small freeholders was a
more intelligent defence of landed property than the LPDL’s negative
opposition to land reform. Here again, the professional apologists of
the LPDL offered a defence of property which undermined, if not its
absolute character, at least its concentration in too few hands.
Thomas Mackay, chief theorist of the Charity Organization Society
and a firm supporter of individual property as ‘a main condition of
survival in civilized society’, believed that a prosperity based on wage
earning alone was too precarious, and should be buttressed by a wide
diffusion of property amongst the working population: ‘The problem
of the future is the solution of this difficulty: How is the
individualization of property to be brought about?’98 The challenge
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of a property-owning democracy was taken up by great landowners

and their professional supporters. Lord Salisbury declared in 1892:
It is rather the fashion to look upon landowners as a semi-
criminal class upon which it is quite reasonable to heap every
burden you like in the shape of rates. But when we have the
alliance of those sturdy yeomen whom we hope to create we
may expect to be treated in a very different manner.99
This argument, deriving ultimately from Cobden and Bright’s belief
in the creation of small freeholders by the effects of ‘free trade in
land’ upon the great estates, and carried over from the Liberal to
the Unionist Party by Joseph Chamberlain and Jesse Collings of the
‘three acres and a cow’ campaign of 1885, became a growing theme
within the Tory Party from the 1880s onwards. Henry Chaplin,
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and a leading landowner,
argued in 1886, in favour of what became the Allotment Act of
1887 (though he was against creating a class of continental-type
peasant smallholders), that ‘a large increase in the number of
owners of land such as I desire is, I think, the surest and perhaps the
only safeguard against the predatory instincts of a class whose
Socialistic schemes have found such powerful exponents in these
days…’100 Although most Tory landowners remained sceptical and
violently opposed to compulsory provision, thus rendering
ineffective the Smallholdings Act of 1892, their leaders continued
to argue in favour of peasant proprietorship as the best defence of
landed property as a whole. Arthur Balfour supported the
extension of state-aided purchase from Ireland to England in 1909:
There is no measure with which I am more proud to have
been connected than with that of giving peasant ownership in
such large measure to Ireland, and I hope to see a great
extension of such ownership to England. Nothing could be
more desirable or important.101
Lord Milner, in the ‘landowners’ panic’ following the land tax
clauses of the People’s Budget, summed up the argument for
buttressing large properties with small:
There can be no manner of doubt that the institution of
private property is seriously menaced at the present time—
more seriously menaced perhaps in Great Britain than
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anywhere else in the world… If the present Social Order is to

endure, it is simply necessary, at whatever cost, to effect a
great increase in the number of people who have a direct
personal interest in the maintenance of private property. There
is no bulwark to communism at all equal to that provided by
a large number of small property owners and especially small
owners of land.102
By that time, however, as we have seen, ‘the apparently stable
Edwardian society had in fact resolved upon a social revolution, the
liquidation of the landed interest.’103 Even Walter Long, the
foremost squire in the House of Commons and president of the
Central Landed Association formed in 1907 to oppose the Liberal
smallholdings legislation, was more interested in getting a good
price for land than in saving the landed interest. He told the
inaugural meeting:
Many of the amenities connected with the ownership of land
have been largely reduced in value. Some have almost
disappeared and there is no doubt that throughout the country
there are opportunities for the transfer of land which did not
exist in the days that are gone…. If we could agree upon a
policy of purchase I believe that would be a very great step in
the right direction for all who are concerned with our
industry.104
The great transfers of land, chiefly to occupying tenants, delayed by
the war but reaching between 6 and 8 million acres between 1918
and 1921 alone, were ‘nothing less than the dissolution of the great
estate system and the formation of a new race of yeomen’.105
Ironically, the only way to defend the principle of absolute property
in land, it seemed, was to sell it off altogether.
But if the number of owner-occupiers rose from 11 per cent in
1914 to 36 per cent in 1927, that still left 64 per cent who were
tenant farmers and whose rights to a share in the beneficial
ownership of land would be upheld by legislation during the
Second World War and the post-war period, while both the owner-
occupiers and tenant farmers came to achieve their security of
tenure only on condition that they cultivated the land efficiently.106
To that extent absolute property in land in 1914 still had a lot of
concessions to make.
153
Why had the capitalists and the landlords, committed as they

were to the defence of absolute property, come to give up so much
of the argument by 1914? The short answer is that their hearts were
no longer in it. The old, self-confident assumption that a man could
do as he wished with his own had been undermined by doubts sown
in their minds and concessions wrung from them by a public
opinion moralized by a competing set of values. It was no longer
possible for great business corporations like the railways and the
coal owners to refuse to acknowledge the existence of trade unions,
and the state was apt to force such recognition if they tried.
Landlords were so demoralized by the prospect of diminished post-
tax incomes and lost power over their land that they were selling
out in droves.
Marx had observed that each new ruling class is compelled to
represent its interest as the common interest of all members of
society.107 The converse was equally true, that the class which lost
that battle for the mind would ultimately cease to be the ruling
class. By the First World War, the propertied classes were still a long
way from losing the battle, but they were already engaged, to a
greater extent than they realized, in severe hand-to-hand fighting
with the class which had for a generation and more been
progressively undermining the concept of absolute property. As F.
M.L.Thompson, English landed society’s obituarist, has expressed
it in relation to the peaceful demise of the landed interest:
In the long run the old aristocratic influence could not resist
the force of the intellectuals, for charm and cultivated
manners were no match for reason, investigation and
administrative vigour. The representatives of the old order
were either too indolent to produce a coherent reasoned
defence of their position or too well aware of the impossibility
of justifying privilege. Instead they concentrated on the tactics
of expediency and the preservation of as much as possible of
the power of property for as long as possible, manipulating
the machinery of political democracy through mass ignorance,
prejudice and apathy to delay the spread of social equality.108
Similarly, as the late Sydney Checkland, historian of British public

policy, observed, by 1914, ‘business man was still in control’, ‘but
he no longer had a confident rationale of what he was doing, no
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confirmatory theory of economy and society, and no sustaining set

of religious and moral beliefs.’109
To see how the ‘moral force of the intellectuals’ and the tactics
of expediency and delay could produce a compromise which was
no mere deadlock but an open-ended pathway to the future, let us
turn to the Edwardian origins of the welfare state.
4 THE PROFESSIONAL IDEAL AND THE

ORIGINS OF THE WELFARE STATE
Like the other class ideals, the professional ideal had two strings to
its bow, in its case trained expertise and selection by merit. The
first, generalized as justification by service to society, was the main
weapon of attack on the concept of absolute property. The second,
generalized as the larger demand for social efficiency, became the
leading factor in the passing of those Edwardian social reforms
which we now recognize with hindsight as the origins of the welfare
state. Social efficiency, in the negative form of a determined
opposition to ‘waste’, the human and fiscal costs of not preventing
dangers to health, economic performance and national efficiency,
had long been the standard argument for state intervention in
public health, factory reform, slum clearance, poor law medical
treatment, state education, workmen’s compensation, and the like.
It had been summed up as long ago as 1859 by Edwin Chadwick,
that arch-practitioner of Benthamite authoritarian intervention: ‘To
the questions sometimes put to me—where I would stop in the
application of my principle—I am at present only prepared to
answer: Where waste stops.’110 Before the end of the century the
most important kind of waste had come to be recognized as the
waste of human resources. As Alfred Marshall put it in 1889:
in the world’s history there has been one waste product so

much more important than all the others, that it has a right to
be called THE Waste Product. It is the higher abilities of many
of the working classes; the latent, the undeveloped, the
choked-up and wasted faculties for higher work, that for lack
of opportunity have come to nothing.111
By the Edwardian age ‘waste’, under the influence of the Boer War
and Britain’s obviously declining economic and military leadership
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of the world, began to take on a further significance. From being a

merely domestic concern to save firstly money and secondly human
talent, an argument which could hope to stand up against the fiscal
and moral rectitude of Gladstonian Liberalism, it now became a
matter of international economic competitiveness and military
survival, which the Gladstonian age had taken for granted. The
naive ‘internalist’ Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, which
confined itself to the survival of the fittest individuals without
regard to the dangers of the unfit (who were to be weeded out) to
the health and strength of the nation, was replaced by the
‘externalist’ Social Darwinism of Benjamin Kidd and Karl Pearson,
who saw the primary struggle for survival as existing between
nations, and the internal struggle between individuals as
determining the nation’s fitness to survive.112
Although Pearson was a socialist and Kidd an anti-socialist, both
interpretations demanded collectivist social reform. Benjamin Kidd,
a minor civil servant who published an immensely popular book on
Social Evolution in 1894, believed that internal individual
competition during the nineteenth century had served its purpose:
Before the rivalry of life can be raised to that state of

efficiency as an instrument of progress towards which it
appears to be the inherent tendency of our civilization carry it,
society will still have to undergo a transformation almost as
marked as any through which it has passed in previous stages.
We have evidence of that transformation in that trend of
present-day legislation which appears so puzzling to many of
the old progressive school… It may be noticed that the
character of this legislation is the increasing tendency to raise
the position of the lower classes at the expense of the
wealthier classes. All future progressive legislation must
apparently have this tendency. It is almost a conditio sine qua
non of any measure that carries us a step forward in our
social development.
Since the masses had been enfranchised, Spencerian individualism

had encouraged socialism by offering them nothing but
exploitation and sacrifice. The answer was ‘to complete the process
of evolution in progress, by eventually bringing all people into the
rivalry of life, not only on a footing of political equality, but on
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conditions of equal social opportunities’. What was now required

as an antidote both to ‘the materialistic socialism of Marx’ and to
the equally irreligious and materialistic individualism of Spencer
was greater equality of opportunity, including the eight-hour day,
the graduated income tax, and education for all, which would tend
‘ultimately to place the workers more on a footing of equality in the
rivalry of life with those above them.’113
Karl Pearson, the Cambridge and German-educated Goldsmid
Professor of Mathematics at University College London from 1884
and first Gallon Professor of Eugenics at London University from
1911 to 1933, was a paradoxically Marxist but anti-revolutionary
socialist who believed that individualism had failed the nation:
I believe that science will ultimately balance the individualistic

and socialistic tendencies in evolution better than Haeckel and
Spencer have done. The power of the individualistic formula
to describe human growth has been overrated, and the
evolutionary origin of the socialistic instinct has been too
frequently overlooked. In the face of the severe struggle,
physical and commercial, the fight for land, food, and for
mineral wealth between existing nations, we have every need
to strengthen by training the normally dormant socialistic
spirit, if we as a nation are to be among the surviving fit. The
importance of organizing society, of making the individual
subservient to the whole, grows with the intensity of the
struggle. We shall need all our clearness of vision, all our
insight into human growth and social efficiency in order to
discipline the powers of labour, to train and educate the
powers of mind. This organization and this education must
proceed from the state, for it is in the battle of society with
society, rather than of individual with individual, that these
weapons are of service.
The ‘true Socialist must be superior to class interests. He must look

beyond his own class to the wants and habits of society at large,’ and
educate himself and the governing class towards a higher social
morality in which veneration for personified society, the state, would
be the rational motive for conduct. In the middle of the Boer War he
preached the beneficial effect of the international struggle for
existence as ‘the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal’.
157
National survival depended not on the individual struggle for

existence but on the social instincts of the herd, in which ‘we must
not have class differences and wealth differences so great within the
community that we lose the sense of common interest.’ A nation was
‘an organized whole’ which was ‘kept up to a high pitch of external
efficiency by contest, chiefly by war with inferior races, and by the
struggles with equal races for trade-routes and for the sources of raw
material and food supply’. Since ‘you cannot get a strong and
effective nation if many of its stomachs are half fed and many of its
brains untrained’, it was the duty of the statesman ‘to treat class
needs and group cries from the standpoint of the efficiency of the
herd at large’ and ‘to lessen, if not to suspend, the internal struggle,
that the nation may be strong externally’. Although he would have
preferred a dictator, free from the bias of class interest, to run his
socialist state, the choice might prove too difficult and divisive and,
though terribly cumbersome, democracy was probably the best
practical solution. It followed that any reform which the democracy
wanted was justified if it increased the efficiency of the nation.114
Not many contemporaries followed Pearson’s social imperialism
all the way to its proto-fascist conclusions, and Benjamin Kidd
himself posthumously denounced Pearson’s eugenic religion and
Gallon’s scheme for improving the world by breeding a race of
Nietzschean supermen, which could ‘only be applied to the world
by the methods of the German General Staff’.115 But imperialism
was rife amongst both Conservatives and Liberals, with the
exception of the few pro-Boers and ‘Little Englanders’, and even
split the Fabian Society down the middle in 1900. Anti-imperialists
like Campbell-Bannerman, Lloyd George, Graham Wallas,
L.T.Hobhouse, J.A.Hobson and Ramsay MacDonald, out of
compassion for the poor and fear of their further deterioration,
were no less in favour of social reform than the imperialists, but
imperialism added power and urgency to the argument for it.116
This came to a head in the debate on ‘National Efficiency’ which
arose out of the Boer War. The term seems to have been coined by
Sidney Webb in a famous article in the Nineteenth Century in 1901,
‘Lord Rosebery’s Escape from Houndsditch’, in which he advised
Rosebery to ‘retailor’ the Liberals into a party of National
Efficiency, which would clear the slums, abolish the sweated trades,
eliminate inefficiency in government, restore British commercial
supremacy, adopt policies of reform in housing, sanitation, poor
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law, and education, together with a ‘National Minimum’ standard

of life, all ‘to insure the rearing of an Imperial race’.117
Rosebery was more than ready to take the bait and delivered a
speech on the idea of efficiency as ‘a condition of national fitness
equal to the demands of our Empire—administrative,
parliamentary, commercial, educational, physical, moral, naval,
and military fitness—so that we should make the best of our
admirable raw material’.118 By then he and his Liberal imperialist
followers, H.H.Asquith, R.B.Haldane and Sir Edward Grey,
inauspiciously known as the ‘Limps’, had already formed the
Liberal League, a party within the party, to push imperialism and
social reform.119 At the very same time Joseph Chamberlain, a more
bellicose social imperialist, was concocting on the government side
the policies of tariff reform and imperial preference which were
designed to unify the empire and provide the money for old age
pensions and other social reforms.
The Webbs attempted to bring leading imperialists of all parties
together in a small dining club, the ‘Coefficients’, who were to
represent professional ‘experts’ in every field of government:
Haldane for law, Grey for foreign policy, H.J.Mackinder the
inventor of ‘geopolitics’, Sir Clinton Dawkins for finance, the
economist W.A.S.Hewins, Director of the new Fabian London
School of Economics, Leopold Maxse, editor of The Nation for
patriotic journalism, Carlyon Bellairs for naval questions, Leopold
Amery of The Times for army reform, William Pember Reeves,
Agent General for New Zealand, for the colonies, Sidney Webb for
local government, H.G.Wells for literature, and Bertrand Russell
(who was soon repelled by their imperialism) for science. They
were later joined by Sir Alfred Milner, Chamberlain’s chief
imperialist lieutenant and patron of Amery and Mackinder.120
H.G.Wells satirized the Coefficients as the ‘Pentagram Circle’ in
The New Machiavelli (1911), but he was, if anything, even more
devoted to efficient government by professional experts,
foreshadowed in Anticipations (1902) and realized in the ‘Samurai’
in A Modern Utopia (1905). Although Chamberlain’s tariff reform
campaign split the Coefficients and perhaps prevented them from
founding a party of national efficiency, they were an eloquent
expression of the professional ideal in its social imperialist phase.
National efficiency, for all its faults and failings, had the great
merit from the point of view of the professional class of appealing
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to the self-interest of all three major classes. To the traditional

landed class and its military offshoots, worried lest an urbanized
industrial society should not be able to defend itself against the vast
conscript peasant armies of the continental powers, it offered an
answer to the army’s complaints, through General Sir Frederick
Maurice, of the desperately poor physique if not the actual physical
deterioration of the recruits during the Boer War. To the capitalists,
concerned about the declining competitiveness of British industry
and trade and the increasing bitterness of industrial relations, it
offered the prospect of fitter, healthier, better trained and educated
workers, and the hope of more harmonious conditions in the
workplace. To the working class it offered a larger and more rapid
progress towards social improvement and a fairer society than they
could have achieved by their own unaided efforts. As for the
professional class—what did it offer them? Perhaps the greatest
prize of all, a share in the expansion of expert services provided by
or paid for by government, a higher level of remuneration
guaranteed by the state and, for some of them at least, an increase
in power and prestige in a system increasingly dependent for its
smooth operation and success upon themselves.
Not all of these varied interests were consciously thought out
and single-mindedly pursued. On the contrary, as Bentley Gilbert
has noted, ‘welfare legislation never figured as an electoral issue in
the years before World War I’.121 With a few exceptions like old age
pensions and the graduated income tax, most of the reforms of the
Edwardian period were unpremeditated and previously little
discussed. As each came to be identified, however, and became an
issue between the contending interests, the debate was conducted in
terms which reflected the moral values raised by different
protagonists of the professional ideal, and was settled by a
compromise between the classes which leaned heavily towards a
professional solution.
The traditionally accepted causes of the Liberal welfare
measures, ‘pressure from below’, ‘the pressure of facts’, and the
newly found ‘intolerability’ of social problems, whether or not they
were adequate as explanations rather than descriptions of what
was happening, all found their response in a professionally
institutionalized provision of welfare.
‘Pressure from below’, the belated upswelling of working-class
political demands after the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts, has been
160
questioned on the grounds that the working class ‘advanced into

the twentieth century with little expectation of social improvement
being engineered by political means, and none at all of the “Welfare
State” as we know it today.’122 It is true that the Labour Party and
the TUC passed resolutions in favour of old age pensions, free
secondary education, school meals, the right to work, and so on,
but comparatively few workers voted Labour before 1918, and
many members of the Labour Party and the unions bitterly
opposed, at first at least, some of the major Liberal social reforms,
such as labour exchanges and contributory national insurance.123
‘Pressure from below’ did operate in the sense that both the
Conservatives and the Liberals wooed the working-class voter with
social imperialist policies of social reform which they thought he
wanted, but the actual measures offered by strong-minded
politicians like Chamberlain and Lloyd George and self-confident
administrators like Sir Robert Morant and William Beveridge were
based on their criteria, not his, and the Liberal reforms were made
for him, not by him.
The ‘pressure of facts’, the impact on public opinion of the new
knowledge of poverty and distress provided by Booth, Rowntree,
the army recruiting figures, and the Committee on Physical
Deterioration was also crucial, not so much because the facts were
new—sensational reports of the condition of the poor went back to
Mayhew, Chadwick and beyond—but because the ‘fear of the poor’
and the effect of their supposed deterioration on the survival of the
nation now made the facts more urgent. Attitudes towards the
political and economic implications of poverty had changed, and
with them the political will to provide administrative solutions for
them.
Finally, if the social problems of the age were now found to be
more ‘intolerable’ than before, by what criteria were they judged to
be so? By the professional criteria derived from the Oxford
idealists, the Cambridge welfare economists, and the Fabians and
other middle-class socialists, emphasizing the responsibilities of
property, national efficiency, and justification by service to society.
More important than the ‘intolerability’ of the problems, however,
were the actual legislative and administrative solutions adopted for
them, and these bore all the marks of the professional ideal, as we
can see by examining each of the main social reforms in turn.
Old age pensions were the longest recognized social need. The
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capitalist view that the individual should make provision by

voluntary saving for his old age was increasingly seen in the late
Victorian age to be unrealistic. Canon William Blackley in 1878,
prompted by the failure of the friendly societies to cater for more
than a prosperous fraction of the working class and by the refusal of
the ‘wasteful’ to ‘share in the burden of natural providence’, had
suggested a compulsory scheme of ‘national insurance’. Under this
every working man between 18 and 21 would invest £10 at
compound interest to provide 8s a week in sick pay and a pension of
4s. a week at age 70.124 In the late 1880s those capitalists of
conscience, Joseph Chamberlain, anxious to maintain his reputation
for social reform and Charles Booth, influenced by Canon Barnett of
Toynbee Hall, had taken up the question and obtained a Royal
Commission in 1895 to investigate and the Rothschild Committee in
1898 to find ways of funding them. Chamberlain came to tariff
reform and social imperialism at least in part as a means of funding
old age pensions as well as other welfare measures. Booth’s argument
for direct taxation for support of the ‘incapable’, beginning with the
elderly poor, pursued through the National Committee of Organized
Labour for the Promotion of Old Age Pensions founded in 1889, was
couched in terms of national efficiency:
My idea is to make the dual system, Socialism in the arms of

individualism, under which we already live, more efficient by
extending somewhat the sphere of the former and making the
division of function more distinct. Our Individualism fails
because our Socialism is incomplete. In taking charge of the
lives of the incapable, State Socialism finds its proper work,
and by doing it completely, would relieve us of a serious
danger… Thorough interference on the part of the State with
the lives of a small fraction of the population would tend to
make it possible ultimately, to dispense with any Socialistic
interference in the lives of all the rest.125
The non-contributory pensions provided by the 1908 Budget

exactly reflected the balance of ideological forces. They made only
a small breach in the capitalist ideal of self-dependence by paying
5s. a week (7s. 6d. for a married couple) at age 70 only if the
applicant earned less than £26 a year, was not a pauper, lunatic or
ex-convict, and had been habitually employed. In line with the
162
aristocratic ideal, they were thus a reward for a lifetime’s loyal

service to the community. In line with the working-class ideal, they
were a deferred instalment of the whole produce of labour. And in
line with the professional ideal they were a more socially efficient
means of supporting the elderly poor, who would in any case have
required public support, than the repellant and arbitrary poor law.
That they were not the most socially efficient means is shown by
their replacement for most workers in 1925 by contributory
pensions, which suited both the social reformers, who believed that
the poor should visibly earn their pensions and receive them by
right, and the Treasury officials, for whom the contributions, like
national insurance, were a welcome widening of the tax base. They
also suited the local civil servants (for lack of others in the localities
in 1908, the Customs and Excise officers who had to administer
them and the post masters who paid them) for whom they provided
more work.
School meals and medical inspection in 1906 and 1907 were an
obvious response to the fear of physical deterioration and the
demand for national efficiency. If education, needed for the
economic competition between the nations, was not to be wasted
on children too hungry to learn, then it was necessary to feed
them.126 Cheap or free school dinners had been pioneered since the
1860s on humanitarian grounds by charities such as the
Westminster Destitute Children’s Society and since 1895 by
Margaret McMillan in Bradford, but now it was generally agreed
to be a matter of national survival and the only question was how
to find the money.127 The Unionist Cabinet in 1905 admitted that
underfed children were ‘one of the evils now generally admitted to
exist’, but it was brought down in December by a motion in the
Commons calling for local authorities to ensure proper
nourishment in elementary schools.128 After the 1906 Election a
Labour Party bill was endorsed by the Liberal majority and the
local education authorities were empowered to provide facilities for
school meals.
School feeding, too, reflected the balance of ideological forces.
The Act made the smallest possible breach in the entrepreneurial
ideal that parents should support their own children: it was
permissive only, allowing Local Educational Authorities to impose
a halfpenny rate, a permission taken up very sparingly by only a
hundred authorities, less than a third of the total, by 1911.129 It
163
appealed to aristocrats like Rosebery, the Liberal imperialist, and

the Duke of Devonshire, who had appointed the Committee on
Physical Deterioration which recommended it, as well as to the
army generals whose complaints led to that Committee.130 It was
popular for obvious reasons with the organized working class who
seized on the Committee’s suggestion and presented the 1906
bill.131 And it chimed with the professional demand for social
efficiency expressed by such diverse bodies as the Fabian Society,
the National Union of Teachers, the Royal Colleges of Physicians
and Surgeons, and the British Medical Association. 132 Most
significantly of all, it eminently suited both the ideals and the
interests of the civil servants who operated it, and used it as a
springboard for further action in the cause of collectivist social
efficiency.
The most obvious further action was school medical inspection,
necessary to measure the need for school feeding and to monitor its
effects, which was smuggled through Parliament in 1907 in a little-
noticed bill of administrative provisions prepared by the Secretary
of the Board of Education, Sir Robert Morant, at the prompting of
Margaret McMillan and other local reformers, to meet another
recommendation of the Physical Deterioration Commitee.133 To
Morant and his colleagues, however, it was more than an
information-gathering device. As a fellow civil servant, Sir
Lawrence Brock, put it later:
Morant knew…and did not tell his Minister, that medical

inspection would reveal such a mass of disease and defect that
no Government subsequently would be able to resist the
demand of the local Education authorities to provide
treatment.134
This was a calculated use of the well-known governmental

principle of ‘feedback’. With a firm fellow-believer, George
Newman, as Chief Medical Officer to the Board, Morant ensured
that Circular 576 (1907) enjoining medical inspection on the LEAs
was followed by Circular 596 (1908) inviting them to establish
school clinics and an Act of 1909 empowering them to provide
treatment from central funds.135 By 1914 214 out of 317 LEAs were
providing treatment and a further fifty-three were contracting with
voluntary hospitals to provide it.136 School medical treatment,
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while a logical development of the demand for national efficiency

by all classes, was perhaps an early example of a social reform
‘manufactured’ by the state bureaucracy, with the tacit support of
other professions, including the teachers and doctors, who saw in it
not only a measure of justice and efficiency but an addition to their
own prestige and potential employment.
The educational ladder created by the new public secondary
schools under the 1902 Act and the scholarship system of 1907 was
a prime example of the professional principle of selection by merit
as well as of the demand for national efficiency. It had been
supported by enlightened members of every political sect and party,
by Arthur Balfour and Sir John Gorst for the Tories, by Lloyd
George and Charles Masterman for the Liberals, by Sidney Webb
and the Fabians, and by both the TUC and the Labour
Representation Committee in 1905.137 Yet it was Morant again,
architect of the (Tory) Education Act of 1902 and of the (Liberal)
scholarship system of 1907, who cut through the rivalries of church
and dissent and of school boards and county councils to make them
possible.138 Although by 1914 only 5.6 per cent of elementary
school children found their way to secondary schools, a ladder had
been erected which would take larger proportions of English and
still more of Welsh and Scottish working-class children on to
secondary and higher education than anywhere else in inter-war
Europe.139 According to Morant, ‘The purpose of the Public
Elementary School is to form and strengthen the character and to
develop the intelligence of the children entrusted to it.’ It was only
‘an important but subsidiary object of the School to discover
individual children who show promise of exceptional capacity and
to develop their special gifts in preparation for secondary and
university education,’ but the means he chose, selective grammar
schools for the very brightest, were as elitist and professional as
himself.140
The same elitist bureaucrat, forced out of Education in 1911 for
his snobbish approval of his chief inspector’s reference to ‘vicious
local inspectors’ recruited from the elementary school teachers,141
provides a link with national health insurance. On the foundations
laid for Lloyd George by W.J.Braithwaite, he built up the elaborate
machinery integrating the friendly societies which issued the
benefits, the Post Office which collected the premiums through the
sale of stamps, the local inspectors who applied and enforced the
165
rules, the panel doctors who certified illness and prescribed

treatment, and the pharmacists who supplied the drugs. 142
Rowntree had shown that sickness, invalidity and/or death of the
breadwinner were, after low wages and large families, the most
important cause of poverty, accounting for 20 per cent of those in
poverty in York. 143 The Majority Report of the Poor Law
Commission (1909) recommended voluntary insurance through the
friendly societies and trade unions against long-term invalidity,
though the Minority demanded a ‘National Minimum’ paid out of
taxation.144 Lloyd George and Morant ignored both, and chose
compulsory insurance for short- and long-term sickness. They
cleverly bought off the opposition of the employers by hinting at
heavier taxation threatened by Labour and the Minority Report;
that of the friendly societies and insurance companies by employing
them as agents of the scheme; that of the doctors by doubling the
annual capitation fees they had received from the friendly societies;
and that of the workers, over the heads of both the Labour Party
and the Minority of the Poor Law Commission, by offering
‘ninepence for fourpence’ (3d. of the weekly 9d. stamp being paid
by the employers and 2d. by the state) of the insurance premium for
sick pay and free medical treatment. Lloyd George and Morant,
with an eye to administrative feedback, confidently looked forward
to the provision of medical treatment for workers’ families, and
eventual coverage of the whole population, which did come but not
until 1948.145
Once again, national health insurance represented the balance of
ideological forces. To the industrialists it meant fitter workers
returning faster to work (though not all of them, especially the
employers of domestic servants, saw it that way). To the workers,
despite the protests of some of their representatives, it meant, for
the first time for many of them, professional medical treatment and
a modest income during illness. To the medical profession it meant
an expanded occupation at increased renumeration for the ‘panel
doctors’. And to the central and local civil servants who operated
the scheme it meant more employment, higher prestige, and an
opportunity to practise social engineering. As Morant himself put it
in 1913, ‘we can make work at the Government Department the
most marvellous means for true social reform that the world has
ever seen.’146
As with health insurance by Lloyd George and Morant, state
166
unemployment insurance was sprung on the nation by Winston

Churchill and William Beveridge, but with no German precedent to
call on. Unemployment, or the problem of the able-bodied poor as
the Poor Law Commission Majority Report still called it, was as
ancient as the Tudor poor law, but it only became an ‘intolerable
social problem’ when the working class got the vote, when Booth
and Rowntree discovered in it a major cause of poverty
contributing to 20.7 per cent of the poverty in East London and (in
a boom year) to 5.1 per cent of those in poverty in York, and when
politicians in the 1880s like Chamberlain and Lord Randolph
Churchill began to demand public measures for its relief.147
Yet it only became a soluble problem when William Beveridge, a
young Balliol man recruited by Canon Barnett as sub-warden of
Toynbee Hall, began to study the statistics produced by the Lord
Mayor’s Mansion House Committee on Distress and by other
bodies operating under the 1905 Unemployed Workmen Act. He
discovered that most unemployment was involuntary and of four
distinct kinds: frictional (between jobs), seasonal (annual
fluctuations in such trades as building, printing and fashion wear),
cyclical (boom and slump), and structural (long-term decline of
particular industries). Only a small fraction could be laid at the
door, as the Charity Organization Society representatives on the
Poor Law Commission believed, of the idle and incompetent.
Unemployment, therefore, was in the words of the subtitle of his
1909 book, ‘a problem of industry’.148 The solution could only be
a professional and administrative one: labour exchanges to fit
workers to jobs as quickly as possible and unemployment insurance
to tide the jobless over through bad seasons and slumps. Both the
Majority and Minority Reports recommended voluntary
unemployment insurance through trade unions with state subsidies,
and the Minority compulsory labour exchanges. Beveridge, with
Churchill’s backing, turned these upside down: voluntary labour
exchanges and compulsory insurance. Many of his ideas were
derived from older students of the question: Percy Alden, Warden
of the Mansfield House University Settlement in Canning Town
and his book Unemployment: A National Question (1905), the
radical economist J.A. Hobson, and Booth’s and Rowntree’s
surveys of the causes of poverty.149 But it was Beveridge, recruited
by Churchill to the Board of Trade ‘to formulate arguments and
schemes for national Labour Exchanges with a view to getting them
167
accepted by the Government’, and the forceful Secretary to the

Board, Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, one of Charles Booth’s original
investigators on the London survey, who devised the Labour
Exchange Act of 1909 and the pilot scheme of unemployment
insurance for 2.25 million workers in fluctuating industries
included in the 1911 National Insurance Act.150 Again, feedback
was confidently expected to expand its coverage, as it did for ex-
soldiers and munitions workers after the war, and for most manual
and low-paid non-manual workers by 1923.151
Despite individualist and Fabian opposition, unemployment
insurance fitted the balance of ideological forces. For the paternalist
aristocrat like Churchill, it took the able-bodied poor out of the
Poor Law and off the local rates. For the capitalist it carried the
burden of the reserve army of labour partly at the expense of the
taxpayer and the worker himself. For the worker—despite the
opposition of the Webbs and the Independent Labour Party—it
provided a small measure of financial security (7s. a week in return
for a 2d. a week contribution), which seemed like a reasonable
bargain. But the most influential contributions, and the most
permanent gains, were those of the social researchers turned
bureaucrats like Beveridge and Llewellyn Smith. The combination
of the labour exchange and unemployment insurance was an
almost perfect example of a professional solution to a problem of
social engineering. Beveridge, like Morant, was no democrat but a
believer in ‘a strong government, a remorselessly unsentimental
government’ which would involve ‘the extension of deliberate
social action—in a word, organization—over fields hitherto left to
the blind play of conflicting interests. It replaces the rule of natural
law by the rule of the expert.’152
There were other social reforms in the Edwardian age—the
Children Act of 1908, the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909,
the 1902 Midwives Act and the local infant welfare centres—to
which the same analysis could be applied. But enough has been said
to show how, given the current balance of ideological forces, the
professional ideal could swing that balance, by selecting the social
problems to be solved and by determining the nature of the solution.
One final test of the process of reform remains. A welfare state, even
an incipient one, which begins to provide social security, educational
opportunity, and a pioneering health service involves a redistribution
of income. Much of this, as with national insurance, is horizontal,
168
from the young, healthy and employed to the same people when old,
sick or jobless; but some at least had to be vertical, from the rich to
the poor. Ideas of graduated taxation were, as we have seen, implicit
in the professional attack on absolute property and the professional
demand for justification of income by service. Although graduation
did not go very far—death duties of 8 per cent on estates over £1
million in 1894 and of 15 per cent in 1909, income taxes of 1s.
instead of 9d. in the pound on unearned incomes over £2,000 in
1907, and supertaxes in 1909 (over and above the standard rates of
9d.–1s. 2d.) of 6d. on incomes over £5,000 and 9d. on over £6,000—
the principle had been established which would carry maximum rates
of tax to 7s. 4d. in the pound in the First World War and 19s. 6d. in
the Second.153
At what point taxation passes from the concept of fair shares
and equal burdens to that of confiscation is a matter for debate—
there were many who thought that point had been passed in
1909—but what is certain is that the principle of graduated
taxation was a breach with the Gladstonian past which could not
have happened unless the confidence of the rich in the inviolable
sanctity of property had already been undermined. To the extent
that it had, the professional ideal had triumphed in fiscal policy
over the landed and capitalist by 1909.
Britain in 1914 was still undoubtedly, and would long remain, a
fundamentally capitalist society. But the influence of the
professional expert, with his belief in contingent property justified
by service to society and in social efficiency for the benefit of the
whole nation, had already begun to permeate the consciousness of
the other classes and the policies and administration of
government. It was in vain that Winston Churchill protested to H.
G.Wells in 1902 in response to a complimentary copy of his
Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress
upon Human Life and Thought:
Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of

States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is
limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain
man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any
vigorous direction of a specialized character. Why should you
assume that all except doctors, engineers, etc., are drones or
worse?154
169
Within a few years Churchill’s and his colleagues’ own actions were
beginning to commit government into the hands of experts, and to
ensure that the twentieth century would become the century not of
the plain man who knows where it hurts but of the professional
expert who ‘knows best’ what is good for him. Even before the
Great War came to test its cohesion, class society began to go into
crisis, which war appeared to mollify or postpone, but which in
reality could only be surmounted by measures which challenged the
system and called in the professional experts to help to provide
them.
170
Chapter 5
THE CRISIS OF CLASS SOCIETY
Between the constitutional clash between the Lords and the

Commons which provoked two general elections in 1910 and the
General Strike which split the nation in 1926, class society in
Britain underwent a profound crisis. The crisis was essentially to
decide whether Britain was to continue along the path of increasing
class conflict culminating in social breakdown or revolution or
whether there was to be, not merely an accommodation between
the classes of the kind which gave mid-Victorian Britain its viable
class society, but something more far-reaching: a tacit co-
partnership between the representatives of capital and labour in
which the state would find itself increasingly involved, to the point
where it became itself a partner in a relationship which transcended
class society altogether.
Looking back from a later age long after the issue was decided,
it is tempting to argue that the crisis was unreal, that the issue was
never in doubt, that there never was a threat to the social fabric or
a challenge to the established system of government.1 This may
perhaps be true in the narrow sense that, apart from a few self-
consciously revolutionary syndicalists and Marxists, the British
labour movement never overtly set out to challenge the elected
government. Crises and revolutions, however, are rarely planned
and programmed but arise out of the clash of interests and of will
between threatened and frustrated social groups whose
determination to gain their ends or maintain their ground can
escalate without conscious intent from incompatible demands to
violent contestation. In an age which saw revolutions from Ireland
to China and the collapse of four great empires in continental
Europe, it would be unwise to rely on ‘the unique good sense of the
British people’ to refute the possibility here. Moreover, what is
important is not the mere threat and avoidance of revolution
171
which, however improbable, appeared real enough to many

contemporaries, but the transcendence of the crisis by means which
were not mere temporary palliatives but the harbingers of a new
social order.
The crisis was predominantly one between the classes of capital
and labour, in which the government became reluctantly involved,
by no means wholly on the side of capital, but it was complicated
by the co-existence of three other crises, any one of which was a
potentially violent challenge to the established order. It is not
necessary to go all the way with George Dangerfield in The Strange
Death of Liberal England to agree that there was some connection
between the pre-war challenge of the Lords, the Suffragettes, the
two parts of Ireland, and the striking workers, if only in the
existence of a weak Liberal government unable to live up to its
Liberal principles without committing suicide.2 Connected or not,
the co-existence of threats of violence from the militant women,
from the Irish Nationalists if Ireland were partitioned and from the
Ulstermen backed by the Tory leadership and the majority of the
Lords if it were not, and from the more aggressive trade unionists,
gave colour to the fear of social revolution before the war, just as
the co-existence of revolutions in Russia, Germany, Austria-
Hungary and Turkey as well as Ireland gave colour to the same fear
after it. And just as in the early nineteenth century the fear of
revolution or of a peaceful takeover from below, whether justified
or not, played an essential role in the emergence of class society, so
in the early twentieth the same mixture of fear and propitiation
played an essential role in the crisis of class society and its incipient
modification into something new.
The crisis was also complicated by the intervention of the war. In
the short term the war suspended all four crises, and seemed to
prove that there was a great deal more unity and cohesion in British
society than many contemporaries, including the Kaiser and his
ministers, had believed. It was certainly, as the social imperialists
had predicted, the supreme test not only of national unity but of
national efficiency. It ruthlessly laid bare the shortcomings and
deficiencies of society, the economy and the political system. It
confirmed the appalling effects of poverty and undernourishment
on the mass armies recruited to fight it, the early weaknesses of
British industry and management in producing the munitions of
modern battle, and the incompetence of the minimalist state
172
apparatus to conduct modern warfare on the grand scale. Yet in the

longer term it also proved the enormous power of the modern state,
when roused to accept the responsibility, to control almost every
aspect of the life of society, from direct industrial production on a
massive scale to the egalitarian distribution of food, the
conscription of men from all classes for the armed forces, and even,
by the negative pressure of scheduling reserved occupations, the
tacit direction of civilian labour.
Yet the massive increase in the role of the state did not, contrary
to patriotic expectations, suspend class conflict between capital and
labour. On the contrary, it raised to a higher power the prestige of
the labour unions and their ability, in exchange for their co-
operation, to demand to be consulted and persuaded by both the
employers and the state. Moreover, if in the opinion of their
members their leaders sold their co-operation too cheaply, an
alternative leadership thrust itself forward in the shape of the shop
stewards’ movement which kept alive the confrontation of capital
and labour in the workplace, the comparatively rare but truculent
strikes serving as a reminder that the suspension of industrial
conflict was only a truce, not a cessation of hostilities. Yet the war
also educated the unions, the employers and the state in the
possibility of an alternative relationship, already in embryo before
its outbreak, based on a tacit understanding of their underlying
common interests.
The war did not end the crisis, however. With the peace, and
especially with the precipitate demobilization of the troops into the
old pre-war fear of low wages and unemployment, the equally
precipitate dismantling of the wartime system of controls which
had seemed to promise fairer shares for all, and the apparent
breach of wartime promises of ‘homes for heroes’ and ‘a fit land for
heroes to live in’, the crisis returned, and went through a
fluctuating series of confrontations until it culminated in the anti-
climactic trial of strength in 1926.
The final phase was the post-crisis settlement. Despite the
vengefulness of many business men and right-wing Conservative
politicians and the legend of vendetta perpetuated by the defeated
labour movement, the victorious government and the leading
employers did not exploit their victory to the full. Instead, they
drew the trade unions into an informal, uneasy but nevertheless real
triangular relationship which was an anticipation of what would
173
later be called the ‘bargained corporatism’ of the 1960s. That this

offended and enraged some of their constituents on all three sides—
militant unionists, traditional business men, and right-wing
Conservatives—merely confirms the trend, and also helps to
explain it. For underlying what Keith Middlemas has called ‘the
corporate bias’ of the emerging system was something more
fundamental than a wish for industrial peace. 3 It was the
professional interest of the men who ran the system—the trade
union leaders, the new professional managers of the great business
corporations and employers’ association, and the state bureaucrats
and politicians—to keep the system going without allowing it to
drift too near the brink of disastrous confrontation. And beneath
this system of ‘crisis management’4 lay not merely a common
professional self-interest but a common philosophy, capable of
embracing both their common interest in maintaining the system
and their differences of outlook. That philosophy was the
professional social ideal.
In this chapter we shall follow the crisis through all its stages
from the massive industrial unrest aborted by the coming of the
war; through the paradoxical co-existence of national unity and
industrial conflict during the war; to the post-war culmination in
the General Strike and its immediate aftermath. In the process we
shall see how conflict and the threat of social breakdown
themselves played a key role in the emergence of an alternative
system of relationships.
1 THE ABORTED PRE-WAR CRISIS

In the last few years before the First World War an unprecedented
upsurge of national unrest took place in Britain. The number of
strikes, rarely more than 500 a year in earlier times, rose from 422
in 1909 to 521 in 1910, 872 in 1911, 834 in 1912, 1,459 in 1913
and 972 in 1914 (chiefly in the seven months before the war broke
out). More to the point, these strikes were on a larger and more
nationwide scale than hitherto, and the number of working man-
days lost, usually 3 to 4 million a year, rose from 2.7 million in
1909 to 9.9 million in 1910, 10.2 million in 1911, 40.9 million in
1912, the year of the great coal strike, falling back to 9.8 million in
1913 and 9.9 million in 1914. 5 There had been something
approaching this upsurge with the New Unionism of the early
174
1890s, with a record 30.4 million days lost in 1893, but there were
now three times the number of union members, approaching 4
million in 1913,6 and there was then nothing like the same threat to
the industrial system and the life of the community which seemed
to be inseparable from the pre-war unrest. The first nationwide
strike on the railways in 1911, the dock strikes of 1911, the vast
coal strike of 1912, the Dublin transport lock-out of 1913, the
textile workers’ strikes (in the main export industry) in 1913,
culminated in the Triple Alliance of the miners, railwaymen and
transport workers, which appeared to threaten a general strike in
the autumn of 1914.7
The legend of ‘the great General Strike of 1914, forestalled by
the bullets at Sarajevo’ has been challenged on two grounds: firstly,
that the trade union leaders did not want it, that the unions
concerned had either won what they wanted, like the railwaymen’s
forty-year objective of recognition by the employers, or were
financially if not morally exhausted, like the miners and the
transport workers, and secondly, that the Alliance was aimed more
at controlling the militant rank and file and strengthening the
power of the three federations against the other unions in their
industry than at challenging the employers and the government.8
But this does not dispose of the fears of contemporaries or of the
belief on the part of even moderate union leaders that the mere
threat of a nationwide strike in three vital industries would be
enough to force the government to coerce the employees to
surrender. There was ‘the sense of an impending general clash, a
civil war between capital and labour, that was strong at that time
of many clashes’.9 As Lloyd George wrote in his War Memoirs,
in the summer of 1914 there was every sign that the autumn
would witness a series of industrial disturbances without
precedent. Trouble was threatening in the railway, mining,
engineering and building industries, disagreements were active
not only between employers and employed, but in the internal
organisation of the workers. A strong ‘rank and file’
movement, keenly critical of the policies and methods of the
official leaders of Trade Unionism had sprung up and was
rapidly gaining strength. Such was the state of the home front
when the nation was plunged into war.10
175
The National Union of Railway men had given notice of a strike for
1 November. The Scottish miners were faced with a wage cut, the
most resented cause of strikes even by exhausted unions, which was
only averted by the owners’ ‘patriotic’ withdrawal on the outbreak
of war, and the district agreements of 1912 under the Coal Miners
Minimum Wage Act were due to expire in June 1915. The London
building workers were already in dispute with the London Master
Builders’ Association over their refusal to sign a ‘memorandum’
against unofficial strikes and had been locked out since January,
and the National Federation of Building Trades Employers had
announced a national lock-out for 15 August.11 Any of these
disputes, despite the union leaders’ supposed moderation, might
have provoked a confrontation which could have escalated into a
much bigger clash. The most moderate of their leaders,
J.H.Thomas of the NUR, believed that the Alliance was irresistible:
‘I do not hesitate to say…that we shall only use this power once. If
we use it effectively, the fear of it will be sufficient for all time after.’
And the more militant and syndicalist Robert Williams of the
Transport Workers thought the threat powerful enough to
challenge the ruling class without a strike:
They did not want to talk too much about a strike, but they
wanted to have power behind them as a final resort to put the
screw upon all the governing classes of society in order to
effect such demands as they might find it desirable to make.12
Such talk of big sticks and easy victories was like the jingoism of
the belligerent nations—‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we
do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money
too’—which led the politicians to think there would be no war in
1914, and if there were the troops would be home by Christmas.
Nor does the misplaced confidence of the Triple Alliance dispose of
the wider industrial unrest of the previous five years, which still
represented a crisis for class society, unresolved in 1914, whether or
not a general strike was imminent when the war broke out.
The causes of this pre-war upsurge of unrest have been much
disputed by historians, mostly divided according to whether or not
they took ‘the threat of civil war’ seriously. The sceptics normally
point to the economic and technical factors: the steepening inflation
(mild by modern standards, a rise of 13.4 per cent in the cost of
176
living between 1903 and 1913, rising to an average of 2.3 per cent
a year from 1909 to 1913); the consequent decline of real wages
(money earnings rose by only 6.1 per cent, so that real earnings
declined by 6.9 per cent);13 the slower growth or even decline, as in
the coal mines, of productivity, leaving less surplus to be shared
between capital and labour; and the consequent refusal of
employers, as on the railways where profits were further squeezed
by legislative limitation of freight rates, to recognize trade unions
for negotiating purposes.14 On the other side, the believers in
revolutionary working-class consciousness have pointed to more
general causes of alienation and unrest: the speeding up of the pace
of work by employers influenced by the new American ‘scientific
management’ of F.W.Taylor and his disciples, responding to the
slackening productivity and the fiercer international competition;
the determination of many employers, notably the mine owners,
railway directors, shipowners and port authorities, to discipline
recalcitrant workers and curb the increasingly disruptive power of
the trade unions; the struggle, emphasized above (Chapter 4), for
control of the work process in the workplace itself; and, less
confidently perhaps, the influence on already disgruntled workers,
disappointed both with Labour and with Liberal political reforms,
of syndicalist ideas of the industrial class struggle and the
revolutionary general strike.15
All these causes certainly played a part in the crisis, but the
particular economic and shopfloor grievances of individual groups
of workers, perhaps excited by the electrifying political atmosphere
and the belief manifested by other militants like the Suffragettes
and the Irish that the threat of violence was a master card, welled
up from below and forced professional trade union leaders to adopt
militant postures designed to coerce the employers and the
government into a confrontation which was in fact more dangerous
than anyone, except a handful of theoretical revolutionary
socialists and syndicalists, intended. The crisis, in other words, was
a genuinely spontaneous conflagration despite the ultimately
peaceful intentions of most protagonists, precisely because it
brought into confrontation men who each thought their
incompatible demands morally impregnable. Both sides, convinced
of the Tightness of their cause, moved steadily towards a clash
which neither wanted, because they believed that the other side
would ‘see sense’ and back down. That both backed down before
177
the common danger from abroad when real war came is no warrant
for thinking that the clash could have been avoided by any less
dramatic means.
Whether the ultimate outcome would have been very different
from the vacillations and anti-climax of the post-war denouement
may well be doubted. The government would have been forced to
intervene in defence of law and order and the preservation of the
community from starvation and collapse in anything approaching a
general strike, just as it did in 1921, 1925 and 1926, and indeed as
it did in industry-wide but less than general strikes before the war.
The trade unions could only have won at the expense of
parliamentary democracy, and it is extremely doubtful whether any
of their leaders, even the handful of syndicalists like Tom Mann,
Robert Williams of the Transport Workers, or A.J.Cook of the
South Wales miners, were ready with an adequate alternative. But
we are concerned with the possibility not so much of violent
revolution as of the escalation of confrontational class conflict on a
massive scale. That was certainly a possibility in 1914, and its
avoidance was entirely due to the ‘luck’ of the outbreak of war.
The outstanding feature of the pre-war industrial unrest was its
upsurge from below, which took not only the government and
employers but even the traditional trade union leaders by surprise. It
was less surprising in the case of the ‘New Unionists’, the hitherto
unorganized, or only occasionally and sporadically organized,
workers like the dockers, the building workers or the Cornish clay
miners. It was much more surprising amongst the old unionists, the
miners, railwaymen, textile workers, and West Midlands engineering
and metalworkers, who had a long tradition of organization,
negotiation and, on a district or national scale, strike avoidance.
Most of the strikes of the period began as ‘wildcat’ or unofficial
strikes, often against the advice of the national union leadership. As
George Askwith, the government conciliator, remarked in 1909,
‘Official leaders could not maintain their authority. Often there was
more difference between the men and their leaders than between the
latter and the employers.’16 The Durham miners in 1910 struck
against the eight-hour day negotiated by the Mining Federation of
Great Britain, over the strong opposition of the leadership, because it
led to a three-shift system (in place of two day-shifts) and disruption
of their home life. The South Wales coal strike in the same year
sprang from a dispute about ‘consideration’ (additional pay) for
178
opening a new and difficult seam at the Cambrian Combine pit at

Tonypandy. The national railway strike of 1911 began as a wildcat
strike at Bristol on 5 August for better pay and shorter hours which
rapidly escalated into a national demand for a 2s. rise in wages and
a reduction of weekly hours from sixty to fifty-four. The port
workers’ strikes of 1911 began with a strike of seamen and firemen
of Southampton which spread by ‘spontaneous combustion’ to
Goole, Hull, Manchester, Cardiff and London. The settlement of the
great coal strike of 1912 was nearly aborted when the rank and file
defeated it by 244,000 votes to 201,000, and the leadership, to get
their way, had to extend a two-thirds majority rule for starting a
strike to settling one. The cotton workers’ lock-out of 1913 was
complicated by unofficial strikes against non-unionists amongst
Nelson weavers and a revolt against the official leadership amongst
the Middleton spinners. The West Midlands engineering and metal
workers’ strikes of 1913 began with spontaneous outbreaks in
Birmingham, Smethwick and West Bromwich and escalated into a
district-wide demand for a minimum wage.17
Many of these strikes were accompanied by spontaneous local
violence, sometimes involving clashes with the police and the army,
which was very unwelcome to union leaders. In the summer of
1911, for example, there was rioting and looting in Tonypandy, a
train was attacked at Llanelly where the troops fired and two men
were killed, and there was rioting in the railway strike at Liverpool
where another two strikers were killed. At Hull during the dock
strike Askwith
heard a town councillor remark that he had been in Paris

during the Commune and had never seen anything like this…
he had not known there were such people in Hull—women
with hair streaming and half-nude, reeling through the streets,
smashing and destroying.18
Almost anywhere, around mines, docks, railway depots and

factories, violence might break out, above all where the employers
tried to bring in blackleg workers past the union pickets. In London
a pitched battle between dockers and blacklegs was only avoided
when Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, had the strike-
breaking ship the Lady Jocelyn, full of blackleg labour, stopped
below the port.19
179
In this seething situation, the official union leaders had to run

very fast to keep up with their members. Older militants like Will
Thorne, Ben Tillett, J.R.Clynes and even Tom Mann had to contend
with criticism and challenges from younger ones influenced by
syndicalists and revolutionary socialists from the Plebs League,
breakaway students from Ruskin College, Oxford, and from the
Socialist Labour Party and the British Labour Party, secessionists
from the Socialist Democractic Party (which was opposed to strikes
as a distraction from political action) and forerunners of the
Communist Party of Great Britain of 1920.20 Such ‘agitators’ would
have had little influence with the rank and file, however, if ordinary
union members had not already had a strong sense of grievance
against the industrial system which frustrated their expectations
and against their official leaders who failed to win the benefits they
demanded and often seemed to be in collusion with the employers
and the government to ‘sell them short’.
The widening gulf between the rank and file and the union
leaderships was the unavoidable result of the rise in scale of the
unions which followed from their growth in size, the trend towards
district and national amalgamations, and the consequent
development of district and nationwide negotiations of wages and
conditions which took place far from the place of work where the
individual workers saw and felt the particular grievances which
loomed so large in their working lives. Thus arose one of the major
weaknesses of British industrial relations, the ‘gap at shopfloor
level’ within the firm itself, which would later be filled by the shop
stewards’ movement, notably during the First World War.21 But the
gap was more than an incidental weakness to be remedied by better
shopfloor organization. It was the inevitable prerequisite and
consequence of the functional success of the trade unions. If they
were to succeed in their objectives of winning a bigger share of the
product of industry and better conditions of life and work for their
members by means of collective bargaining, it was necessary and
far more efficient that their leaders become full-time expert
representatives and negotiators. This had long become obvious
where the negotiations were concerned with complex conditions of
remuneration or production, as in the cotton industry’s Brooklands
Agreement on piece rates for different grades, patterns and weaves
of cloth or in the mining industry’s disputes over compensation for
working in ‘abnormal places’.22
180
The Webbs observed and welcomed the growing professionalism

of trade union leaders, and saw it as part of the wider
professionalization of an increasingly corporate society. In place of
individual bargaining
we shall see the conditions of employment adjusted between

equally expert negotiators, acting for corporations reasonably
comparable in strategic strength, and always subject to and
supplemented by the decisions of the High Court of
Parliament, representing the interests of the community as a
whole.23
In the fully developed collectivist industrial democracy
the official of the Weavers’ Union would debate questions of

wages and technical training with the [Co-operative] Store or
Municipality; the college of surgeons or physicians would, as
at present, determine the standard and subjects of examination
for the medical student and fix fees for medical attendance,
subject perhaps to the democratic control of a Minister of
Health. The official of the Trade Union and the official of the
community would, it is true, represent the rival interests of
different sections of the community. But, as members of one
State the interests of their constituents are ultimately
identical.24
In this optimistically harmonious way
Trade Unionism adds to the long list of functions thus

delegated to professional experts the settlement of the
conditions on which the citizen will agree to co-operate in the
national service.25
Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence the employer was already
being replaced by a congeries of professional managers:
in place of the single figure of the ‘capitalist entrepreneur’ we

watch emerging in each trade a whole hierarchy of specialized
professionals—inventors, designers, engineers, buyers,
managers, foremen and what not—organized in their own
181
professional associations, and standing midway between the

shareholder, taxpayer, or consumer, whom they serve, and the
graded army of manual workers whom they direct… In short,
whilst Trade Unionism emphasizes the classic dictum of Adam
Smith that division of labour increases material production, it
carries this principle into the organization of society itself. If
democracy is to mean the combination of administrative
efficiency with genuine popular control, Trade Union
experience points clearly to an ever-increasing differentiation
between the functions of the three indispensable classes of
Citizen-Electors, chosen Representatives, and expert Civil
Servants.26
The touching faith of the Fabians in ‘an elite of unassuming experts

who could make no claim to superior social status’ was not shared
by observers of the same phenomenon to their right and left.27 On
the right Sir Arthur Clay, who saw the crisis in terms of the rise of
syndicalism and collectivism and prophetically warned his
contemporaries in 1912 that ‘Social and industrial movements of
far-reaching importance are now in progress, and what they
portend no living man can say,’ could understand ‘the allurement of
the “general strike” for uneducated and morally undisciplined men’
but found it ‘difficult to understand what attraction Collectivism
can have for them. For wage-earners the establishment of
Collectivism would mean the substitution of bureaucratic control
for that of their present employers, but how would this benefit
them?’
It is true that under a democratic government the Cabinet

would continue to be more or less at the mercy of political
parties strongly represented in the House of Commons; but if
the State Socialist party are able to secure the continuance of
legislative encroachment upon individual liberty now in
progress until private enterprise is absorbed in the State, and
Collectivism is firmly established, government ‘by the people
for the people’ could not survive: long before this point in
Collectivist development is reached, a great army of officials
would have been created, linked from the highest official
down to the lowest State workman by the bond of a common
interest. Almost all the multitudinous and intricate functions
182
of the daily life of a great community would be under the

control of men whose position and livelihood would depend
on the continuance of a system to which they owed them, and
who, if organized as they undoubtedly would be, would be in
a position to make any attempt to subvert it a hopeless
enterprise.28
To the Fabians’ left, Fred Jowett, one of the founders of the

Independent Labour Party, opposed Cabinet government even
under a Labour administration ‘because it means bureaucracy;
because it means the people are not having control’.29 What the
Webbs welcomed and applauded, government by professional
experts, the Labour left understandably feared and suspected. How
much more then did they fear and suspect the permeation of trade
unionism itself by professional bureaucrats. Many of the unofficial,
wildcat strikes of 1910–14 displayed an instinctive fear and
suspicion by the rank and file, by no means confined to politically
conscious militants, that their union leaders were already too
professional, too bureaucratic, too ready to see the employers’
point of view and to respond to appeals to patriotism and
‘responsibility’ by members of the Liberal government.
From the trade union officials’ point of view, by contrast, they
were simply doing the professional job for which they were paid,
and negotiating the best terms that could reasonably be obtained
for their members. They could argue that they were using the
government, through the reluctant intervention of leading
politicians, to wring concessions from the employers and, even
more important for the future, to force employers to recognize the
trade unions and come to the negotiating table. Indeed, it was the
very success of this tactic of pressurizing the government which
gave them illusions of grandeur and the mistaken notion that, if
they were only united, they could coerce the government into
meeting—or into forcing the employers to meet—their demands. As
Robert Williams of the National Transport Workers’ Federation,
still preaching as in 1914 the invincibility of the united unions in
the face of the government and the whole electorate, was to express
it in 1921:
When the workers are negotiating with the employers, or with

the government which invariably represents the employers,
183
they invariably exercise a greater influence when they speak in

terms of industrial strength and power than when they speak
politically… Before the general strike the general election pales
in significance.30
In fact, nearly the opposite of this was true. Far from siding with the
employers, the Liberal government had most frequently intervened to
coerce them, sometimes under the threat or indeed the enactment of
legislation, to recognize the unions and come to a settlement. This
they did reluctantly, and would have preferred to leave such matters
to the professionalism of George Askwith and the Labour
Department of the Board of Trade or the new National Industrial
Council of 1912.31 But the union leaders quickly discovered that,
where they could not get their way through Askwith, there was
nothing to be lost by appealing over his and the employers’ heads to
the Cabinet itself. As Phelps Brown expressed it:
In very patient hands, conciliation proved enough to settle the

disputes which, though some of them were sizeable, did not
threaten to stop a basic industry throughout the country.
Those that did the government tackled very differently. In the
disputes on the railways in 1907 and 1911 and in the mines in
1912 what it in fact did was to coerce the employers by
legislation or the threat of it. Ministers did not leave the
dispute to the conciliatory service, but took it into their own
hands. For its menace to the whole life of the country was felt
to be intolerable…32
As Lloyd George summed it up in Cabinet during the railway strike

of 1911, which coincided with the Agadir crisis and the German
threat of war over Morocco, ‘The government are bound at all costs
to protect the public from the dangers and miseries which famine and
a general unrest of industry will entail.’33 In this case Lloyd George
used the patriotic, anti-German card to force the railway companies
to recognize the unions and negotiate a settlement. But the unions
were mistaken to draw the conclusion that the government could do
no other. Asquith and Churchill were ready to fight the railway
unions to a finish and to use troops, as Churchill and Baldwin did
later in the general strike of 1926, to keep supplies going.34 Yet it was
Asquith himself, with tears in his eyes, who asked the House of
184
Commons in 1912 to pass the Coal Mines Minimum Wage Act as the
only way of forcing a settlement upon the mine owners.35
With such apparent encouragement from the politicians, it was
understandable that the unions should think that they had only to
threaten for the government to capitulate and coerce the employers.
The employers saw the crisis the same way, and believed that the
government—already suspected of favouring the unions in
appointments to the conciliation service, in consultation over the
trade boards and labour exchanges, and in their ‘approved society’
status in national insurance—was in collusion with the unions
against them. Such misunderstandings and misreadings of the
situation and of each other’s motives were behind the mounting
industrial crisis which threatened to come to a head in the autumn
of 1914.
Yet, in a paradoxical way, the crisis contained the seeds of its own
solution. Sir William Ashley, the leading imperialist economist, was
one of the few people to recognize it at the time. He encouraged
employers in 1913 to recognize and support strong trade unions:
‘The weakening of unionism, paradoxical as it may sound, weakens
the necessary basis for industrial peace in the only direction in which
it is likely to be secured nowadays, i.e., the direction of collective
agreement.’36 And already in 1914 he saw that collective bargaining
must lead, however reluctantly, to a form of corporatism:
Society is feeling its way with painful steps, towards a

corporate organisation of industry on the side alike of
employers and of employed: to be then more harmoniously, let
us hope, associated together, with the State alert and intelligent
in the background to protect the interests of the community.37
This was confirmed in practice by the development in many

industries of joint negotiating machinery, the price exacted and the
solution imposed for the settlement of so many disputes by George
Askwith and the government conciliation service. Askwith
observed in July 1914, ‘trade after trade was gradually being
organized on a basis of good relationships so far as the leaders on
both sides were concerned. A network of associated employers and
federated trade unions was spreading over the country.’38 But
corporatism was not born, as militant unionists and recalcitrant
business men believed, out of collusion between professional union
185
leaders and their increasingly professional opponents, much as it

suited their interests after the event in maintaining the stability of
the system which employed them. It was born out of conflict itself
and the shifts and compromises forced on reluctant participants by
the logic of industrial confrontation.
If the war had not come that logic might have worked faster,
either through a showdown in November 1914 or June 1915 or
through the spread of collective bargaining to avert just such a
mutually destructive confrontation. But the war did come, and with
it a new paradox: a short cut to an enforced corporatism imposed
by the state for the sake of national survival. Yet, as we shall see,
wartime corporatism proved to be a bumpier ride than its patriotic
participants expected, it was challenged from below by a militant
rank and file who feared its embrace and, despite Lloyd George’s
best efforts to perpetuate it in formal corporatist institutions, it was
repudiated by both employers and unions after the war with
breakneck speed. Thus the crisis of 1910–14 was neither solved nor
confronted, but merely aborted and postponed to the post-war
period.
2 THE SUPREME TEST OF CLASS SOCIETY

The Great War, as it was called for a generation before a greater
one supervened, was, as the social imperialists had forecast, the
supreme test of national efficiency not only in Britain but in every
one of the belligerent empires. At least four of them failed the test.
Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey broke under the
strain and their traditional military aristocracies were swept from
power and destroyed. France was brought to the edge of collapse,
notably in 1917 with the mutinies in the army against the terrible
conditions at the front and the incompetence of the generals (by no
means unique to the French). Amongst the leading industrial and
military powers, leaving aside the Americans and Japanese as never
fully put to the test of ‘total war’ affecting their home populations,
Britain alone passed the test and survived without substantial
threat of social collapse. This has led to the mistaken belief in
historical and popular legend that Britain came through the world
crisis unscathed and substantially unchanged, save for obvious
benefits to national cohesion and social and political reform which
arose from a successful and united struggle. In fact, as the Duke of
186
Wellington said of Waterloo, it was ‘the nearest run thing you ever
saw in your life’. There were severe strains in the social fabric
which came near at times to tearing it apart.
This is not to deny the very real patriotism which infused the
great majority of the British people during the war, or the social and
political progress which it accelerated. The outright opponents of
the war, whether pacifists like Fenner Brockway, moderate
socialists like Ramsay MacDonald or militant communists like
John Maclean, leader of ‘Red Clydeside’ and ‘first British consul’ of
the Soviet Russian government, were a tiny and much-divided
minority, often counterproductive in their efforts to influence an
inflamed anti-German public opinion. In the name of patriotism
and national efficiency great sacrifices were called forth and freely
made. Millions of men in the first seventeen months before
conscription was imposed in 1916 volunteered for the armed
forces. Hundreds of thousands of women, some of whom,
particularly those from the middle class, had never done paid work
before, volunteered for munitions and other work vital to the war
effort. The whole official Labour movement, with the exception of
the small and moribund Independent Labour Party, united in
support of the war. Meeting in a new Joint Board on 24 August
1914 the Trades Union Congress, the General Federation of Trade
Unions and the Labour Party urged both employers and workers to
abandon all strikes and lock-outs for the duration and to reach
amicable settlements of their outstanding differences. Despite the
‘Appeal to the British Working Class’ by the British Section of the
Second International Working Men’s Association to repudiate the
war, the bulk of the Labour movement backed the call for ‘a nation
united behind the lads at the front’.39
The employers on their side dropped all threats of lock-out
pending at the outbreak of war and, after a feeble attempt to regain
the ground they had lost to the trade unions in the last few years by
calling on the government to impose ‘a sort of martial law’ in
civilian industry, accepted in principle an industrial truce for the
duration.40 More to the point, they came to accept a massive
increase in direct government control of industry and trade which
would have been completely unthinkable in peacetime. The
railways were put under government control from the day the war
started, though they were still managed by their old directors.
Gradually British shipping and all vital supplies of food, such as
187
sugar and wheat, and raw materials, including dyestuffs, iron ore
and non-ferrous metals, were also brought under control and bulk
purchase and, from Lloyd George’s take-over of the Ministry of
Munitions in May 1915, almost every sector of industry remotely
connected with the waging of war was mobilized under
government supervision. The government itself became an
industrial employer on an enormous scale, with the sixteen
National Factories of July 1915 rising to 250 by the war’s end.
Before then the coal mines, beginning with the much disturbed
South Wales coalfield in December 1916, had been virtually
nationalized, agricultural production was directed by the Board of
Agriculture and the County War Agriculture Committees, staple
foodstuffs came to be belatedly rationed, many food prices
controlled, and the import of ‘luxuries’ such as motor cars and
foreign films discouraged by a 33.3 per cent duty.41
The greatest government intervention of all, of course, was
conscription, contemplated and prepared for with increasing
apprehension, from the introduction of National Registration for
men between 15 and 65 in August 1915 to final imposition in
January 1916. Although direction of civilian labour, as in the
Second World War, was never overtly imposed, the various devices
for conserving skilled men and keeping key war workers out of the
armed forces—‘badging’ of munitions workers (December 1914),
‘leaving certificates’ (May 1915) to prevent skilled workers from
leaving their jobs, ‘trade cards’ (November 1916) to enable selected
engineers and other workers to resist the recruiting sergeant, and
finally the Schedule of Protected Occupations (April 1917)—
operated negatively to force men who did not wish to join the army
into essential industries.42 Thus was the whole nation mobilized for
‘total war’ on a scale previously undreamt of, surpassed only by the
greater involvement of the civilian population in the Second World
War. The concept of total war and government direction for the
sake of victory was generally accepted on all sides, except for the
small minorities of conscientious objectors and militant
revolutionaries. The Labour Party and the TUC demanded only
equal sacrifice: conscription of wealth as well as men, the
graduated taxation of the rich and the prevention of profiteering by
a swingeing excess profits tax, and the nationalization of any
industry or activity, such as railways, shipping and the mines,
deemed vital to the war effort.43 Even the Federation of British
188
Industries, formed to represent the employers in 1916, declared

itself in favour of
nationalization…not by the Socialist’s panacea of

‘appropriation’ at all, but by amalgamation, by coordination
and cooperation, and by bringing the state into partnership,
and an increasing partnership in the big businesses that result
from these amalgamations, by developing the crude beginnings
of the ‘controlled establishment’, by the quid pro quo of
profit-sharing and control in the national interest in exchange
for the national credit and a helpful tariff.
This was a sort of ‘war corporatism’ which the FBI envisaged as

one of the elements of post-war reconstruction.44 During the same
critical year Winston Churchill, no friend to socialism, called for all
important employment to be regulated by the state, together with
‘rationing tickets for everything that matters’ and the fixing of
prices ‘so as to secure to the poorest people of this country… the
power of buying a certain modicum of food sufficient to keep up
physical war-making efficiency, at prices which are not outside the
scope of the wages they receive’. These things were being forced
upon the government by the necessity of war. ‘Why not do them
now while there is time?’45
Churchill was right. It was the need for national efficiency which
was driving the government ‘inch by inch’ to adopt measures of state
control which it could never have considered in peacetime. And it
was the civil servants responsible for running the bureaucratic war
machine who saw this most clearly and planned for it. As early as
September 1914 the Director of Army Contracts, U.F.Wintour,
foresaw that the government would have to adopt bulk purchase to
ensure supplies of essential materials. In January 1915 Sir Hubert
Llewellyn Smith at the Board of Trade, responsible along with Sir
George Askwith for the government’s industrial relations policy on
which the whole system of war production depended, forecast that
‘we shall ultimately find some form of compulsion necessary in order
to ensure that effective priority shall be given to Government work
on existing contracts and sub-contracts’.46 It was indeed the civil
servants, the state’s own representatives of expert efficiency and the
professional ideal, who took the initiative in suggesting the extension
of state control and in creating the machinery to carry it through:
189
men like Sir Arthur Salter, Director of Ship Requisitioning at the

Admiralty Transport Department and architect of the Ministry of
Shipping, the ‘whirlwind trio’ E.M. H.Lloyd, E.F.Wise and
U.F.Wintour at the Army Contracts Department, Sir Josiah Stamp at
the Board of Inland Revenue fixing the taxes and finding the money,
Llewellyn Smith, William Beveridge and Charles Rey, the group of
civil servants recruited by Lloyd George from the Board of Trade to
the Ministry of Munitions who broke the Clyde Workers’ Committee
and its revolt, and Beveridge again at the Ministry of Food who
quarrelled with the Food Controller Lord Devonport’s dislike of state
intervention, before the latter was replaced by Lord Rhondda.47
A large number of business men were brought into government
by Lloyd George, largely because of their expertise: Devonport, the
retail grocer, as Food Controller, Joseph Maclay, the Glasgow
shipowner, as ‘Shipping Tsar’, Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily
Express as Minister of Information, Lord Cowdray, the engineer
and oil magnate, as Air Minister, Lord Weir and Allan Smith, the
engineering employers, as advisers on production, Sir Eric Geddes,
the railway director, as the ‘Napoleon of Transport’ and then
munitions chaser, and so on.48 So too were trade unionists and
Labour men, for much the same reason: Arthur Henderson and,
when he resigned, G.N.Barnes in the War Cabinet were brought in
to represent and reassure Labour, Barnes again as Minister of
Pensions, John Hodge and G.H.Roberts as successive Ministers of
Labour. There were also the professional men similarly chosen for
their specific expertise: Dr Christopher Addison at the Ministry of
Reconstruction preparing health and housing plans and Professor
H.A.L.Fisher at the Board of Education. All these prove the rule
that the war demanded professional expertise applied to specific
problems, and the business men in particular showed with what
alacrity professional managers could switch their talents from
private to public enterprise if the incentive proved stronger than
profit making.
As Sir Arthur Salter said, it was not the particular individuals
who mattered but ‘the logic of events and the impelling necessity of
the situation’,49 but it was the bureaucratic experts who recognized
the logic, defined the necessity, and created the machinery to meet
it. War was the ideal environment in which to show off the paces of
professional expertise and its superiority over private enterprise for
‘getting things done’ at breakneck speed on a massive scale. But this
190
assumed, of course, that the experts would be given their heads and
all the powers and resources to do the job, and these conditions
could not, at that stage in the evolutionary process, be expected to
outlast the war. Nevertheless, the lessons of state control by a few
hundred senior civil servants,50 though officially rejected by the
post-war government, would not soon be forgotten or evaded. Even
the Federation of British Industries, in the very act of calling for the
demolition of government control of industry in October 1918,
asked in the same breath for state guidance in ‘the huge task’ of
resettling industry on a peace basis.51 The War Cabinet concluded
prophetically that ‘the war has brought a transformation of the
social and administrative structure of the state, much of which is
bound to be permanent’.52
The transformation was crowned by the extension of the
franchise to those who had participated so loyally and effectively in
winning the war, to the working classes as a whole and, with a
timidity which proved unfounded, to women but only those over
30. These two victories for democracy were, paradoxically, to
justify all the fears of the pre-war Liberal government: the first
ensured—together with the Liberal split between Asquith and
Lloyd George from 1916 to 1926—that the Liberals would never
hold office alone again; the second, since more women than men
even in the working class voted Conservative, determined along
with the division of the anti-Tory vote between Liberals and
Labour, that the Conservatives would hold office (including
coalitions) for most of the next seventy years.53
Nearly universal adult suffrage was one reward for mass
participation in the war, what Andrzejewski has called the ‘military
participation ratio’, the proportion of the population drawn into
the war effort.54 In the First World War this was unprecedently
high, with about 4 million men, 24 per cent of the adult male
population, under arms and another 1.5 million men and women in
munitions work out of a population of 42 million (or about 46
million including Ireland).55 According to that theory such mass
participation should lead to a measure of social levelling by means
of progressive taxation and social reform. As Richard Titmuss
expressed it after the Second World War:
The aims and content of social policy, both in peace and war,
are thus determined—at least to a substantial extent—by how
191
far the cooperation of the masses is essential to the successful

prosecution of the war. If this cooperation is thought to be
essential then inequalities must be reduced and the pyramid of
stratification must be flattened.56
Although this has been hotly disputed, at least as far as the

immediate effects of the 1914–18 war are concerned,57 it cannot be
denied that such a levelling was the intention of the wartime
coalition and its successor, that progressive taxation took a
quantum leap during the war to a new level of ‘taxable tolerance’
from which it never again subsided, and that in housing policy,
education and social security provision corners were turned which
proved irrevocable.58 Lloyd George had promised ‘a fit land for
heroes to live in’, and the King’s Speech to the first post-war
Parliament promised even more:
The aspirations for a better social order which have been

quickened in the hearts of My people by the experience of war
must be encouraged by prompt and comprehensive action.
Before the War, poverty, unemployment, inadequate housing,
and many remediable ills were aggravated by division. But
since the outbreak of the war every party and every class have
worked and fought together for a great ideal… We must
continue to manifest the same spirit. We must stop at no
sacrifice of interest or prejudice to stamp out unmerited
poverty, to diminish unemployment and mitigate its sufferings,
to provide decent homes, to improve the nation’s health and
to raise the standard of well-being throughout the country. We
shall not achieve this end by undue tenderness towards
acknowledged abuses, and it must necessarily be retarded by
violence or even by disturbance. We shall succeed only by
patient and untiring resolution in carrying through legislation
and the administrative action which are required. It is that
resolute action which I now ask you to support.59
Despite the almost immediate ‘bonfire of wartime controls’ and the

onset in 1921 of mass unemployment, these promises were not so
cynically disregarded as was later believed by those who expected
more than the words actually said. Poverty did decline, at least in
part owing to government policy, decent homes were to be provided
192
on an unprecedented if still inadequate scale, and the nation’s health

and living standards did improve between the wars beyond anything
expected before it. But this was not entirely due to gratitude for mass
co-operation in the war effort, and at least as much to the crisis in
class relations which might have lost the war and to the fear of social
collapse and revolution which might have lost the peace as well.
The locus of the crisis was in industrial relations, where the
combination of social harmony and patriotic fervour was by no
means as uncomplicated as popular legend has it. Lloyd George,
who had expected massive industrial unrest amounting to a
challenge to the government if war had not intervened, saw
industrial disputes as the main obstacle to a united war effort. He
wrote to Ben Tillett in late August 1914:
It is very difficult to gauge what the actual effect of war under

modern conditions will be upon either capital or labour, but
one thing is already perfectly obvious—it must effect a
revolutionary change in the relations of the state to both.60
In the sense that any substantial strike in an industry vital to the

war effort would be a challenge to national survival and would
invoke government intervention to settle or suppress it, he was
more prophetic than he knew. The government, and often Lloyd
George himself, were increasingly forced to take drastic action,
vacillating between forcing employers to meet the workers’
demands at one end of the spectrum and imprisoning or deporting
strike leaders at the other. Nor was the crisis confined to workplace
disputes over wages, conditions of work, excessive overtime,
dilution of skilled work by unskilled men and women, and the like.
Through the threat of conscription and the inefficient devices used
to protect key workers, through the demand for equal sacrifice by
all classes and for the ‘conscription of riches’ (Ben Tillett’s phrase,
taken up by the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee),61
through the denunciation of war-profiteering by industrialists and
of exploitation by landlords of scarce housing accommodation, and
through the widespread belief amongst workers that they had a
right to share with management in the decisions which affected
their current lives and their post-war future, the conflict escalated
beyond the workplace to the main political arena. For some of their
leaders at least, especially after the success of the Bolshevik
193
revolution in Russia, the war represented the terminal crisis of

capitalism and an opportunity to be exploited to the full, and if
they were remarkably few they were still vociferous enough to instil
into the government the fear of revolution in Britain itself.
The crisis began on what came to be known as ‘Red Clydeside’
where, as early as February 1915, 10,000 members of the Amal-
gamated Society of Engineers struck for a wage increase of 2d. an
hour which stemmed from a claim made in June 1914. The strike
was unofficial and as much a revolt of the rank and file against their
union leaders as against the big Glasgow employers, including Sir
William (later Lord) Weir, soon to be one of Lloyd George’s business
men in government. It was organized by the shop stewards, the
unpaid local workplace officials of the union, who formed the Clyde
Labour Withholding Committee. The strike, which many members
of the government and even some employers thought justified by the
rise in prices, was settled for 1d. an hour and an equivalent 10 per
cent increase in piece rates, but the stewards went on in October
1915 to create the famous Clyde Workers’ Committee which was to
give the government so much trouble that it finally suppressed it and
harassed its leaders. The leaders were a more diverse group than the
government and employers supposed.62 Although they all belonged
to left-wing radical or revolutionary parties, the Socialist Labour
Party, the British Socialist Party, or the Independent Labour Party,
they included genuine if ineffectual revolutionaries like William
Gallacher, Arthur MacManus and, behind the scenes, John Maclean,
the Glasgow teacher whose Marxist economics evening classes drew
as many as 500 trade unionists; but they also included a majority of
stewards like John Muir, David Kirkwood and, again behind the
scenes, the ILP journalist and publisher John Wheatley, who while
bitterly opposed to the capitalist system saw little chance or benefit
in violent revolution.63 Their main unifying belief was that the
official leadership of the trade unions and the Labour Party, by
unconditionally supporting the war, by making the Treasury
Agreement of March 1915 with Lloyd George to abandon the strike
weapon, permit dilution of skilled labour and relax restrictions on
overtime and Sunday working, and by accepting the Munitions of
War Act of May 1915 which gave the government almost carte
blanche control of industrial relations, had betrayed them to the
employers and the politicians. The Committee’s first leaflet declared:
194
The support given to the Munitions Act by the officials was

an act of treachery to the working classes. Those of us who
have refused to be sold have organized the above
Committee… determined to retain what liberties we have, and
to take the first opportunity of repealing all the acrimonious
legislation that has recently been imposed on us.64
They were interested in industrial unionism (one big union per

industry), influenced by the syndicalism preached by the Irish trade
unionist and revolutionary James Connolly, and in ‘workers’
control’, defined as organized labour taking a ‘direct share in the
management down through all the departments’. 65 But their
language, like that of the quasi-syndicalists before and indeed after
the war, was systematically ambiguous and could be interpreted as
being ultimately aimed at seizing control of the system by
revolution:
Let it be clearly understood that we make no claim to power

of any kind. Our policy is simply and purely defensive;…
multiplicity of unions spells weakness and the ultimate aim of
the CWC is to weld these unions into one powerful
organization that will place the workers in complete control of
the industry… The Clyde Workers’ Committee stands for
Unity on the Clyde, and unity on the Clyde means freedom
for the workers.66
The government could afford to ignore such long-term threats but it

could not afford to ignore repeated strikes against dilution by key
engineering workers and what it considered to be political strikes
against conscription and against the Munitions Act itself. By
November 1915 the government had determined that ‘to obtain a
reasonably smooth working of the Munitions Act, this committee
should be smashed’. Dilution Commissioners were sent to Glasgow
‘to convert and persuade the men in say half-a-dozen of the principal
establishments to the principle of dilution’, and plans were made,
failing persuasion, to impose it and risk the threat of a strike. What
may finally have brought Lloyd George to the end of his patience
was his rough handling on a visit to Glasgow at Christmas 1915 at
which his Welsh charm failed to work on the dour Scots. At a riotous
meeting on Christmas Day which closed in disorder he was treated to
195
abuse as ‘the best paid munitions worker in Britain’, whose ‘every

action has the taint of slavery about it’, and to threats of a general
strike against dilution and against conscription. The government
suppressed the Glasgow socialist weeklies, the ILP’s Forward, the
BSP’s Vanguard and, later, the SLP’s Worker, arrested Gallacher,
Muir and Bell as the latter’s publishers, which provoked strikes in all
the major CWC factories except Parkhead where Kirkwood was
operating his own dilution scheme.67 Finally, in March 1916, the
government ordered the arrest and deportation to Edinburgh of the
main leaders of the CWC, threatened the strikers with prosecution
under the Defence of the Realm Act, and actually imprisoned thirty
of them. By mid-May Maclean and MacDougall of the BSP’s
Vanguard, the only genuine revolutionaries, were also in jail. The
Clyde Workers’ Committee, which Christopher Addison of the
Ministry of Munitions suspected of ‘a systematic and sinister plan’ to
blackmail the government into repealing the Munitions and Military
Service Acts, was crushed. Although it reappeared in late 1917, and
John Maclean became the (unrecognized) British consul of the
revolutionary Russian government, it did not regain its threatening
appearance until after the war.68 The only substantial success the
CWC claimed, and that doubtfully since it was begun by soldiers and
munitions workers’ wives and supported by unofficial strikes at five
shipyards not controlled by the engineering CWC, was the Glasgow
rent strike and the subsequent Rent Restriction Act of 1915—though
the latter had other, more national roots, as we shall see.69
The government’s industrial strategy, in so far as it had one, was
to separate the militants amongst the rank and file from the official
leadership of the trade unions. In this it unconsciously justified the
suspicions among the rank and file, not confined to the militants,
that their leaders had sold them out. How far Lloyd George was
willing to go to placate and support the official leadership is shown
by his very different treatment of the coal miners who, ironically,
had not signed the Treasury Agreement and considered themselves
unbound by the Munitions Act. In South Wales the 1910 wage
agreement was due for renewal in the summer of 1915 and, despite
efforts at settlement by Askwith and Walter Runciman, President of
the Board of Trade, and appeals by the Miners’ Federation, the
Welsh miners, seeking a permanent rather than a mere wartime
wage increase, came out on unofficial strike on 15 July. Runciman,
with the backing of prime minister Asquith and the Conservatives,
196
proposed not to imprison the strikers but to fine and disenfranchise

them under the Munitions Act. At this point, Clement Edwards,
President of the Miners’ Federation, went to Lloyd George, who
immediately chartered a special train to Cardiff, taking Runciman
and Henderson with him, and conceded the miners’ demands.70 Sir
George Askwith considered this sort of instant capitulation made
his task and that of responsible trade unionists and employers that
much more difficult: ‘The so-called settlement did more to cause
unrest during the succeeding years than almost any other factor,
and to lessen hopes of establishing a sane method for the settlement
of disputes.’71 It certainly confirmed the miners’ and many other
militant unionists’ belief, so pregnant with misplaced confidence
for the post-war crisis, that the government could not resist a
resolute working class.
Meanwhile, Red Clydeside’s torch, overrated in its incendiarism
as it undoubtedly was, now passed to the wider, more national shop
stewards’ movement. This was in part due to the government’s own
action in dispersing the Clydeside leaders. Through the missionary
travels of Arthur MacManus, who became President of the
National Administrative Council of the Shop Stewards’ Movement
in August 1917 (and first President of the Communist Party of
Great Britain in 1920), and others to Liverpool, Manchester,
Barrow, Coventry, Birmingham, Derby, Sheffield, Leeds, London
and other engineering centres, they became the instigators of many
shop stewards’ amalgamation committees.72 But it was also a
spontaneous rank and file movement by men provoked into conflict
with their own union leaders, as well as with their employers and
the government, above all over the question of conscription. Both
the Parliamentary Labour Party (despite a Conference majority
against it) and the TUC had by mid-1916 accepted the need for
conscription.73 In November 1916 the call-up of a young Sheffield
engineer, Leonard Hargreaves, provoked an unofficial strike.
Hargreaves worked in the same department of Vickers as
J.T.Murphy, leader of the Sheffield shop stewards, a pre-war
follower of Connolly and himself an ideologue of industrial
unionism and workers’ control, who organized a nationwide
campaign for his release. The outcome was a remarkable victory
for the shop stewards. Not only was Hargreaves released but the
government negotiated with the Amalgamated Society of Engineers
a ‘trade card’ scheme of military exemption certificates which was
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operated by the union itself.74 A national conference of shop

stewards organized by MacManus at Manchester declared, ‘We
will support the officials just as long as they rightly represent the
workers, but we will act independently immediately they
misrepresent us.’75
The euphoria did not last, however. In April 1917 the
government, pressed by the army for more and more conscripts to
staunch the bloody losses on the western front, repudiated the trade
card agreement and by May provoked a massive wave of strikes
throughout England (though not, significantly, on the Clyde),
involving over 200,000 engineers and shipbuilders in forty-eight
towns, with the loss of a million and a half working days. The
government refused to meet the shop stewards and, after sending
King George and Queen Mary on a tour of the affected areas to no
avail, arrested the strike leaders. Finally, the Minister of Munitions
agreed to meet a deputation of the shop stewards in the company
of J.T.Brownlie, the secretary of the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers, who agreed to call off the strike in return for the release
of the leaders and further negotiations with the trade union officials
(not the stewards). The outcome was an amended Schedule of
Protected Occupations which kept many more engineers out of the
army.76
That the shop stewards’ movement was led by self-conscious
revolutionaries there can be no doubt. MacManus, from the chair
of a further national conference in Manchester on 5 August 1917,
welcomed the Russian Revolution (not yet taken over by the
Bolsheviks) and talked of the strike wave in the engineering
industry as ‘a symptom of the beginning of revolutionary
development in this country’.77 Six out of the eight members of the
National Administrative Council elected at the 1917 Conference,
including MacManus, Murphy and Gallacher, became founding
members of the British Communist Party, and by 1923 MacManus,
Bell, Murphy and Gallacher were all members of its Political
Bureau. A further conference at Manchester in January 1918 voted
to ‘actively resist the manpower proposals of the government…
even though these might be agreed with the trade unions’ and
demanded ‘that the government shall at once accept the invitation
of the Russian government to consider peace’. One delegate asked,
‘Who can say this conference may not start a revolution? Someone
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has got to make a move, and there is going to be a revolution in this

country in a week or two’.78
But the revolutionary stewards, however few or many, could no
more carry the rank and file with them than the abused officials.
Despite a growing opposition to the war, and their belief that ‘a
general strike in the big key industries of Europe would put an end
to the war in less than a week’, most stewards and workers were
not willing to risk losing the war if enemy workers would not join
in.79 This was particularly true during the German spring offensive
of 1918, which took the steam out of the whole movement. Lord
Burnham, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph still believed in
October 1918 that ‘we cannot hope to escape some sort of
revolution…and there will be no passionate resistance from
anybody’, and the Soviet Russian government believed that Britain,
like Germany, was ripe for revolution, but the revolution refused to
happen.80
Some of the credit (or blame) for this must go to the clever, if
opportunist, tactics of Lloyd George and his team of skilful civil
servants and inducted business men and trade unionists. But most
credit must go to the almost instinctive way in which the
professional representatives of government, capital and labour
drew together in the face of a threat not only to the survival of the
country but also to the system which nourished and supported
them. In one sense the militant shop stewards were correct; trade
union officials did have a stake in maintaining the industrial
system, but that did not mean that they had sold out to the
capitalists. On the contrary, it was the employers who felt most
aggrieved at giving up, even temporarily, what they believed had
been their natural right to control their own property and discipline
their own workmen, and understandably looked forward to
regaining ‘the right and power to manage our own businesses as
soon as possible’ after the war.81 It was the professionals who ran
the employers’ associations who could see a new future for
industrial relations in the lessons of wartime co-operation. The
Federation of British Industries, as we have seen, declared in 1916
for non-socialist ‘nationalization’ (meaning corporatism rather
than public ownership) in the form of a partnership between big
business, the state and profit-sharing workers. By 1918 it was
blaming ‘the absence of any human touch’ in industry for labour
troubles and arguing that ‘in future the work people would expect
199
to be consulted on a number of questions that had previously been

dealt with by employers’. Although it was bitterly criticized for its
‘softness’ by the tougher-minded Engineering Employers’
Federation under Allan Smith, which created the rival National
Confederation of Employers’ Organizations in 1919, Smith and the
EEF itself learned by experience to deal informally with the shop
stewards’ committees in the interests of industrial peace. 82
Consciously on the part of the FBI, less consciously on the part of
the EEF, the officials professionally responsible for management’s
policy towards labour were moving towards a form of
collaboration with labour—self-interested, no doubt, but no less
sincere for that—despite the opposition of many, if not most, of the
less far-sighted business men.
On their side, the TUC and trade unions and the labour
movement as a whole enjoyed an enormous surge of power and
prestige during the war which arose out of the shortage of
manpower and the demonstrable indispensability of labour. The
collaboration thrust upon them by the government was not wholly
welcome, since it faced them with a dilemma. On the one hand, it
was designed to prevent them from exploiting their advantage to
the full in better wages and conditions and consultation by
management, and every accommodation offered to government
and the employers, on dilution, overtime, suspension of restrictive
practices, and the acceptance of conscription, laid them open to the
charge from their more militant members of betraying the very
people they represented. On the other hand, they made enormous
gains from their support of the war effort, in recognition of
themselves as responsible negotiators by the employers and as a
force to be considered and consulted by government. They were not
taken in: they knew that if peace brought depression and a glut of
labour in place of shortage, all these gains would be hotly
contested. At the same time, many of them were reinforced in their
pre-war belief that a united trade union movement was irresistible
and that the mere threat of a general strike would produce
unconditional surrender by any government.
The political wing of the labour movement gained most of all.
With four Labour MPs getting their first taste of Cabinet office—
two of them successively in the five-man War Cabinet—and
numerous junior ministers, the Labour Party made its first real
advance towards becoming a governing party. By the end of the
200
war it had become a fully-fledged political force with a

constitution, individual members and constituency parties, ready to
bid against the Liberals for the role of the alternative government.
Yet in some ways more significant from the present point of view
was the behind-the-scenes work of the War Emergency Workers’
National Committee, the body set up in August 1914 with
representatives from all sections of the Labour movement:
to protect working class interests during the War…, arrest

existing distress, and prevent as far as possible further distress,
and unemployment in the future. The Nation is only at the
beginning of a crisis which demands thorough and drastic
action by the State and the municipalities. Any bold, far-
reaching change, which will probably be resisted by existing
bureaucracy, can only be made possible by the strong pressure
of well organized, well directed popular agitation.
It was not by popular agitation but by patient pressure on the

government on behalf of individuals and groups oppressed, as they
saw it, by bureaucracy, both civilian and military, and by property,
capitalist and landed, that their most important work was done.
Most of it was done, moreover, not by the ragbag Committee of
‘sane patriots’ like Sidney Webb and Susan Lawrence and
‘superpatriots’ like Hyndman, John Hodge and Havelock Wilson,
of opponents of the war like Ramsay MacDonald and Robert
Williams, and of ‘revolutionary defeatists’ like Robert Quelch or
E.C.Fairchild, but by the cool and sensible Jim Middleton, Assistant
Secretary of the Labour Party, who became Secretary of the
Committee and brought almost the whole staff of the Labour Party
with him. After a false start in urging the government to provide
public works for the rapidly disappearing unemployed, the
secretariat went on to press behind the scenes for most of the
measures the government was later forced to adopt; more adequate
war pensions, better dependants’ allowances for soldiers and
sailors, bulk purchase of grain and other foodstuffs, control of
sugar, milk, coal and other domestic supplies, help for the special
hardships of families who had lost more than one member in
action, protection against eviction by landlords of soldiers’ families,
and so on. As Middleton put it in February 1917, ‘We have made
representations to Government departments almost without end.
201
Our proposals have generally been turned down to begin with, but
have been adopted in very many important particulars after
inordinate and simply damnable delays’.83
Perhaps their most signal success—aided of course by rent
strikes and protests in Glasgow, Coventry and elsewhere—was the
Rent and Mortgage Interest Restriction Act of December 1915.
This was based, like their pressure for higher taxation of the rich,
on the principle of ‘conscription of riches’ to balance the
conscription of men from the unrich classes, and on the
professional notion that property should justify itself by service to
the community, above all at this time when the working class was
being forced to fight for the defence of property. The conscription
of riches, Royden Harrison argues, was, through Sidney Webb who
served on both the Committee and the Labour Party Executive, the
real origin of Clause 4 of the 1918 Party Constitution, calling for
‘the common ownership of the Means of Production, Distribution
and Exchange’.84 Although Webb and Tawney, who drafted the
Constitution, needed no such source for their own belief in public
ownership, the experience of the war made it more acceptable to
the trade unions and the non-socialist members of the Party. But the
main significance of the War Emergency Committee was its
continuous experience of working behind the scenes with
government, both ministers and officials, which drew the Labour
movement almost unconsciously into a collaborative rather than a
confrontational relationship with the state.
The third partner in the ‘triangular collaboration in the industrial
sphere, between government, trade unions and the business class’, as
Keith Middlemas has called this ‘emerging corporatism’, was of
course the state.85 The government’s reluctant pre-war involvement
in industrial relations became just as reluctant but still more
inevitable during the war. If the government was bound, as Lloyd
George put it, to protect the public from famine and misery in
peacetime,86 how much more was it bound to intervene to protect the
country from collapse and defeat in war. The first instinct of the
politicians, including Lloyd George, Churchill and Balfour, was to
blame a disaffected minority of political agitators for the wartime
strikes and to talk of arresting, deporting or conscripting them; but
experience taught them, firstly, as Balfour admonished Churchill in
Cabinet in June 1915, that coercion only created martyrs and,
secondly, that agitators could work only on real grievances.87 The
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eight industrial Unrest Commissioners sent to the strike-ridden areas

reported that the high cost of living, the scandal of profiteering, the
effects of dilution of skilled men’s pay and status, conscription, and
administrative incompetence were the real causes of unrest, but
underlying them all:
The want of confidence is the fundamental cause, of which

many of the causes given are manifestations. It shows itself in
the feeling that there has been inequality of sacrifice, that the
Government have broken solemn promises, that trade union
officials are no longer to be relied on, and that there is woeful
uncertainty as to the future.88
Although the government never quite understood that the line

between revolution and loyalty ran through the shop stewards’
movement, not between the shop stewards and the trade union
officials, they nevertheless grasped instinctively at a tacit alliance
with the officials whom they saw, rightly or wrongly, as their main
hope of industrial peace. By the end of the war even the bellicose
Churchill was ready to argue for a powerful trade union movement
and the industrialist Tory leader Bonar Law declared that ‘trade
union organization was the only thing between us and anarchy’.
But it was civil servants responsible for industrial relations, notably
men like Askwith, Llewellyn Smith and Horace Wilson at the new
Ministry of Labour, who not only saw the need for ‘triangular
collaboration’ but worked out the machinery through which it
would work: the Whitley Councils for joint consultation between
employers and workers in each industry on everything ‘affecting
the progress and well-being of the trade’, the Arbitration
Department of the Ministry of Labour, and over them the
‘industrial parliament’, the National Industrial Conference.89
That in the immediate post-war years the whole machinery
atrophied, leaving only remnants behind, was no fault of theirs. In
the nature of the case, any formal machinery of a corporatist
character involving the professional representatives of government,
employers and trade unions was bound to raise suspicion and
hostility amongst their constituents. In the renewed crisis of the
post-war period the lessons of the war had to be learned all over
again.
203
3 THE CRISIS AVERTED
At the end of the war almost everyone in Britain was dedicated to

the task of ‘reconstruction’, from the government in the King’s
Speech at the opening of Parliament which looked forward to ‘a
better social order’, to those admirers of Soviet Russia who
expected an immediate revolution in Britain. The War Cabinet
commented, on the setting up of the Ministry of Reconstruction in
1917, that it was ‘not so much a question of rebuilding society as
it was before the war, but of moulding a better world out of the
social and economic conditions which have come into being during
the war’.90 Nor was it a cynical piece of war propaganda to con the
public into supporting the war effort, to be dismissed without
remorse once victory was achieved. There is no reason to think that
Lloyd George and the Coalition government did not believe in ‘a fit
land for heroes to live in’, or that ‘the hard-faced men who had
done well out of the war’ amongst the new MPs wished to preside
over an economically depressed, socially deprived and politically
discontented country.91 No one, least of all those business men who
were most determined to abolish government controls and reinstate
unfettered private enterprise, wished to return to the near-anarchic
industrial relations which threatened to explode into a major clash
between the classes in 1914. On the contrary, the Federation of
British Industries even put forward a scheme for a welfare system to
be run jointly by the employers and the unions in return for
concessions on overmanning and productivity, while Steel-
Maitland, an industrialist and Tory Party manager, looked forward
to ‘a visible and automatic community of interest between masters
and men, and of making the latter feel they are a corporate part of
a mutually beneficent organisation’.92 The problem, and the chief
cause of the renewed crisis after the war, were the incompatible
interpretations and expectations which ‘reconstruction’ aroused,
and the consequent mutual fear on both sides of industry of what
one side saw as revolution and the other as counter-revolution.
The trade unions and the Labour Party had grown in power and
stature as a result of the war: trade union membership doubled
from 4,145,000 in 1914 to 8,348,000 in 1920, while the Labour
Party’s vote had multiplied six fold, from 400,000 in 1910 to
2,374,000 in 1918, and it had replaced the Asquith Liberals as the
official Opposition.93 The Labour Party, in their manifesto ‘Labour
204
and the New Social Order’, called for a brave new world which
would:
secure for the producers by hand and by brain the full fruits
of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof
that may be possible, upon the basis of the common
ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable
system of popular administration and control of each industry
and service.
The ‘Four Pillars of the House that we propose to erect’ were (in the
words of the 1918 manifesto, written by Sidney Webb in his
capitalized Law of the Covenant style):
The Universal Enforcement of the National Minimum;

The Democratic Control of Industry;
The Revolution in National Finance; and
The Surplus Wealth for the Common Good.
This Fabian Utopia meant social security, public works to maintain

full employment, the nationalization of key industries including
railways, coal, electric power, industrial life insurance and alcoholic
drink, democratic control through Parliament rather than workers’
participation, and steeply graduated taxation including a capital
levy.94 This was certainly enough to make most employers think of
Soviet Russia and Lloyd George to fling the charge (in a rather odd
combination of adjectives) that ‘the Labour Party is being run by
the extreme pacifist, Bolshevist group’.95
The trade union movement looked even more immediately
threatening. Trade unionists, both leaders and rank and file, had
gained a great deal from the war, not so much in increased money
wages (which, in fact, barely kept up with prices) as in recognition
and consultation and, above all, in a sense of power and self-respect
which came from the manifest indispensability of labour. Yet their
chief motivation at the end of the war was fear: fear of depression
and unemployment and the consequent loss of bargaining power,
decline of wages and worsening of conditions, and the snatching
back by the employers of all the concessions they had been forced
to make during the war by the shortage of labour and the pressure
of a desperate government. While for the Labour Party state
205
control and nationalization were an ultimate goal accelerated by

the war, for many of the workers in the troubled industries, notably
coal and the railways, they were an immediate safeguard of wages,
hours and conditions which would be threatened as and when the
capitalist owners took back control from the state. To this was
added an urgency which stemmed from the belief that war was
always followed by depression, and the knowledge that the
demobilization of some 4 million troops and the closure of the
munitions factories would soon flood the labour market with new
competitors. For some of the more militant rank and file leaders the
Russian Revolution, too, was not just an example to be admired
and a model to be cautiously followed but the symptom and
harbinger of a worldwide crisis of capitalism, already spreading to
Germany and other parts of Industrial Europe, which had to be
taken at the flood or not at all.96 And hovering over the whole
industrial scene was the mistaken belief, not only on the part of
syndicalists like Robert Williams of the Transport Workers but also
of moderate leaders of the Triple Alliance like J.H.Thomas of the
National Union of Railwaymen, that the mere threat of a general
strike was enough to bring the government and the employers to
their knees.97
For the employers, reconstruction meant the end of state control
of industry and the recovery of their power to manage their own
property and workforce. As the FBI put it in October 1918,
‘Among the business community there is practical unanimity of
agreement that there should be as little interference as possible on
the part of the State in the future Governance of industry’.
Although the FBI admitted that ‘some measure of national control
might conceivably be a good thing in some industries’, it was
determined that state enterprises like the National Factories should
not be allowed to compete with private enterprise in peacetime, and
in January 1919 it joined with the Associated Chambers of
Commerce and other manufacturers’ and traders’ associations to
oppose the nationalization of railways.98
But state intervention was not the only problem. Many
employers were even more concerned about the temper of the
workforce and whether it was becoming alienated and potentially
revolutionary. The tough Engineering Employers’ Federation,
which was to set up the National Confederation of Employers’
Organizations in 1920 in rivalry with the ‘incompetent’ FBI to
206
oppose growing labour influence in Parliament and Whitehall, was

concerned not so much with ‘normal’ labour unrest but with
revolutionary phenomena, due ‘to a state of indiscipline (1) of the
workpeople to their trade unions, (2) of the workpeople generally
towards the government, and (3) to objections which are felt by a
section of the community to the present state of society’.99 Once
again it was fear—fear of what they perceived to be a revolutionary
threat to their existence—that motivated the employers.
The government too had a genuine fear of revolution and was
not just playing the Bolshevik card for electioneering purposes. In
the last year of the war the Cabinet had been much impressed with
an analysis by its young Assistant Secretary, William Ormsby-Gore,
MP, who saw connections between the shop stewards’ movement,
the Irish problem and the Russian Revolution:
The essence of this movement is, of course, the new form of

Marxian syndicalism, revolutionary in its aims and methods,
aiming at the overthrow of the existing social and economic
order by direct action; its leaders welcome unrest and strike
action in any form and for whatever cause, they are the true,
up-to-date revolutionaries, who seem to be appearing in every
country in the world, and whether it is Petrograd, Chicago,
the Belfast dock-yards, the Clyde or the West Riding of
Yorkshire, it is all the same thing. It looks as if the Leaders,
whether Jew or Irish, have this common feature, they are all
men with dissatisfied aspirations, embittered against society
and bent on using the results of the War to overthrow the
existing order of things.100
There was plausible colour for his Cassandra-like warnings. The

shop stewards’ movement on the Clyde and in Sheffield and
elsewhere was dominated by Irishmen, often followers of James
Connolly, the syndicalist leader of the pre-war Dublin transport
strike, like Arthur MacManus and J.T.Murphy, who were also
members of the British Socialist Party or the Socialist Labour Party
(with its connections with Daniel De Leon and the American SLP),
the two main groups from which the founding members of the
Communist Party of Great Britain in 1921 were to come.101 The
midwife of the British Communist Party was a Russian émigré
named Theodore Rothstein, who joined the SDF in 1899, was on its
207
Executive from 1901, dominated the breakaway British Socialist

Party during the critical period between the Russian Revolution
and its transformation into the Communist Party of Great Britain,
and had been a member of the Russian Communist Party
(Bolshevik) since 1900.102 Lloyd George and the government came
to be well apprised of such activities through the somewhat
alarmist ‘Reports on Revolutionary Organisations within the
United Kingdom’ by Sir Basil Thomson, ex-head of MI5 and now
head of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, which
coloured their view of the industrial labour movement.103 They saw
it as divided between the reckless ‘extremists’ of the shop stewards’
movement and the Triple Alliance and the responsible ‘moderates’
of the TUC and the leadership of most of the trade unions outside
the Triple Alliance. The perceived threat of revolution, albeit from
a small segment of the labour movement but one which might win
the battle for the minds of the rank and file against the official
union leadership, helps to account for the government’s strategy,
which was to buy off the moderates with concessions which would
strengthen their hold on the membership, isolate the extremists
and, in the last resort, crush them.
As part of this strategy Lloyd George developed his ‘emerging
corporatism’, his attempted ‘contract’ between government,
employers and trade unions which reached its high point in the
National Industrial Conference of February 1919. Whether this
was as deliberate and self-conscious an attempt to set industrial
relations and society at large on a new foundation as admirers of
Lloyd George believe may well be doubted.104 Lloyd George, the
great extemporary prestidigitator, seduced men as he seduced
women, by a dazzling combination of spontaneous charm and spur-
of-the-moment promises, calculating that the same vertiginous skill
would extricate him from any unfortunate and unforeseen
consequences later. He grabbed at the corporatist solution because
it was the only stratagem available to him in the immediate post-
war crisis, and he instinctively divined that it would appeal
sufficiently to the interests of the more moderate and intelligent
trade union and employers’ representatives to divide them from
their extremists long enough to ride the crisis out. But he could not
have done this if a ‘corporate bias’ (to use Middlemas’s term) had
not already been built into the instinctive responses of the union
and employers’ leaders, whose interests lay in gaining benefits for
208
their constituents peacefully and with credit to themselves, with

much talk indeed of threats and bluff but without the damaging
industrial warfare which could only destroy their own assets—their
union funds or the profits which supported employers’
organizations—and thus undermine their own professional
position.
What Lloyd George did not consider, and what wrecked his
hopes of a formal, institutionalized corporatism, were two flaws in
the scheme: firstly, the personal flaw of all philanderers, political as
well as sexual, that the victims of seduction soon learn to distrust
the seducer; and secondly, the more impersonal and significant fact
that, if it was in the interests of the union and employers’ leaders to
adopt a corporate approach, it was still more in their interests not
to institutionalize it. This was because an informal, tacit
understanding of the kind which grows up between all negotiators
(from international diplomats to police spokesmen and hijackers in
hostage cases) leaves the protagonists freer to pursue their own
unfettered and unstated aims, allows them personally to claim the
credit for negotiating success rather than make it appear the
automatic outcome of impersonal machinery, and above all
protects them in both directions, from the demands of the other
parties that they take responsibility for delivering their constituents’
consent to agreements which may be repudiated by them, and from
charges by their constituents that they have sold them out to the
other side. It is against this paradoxical ambivalence of all three
parties to the triangular collaboration that we must view both the
immediate post-war crisis and the apparent failure of Lloyd
George’s instinctive formalized corporatism, and also the longer-
term solution of the crisis in the informal corporate ‘entente’ which
succeeded it.
The industrial crisis began within weeks of the armistice with a
call for a general strike on the Clyde for a forty-hour week on 27
January 1919. In response to the call from a joint committee
representing both the shop stewards and local trade union officials,
70,000 engineering, flour mill and transport workers stopped
work, mass demonstrations were held outside St Andrews Hall,
Glasgow, one of which turned into ‘the battle of George Square’ in
which many strikers and police were injured by batons and bottles,
and tanks and troops were called out to hold the deserted field. The
strike was abandoned on 11 February. Twelve leaders were later
209
arrested and two of them, Emanuel Shinwell and Willie Gallacher,

were sent to prison for short terms. Gallacher, the tactical organizer
of the strike and later a Communist MP, wrote in his memoirs, ‘A
rising was expected. A rising should have taken place. The workers
were ready and able to effect it, the leadership never thought of
it.’105 Whether revolutionary or not, the leadership failed to spread
the strike beyond Glasgow, and had no idea how to deal with tanks
or troops. Gallacher’s rallying cry to revolution—‘Workers of
Britain, the decisive hour has come. March forward, strong of
heart, with the workers of Germany, the workers of Russia, the
workers of all lands. March forward to the conquest of the world.
Down with capitalism! Long live the Soviet Republic!’106—may
have sounded like Lenin but it lacked Leninist vanguard leadership,
tactics and ruthlessness.
Much more threatening from the government’s point of view
was the Miners’ Federation six-to-one ballot in favour of a strike
on 30 March for a six-hour underground day, a 30 per cent increase
in earnings, and nationalization of the coal industry. This might
have brought in their partners in the Triple Alliance, the
railwaymen and the transport workers, and brought the country to
a standstill. Lloyd George bought it off with the appointment of the
Sankey Commission on the problems and future of the industry,
whose mixed membership of coal owners, unionists, economists,
engineers and Fabian intellectuals produced, as was no doubt
expected, four conflicting reports, with a slight majority of
members in favour of nationalization, which the government
surprisingly accepted. An independent strike by the Yorkshire
miners in July and August against the compromise seven-hour day
and the 2s. a day earnings increase, however, gave Lloyd George a
chance to retreat from his commitments, which provoked a Welsh
miners’ leader to declare that the miners had been ‘deceived,
betrayed, duped’, and stored up trouble for a future when Lloyd
George hoped, rightly as it turned out though not to his advantage,
that conditions would be less favourable to the miners.107 More
time was bought by the Mining Industry Act of 1920, which
continued government control for the time being.
Meanwhile, the government weathered mutinies in the army
protesting against slow demobilization, and a second police strike
(the first having been a successful wartime one for higher wages in
August 1918) for union recognition in London and in Liverpool,
210
where troops were called in to put down a riot, but which ended in
the dismissal of the police strikers.108 With the demobilization of
discontented conscripts and the expulsion of the police strikers, the
army and the police became more reliable, and the government,
embattled in Ireland and Russia as well as on the industrial home
front, was beginning to feel slightly more confident.
The nearest the labour movement came, however, to political
revolution, was in the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign against British
intervention in defence of the Poles. Up to 350 ‘councils of action’
drawn from the old shop stewards’ movement, the local trade
councils and Labour constituency parties, and a sprinkling of left-
wing socialists from the BSP, the SLP and similar bodies, persuaded
the TUG and the Labour Party in August 1920 to pass a resolution
against this ‘crime against humanity’ and to threaten a political
general strike. A delegation to Lloyd George failed, but the Poles’
unexpected victory over the Red Army on the Vistula on 14 August
saved Britain from the need for further intervention. Apart from a
similar, and unsuccessful, threat to bring an end to the civil war in
Ireland in July 1920, this was the only attempt to use the general
strike as a political weapon.109
The main threat, therefore, was on the industrial front, and the
government still had to face down the Triple Alliance, which was
convinced that the mere threat of a general strike by the big unions
which controlled the coal supply and transport could bring down
any government. This the government did in three major
confrontations in which its policy of divide and rule backed up by
the increasing threat of counterforce successfully split the Alliance
and rendered it, with the help of the onset of depression and
unemployment in 1921, comparatively impotent. These were the
national railway strike of September to October 1919, the miners’
datum-line strike of October 1920, and the miners’ lock-out of
April to July 1921.
The railwaymen were the keystone of the Alliance, since a
railway stoppage could have the most immediate effect on the
economic life of the country, as Bonar Law had recognized in the
dispute with the Railway Clerks’ Association in January 1919,
when he had defeated the trigger-happy Geddes brothers by
reminding the Cabinet that ‘trade union organization was the only
thing between us and anarchy’. It had also been recognized by Sir
Albert Stanley, President of the Board of Trade during the wider
211
negotiations with the railway unions in March, who thought ‘it was
worthwhile paying something to avoid the threatening
catastrophe’. Yet the railwaymen were much more vulnerable to the
counterweapon of blackleg labour than the miners, and if these two
could be split—leaving aside the much weaker third partner, the
National Transport Workers’ Federation with its thirty-odd loosely
connected unions—then the government could face down even a
railway strike, provided it was sufficiently prepared. In the event
the Alliance split itself. Having failed in the summer of 1919 to
force the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC to call a special
national conference and threaten a general strike to coerce the
government into meeting its political demands—to withdraw
conscription, evacuate British troops from Russia, raise the
blockade of Germany, and amnesty conscientious objectors—the
three unions, led by the miners (who clung to their ballot
requirement), refused to co-ordinate their strike procedures and so
made it that much more difficult to synchronize strike action.110
In this situation the railwaymen, faced with the refusal of the
employers’ Railway Executive Committee to meet their demand for
a generous standardized wage rate, determined to go it alone. With
the concurrence of the Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), the
National Union of Railwaymen struck on 26 September without
notifying its allies. This was because their Secretary J.H.Thomas,
ignored his Executive Committee’s order to consult the other
unions, officially because it was essential to strike quickly before
the government could take counter measures but actually because
Thomas distrusted his vacillating allies and did not wish to widen
the strike. In fact his action, while tactically successful in achieving
a settlement, led to three consequences destructive of the Alliance
and its weapon, the general strike. Firstly, there were bitter
recriminations and abuse from the other two unions, which made
the railwaymen less willing to come to their aid in later disputes.
Secondly, the TUC, which had suffered greatly from the abuse and
arrogance of the Alliance, set up its own General Council (replacing
the ineffective Parliamentary Committee which had few powers
between meetings of Congress) as a ‘general staff of labour’ for
‘coordinating industrial action’, thus rendering sectional groupings
like the Triple Alliance theoretically unnecessary.111 Thirdly, and
more decisively, the government, which had mobilized at short
notice 6,000 servicemen, 2,500 military lorries, and an unknown
212
number of civilian volunteers, set up a permanent strike-breaking

organization under the name of the Supply and Transport
Committee. This was the body which was to help break the General
Strike of 1926.112
It was the miners, however, who fully exposed the weakness of
the Alliance before, during and after their two national disputes of
October 1920 and the spring of 1921. While always quick to call
for a general strike in support of themselves, they failed to support
the calls of others, as for example that of the dockers in December
1919 which Robert Smillie, the miners’ President, said came at ‘a
very inopportune time’. Worst of all, they demanded that their
allies should come out in sympathy at great cost to themselves but
refused them any share in the negotiations towards a settlement.
The railwaymen, nevertheless, voted to support them in their
‘datum-line’ strike of October 1920 (against a rising scale of wages
linked to ‘datum lines’ of national coal production) and it was the
threat of a railway strike which re-opened negotiations between the
prime minister and the miners’ leaders and led to a settlement,
barely accepted by a miners’ ballot which showed a majority
against it but which failed under a new rule requiring a two-thirds
majority for strike action. The strike further exacerbated the
mutual distrust of the allied unions, and hastened the passage of the
Emergency Powers Act of the same month which gave the
government its strike-breaking charter.113
The third and final act in the demise of the Triple Alliance
(though not of the crisis) was the miners’ lock-out of 1921. This
was brought on by the sharp economic depression accompanied by
a massive fall in the export price of coal. The government hastened
the decontrol of the industry and on 31 March 1921 handed the
problem back to the coal owners. The owners gave notice of
massive wage cuts to match the price fall as from the date of take-
over and, on the union’s refusal, locked out the miners. The
Alliance swung into action and gave notice of a general strike
which caused the government to open negotiations with the miners
and the owners. When these immediately broke down the strike call
was renewed for midnight on Friday, 15 April. A meeting between
the miners’ leaders and a group of Coalition MPs seemed (due to a
misunderstanding of some words by Frank Hodges, the union
Secretary, which were interpreted as accepting the owners’ demand
for district rather than national wage rates) to offer grounds for a
213
settlement, and Lloyd George invited the miners’ leaders to a

meeting. When, despite the urging of their allies, the miners refused
to go, J.H.Thomas and Ernest Bevin, the railway and transport
leaders, cancelled the strike, on what came to be known as ‘Black
Friday’, the day the Triple Alliance broke down. The miners’ strike
staggered on to defeat on 1 July, mitigated by a profit-sharing
agreement (17 per cent to the owners, 83 per cent to the men) and
a temporary government subsidy to steady the decline in wages. But
the Alliance was to all intents and purposes dead, to be replaced by
the wider and more ‘responsible’ alliance of the TUC under its new
General Council.114
Yet, as it turned out, the TUC was no better prepared to run a
general strike than the Triple Alliance. After the failures of 1919–
21, the General Strike of 1926 was no more than an epilogue to the
mining disputes of 1920 and 1921, and broke down from precisely
the same causes: the inability of the trade union leaders to know
what to do when the government (now headed by Baldwin, Lloyd
George having lost the confidence of his Conservative allies in
1922) called their bluff and challenged them to take over the
country, and the miners’ refusal to allow their long-suffering allies
any say in the negotiations for a settlement. Once again the unions
were misled—by their success in forcing the government to
subsidize the coal industry to avoid a wage cut on ‘Red Friday’, 31
July 1925—into thinking that a united front could coerce the state
without a fight. Once again the government used the time it bought
with the subsidy and a Royal Commission (the Samuel
Commission) to prepare for civil war, with civil commissioners,
troops and volunteers to maintain supplies and communications.
Once again the unions had their bluff called and were challenged to
fight or withdraw. Once again the miners refused to accept
negotiations on their behalf without reserving the last word for
themselves. After the fateful nine days (4–12 May 1926), in which
every affiliated union except (for tactical reasons) the journalists,
the sailors and firemen, and the electrical power engineers, came
out on strike, the TUC backed down. The miners’ strike went on to
its crumbling end in December and a settlement not very different
from that of 1921, except for longer hours.115 The General Strike
served only to prove that the syndicalist theory that the state could
be coerced by direct industrial action without recourse to violence
was false.
214
The failure of the General Strike marked the belated end of the
crisis of class society in Britain, but it was not the cause of its
demise. That was due to the tacit entente between the
representatives of the unions, the employers and the state which
grew up despite or, indeed, in the course of the confrontations and
disputes which filled the crisis, because of the General Strike itself.
Paradoxically, it also grew up despite the failure of the formal
corporate machinery through which Lloyd George and his
successors attempted to solve the crisis. The Whitley Councils, joint
consultative bodies of employers and workers in each industry,
never came to much outside government employment and a
handful of small industries. The Trade Boards under the 1909 and
1918 Acts to settle wages and conditions in poorly organized
trades, which expanded from eleven to sixty-three between 1918
and 1921 to cover 3 million workers, were deliberately discouraged
from expanding further by the Treasury, concerned to cut
expenditure and taxes so as to encourage, according to classical
economic theory, private industrial investment and the creation of
jobs.116 The creation of the Arbitration Department of the new
Ministry of Labour in November 1918 helped to co-ordinate the
network of Conciliation Officers patiently built up by Sir George
Askwith. Askwith had by now been superannuated and raised to
the Lords, but his crowning ambition, the Industrial Courts Act of
1919, did not much appeal to unions and employers who, in major
disputes, appealed over any lesser machinery to the Cabinet itself.
And Lloyd George’s grandiose symbol of corporatism, the National
Industrial Conference of 400 representatives of the employers and
the unions, which began in a blaze of glory in 1919, soon alienated
all three constituents: the employers by recommending a forty-
eight-hour week and a minimum wage, the unions by the failure to
implement these, and the government by its threatening to become
an ‘industrial parliament’ which claimed the moral right to greater
authority in industrial affairs than Parliament itself. It collapsed in
July 1921 when the trade union members resigned in disgust.117
The entente nevertheless survived. Both the TUC and the
employers’ representatives, the Federation of British Industries and
the National Confederation of Employers’ Organizations, came to
have direct access to the government on all questions concerning
industrial affairs. Whether this made them ‘governing institutions’
in the exclusive sense used by Middlemas there is reason to doubt.
215
Though they undoubtedly became the most important of the

interest groups continuously consulted by government, or the
‘unsleeping veto groups’, to use Dahrendorf’s phrase,118 they
became so because they were the most striking examples of a
phenomenon central to the emerging society, the almost automatic
consultation by government when faced by any problem of ‘social
engineering’ of the expert representatives in the field of action
concerned. Other such bodies, like the medical doctors’, the
sanitary engineers’ or the teachers’ organizations, were consulted
intermittently because their problems necessitated government
intervention only occasionally, while industrial relations and
economic policy came to be a continuous concern of the state.
The emerging relationship between the state, the industrialists
and the trade unions is nowhere better exemplified than in the
aftermath of the General Strike. While the mine owners and some
right-wing Conservatives gloried in the victory (thus storing up for
themselves a nemesis in which no one would come to their rescue
against eventual nationalization), the majority of the government
and the employers were unwilling to press their advantage over the
unions at the expense of future co-operation. Baldwin declared in
the House of Commons, ‘I will not countenance any attack on the
part of any employers to use this present occasion for trying in any
way to get reductions in wages below those in force before the
strike commenced or any reduction of hours.’119 The National
Confederation of Engineering Employers did indeed put pressure
on the government to abolish the unique legal immunity of British
trade unions under the 1906 Trade Disputes Act from civil suits for
loss of trade arising out of industrial conflicts. But the 1927 Act
merely banned sympathetic or insurrectionary strikes, re-
emphasized the illegality of intimidation, and changed the
presumption for paying the unions’ political levy from ‘opting out’
to ‘opting in’, thus relying on the inertia of members to reduce,
though not to abolish, financial support for the Labour Party.
Despite the Labour Party’s denunciations and pledge to repeal the
1927 Act, these were irritations rather than vital wounds, and the
NCEO hastily backed away from the blame even for these.120
Meanwhile, the TUC was becoming more professional, adopting
under its professional Secretary-General, Walter Citrine, a cool and
pragmatic approach. The director of its new think-tank, the TUC
216
Research Department, another shrewd professional, Milne-Bailey,

argued in December 1926 that the trade union movement
is developing its own hierarchy of government, its own civil

service, its own sanctions, independently of the state; with
employers it is creating codes, regulating conditions of labour
… [I]t has even, at the request of the state, taken over
important administrative functions.121
These functions would soon include formal consultation, along

with the FBI and NCEO, by the government over such matters as
national insurance and pensions, and in 1929 the TUC and the
employers gave joint evidence to the Macmillan Committee on
Finance and Industry. It was the TUC President, George Hicks,
whose offer to the employers during the Edinburgh Conference led
to the Mond-Turner talks in 1928 between trade unionists and
progressive industrialists, and although these failed to establish
another formally corporate National Industrial Council they show
how far the professionals on each side had come to realize their
common interest in avoiding conflict.122
The crisis of class society in Britain was averted not by the
triumph of the government and the employers over a potentially
revolutionary labour movement, which could have only been
temporary, but by the common interest of professional managers,
professional union leaders, and increasingly professional politicians
and civil servants in keeping the system going and avoiding crises.
This did not mean that they did not have their own separate,
competing interests which they severally tried to foster at the
expense of one another and of their constituents and the general
public. On the contrary, they also had an interest in conflict, in the
sense of the competitive collective bargaining which displayed their
skills and made them indispensable. But their fundamental interest
was in keeping the game going, for without the game they had no
raison d’être.
217
Chapter 6
A HALFWAY HOUSE: SOCIETY

IN WAR AND PEACE
In the development of English society in the twentieth century the

two world wars mark the boundaries between three stages on the
way to a more professional society. The First World War, along
with the crisis of class society which straddled it, marked the end of
Victorian society in its most pronounced form, a class society in
which, as we have seen, social segregation and inequality reached
their zenith. The Second World War, along with the demand for a
brave new post-war world which accompanied it, marked the
tentative beginnings of a new society in which citizenship, as T.
H.Marshall observed in 1949 in his Cambridge lectures on
Citizenship and Social Class, of itself granted claims to security of
income, shelter, health and education without the humiliation
which had attached to Victorian poor relief. Between these two
landmarks inter-war society was in a transitional stage, a sort of
halfway house in which remnants of Victorianism, such as the
lingering poor law, the means test, and an intensified form of class
politics, co-existed with harbingers of the future.
There were three such pointers to the future. For the first time
since the Industrial Revolution there was the beginning of a shift in
the distribution of income and wealth in the direction of more
equality. Secondly, this shift was intensified by the deliberate action
of the state in taxing the rich much more heavily than the poor, and
in redistributing some small share of the revenue to the lower
classes of society. It also redistributed resources horizontally, from
the working class while in work to those who were for whatever
reason without income. Thirdly, the state took small but significant
steps towards modifying the shape of society itself, by means of
sponsored mobility through the education system. All three
218
A HALFWAY HOUSE: SOCIETY IN WAR AND PEACE
developments, it is true, could be seen in embryo before the First

World War, in the rise in real wages from 1874 onwards, in the
People’s Budget of 1909 and the Liberal welfare measures of 1908–
11, and in the secondary school scholarships of 1907 onwards. But
their full impact only began to be felt between the wars.
The transition towards a more equal society was also symbolized
by changes in dress, housing, town planning and the growth of
suburbs, public and private transport, leisure, and even in public
morals and religious observances. In dress, that outward witness to
the inner aspirations of a society, the most dramatic change took
place in the sartorial history of Western civilization since the
Renaissance. The shortening of women’s skirts marked the
approach towards greater freedom for women and more equality
between the sexes, and the gradual disappearance for men of the
formal morning coat, the Victorian uniform of the upper class,
marked the approaching end of sartorial inequality. Henceforth,
men and women of all classes would, out of working hours at least,
wear much the same styles, and it would take a shrewd eye for the
niceties of cut and quality to tell the difference between aristocrats
at leisure in their ‘lounge suits’ and working-class men in their
Sunday best in the same suits from the ‘fifty-shilling tailors’. The
transition remained incomplete, and the casual, unisex, uniclass
blue jeans and T-shirts of the 1960s were still far in the future. In
public architecture the plain functional slabs of modern brutalism
began to replace the ornate eclecticism of Victorian civic pride,
marking a change from bourgeois self-confidence to corporate
anonymity and mass civilization, but as yet without the human
scale and sense of fun which the best late twentieth-century
building would bring. Private houses became for the most part
mass-produced brick boxes regressing as it were to the mean (in
both senses): the ubiquitous semi-detached house, whether
privately built or council-owned, was more comfortable and
convenient than either the large Victorian villa or the small
working-class terraced house. With its compulsory strip of garden
and occasional ‘space for garage’, it yet lacked many of the
amenities—fitted carpets, a refrigerator and a television set—which
would become the necessities of future living. Most new houses
were built at much lower densities to the acre and, despite scenery-
hiding ribbon development, generally separated from industrial and
commercial property. Their spread was made possible by the new
219
motor buses and private cars, a far cry from the Victorian railway
suburb within walking distance of the station, but not yet designed
for the highly motorized society of the late twentieth century.
In the sphere of public morals an easing of relations between the
sexes could be detected, with the disappearance of chaperones at
one end of society and at the other greater freedom from family
control of courting hours for girls, but it was still a long, long way
from the ‘permissive society’ of the 1960s. Perhaps the most
striking change in ‘mentalité’ was the steep decline in religious
attendance, now absolute instead of relative, after the First World
War, but most people still claimed to be Christians and were far
removed in outlook from the ‘post-Christian Britain’ of the post-
1945 generation.
The wars were also milestones in two other transitions of the
greatest importance to English society and to Britain as a whole, the
double helix of economic decline and rising prosperity. The first,
descending spiral was the onset of economic decline, relative rather
than absolute, in comparison with other advanced industrial
countries, which increasingly began to overtake Britain in
production, foreign trade and living standards. This relative decline
had begun before the First World War when Britain had already
been overtaken in heavy industry, though not in foreign trade and
overseas investments, by the United States and Germany, but it did
not become glaringly obvious until well after the Second World
War. Only in the late 1960s did Britain come to be decisively
overtaken in production per head and average living standards by
most of Western Europe and in the 1970s by Japan. Between the
wars the decline was still shielded from public view by a cushion of
past investment and by very favourable terms of trade which still
enabled Britain to pay its way in the world in the 1920s, sliding not
very far into the red only in the 1930s. There was nonetheless a
sense of nostalgia for lost economic hegemony and the golden age
of free trade, and a touching faith in its restoration which
bedevilled economic policy.
The second helix was the obverse of the first. Relative decline
was accompanied by an absolute advance in production and
productivity at a pace not seen since the height of the Industrial
Revolution. This made possible, along with the favourable terms of
trade, a rise in living standards which benefited all classes, not least
the working class. Many of the poorest were raised out of the
220
harsh, grinding poverty which had been their lot in Victorian

society. The improvement was modest and fell short of the
comparative affluence of the second half of the twentieth century,
but it was real enough to lead social surveyors to invent, in fact if
not by name, the concept of relative poverty which would be used
to question that later affluence.
This conjunction of political and economic progress and decline
is the supreme paradox of Britain’s history in the twentieth century.
The descending spiral of Britain as a world and imperial power and
as the leader in world trade and the ascending spiral of individual
prosperity and public welfare were intimately intertwined. It was
surprising but true that the country which had at the beginning of
the century been the head of the world’s largest empire and the
world’s leading exporter of manufactured goods should
progressively lose those positions and yet should find itself both
richer than ever before in terms of public and private affluence and
more powerful in terms of its ability to destroy its enemies—at the
cost, it goes without saying, of destroying itself. The paradox is
easily enough explained: the decline was relative, the rise in
affluence absolute. While Britain was making progress in the
production of goods and services at rates unparalleled since the
Industrial Revolution, other countries, many but not all with far
larger resources, were advancing still faster and would eventually,
though not until the late 1960s and 1970s, decisively overtake it.
Just as in the nineteenth century Britain taught the world the hard
lesson that military and economic power followed industrial
hegemony, so in the twentieth Britain had to learn the hard lesson
that relative failure in the industrial race meant loss of military and
commercial leadership.
The two world wars contributed to it directly with the loss of
overseas investments, small in the first but much larger in the
second, and, more importantly, the loss of export markets. Britain’s
share of world trade in manufactures fell from 30.9 per cent in
1913 to 21.3 per cent in 1937 and, after a temporary recovery to
25.3 per cent in 1950, to 16.5 per cent in 1960. Even if world trade
as a whole was growing, by 27 per cent to 1929 though declining
by 11 per cent in 1929–37, Britain’s share lagged behind by 19 per
cent in the 1920s and by 20 per cent in the 1930s, and in volume
terms UK exports scarcely reached three-quarters of their 1913
level in the 1920s, or three-fifths in the 1930s.1 The immediate
221
cause of the decline was Britain’s failure to adjust her production to

the new patterns of world trade. British industry continued to
concentrate on the old nineteenth-century staples, cotton, coal,
shipbuilding, heavy chemicals and heavy engineering, when world
demand was turning increasingly to new lighter products, cars,
man-made fibres, and consumer goods of all kinds. Britain, it is
true, did begin to invest in these new industries, but not enough to
replace the decline in the older ones, either in production or in the
employment of labour and capital. In the 1920s the decline was
masked by the invisible earnings from the overseas trade balances
of the pre-war period and by the very favourable terms of trade
which enabled British exports to buy larger quantities of food and
raw materials from the primary producers, but by the 1930s even
this windfall failed to fill the developing gap in visible trade.
The origins of this revolution in Britain’s world role go back to
the falling rate of economic growth in the generation before the
First World War but they were not recognized until afterwards, and
only dimly then. As late as 1925 a Conservative government
believed that it could wish Britain back to pre-war prosperity
simply by restoring the gold standard at pre-war parity. The Labour
government of 1929–31 had no better idea how to cope with the
new world of declining trade and unemployment. It took the
financial crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s to
convince the National government that the world had changed.
Even then, if it abandoned free trade only to find that the resulting
retaliation acted to reduce trade all round, it continued to apply the
nineteenth century shibboleths of retrenchment and a balanced
budget. Only a few individuals, J.A.Hobson, John Maynard Keynes
and Ernest Bevin, put the alternative view that balanced budgets
were not the answer but operated to make the situation worse by
discouraging both spending and investment. What the Americans in
the New Deal and the Germans under Hitler worked out for
themselves, that government spending need not be a drag on
enterprise but the starter motor that set the machine in motion,
British governments of both parties refused to contemplate. Only
the belated and half-hearted Special Areas legislation of 1934 and
1937 tried to stimulate enterprise in the depressed areas, and this
created less than 50,000 jobs in areas where in 1935 over 360,000
workers were registered as unemployed. All told, unemployment
rarely fell below 10 per cent of the insured population in the 1920s
222
and averaged 17 per cent in 1929–36, and in 1932 it peaked at

nearly 3 million, 23 per cent of all insured workers. It was far worse
in the old industrial areas of the north and Wales, where it averaged
23 per cent throughout the 1930s, and 29.5 per cent in 1932.2
What finally helped to solve the problem, besides subsidized house
building and transport construction, was government spending on
rearmament from 1936 onwards, and even then there were still
over a million and a half unemployed at the outbreak of war in
1939. But the war itself only confirmed Britain’s decline, selling off
the last remnants of overseas investments and further depleting
export markets. After a short-lived recovery in the immediate post-
war reconstruction boom, Britain’s relative decline continued
without abatement, and by 1966 it had been overtaken in per
capita income, not only by the older competitors, the United States
and Scandinavia, but by the six countries of the new European
Common Market, and would shortly be overtaken by Japan.
To the reasons for the decline in competitiveness—lack of
sufficient investment, still more lack of an adequate return on what
investment there was, due to unimaginative management,
recalcitrant trade unions fearful of redundancy, low trust industrial
relations, and the like—we must return later, in Chapter 9.
Meanwhile, the picture was by no means as gloomy as it might
appear. On the contrary, production was, surprisingly, growing
faster than before the war, faster than at any time since the
Industrial Revolution, while national income per head was growing
faster than Edwardian rates and almost as fast as Victorian.
Although economic historians differ as to the exact figures, Gross
Domestic Product seems to have grown between 1924 and 1937 by
about 2.3 per cent per annum, compared with 2.0 per cent per
annum in 1856–99 and 1.1 per cent in 1899–1913. National
income per head in real terms (at constant, 1913 prices) grew even
faster (thanks mainly to the favourable terms of trade), at 2.6 per
cent per annum, the same rate as between 1856 and 1913, much
better than the 1.1 per cent in 1899–1913 but somewhat slower
than the 2.9 per cent in 1856–99. Thus average annual real incomes
rose by about 29 per cent between 1913 and 1938, while average
real annual wage earnings for those in work rose by slightly more.3
This improvement could be seen everywhere, even to some
extent in the depressed areas, in the new houses, both private and
municipal, with their gas cookers, electric light, and better
223
furnishings and appliances, in the better clothing and shoes of the

working class—children in rags and without shoes, commonplace
before the war, were now a rarity—and in the new shops, cinemas,
dance halls, greyhound tracks, and all the appurtenances of a
somewhat more leisured and affluent society. Even the unemployed
were, with the exception of those with large families, better off than
the average unskilled worker before the war, while poverty of the
harsh, grinding kind documented by Booth and Rowntree had been
halved, as we shall see. All this is not to say, of course, that the so-
called affluent society (with all its ambiguities) of the later
twentieth century had already arrived. Far from it: poverty was still
rife by current standards, as social surveyors like Rowntree argued
when he raised his poverty line to take account of ‘human needs’.
But the fact that the line could be raised in this way argues that the
average standard of living was rising.
Before we come to the effects of these contradictory changes on
society and the various classes within it, however, we must consider
the impact of the First World War, that great divide between the
Victorian and Edwardian world and the new world of the twentieth
century.
1 THE GREAT DIVIDE, 1914–18

The Great War came to be seen by those who looked back from the
inter-war period to the lost world of Victorian and Edwardian
England as a great divide between two quite different societies. For
the nostalgic rich and powerful, who felt they had lost so much,
that earlier society inhabited an Indian summer of gracious living,
the whirl of the London ‘season’ and country house parties, an
endless round of pleasure based on low taxes, cheap servants and
the self-confidence which went with unquestioned status. At the
opposite pole, the poor and their professional surveyors looked
back on a world in which life for the great majority was one long
struggle to survive, in which a labourer’s wage in full work was
insufficient to maintain a moderate family of two or three children
above a very low poverty line, and in which a majority of the
working class passed through a period of malnutrition at some time
in their lives. For the middle class, who were the first to feel the
decline of personal service and its increasing cost, life had lost some
of its accustomed amenities, though it had brought new ones in
224
compensation. For all classes, the war was a major watershed, a

mountain range between two climatic zones, a bourne of no return
that proclaimed that, for good or ill, things would never be the
same again.
For this reason the First World War has often been credited or
blamed for a series of major social changes which, it has been
countered, would probably have happened sooner or later anyway.
Although it inaugurated very little, the war certainly accelerated
most of the major trends which were already in operation in pre-
war England. To the extent that it dramatized the transition, it
marked a boundary between two significantly different societies.
We have already seen its role as the supreme test of a class society
which was already in crisis when war broke out in 1914, and how
at one and the same time it postponed and intensified the crisis until
it came to a head, and a delayed dénouement, after the war. Now
we must consider its effects on the long-term social trends: changes
in the direction of economic growth, in living standards and the
distribution of income and wealth; changes in the position of
women; changes in the hopes and expectations of education; and
the more ethereal but no less significant changes in religious belief
and moral conduct.
What dramatized the war most of all as a great historical divide
was its unprecedented cost, in life and limb, in money and material
resources, in lost trade and overseas earnings, and in Britain’s
power and economic position in the world. The cost in human life
was horrific: 745,000 men were killed (plus another 200,000 from
the empire) and 1,600,000 wounded out of the more than 4 million
who served in the armed forces—nearly three in five of all British
men of military age.4 The dead, nearly one in seven of those who
served and nearly one in ten of those of military age, constituted the
‘lost generation’ whom contemporaries came to see as the missing
political and business leaders, and the missing husbands and
fathers, of the inter-war years. Even though some of the survivors,
like Clement Attlee and Harold Macmillan, were as capable as their
predecessors, and the decline of mass emigration, always more men
than women, from its pre-war peak probably meant that there were
more potential husbands than before, there was the sense of a
stunning loss which could never be replaced. The civilian
population too was more affected by this first total war than by any
previous conflict, and although less than 1,500 people were killed
225
in air raids (compared with 60,000 in the Second World War), most
of the occupied population, including unprecedented numbers of
women, came to be engaged in ‘war work’, either in the forces or
in industries essential to the war. The sense of having participated
in a great struggle to save the nation from destruction was almost
universal.
The cost in money and material resources was also immense:
about £12 billion by 1920 to the British Exchequer, less than half of
which had been raised by taxation, the rest by internal borrowing.5
The National Debt rose elevenfold, from £706 million to £7,876
million and debt interest came to absorb up to 40 per cent of state
expenditure between the wars. Income tax rose dramatically, and
permanently, to a new plateau, from 1s. 2d. (6 per cent) in the £ in
1913 to 6s. (30 per cent) in 1918, and never fell below 4s. (20 per
cent) again, while supertax on higher incomes jumped from 6d. in
the £ to 6s. in 1918 and to 8s. 3d. from 1931 onwards. More
strikingly, the numbers swept into the income tax net jumped from
about 1 million to 8 million, over 40 per cent of the occupied
population. Thus the taxable capacity of the population was raised
to a higher plane, and the modern trend towards big government
accelerated. Public expenditure rose from 12 to 52 per cent in 1918
and, after falling back to 24 per cent in 1929, reached 35 per cent
in 1939 (and a huge 74 per cent in 1943), this displacement effect
massively increasing the power of the state to intervene in the life of
society.6
The war and its consequences were less costly in lost foreign
investments and repudiated foreign debts. Sales of private assets to
pay for essential imports, mostly to the Americans, exceeded
overseas investments by £300 million, but this was less than a tenth
of the nearly £4 billion held by Britain in 1913.7 Inter-government
lending lost a similar amount: Britain lent £1,825 million, mainly to
European allies, and borrowed £1,340 million from the American,
Dominion and colonial governments, but when the new Russian
and some South American governments defaulted there was a small
net loss.8
The normal revival of trade would soon have recouped these
losses, but British exports failed to regain their old levels and the
biggest economic loss was in foreign markets. After a short burst of
success in the 1920s, the British balance of payments in the 1930s
became negative, briefly, for the first time since Waterloo. Thus in
226
the economic field there was ‘a radical change in Britain’s position

vis-à-vis the rest of the world’, which many contemporaries
attributed to the capture of traditional markets by allies less
involved in the war like America and Japan, and by neutrals who
had been forced to supply themselves.9 In fact it was mainly due to
British industrialists and traders persisting with products like coal,
ships, heavy engineering and textiles for which world demand was
shrinking, and not investing enough in the new consumer goods
like motor cars, radios and electrical appliances for which demand
was rising. But to the hard-pressed business men and unemployed
workers of the day it seemed that the pattern of world trade had
changed and that the war had changed it. This was undoubtedly
true: the British had simply failed to change with it; or, rather, they
had not changed enough. They did indeed invest in the new and
expanding industries, motor cars, light engineering, ‘artificial silk’
(rayon), and so on, so that a large part of the inter-war
unemployment could be attributed to the high productivity in these
new industries, which therefore failed to absorb enough redundant
workers from the old. But unemployment of both labour and
capital was the principal problem of the inter-war period, and
undoubtedly reached a new scale after the 1914–18 war and
seemed in some obscure way to be connected with it.
The war too was credited with the end of laissez-faire and the
beginnings of state collectivism in the shape of government control
of war production. While pre-war thinkers and politicians had only
discussed socialism and nationalization, the wartime government
had put them into practice. It had not set out to do so but was
forced by degrees not only to take over the munitions industry but
to control the production, transport and distribution of every
commodity, including food and fuel, remotely connected with the
war effort. As Sidney Pollard has put it:
What appeared at first as a specific need or shortage often

quickly became a symptom of a much wider alteration in
supply and demand relationships. Some relatively minor
control, to deal with an immediate issue, often had
repercussions which required Government intervention further
and further back, until the State found itself directing a major
part of the country’s industries, and controlling or licensing
most of the remainder. Thus a sudden demand for blankets
227
would set up an immediate rise in price and lead to the

hoarding of wool tops, which would affect other sectors of the
woollen and worsted industries; and this, in turn, might affect
British agriculture or imports from Australia, and so on in
unending progression.10
This led on inexorably to state control of most manufacturing

industry, transport, mines, and ultimately to food rationing and the
control of labour. The official war history noted:
The final step was to assume responsibility for all visible

supplies, to control all private importation and distribute
material to non-munitions as well as munitions trades, thereby
virtually bringing the industries connected with munitions
supply, and all the industries using munitions materials,
including private as well as munitions trading, under the
control of the [Army Contracts] Department.11
By the end of the war the twenty clerks of the Contracts

Department in August 1914 had grown to 65,000 officials in the
mighty Ministry of Munitions set up under Lloyd George in 1915,
which came to control 2 million workers in 250 government
factories, mines and quarries, and another 1.4 million in 20,000
controlled establishments.
Beyond the munitions industry state control came to be
symbolized by six Controllers, of shipping, labour, food, food
production, coal and national service. They were all ‘experts’,
drawn from the industries or interests concerned, and though some
of them, like Food Controller Lord Devonport of the grocery chain
Kearley and Tonge, were anything but competent, they were
formidable dictators of large areas of economic life.
The mobilization of labour followed the same reluctant pattern.
When the first 2.5 million volunteers for the army proved
insufficient, Lord Derby’s National Registration Scheme of
October 1915 tried to get men to ‘attest’ voluntarily for what
proved to be compulsory service, and only when the 2.25 million
attesters were called up did the government resort to conscription,
of single men in January 1916 and of married men in May.
Meanwhile, workers in reserved occupations were in effect directed
into essential work and held there by devices such as the notorious
228
‘leaving certificates’ and ‘trade cards’ which the shop stewards, if

not the trade union leaders, considered the badge of slavery. Food
rationing was avoided until the last few months of the war,
preceded by appeals for voluntary self-denial, meatless days, rules
against ‘flaunting’ luxury foodstuffs, and even a Royal
Proclamation on saving grain read in places of worship, before the
U-boat campaign finally forced it on the whole country in April
1918.
State control was not without its advocates, some old
nationalizers like Sir Leo Chiozza Money who saw it as a foretaste
of socialism to come, some new converts like Winston Churchill
who wished the government to accept wholeheartedly the path of
necessity, while some cautious pragmatists like The Times agitated
for ‘mobilizing the whole nation’ and the Manchester Guardian
urged the control of profits under what it called ‘war socialism’.12
The war certainly proved that state control and even
nationalization could be made to work, for some purposes, more
productively than private enterprise. It encouraged many people,
like R.H.Tawney, Sidney Webb, Chiozza Money and the three trade
union representatives on the Sankey Commission on the Coal
Industry in 1919, together with Lord Sankey himself, to think that
nationalization of a key industry could work in peacetime.13 As
J.M.Keynes said in 1924:
War experience in the organization of socialized production

has left some near observers optimistically anxious to repeat it
in peace conditions. War socialism unquestionably achieved a
production of wealth far greater than we ever knew in Peace,
for though the goods and services delivered were destined for
immediate and fruitless extinction, none the less they were
wealth. Nevertheless, the dissipation of effort was also
prodigious, and the atmosphere of waste and not counting the
cost was disgusting to any thrifty or provident spirit.14
Whether the efficiency of state production could have overcome the

atmosphere of waste was never given a trial, however, since the
predominantly Conservative Coalition of 1918–22, full of what
Stanley Baldwin called the ‘hard-faced men who looked as though
they had done well out of the war’,15 was in no mood to continue
war socialism a moment longer than was militarily necessary. It
229
made ‘a bonfire of controls’ in a bid ‘to go back as far as possible

to the social and industrial situation as it existed at the outbreak of
the war’.16
Even the one breach with laissez-faire which most Conservative
business men now favoured, tariff reform to protect their own
particular industries in the shape of the McKenna duties of 33.3 per
cent on ‘luxury’ imports to save shipping in 1915, failed to make
more than a dent in the Cobdenite orthodoxy of free trade. Though
they were continued after the war, and ‘key industries’ were
ineffectually ‘safeguarded’ in 1921, a full-blown protectionist
platform lost Baldwin the election in 1923, and it took the
Depression and a National Coalition in 1931 to bring back
protection.
On the other hand, no coalition, however powerful, could bring
back the pre-war social and industrial situation, which for the great
majority was a very good thing. A golden age it may have seemed
in retrospect for the rich, but for the working class, especially the
unskilled, it represented the bad old days to be avoided at all cost.
Reconstruction for them meant a new start and an attempt to build
a better society. That they were frustrated in their hopes by the
failure of social reform in 1918–20, by the onset of mass
unemployment in 1921, and by the ‘Geddes axe’ laid to the root of
public spending—the first of those cycles of economic depression
and deflationary public expenditure cuts which dominated the
1920s and 1930s—must not be allowed to conceal the very real
changes in distribution of income and living standards which also
characterized the inter-war period.
The most dramatic change was in the living standards of the
working class. Robert Roberts, the child of a corner shop in
Salford, the ‘classic slum’, called the war ‘the Great Release’. ‘The
first world war cracked the form of English lower-class life and
began an erosion of its socio-economic layers that has continued to
this day… “Things”, people repeatedly told one another, “will
never be the same again.”’17 Although the troops themselves were
miserably paid, many of them were never so well fed and clothed,
and at home labour of all kinds, including women’s, was in such
demand that wages rose sharply, especially for munitions and
engineering workers: ‘Some of the poorest in the land began to
prosper as never before.’18 Money wages had nearly trebled by
1920 but much of the gain was eroded by inflation and real wages
230
rose on average no more than 10 per cent. The money improvement

was crucial, however, since in the steep price fall of the early 1920s
wage earners were able to hold on to most of the gains, so that real
earnings levelled out by the 1930s at about 30 per cent above those
of 1913.19 As John Burnett, historian of the cost of living, has put
it, ‘If the Great Depression [of 1874–96] marks the first important
step by the working classes of England towards material comfort,
the First World War, for all its horrors and miseries, marks the
second.’20
Equally important for the poorest workers was the narrowing of
differentials which lifted the floor on which the unskilled labourer
stood. In 1913 unskilled labourers’ wages in most industries were
between one-half and two-thirds of skilled men’s; by 1919 they
were between three-quarters and five-sixths. The effect of this,
together with the trend towards smaller families, was to lift the
average unskilled labourer and his family, provided he were in
work, out of the harsh, grinding, absolute poverty of the pre-war
period. Sir Arthur Bowley, who during the war had argued on the
basis of his pre-war study of five industrial towns that ‘to raise the
wages of the worst-paid workers is the most pressing social task
with which this country is faced today’, went on to say in his repeat
study in 1925, ‘It has needed a war to do it, but that task has been
accomplished, so far as rates of wages are concerned, though
employment has not yet been permanently possible at all those
rates.’21 Poverty in his five towns had been more than halved,
indeed had been cut by two-thirds (from 12.6 to 3.5 per cent) for
those in work on full wages, and this improvement was confirmed
by other social surveys, of London, York, and Bristol.22 Even the
unemployed, though more numerous, were as well off on their new
insurance benefits as the unskilled wage earners in full work before
the war, although that still left those with very large families in
poverty.
The narrowing of differentials also operated between the
working class and those above it. In 1924 Bowley and Stamp found
a modest shift of 1 per cent of the National Income before tax from
the higher income groups to wages since 1911 (from 43 to 44 per
cent), despite the smaller size and shorter hours of the working
class, and this was increased by old age pensions and employers’
national insurance contributions.23 After income tax, which had
quadrupled since before the war and was not paid until the Second
231
World War by most working men, the shift in income distribution,

modest enough in all conscience, was still keenly felt by the
taxpaying classes, who pined for the palmy days before the war. At
the bottom end the lowest middle-class taxpayer in 1913 paid
about 6 per cent of his income in tax, in 1919 about 13 per cent; at
the top end, the man with an unearned income of £10,000 in 1913
paid 15 per cent, in 1919 over 50 per cent.24 The rich could not but
look back at the war as the beginning of their decline in lifestyle
and prosperity.
One reason why taxation did not return to the old levels after
the war is that Britain for the first time had become a (nearly)
complete democracy. Only in 1918 did every man over 21 get the
right to vote, along with every woman over 30, and the electorate
trebled to over 18 million. Universal adult suffrage (completed
when women between 21 and 30 finally got the vote in 1928) was
meant to be a reward to working-class men and to women of all
classes for their enthusiastic and patriotic participation in the war
effort, as the Speaker’s Conference on the franchise bill declared in
1917. No doubt manhood suffrage and certainly votes for women
were on the verge of attainment in 1914. But it was the war which
finally brought it about, and with it a profound change in the
structure of politics, albeit in an unexpected direction. Far from
putting into more or less permanent power one or other of the
‘progressive’ parties, the working-class vote divided unevenly
between them, indeed between all three major parties, and the
Conservative Party was effectively in power, if not always in office,
until 1945.
The question whether this would have happened if the Liberal
Party had not split over the conduct of the war in 1916 or if it had
managed to come together again sooner after it ended will no doubt
divide political historians for ever—though as we have seen there
were much older and deeper sociological causes behind the decline
of Liberal England. The war, however, changed both the teams and
the nature of the game. The rise of the Labour Party from a
pressure group to official Opposition and alternative government
was enormously accelerated by the war and the participation of
Labour ministers in the cabinet. The rise of the Labour vote from
0.5 million in 1910 to 2.4 million in 1918, 5.5 million in 1924 and
to 8.4 million in 1929 ensured that the Tories would have to woo
the working-class voter even more assiduously than before the war.
232
Though they were to offer reforms which they thought the working
class wanted, provided these did not endanger the main social and
economic fabric they existed to conserve, they soon learned that to
take away gains which had already been granted was to court
electoral defeat. If the proportional representation recommended
by the Speaker’s Conference in 1917 had been accepted by
Parliament, the structure and the story of British politics in the
twentieth century would no doubt have been very different. In its
absence the Conservative Party was able to cling to office, mostly
with a minority of the popular vote, for fifty of the next seventy
years, through its success in capturing at least a third of the
working-class vote. It was to be that third, voting across class lines,
which was to determine the shape of British politics.
According to the late Philip Abrams, ‘The one group in English
society to which the war brought a significant extension of social
and political privilege was middle-aged, propertied women.’25 Such
women, like those leaders of the militant Suffragettes and the non-
militant Suffragists Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett,
had seen the war as an opportunity to show what women could do
and threw themselves enthusiastically into the war effort.26 Others,
like Beatrice Webb, one of fourteen well-to-do women who served
on the eighteen-member social affairs committee of the Ministry of
Reconstruction, seized the opportunity to exercise their undoubted
talents for administration and policy making.27 Thousands of
middle-class ladies rushed to ‘do their bit’ as nurses, VADs
(Volunteer Aid Detachments), officers in the women’s auxiliary
forces, industrial welfare workers, and so on, and many more
substituted for men in government offices, business and the
professions. For most women, however, the call was not to
glamorous jobs in the public eye but to arduous ones in the
munitions factories, engineering workshops, bus conducting, even
garbage collecting, any occupation in fact where they could release
men for service in the army. For some it offered escape from the
drudgery of domestic service, dressmaking or shopwork, but
winning the vote and other women’s rights was probably the last
thing on their minds. Probably the second factor after the need to
win the war was the added earning power and the increased self-
confidence which a well-paid job brought with it. As Robert
Roberts noted:
233
Women grew in social stature and gained an authority they

have never lost since… But whatever war did to women in
home, field, service or factory, it undoubtedly snapped strings
that had bound them in so many ways to the Victorian age.
Even we, the young, noticed their new self-confidence. Wives
in the shop no longer talked about ‘my boss’ or ‘my master’…
She discovered her own rights. The pre-1914 movements for
her political emancipation, bourgeois in origin and function,
meant very little to the lower-working class woman. In the
end the consequences of war, not the legal acquisition of
female rights, released her from bondage.28
Women’s employment in the war effort was at the base of both

kinds of emancipation, personal and official. The ‘munitions girls’,
including the yellow-skinned ‘canaries’ filling shells with TNT,
were the most obvious, increasing from 212,000 in 1914 to over
900,000 by the war’s end, and enjoying their few years of economic
independence with riotous spending on fur coats, jewellery, boiled
ham high teas and the cinema. In industry as a whole women’s
employment increased from 2,179,000 to 2,971,000, in transport
from 18,000 to 117,000, in commerce (mainly office work) from
505,000 to 934,000, in national and local government (including
school teaching) from 262,000 to 460,000.29 Many were recruited
from domestic service, which shrank from 1,658,000 to 1,258,000
but refused to disappear. The New Statesman reported of the new
women workers in 1917:
They appear more alert, more critical of the conditions under

which they work, more ready to make a stand against
injustice than their pre-war selves or their prototypes. They
have a keener appetite for experience and pleasure and a
tendency quite new to their class to protest against wrongs
even before they become ‘intolerable’.30
Some doughty women led unaccustomed street protests: riots and

looting of German shops in London and Manchester, food riots in
the mining towns of West Cumberland, rent strikes in Glasgow.31 If
none of these were new to historians of an older Britain, they
shocked contemporaries with a different image of womanly
behaviour.
234
Women’s participation and newfound confidence found their

reward in the long-delayed vote, in the Sex Disqualification
(Removal) Act of 1919, and in the opening of Parliament itself to
women, with Lady Astor the first to take her seat in 1919. Yet
many of these gains were nullified soon after the war by the
pressure to force women out of jobs to make way for demobilized
troops, by the massive increase in unemployment, worse for women
than for men, by the tacit acceptance of unequal pay for women
and by the new or reimposed rule in the Civil Service, teaching and
many other occupations that women must resign on marriage. The
number of women workers declined rapidly with the peace: in 1921
there were relatively fewer at work (33.7 against 35.3 per cent)
than in 1911. Yet ‘things were never the same again’. Women in the
professions and white-blouse occupations had increased in number,
those in factory work and domestic service had decreased, as more
middle-class (or aspiring) women demanded more jobs and many
working-class women, emulating the old aspiration of the skilled
working class, responded to higher living standards by electing to
stay at home to look after their children, a luxury many could not
previously afford.
The new self-confidence expressed itself in two highly symbolic
ways, one in the most private and intimate of emancipations, the
other in the most public and visible. The first was in the practice of
birth control, which had indeed begun amongst the middle class in
the late Victorian age but now spread throughout society, reaching
for the first time a majority of the working class. Its progress can be
measured by the fall in family size: women marrying between 1900
and 1909 had an average of 3.5 children, those marrying between
1920 and 1924 2.4.32 The fall was greater, since middle-class
families were already small, amongst the working class.
Professional families shrank by a quarter, manual and agricultural
wage earners’ families by a third (though unskilled labourers’
families, still with larger families than the rest, only by a quarter).33
Clerks and textile workers were the pioneers, followed last of all
and more slowly by the miners and agricultural labourers. The
statistics say nothing about the causes, however. Just as the decline
of the middle-class birth rate from the late 1870s was naively
attributed to the Bradlaugh-Besant trial, so the post-war decline of
the working-class birth rate was put down to mechanical causes
like the ‘prophylactics’ (condoms) against venereal disease issued to
235
the troops from 1917 and Marie Stopes’s Married Love and
Planned Parenthood published in 1919. Such arguments ignore the
fact that most working-class couples who took precautions,
according to the Royal Commission on Population, 1949, practised
coitus interruptus, and that Slopes said little about contraception
and coyly recommended only an ineffective vinegar and water
douche or quinine solution pessary.34 This confirms that, as with
the middle class, it was the motivation rather than the means that
mattered.
One of the few historians to ask working-class mothers of the
period how they limited their families, Diana Gittins, found that
they learned nothing from Maries Slopes, from their doctors, or
even from their own mothers. Enlightenment came from their own
age mates in the factories and offices.35 It was therefore the
expansion of women’s employment during the war that probably
had most effect on the spread of contraceptive information. As for
the motivation, it did not need middle-class propaganda to teach
the possibility of escape from the cycle of poverty, that having
fewer children would speed the rise in living standards. Thus the
war played a double role, by increasing both the motive for limiting
family size and the knowledge of how to bring it about. Whatever
the reason, it had the effect of dramatically decelerating population
growth. From the first census in 1801 down to the 1911 census the
rate of growth was never less than 10 per cent per decade; after
1911 it was never more than 5.5 per cent.
The second, more visible emancipation of women was in the
realm of dress. Clothing has been an expression of the values and
ideals of society since civilization began, and the dramatic change
in women’s fashions which came in during the war expressed the
most profound transition in attitudes to women and in women’s
belief in themselves since Anglo-Saxon times (the last age,
according to Lady Stenton, in which women approached equality
with men, and both sexes wore long skirts).36 The shorter skirts of
the war years, like the trousers of the ‘munitions girls’, have been
explained by their greater practicability for factory and other
traditionally masculine occupations. But women had worked in
factories ever since they were invented without departing from
traditional dress, and their refusal to abandon short skirts or even,
at least for casual and leisure wear, trousers in the post-war period
shows that deeper change in women’s psychology and men’s
236
appreciation of it was in progress. The demand for equality had led

in the Victorian age to experiments in freer dress by avantgarde
ladies like Mrs Bloomer and the pre-Raphaelites, but it was only in
the First World War that enough free spirits came together to make
the experiment stick. No doubt the change would eventually have
come anyway, and there were hints of shorter skirts on the way
from about 1912, but it took the war, with its self-confident and
self-assertive women workers, to impose this unprecedented change
in women’s dress and the feminine psyche.
For some, both the pruriently scandalized and the hopefully
libertine, shorter skirts meant looser morals, and within nine
months of the outbreak the popular press was running a campaign
about illegimate ‘war babies’. In fact, illegitimate births were fewer
in 1915, and although by the end of the war they were 30 per cent
higher than pre-war, they fell in the early 1920s to the lowest rates
ever recorded.37 No doubt the war presented greater opportunities
for casual sex amongst soldiers and ‘munitions girls’ far from home
as well as encouraged stronger emotions between men going to the
front and women wishing to be ‘kind’ to them. More significant,
perhaps, was the increase in the number of marriages: how many
illegitimate babies were the fruit of planned marriages frustrated by
death or injury at the front? Any notion of a permanent change
towards sexual permissiveness was undermined, on both sides, by
the swift return after the war to traditionally strict public standards
of premarital conduct in the middle and upper working classes
(whatever the private behaviour behind it), and by the traditionally
loose behaviour long before the war at the two extremes of society,
amongst the notorious libertines of high society and the notoriously
feckless ‘roughs’. Not until the permissive 1960s did ‘free love’ and
premarital cohabitation become overtly acceptable, and whatever
dent the war made in public morals in the conventional sense was
quickly repaired. Morality concerns more than sexual behaviour,
however, and the twentieth century was to be in some respects a
more moral society than any before, as we shall see.
For contemporary feminists the war marked the end of
Victorianism. As the historian of the women’s movement, Mrs Ray
Strachey, summed up in 1928:
No woman of today would go back if she could to the

conditions which her grandmother endured. No girl would
237
submit to the clothing and the restraints of 1837, no wife

would be content to merge her whole legal and financial
existence in that of her husband; no matron would agree to
put on her cap and retire from life at thirty-five. And even if
women would do these things, men would not approve!…
neither sex would now, even if it could, turn back the hands
of the clock.38
If women’s liberation still had a long way to go, it had already

come a long way since Victoria’s day.
Even children participated in the war and benefited from that
participation, both in the imprudent short term and in the
enlightened long term. According to H.A.L.Fisher, the first
educationist to be minister of education, by 1917 600,000 children
had left school prematurely—at 13 years of age or less—to work,
most of them in well-paid but dead-end jobs either connected with
the war effort or releasing adults for it. Many of them lost out
permanently in missed education and apprenticeships, and in his
proposal in 1917 for a post-war Education Act Fisher said that it was
prompted by deficiencies which had been revealed by the War;

it is framed to repair the intellectual wastage which has been
caused by the War; and should it pass into law before peace is
struck it will put a prompt end to an evil which has grown to
alarming proportions during the past three years—I allude to
the industrial pressure upon the child life of this country—and
it will greatly facilitate the solution of many problems of
juvenile employment, which will certainly be affected by the
transition from a basis of war to a basis of peace.39
What worried many observers even more was the evidence the war
produced of the physical wastage of peacetime. As in the Boer War
when they had led to the Committee on Physical Deterioration
being set up, the recruitment statistics of the Great War showed on
a much more massive scale the low standard of physical health and
fitness produced by a society which brought up more than half of
its children in poverty. Of the 2.5 million recruits examined in
1917–18 only 36 per cent were passed as fit for full military duties,
and 41 per cent were graded as unable ‘to undergo physical
exertion’ or ‘totally or permanently unfit for military service’.40
238
That nearly two-thirds were below the standard for front-line

service was an indictment of the low-grade food and living
conditions in which most of them had been reared, and fully
justified the pre-war campaign for national efficiency. As the new
minister of health, Christopher Addison, himself a medical doctor,
pointed out in 1919, ‘the armies of children who are physically
defective’ in the elementary schools had become
the hundreds of thousands of men who were physically unfit

and could not pass the very moderate standard of physical
fitness which the army required. Then it was revealed as a
source of national weakness, which is very great in time of
emergency, but it is just as much a source of national
weakness in time of peace.41
Such incontrovertible facts gave added point to Fisher’s argument

that conscription meant ‘that the boundaries of citizenship are not
determined by wealth and that the same logic which leads us to
desire an extension of the franchise points also to an extension of
education’.42
The 1918 Education Act, much amputated in its passage, was
intended to be a children’s charter: universal compulsory schooling
to 14, part-time day continuation schools from 14 to 18, abolition
of fees in public elementary schools, physical training for all,
improved standards in the higher school classes, special provision
for handicapped children, and nursery school places for all who
wanted them. Some of these gains fell to the post-war Geddes axe,
notably the day continuation schools, but, together with the
expansion of the 11-plus scholarships and ‘free places’ in the
grammar schools and from 1920 the few hundred state
scholarships to the universities, they had breached the class barriers
to more egalitarian education. It was a far cry from The Times
Educational Supplement’s opposition in 1910 to ‘so large a
proportion as 25 per cent of “free placers”, ex hypothesi boys and
girls from working-class homes, in an average Secondary school to
which middle-class parents send their children’ on the grounds that
‘in an old country like England, whose lines of social distinction are
sharply drawn, they cannot be set aside in practice’ since ‘the
parents of paying pupils will hold aloof’.43 Where men of all classes
had shared the same trenches and thousands of officers had risen
239
from the ranks, such sentiments no longer went unchallenged. By

contrast the Report of the Departmental Committee on
Scholarships and Free Places in 1920 had the same fear of middle-
class withdrawal but talked instead of ‘an undesirable segregation
of social classes’44—a significant change of focus.
The war proved to be a turning point in religious observance.
Considering the support given by the churches to the war to end
war, the pathetic faith of some of the troops about to ‘go over the
top’, and the naive belief in miracles like ‘the angel of Mons’, it
might have been expected that the war would increase the power of
religion or at least arrest the relative decline in church attendance
which had persisted since the 1851 Religious Census. In fact, quite
the opposite occurred. Whereas ‘in all the major Churches
organizational expansion continued to the eve of the First World
War’ in terms of absolute if not of proportional church attendance,
‘All the Churches lost ground substantially during World War I.’45
Despite a revival in the 1920s from the low point of 1917, the war
marked the beginning of the steep decline in the number of church
attenders; in York, for example it declined, from about a third of
the adult population in the Edwardian age to a sixth between the
wars and only a tenth after the Second World War.46 The immediate
reasons for the change can be found in soldiers’ diaries and letters
from the front. One soldier wrote just before he was killed, ‘Any
faith in religion I ever had is most frightfully shaken by the things
I’ve seen.’47 The longer-term factors were more complex: ‘if
supportive social and political causes had been operating in favour
of organized Protestantism in the Victorian and Edwardian eras,
their significance waned with the First World War.’48 If religion is
defined by its modern historians as ‘the attempt to effect certain
ends either in this world or in other worlds by means wholly or
partially supernatural’,49 then the war put it to a test which many
contemporaries thought it had failed.
It also failed a less obvious test. It could no longer claim to be,
as even Victorian doubters like Matthew Arnold and George Eliot
believed, the sole foundation of morality. The passionate unity and
social cohesion of wartime, though never quite so complete as
unthinking patriots believed, proved that law and order at least
could rest on other foundations. If criminal statistics are any guide
to general conduct, then the population was no worse behaved
after than before the war. The proportion of offences per 100,000
240
was almost the same in 1921 (273) as in 1911 (269), and serious
crimes declined by a third. Drunkenness in terms both of what
could be commonly observed on Saturday nights and of drink-
related arrests declined dramatically. Murders and other crimes of
violence reached record lows, and Britain between the wars became
a less violent society than ever before—or since.50 Although, unlike
church attendance, crime in general was to rise again, moderately
in the 1930s, steeply in more recent times, the grim fate the
Victorians feared for a post-Christian Britain did not materialize.
Indeed, if true morality is caring for one’s neighbour, the twentieth
century was to become a more truly moral age than its predecessor.
In all these ways, in economic progress and decline, in social
structure and living standards, in the onset of full democracy, in the
status of women, in the size of the average family, in the social aims
of education, in the decline of religion and the rise of a more caring
morality, the First World War marked the great divide between the
society created by the Industrial Revolution and the one which
created the welfare state. Though it did not originate that
transition, which was foreshadowed long before the war, it
accelerated and dramatized the change, which was far from
complete. To this extent it marks the boundary between Victorian
class society at its zenith and the halfway house between the wars.
2 SOCIAL CHANGE BETWEEN THE WARS

Britain between the wars was a halfway house, not between a
grossly unequal class society and some mythical egalitarian society
of the future, but between one unequal society and a somewhat less
unequal one in which the state intervened to redistribute income
and, to a lesser extent, wealth and opportunities among its citizens.
The reasons why this transition came about, the change from a
purely class-based, market-oriented society to a more corporate one
based on the status of citizenship, will be addressed in the next
chapter. Here we shall be concerned with the changes themselves
and their effects on the different levels of society emerging from the
First World War. To catch the transition on the wing we shall have
to look for comparison backward and forward, before the First
World War and after the Second.
The three major pointers to the future, we saw at the opening of
this chapter, were (1) the beginnings of a shift in the original
241
distribution of income and wealth in the direction of more equality,

or of less inequality; (2) the intervention by the state to bring about
a further redistribution of income from the rich to the poor, and
from the working class while in work to those without income
either temporarily or permanently; and (3) the small beginnings of
state-sponsored social mobility via education. All three began in
embryo before the First World War, but they certainly had little
opportunity of changing society in any visible way before 1914.
Before the war any pre-tax shift in income and wealth was at best
minimal. Significantly graduated taxation began only with the
People’s Budget in 1909, old age pensions for a small minority of
the very elderly only the same year, national health insurance for
most workers and unemployment insurance for a few were only
implemented in 1913, and between 1907 and 1914 comparatively
few working-class children benefited from the new grammar school
scholarships. No one at the time thought of these exiguous
beginnings as social engineering by the state, and it was only
between the wars that they reached a scale to deserve that label.
In the history of inequality, according to the careful revision of
historical national income estimates by Peter Lindert and Jeffrey
Williamson, ‘1867 looks like a watershed. Sometime around this
mid-Victorian benchmark an episodic shift took place. It now
appears that income inequality declined for at least a century after
1867.’ If so, the trend was barely perceptible before the First World
War. In 1867, based on Dudley Baxter’s figures quoted above
(Chapter 2, Table 2.1), the top 10 per cent of income earners
received about 50.6 per cent of the national income; by 1913 they
still received 49.8 per cent—a decline, given the uncertainty of the
sources, well within the margin of error.51 The decline in inequality,
most economic historians agree, became perceptible only between
the wars. Lee Soltow concluded that long-run inequality continued
down to the end of the nineteenth century: ‘Only since the First
World War has there been a decrease, and this decrease is
substantial.’ 52 This has been confirmed by the Diamond
Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth of the
1970s, which found that the top 10 per cent of earners received
40.5 per cent of total personal income (before tax) in 1938 and
32.1 per cent in 1949 (see Table 6.1).
It will be noticed: (1) that the decline of the top 1 per cent of
earners before tax was much steeper before and after the Second
242
World War than for the top 10 per cent; (2) that the incomes of the
next 20 per cent, roughly the prosperous middle class, remained
much the same; and (3) that the bottom 70 per cent, the working
class and some low-paid non-manuals, made only modest gains.
This was of course before taxation and the social benefits mainly to
the lower-paid, which will be dealt with below.
Wealth has always been more concentrated than income, for the
obvious reason that unearned incomes from property have always
gone to the few who drew them ultimately from the many, whether
tenants, outworkers or employees, but even wealth has seen some
redistribution since the First World War. Peter Lindert concludes
from his long-term survey:
As far as the data can reveal, wealth inequality remained

steady from 1740 until 1911–13, subject to what are now
wide confidence bounds. The pronounced levelling of wealth
inequality within this century has left us with a distribution in
the 1970s and 1980s that is clearly less unequal than any now
documented for the past.53
Even before that, according to the Diamond Commission, the share

of total personal wealth held by the top 1 per cent of adults (aged
25 years and over) declined from 69 per cent in 1911–1913 to 62
per cent in 1924–30, 56 per cent in 1936–38, and to 43 per cent in
243
1954. At the same time the share of the top 10 per cent declined
somewhat less, from 92 per cent in 1911–13 to 91 per cent in
1924–30, 88 per cent in 1936, and to 79 per cent in 1954.54 These
figures, however, are based on probate returns, and exclude small
estates below the exemption limit, the real value of most people’s
cars, furniture and consumer durables and, more importantly, the
capital value of pension rights, including the state pension rights
which, since 1925, have accrued to wage-earners and their widows
and, since 1948, to most adults. When these are allowed for, the
share of the top 10 per cent in 1972 was reduced according to the
Diamond Commission from 69 to 45.7 per cent and the share of the
bottom 80 per cent increased from 15.6 to 40.7 per cent.55
The statistical trend towards the more equal distribution of
income and wealth before tax has been challenged by left-wing
critics, who believe that modern capitalism inevitably widens the gap
between rich and poor, and that the rich understate their income and
possessions so as to avoid taxation and rearrange their resources
between their relatives: ‘the redistribution of wealth over this century
has not been between the rich and the poor, but between successive
generations of the same family.’56 The figures have also been
challenged by right-wing critics, who believe that they present ‘a
deformed picture of British society…which makes it easier for
politicians and commentators to invoke the feelings of envy present
in most societies at most times’, and complain that ‘the statistics on
which popular discussion rest are too weak for the purpose to which
they are put’.57 Such critics tend to think that the trend towards
equality has gone too far, and that Britain’s relative economic decline
is due to the discouragement of enterprise and capital accumulation
by punitive income taxes and death duties or capital transfer tax.
Be that as it may, there can be little doubt that the period since
the First World War has seen a remarkable change in the patterns
of income and wealth. As a judicious summary of these complex
changes by W.D.Rubinstein concludes:
Broad trends in wealth and income distribution, and gains in

living standards and property ownership, seem to indicate
growing and, in some respects, unprecedented degrees of
equality (with bastions of privilege remaining), while those
who perceived the existence of a class-based economic elite see
little or no evidence of its passing.58
244
Leaving aside the changing nature of that economic elite, which it

is one purpose of this book not to deny but to explore, the
unprecedented decline in inequality which began in the inter-war
period was but the first step on the way to a further turn of the
egalitarian screw by the intervention of the state.
To some extent the change in the original, pre-tax distribution of
income and wealth was due to the introduction of graduated death
duties in 1894 at 8 per cent on estates of £1 million-plus and to
their successive raising to 15 per cent in 1909 and to 40 per cent
between the wars. Despite the common belief, in the words of
Burke’s Landed Gentry, that ‘death duties are a voluntary tax’, the
probate returns show that the rich still volunteer to pay them,
partly because of the increasing taxation of gifts inter vivos but
mostly because of the ‘King Lear syndrome’, the fear of losing
control and even independence along with their wealth if they pass
it on to relatives. Those who doubt their efficacy have only to ask
what would have been the distribution of income and wealth in the
absence of death duties. They are, however, only a prologue, as it
were, to the second pointer to the future, the direct action of the
state in bringing about a far larger change in the distribution of
income and wealth since the First World War.
State intervention took two forms, graduated taxation and the
payment of social benefits to those in need. The effect of graduated
income tax, scarcely known before 1909 except in the form of the
lower exemption limit and abatements for smaller incomes, can be
seen from Table 6.1. In 1938 the share of personal income received
by the top 1 per cent of income receivers was reduced by nearly
one-third, from 17.1 per cent before tax to 11.7 per cent after tax;
the share of the top 10 per cent by nearly one-sixth, from 40.5 to
34.6 per cent. By 1949 the reduction was still steeper, for the top 1
per cent of income receivers by nearly half, from 10.6 to 5.8 per
cent and for the top 10 per cent by one-fifth, from 32.1 to 25.7 per
cent. While the share of those in the middle (including, surprisingly,
the moderately rich between 5 and 10 per cent of income earners as
well as the next 20 per cent) changed little, the share of the bottom
70 per cent was increased by 1938 by nearly half, from 38.7 to 56.8
per cent, and in 1949 by much less, about one-ninth, from 44.2 to
49.4 per cent.
The aggregate figures, however, give little notion of what they
meant in terms of individual incomes. A rich man earning £10,000
245
a year paid 8 per cent in tax in 1914, 42.5 per cent in 1919, 37.1
per cent in 1924 and 39.1 per cent in 1938. There were nearly
5,000 such incomes in 1914 and 9,200 in 1925; but while after tax
there were 4,000 in 1914 there were still only 4,120 in 1925.
Moreover, as Sir Arthur Bowley pointed out at the time, because of
inflation the equivalent of £10,000 in 1914 was £18,000 by 1925,
and to receive the same purchasing power after tax required a gross
income of £30,000. The number of rich people with the spending
power represented by £10,000 a year in 1914 had therefore
declined from 4,000 to 1,300. Bowley commented:
The general result of the whole system of taxation, wage

adjustments, and social expenditure has been a very marked
redistribution of the National Income… The very rich have
less than half their pre-war income (allowing for taxes and
changes of prices); the least well off of the working class have
gained most.59
Redistribution by taxation was only the first part of this

unprecedented social engineering. The second was the rise of
transfer payments to the poor by means of social benefits. There
had of course been statutory poor relief since Tudor times, and the
Liberal government of 1906–14 had begun old age pensions and
national insurance before the war. But the poor law had been
deliberately deterrent to minimize the cost, old age pensions were
confined to people over 70 with incomes under £26 a year, and
health insurance benefits for most of the working class and
unemployment insurance for a small minority were paid only from
January 1913. Only from 1923 was unemployment insurance
extended to most workers and their dependents, and contributory
old age, widows and orphans’ pensions to most wage earners and
their families from 1925. These social benefits and others in kind,
including medical treatment for the insured (though not for their
families), maternity and child welfare clinics, tuberculosis
sanatoria, school medical treatment, state secondary education for
some, housing subsidies, and the like, totalling only £89 million in
1910 (4.2 per cent of GNP), amounted to £412 million in 1920 (6.8
per cent of GNP), £596 million in 1938 (11.3 per cent of GNP), and
£2,094 million (18 per cent of GNP) by 1950.60
They were not all paid for out of ordinary taxation, and the
246
insurance benefits in particular represented in large part a

horizontal transfer from the wage earners while in work to the
same people when they were sick, unemployed or too old to work.
Nonetheless, these were valuable rights which could be viewed as
the equivalent of property. John Hilton, a shrewd egalitarian
observer, estimated in 1938 that the old age pension capitalized as
an annuity at age 65 was worth between £250 and £350, up to
twice a year’s wage for the average worker; unemployment
insurance was worth a capital sum of over £500, and education,
school milk, medical and dental treatment between £100 and £500
depending on the number of children.61 In sum, according to one
estimate, whereas in 1913–14 the working classes contributed 20
per cent more in taxes than they received in social benefits, by
1925–26 they received 15 per cent more than they contributed (a
gain of £45 million); by 1935–36 they received 21 per cent (a gain
of £91 million). Altogether, it was calculated that in 1937–38 there
was a transfer of £386 million from the rich to the poor (8.8 per
cent of the National Income) and in 1948–49 a transfer of £1,260
million (13.1 per cent).62 Thus the state had operated to bring about
what T.H.Marshall was to call ‘the compression, at both ends, of
the scale of income distribution’.63
The third and final pointer to the future was even less intentional
than the other two, the incipient role of the state in sponsoring
social mobility. This had been mooted from the turn of the century
by such would-be social engineers as Sidney Webb and Sir Robert
Morant, more in terms of ‘national efficiency’ and saving the waste
of talent in the lower reaches of society than of creating a
meritocracy. Between the wars the creation of an educational
ladder, narrow enough in all conscience, from the elementary
school through the grammar school to college and university was a
measure of social justice rather than a deliberate piece of social
engineering. Nevertheless, while graduated taxation and social
benefits merely levelled up and levelled down the extremes of
income inequality, educational mobility was the only means by
which the state could directly modify the social structure, as
distinct from encouraging spontaneous mobility via the market for
people. As a result, while Britain still had one of the smallest
percentages of university entrants in the developed world, it came
to have the largest percentage of working-class students within its
university population.64
247
Not that education became the only or indeed the chief means of
social mobility. Far from it: privileged education did not prevent
many members of the upper middle class sliding down into the
lower middle or even into the working class; and the old, well-worn
paths of upward mobility taken by self-made men of energy and
enterprise continued in use and sometimes went further and higher
than the educational route. From Lord Nuffield of Morris Motors
to Lord Stokes of British Leyland there were spectacular examples
of self-made men who would have been positively handicapped by
higher education. Indeed, university education could be described
as a process by which potential tycoons are turned into civil
servants and academics. Be that as it may, the inter-war period saw
the beginnings of an institutionalized machinery of state-sponsored
social mobility via the educational system which reversed the
Victorian belief in education as the buttress of class society. Or
rather, education came to reinforce the social structure in a
different way, by upgrading men (rarely women before the Second
World War) of talent and training into the professional and
managerial classes.
Here we must make a sharp distinction between intentions and
consequences. The expansion of secondary and higher education
since the First World War has certainly increased the absolute
numbers of children from the working classes going to secondary
school and university, but it has relatively benefited the middle
classes even more, so that the percentage of university students
coming from the working class has hardly changed since the 1920s.
This is because the middle classes, and especially the professional
and managerial classes, have a livelier appreciation of the value of
education and of the opportunities for obtaining it than the
working class, and in any movement towards a more meritocratic
society will be more assiduous in acquiring the necessary merit.
All this is borne out by the two major social mobility studies in
England and Wales in this century, the London School of
Economics survey led by David Glass in 1949–53 and the Oxford
Social Mobility Project directed by A.H.Halsey and John
Goldthorpe in the early 1970s.65 The Oxford survey was more
detailed and sophisticated but, since only part of their earliest
cohort, born between 1913 and 1922, came of age between the
wars, has little bearing on inter-war society, and will become more
relevant in Chapter 9 on post-1945 society. The LSE study ‘yields a
248
picture of the achievement up to the outbreak of World War I… of

the English system of public education.’ It showed that, while the
proportions of working-class children (from their social categories
5, 6 and 7) achieving a secondary education over the period 1900–
40 nearly trebled, a middle-class boy (from categories 1, 2 and 3)
still had more than four times the chance of one from the skilled
working class (category 5) of getting a grammar school education,
and more than five times the chance of one from the semi- or
unskilled working class (categories 6 and 7). There was even more
disparity for girls, with a middle-class girl having three and seven
times the chance respectively of a skilled and lower working-class
girl.66
As might be expected, the chances of going on to university were
even more unequal. Boys from the professional and managerial
classes (categories 1 and 2), whether born before 1910 or in 1910–
29, had thirteen times as great a chance of going to university as a
working-class boy (categories 5–7), and a middle-class girl no less
than sixty times the chance of a working-class girl. Yet all this must
be seen in the perspective of a society in transition from one in
which education was the consequence of status rather than its cause
to one in which it was becoming a significant factor in placing
recruits in positions of influence and authority. The proportions
attaining a secondary education, though still a minority in all
classes, increased by about 40 per cent in the middle class and more
than doubled in the working class. The numbers of middle-class
boys going to university nearly doubled, from 4.4 to 8.5 per cent,
between those born before and those born after 1910, and the same
at a lower level of participation for girls, from 2.1 to 4 per cent.
The proportion of working-class boys going to university grew
from 0.9 to 1.4 per cent, of girls from 0.1 to 0.2 per cent.67
What is striking about these figures is not merely the disparities
between the classes but the tiny proportions even of middle-class
men who even at the end of the expansion achieved secondary
education (less than two in five) and a university degree (one in
twelve). The surveyors could nevertheless conclude that the
traditional routes of upward mobility, via training on the job or the
working up of a small concern into a large one, were now
overshadowed by the acquisition of formal educational and
professional qualifications. In other words, the scholarship boy had
overtaken the self-made man.68
249
Since this was a halfway house between a wholly class-based and

a partially meritocratic society, there was still a strong tendency for
sons to follow fathers in the same occupation. One study within the
LSE survey of Cambridge graduates in teaching, medicine, the
church and the law showed that over the previous half-century the
proportion following their fathers into these four professions had
fallen only from 45 per cent to 36 per cent, while even in
democratic Scotland about one in seven sons in the same four
professions had followed in the footsteps of their fathers.69 This
was not very different from the social classes generally, where a
large minority but rarely a majority of each category except,
surprisingly, for skilled workers, followed their fathers in the same
class. Even in the top professional and managerial middle classes
(categories 1 and 2), most of those born after 1890 came from
families below that level, though very few from the working class.
There was surprisingly little change over time, however, which
suggests that education was not so much expanding opportunities
for upward mobility as replacing old, less formal ones.70 The self-
made entrepreneur was being replaced by the professional and the
salaried manager.
Amongst the elite groups at the heads of the various key
institutions in society there were only small signs of this trend
before the Second World War, for the very good reason that it takes
a generation or more to rise to such positions. An exception was the
Civil Service, where entry by competitive examination began in
1871, and there was a steep decline in the number of heads of
department coming from upper-class families and educational
backgrounds. The proportion with fathers in the top class of the
elites survey (large landowners, big business men and higher
professional men) declined from 72 per cent in 1880–99 to 45 per
cent in 1920–39; and the proportion educated at the eleven major
public schools declined similarly from 71 per cent to 41 per cent—
those from Eton alone from 44 per cent to 10 per cent. Only the
number educated at Oxford and Cambridge increased, since the
new men coming up from below were mainly lower middle-class
scholarship boys at those two universities. On the surface there
seemed to be little change at the top of other professions, senior
judges, vice-chancellors of universities, and the presidents of the
leading professional institutes, but if we turn to family wealth,
especially in real terms (at 1913 prices), we shall find (in Section 4)
250
the beginnings of a decline in the median wealth of their fathers as

measured by their probate returns. Even the chairmen of the 200
largest companies, a wealthy and conservative group, came from
families whose median income in real terms had been halved since
the late Victorian age—a measure of the extent to which they were
being infiltrated by the career manager without inherited wealth.71
These were early days in the transition towards a different sort
of elite structure, and the great landowners, Conservative Cabinet
ministers, and (partly because of inflation) the increasing number of
millionaires still held on to their wealth and came, on the whole,
from the highest echelons of society. But even they felt that the old
order was threatened by the egalitarian forces at work in inter-war
society, as we shall see next. In the next four sections we shall
consider how these changes in the inter-war period, in the original
distribution of income and wealth, in the role of the state in the
redistribution of income through taxation and transfer payments,
and in state-sponsored and other forms of social mobility, affected
the rich and powerful, the elites whose position did not depend on
wealth, the middle classes, and the working class.
3 THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH

‘The old order is doomed,’ wrote the Duke of Marlborough in 1919
when death duties were raised to 40 per cent, a rate he claimed was
deliberately aimed at preventing the inheritance of great houses.
‘These fortresses of territorial influence it is proposed to raze in the
name of social equality,’ The Times lamented; ‘England is changing
hands’ and ‘the stately homes of England’ were being turned into
schools and other institutions. The Estates Gazette estimated in
1921 that a quarter of England had been put on the market. The
patrician Liberal Charles Masterman claimed in 1922, ‘There is
taking place the greatest change in the history of the land of
England since the days of the Norman Conquest; with the possible
exception of the gigantic robberies of the Reformation.’
F.M.L.Thompson, noting the sale of 6 to 8 million acres between
1918 and 1921, much of it to sitting tenants, and the consequent
increase in owner-occupiers from about 11 per cent of all farmers in
1914 to 36 per cent in 1927, has called it ‘a startling revolution in
the countryside, nothing less than the dissolution of a large part of
251
the great estate system and the formation of a new race of

yeomen.’72
By no means all the sales were to the tenants and other small
owners. There were still big business men willing to buy status and
prestige, like the soap manufacturer Joseph Watson who bought
Lord Willoughby de Broke’s Compton Verney in 1921 and was
created Lord Manton, the brewer Newall-Cain who bought Lord
Melbourne’s Brockett Hall (from an intervening owner) and
became Lord Brockett in 1933, or the self-made financier and
shipowner Sir John Ellerman, already a great landowner with over
100,000 acres, who bought Great Portland Street from Lord
Howard de Walden in 1925.73 But the old aristocratic round of the
London season and the country house party was no longer what it
was. The Duke of Portland complained in 1937 that:
large estates…have been and are still being broken up, and the
houses attached to them sold to individuals, most of whom
have little or no connexion with the land… When I first lived
at Wellbeck the great neighbouring houses, such as Clumber,
Thoresby, and Rufford, were all inhabited by their owners….
Now not one…is so occupied, except for a few days in the
year.
In the old days, he went on, the great town houses ‘were thrown
open every season for large social gatherings’, including Hertford,
Grosvenor, Dorchester, Lansdowne, Devonshire, Spencer,
Chesterfield, Stafford, and Montague Houses. ‘At present, only
Londonderry, Apsley, Bridgewater and Holland Houses remain as
private residences.’74
The country gentry, entirely dependent on agricultural rents
which in the 1930s reached their lowest point since 1870, suffered
most. Thompson estimated that only a third of the gentry families
of Essex, Oxfordshire and Shropshire of the 1870s remained in
residence by 1952.75 Many of their houses simply disappeared, or
were let or sold to farmers, wealthy commuters, or institutions. In
face of the competition of cheap food from overseas, agriculture
declined between the wars, arable land tumbled down to grass,
fields became derelict, weeds multiplied, ditches were choked, gates
and fences fell into disrepair, roads left unmade, buildings decayed,
and the landscape assumed a neglected and unkempt appearance.76
252
Even sitting tenants stopped buying, and the number of owner-

occupiers stagnated until after the Second World War.
The great urban landowners too were selling off parts of their
holdings. In 1919 the Duke of Bedford, Lords Portman, Camden,
Cadogan and Northampton sold off parcels of their London
estates, Berkeley Square and estate were sold in 1922 for £2
million, Devonshire House the same year, and even part of the
Duke of Westminster’s Belgravia in the late 1920s. At the seaside,
the Haldons had already liquidated their Torquay holdings by
1914, Lord Radnor began to dispose of his land at Folkestone in
1920, at Bournemouth Sir George Tapps-Gervis-Meyrick got rid of
his ground rents in 1921 and the Earl of Malmesbury of his in
1923, and the Scarisbricks and Heskeths of theirs in Southport in
1926. In the industrial areas, that ‘leviathan of wealth’ the Duke of
Sutherland gave Trentham Park to the City of Stoke-on-Trent in
1912, the Ramsdens sold their entire Huddersfield estate to the
Corporation for £1.3 million in 1920, Lord Derby began selling his
Liverpool ground rents, Lord Calthorpe sold the outlying parts of
his Birmingham estates, the Dudleys their Black Country
properties, Lord Fitzwilliam his Eccleshall estate in Sheffield, the
Marquess of Bute his Cardiff building property and docks, and
Lord Shaftesbury abandoned his Belfast connections and gave the
castle to the city. David Cannadine concluded, ‘in the towns as in
the countryside, the period from the 1870s until the outbreak of the
Second World War saw the aristocracy under attack and in
retreat.’77
The old order was not yet doomed, however, it was simply
changing and ‘yielding place to new’. Like Mark Twain’s, the
reports of the great landowners’ demise were exaggerated. Despite
the much resented death duties (which were levied at only halfrates
on agricultural land), the great landowners still held on to most of
their wealth, as measured by their probate returns. Their median
estate (with land) at death actually rose from £287,500 in 1880–99
to £633,000 in 1920–39, and retained most of its value in real
terms (from £282,300 to £274,700 at 1913 prices) (see Table 6.2.6
on page 263) while over a quarter of them, more than in the late
Victorian age, died millionaires. Many were still amongst the
wealthiest men in Britain. Of the 177 millionaires dying in the
1920s and 1930s, twenty-four of them were principally
landowners, to whom another five should be added for settled land
253
excluded from probate before 1925. Four out of eight decedants

leaving over £3 million in the 1940s (including the Dowager
Countess Peel, heiress of Lord Ashton, whose wealth was partly in
linoleum manufacture) were landowners. The richest of the ten, the
eleventh Duke of Bedford, left £4.7 million in 1940, yet his son the
twelfth Duke, after paying duty at 75 per cent, could still leave £5.8
million thirteen years later.78
The new order was, of course, that amalgamation of old and
new wealth in a new plutocracy which was already emerging in the
generation before the First World War. Now, however, the
assimilation process was reversed. The great landlords were
becoming great corporate business men rather than the business
men landed aristocrats. The successful landowners who continued
to increase their wealth and vie with the great business tycoons
were those like the Dukes of Bedford and Westminster and Lords
Derby and Cadogan who formed companies or trusts to manage
their estates, treated land as only one form of investment amongst
many, sold unprofitable parcels and bought higher yielding stocks
and shares with the proceeds, accepted directorships in other
companies, especially banks and insurance companies rather than
industrial corporations, and generally behaved like financial
tycoons rather than landed grandees.
Even their lifestyle changed, though not as much as they
complained. Many used their non-landed income to keep up the
traditional style—the Calthorpes re-equipped Elvetham, the
Berkeleys restored their Gloucestershire castle, Waldorf and Nancy
Astor still kept open house at Cliveden, and the Devonshires
continued their itinerant life between their five or six houses—and
despite the rising costs of servants, the lack of suitable neighbours,
and the preference for a more private, comfortable existence made
possible by modern amenities and consumer goods, some were able
to keep up their old extravagant way of life down to the Second
World War. As Gathorne-Hardy put it in relation to domestic
service and the decline of the British nanny, It is 1939 that is the
significant divide, not 1914.’ Nevertheless, the old way of life had
lost its savour for many, and led them to live near to other
plutocrats in London’s West End, with a pied à terre in the country
in part of their old mansions. The old landlords did not die, and
indeed were to enjoy a great revival in their fortunes after the
Second World War, but the glamorous way of life they once
254
dominated began to fade into the preferred anonymity of the

twentieth-century plutocracy.
This self-effacement was reflected in politics. It has been argued
that a quarter of the Conservative Cabinet ministers between 1916
and 1955 were ‘aristocrats’, but this was by the peculiar definition
of anyone with a titled grandparent.79 It is clear that most of the
leading aristocratic politicians of the inter-war period, such as
Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, or Lord Halifax, were either scions of
noble houses removed from the main line or minor landlords not in
the league of the great magnates. In the 1935 Cabinet only the
Marquess of Londonderry, in the honorific office of Lord Privy
Seal, was a great landowner of the Duke of Omnium type which
had dominated Victorian politics. The leading members were
business men or rentiers like Stanley Baldwin and Neville
Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, barrister son of a small farmer and
builder, Sir Samuel Hoare of the Norfolk landed banking family, Sir
Godfrey Collins, the Scottish publisher, Sir Kingsley Wood, solicitor
son of a Wesleyan minister, Walter Runciman, Methodist
shipowner and insurer, and, curiously, three sons of the working
class, Ramsay MacDonald, illegitimate child of a ploughman and a
servant girl, his son Malcolm MacDonald (working-class at one
remove), and J.H.Thomas, the railway unionist always cartooned
in his dress suit. Apart from Londonderry, Halifax and Eden, the
leading landed members were Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, who had
married into the woolcombing inventor’s family and its coal mines,
W.Ormsby-Gore, plutocratic son of Lord Harlech and chairman of
the Midland Bank, and two offshoots of great houses, Oliver
Stanley, younger son of the Earl of Derby, and Lord Eustace Percy,
younger son of the Duke of Northumberland. Their presence
attested that members of the old aristocracy still had advantages in
politics if they wanted them; the question was, did they still want
them? To the extent that they did, the halfway house of inter-war
politics still had its foundations in the old, pre-war order.
Nor yet were the great landed politicians replaced by plutocrats.
The business tycoons and millionaires took even less part in
politics, unless behind the scenes, than they did before the war. The
notorious Victorian bosses of the industrial towns, like Lord
Ashton, the ‘linoleum king’ of Lancaster, the Hornby family of
Blackburn, the Woods and Sidebottoms of Glossop, and the Peases
of Middlesbrough, now sold out to great combines or left their
255
firms to be run by professional managers, leaving local government

to small business men, shopkeepers and trade unionists. Only the
odd really big business man, like Lord Weir, the Glasgow engineer
brought in as ‘munitions Czar’ in the First World War, pioneer of
the electric power National Grid and ‘architect of air power’ for the
Second World War, Sir Alfred Mond, Lord Melchett, first head of
the chemical giant ICI and protagonist of the Mond-Turner talks
between big business and the TUC, or the newspaper tycoons
Northcliffe and Beaverbrook with their own political axes to grind,
played a continuous if often backstage role at the national level. By
far the largest group of Conservative ministers between 1916 and
1955 were the forty-three professionals (including ex-civil servants
and public administrators), followed by nineteen landowners,
sixteen rentiers, and sixteen business men (out of 100). On the
Labour side the twenty-five professionals were second only to the
twenty-eight union officials (out of sixty-five ministers), who were
in effect a special kind of professional. Amongst Tory MPs
professionals were in a clear majority (52 per cent) in the inter-war
Parliaments and the largest group (24 per cent) of Labour MPs
apart from the manual workers (72 per cent), most of whom were
trade union officials.80 Politics was already more than halfway
towards becoming a professional occupation, in both senses.
What is more difficult to discover is the extent to which business
itself was becoming professionalized. The rise of the giant
corporation, as we shall see in the next chapter, was a special
feature of the 1920s, and as the vehicle for the mergers and
amalgamations of scores of family businesses it automatically
replaced the owner-managing entrepreneur by the professional
manager who controlled far more capital than he owned. Even
when the family business owner became the new corporate
manager, he had to learn a new and unfamiliar behaviour pattern,
less autocratic and paternalistic, more bureaucratic and
consultative, which many found intolerable, or intolerant of
themselves. In this way Lord Leverhulme was not succeeded in the
chair of Unilever as he wished at his death by his son but by Francis
D’Arcy Cooper, a professional accountant. Lord Nuffield was eased
out of day-to-day management of Morris Motors to concentrate on
his philanthropic works and go on his endless world cruises. At ICI
Lord Melchett was succeeded at his death in 1930 by Sir Harry
McGowan, the career manager who had put together the chemical
256
giant.81 Indeed, only fifty-two out of over 500 chairmen of the

largest companies in the period 1905–39 were wealth holders of the
traditional kind (leaving over £500,000 at death).82 Since the
capitals of these companies ran into millions of pounds (the fiftieth
in 1930 had a market volume of £6.3 million), 90 per cent of the
chairmen were in effect professional controllers of other people’s
capital. This fact may not have come home to many family business
men absorbed by big corporations who continued to behave like
old-fashioned entrepreneurs but they were, perhaps even more than
the career managers who were beginning to replace them, vehicles
of the transition to managerial capitalism.
Recent research on the very wealthy in Britain has emphasized
their concentration in the non-manufacturing sectors of the
economy, commerce and finance, and especially in the City of
London.83 Much of this has been misconceived. It assumes, firstly,
that large individual fortunes are somehow more important to the
economy than the relative weight of the various sectors in the
generation of aggregate income and employment. Agriculture,
mining and manufacturing have always employed more workers
and produced more wealth than commerce and finance, and still
do, despite the rise of a ‘service economy’.84 Secondly, it confounds
commerce and finance, and assumes that the manipulation of
money by the City is closer to the distribution of goods by
merchants and retailers than the latter is to production. The
Morrisons, Sainsburys, and Marks and Spencers are bracketed with
the Rothschilds, Samuels and Slaters rather than the Lords
Leverhulme, Bears ted and Nuffield who were also commercial
distributors of the soap, petrol and cars they manufactured. Finally,
it manipulates the figures even in its own terms by refusing to count
as manufacturing the food, drink and tobacco industries, which
produced more millionaires than any other ‘standard industrial
category’, because ‘these trades are not normally thought of as part
of the Industrial Revolution.’85 The inclusion of food, drink and
tobacco gives manufacturing in the late Victorian age (1880–99) 62
per cent of the probated millionaires as against 38 per cent for
commerce and finance, 46 per cent as against 58 per cent in 1900–
19, and 55 per cent as against 40 per cent in 1920–39. If commerce
is excluded, finance (banking, insurance, stockbroking, and ‘other
finance’) accounts for only 21, 31 and 17 per cent of millionaires
dying in the three successive periods.86 So much for the supposed
257
domination of wealth by the City of London. The whole argument,

however, becomes irrelevant when set against the accelerated rise of
corporate capitalism between the wars, when the managers of giant
corporations, with interlocking boards of directors and
shareholdings, did not ask each other what category they belonged
to. They increasingly invested in diversified enterprises, producing
either goods or services, as long as they were profitable. This
curious attempt to divide the new plutocracy, at last amalgamating
into a single economic elite, thus falls to the ground. What remains
of it is the increasing centralization of the British economy, both
commerce and manufacturing, in managerial corporations based in
London.
Yet society between the wars was no longer run by the same kind
of ruling class that dominated Victorian England. Despite the
merging of great landed and business wealth into a new plutocracy,
there was also a greater fragmentation of the competing elites into
separate hierarchies which, unlike the old days of patronage and
absorption of new men into London society, were no longer part of
a unified ruling elite. To understand this we must turn to the
changes which were taking place in recruitment to the other elites.
4 ‘MONEY ISN’T EVERYTHING’

For the other elites, developing independently, money was not the
sole source of their prestige and power. They were not as rich or
economically powerful as the great landowners and business
tycoons, but they were increasingly important within their own
spheres as decision makers and opinion leaders: politicians, high civil
servants, judges, vice-chancellors of universities, national newspaper
editors, leading accountants, architects, physicians and surgeons,
engineers, and even trade union leaders, who were becoming what
Robert Taylor has called ‘the fifth estate’. Except for the last, much
has been made of their supposed recruitment from a narrow segment
of society, largely from middle-class families via a small number of
public schools and, to a lesser extent, the unversities of Oxford and
Cambridge. This widely accepted notion stems from a number of
sociological studies based on easily accessible sources of information
on elite figures’ education and, occasionally, fathers’ occupation. It is
founded on the fallacy that education at a public school and/or a
father in the Registrar-General’s social classes 1 and 2 (higher
258
professional and managerial occupations) are sufficient guarantee of

a wealthy and privileged origin.
In fact, there is a far greater range of income, wealth and status
within those schools and classes than between them and the state
schools and the classes below. Classes 1 and 2 may include great
landowners, millionaire business men and rich judges but they also
embrace farmers, shopkeepers, poor clergymen and mere
professors. The so-called public schools have always catered for the
same wide range of families, from aristocrats and big business men
to the poorer clergy and the lesser professions. Even the great
Clarendon schools, except perhaps for Eton, never had a majority
of boys from the gentry and aristocracy. At Winchester from 1820
to 1922 a quarter of the pupils came from the landed elite, only 11
per cent were from business families and the rest were sons of the
clergy and the other professions, many of whom made sacrifices to
send them to public school.87 No more than 15 per cent of
Harrovians entering the school in 1840, 1870 and 1895–1900 had
elite fathers. Even at Eton there was an immense range of family
income, from princely to genteel poverty, front the £200,000-plus
per annum of the Marquess of Hartington’s father, the Duke of
Devonshire, to the £438 10s. pension of the retired Indian civil
servant father of Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, who
recalled the Etonian son of a Russian émigré boasting that his
father had 200 times as much income as Blair senior.88
It was to test this dubious notion of the narrowness and
uniformity of elite recruitment that the Social Science Research
Council in the 1970s funded the only study to date which
considered the family wealth as well as the education and fathers’
occupations of elites in British society since 1880. The study
examined the probate returns of both the fathers and, where
deceased, of the elite figures themselves. It also extracted the
father’s occupation, where necessary, from the elite person’s birth
certificate, a more reliable source than the published directories.
The full results of the survey have been deposited with the British
Library Lending Division and are available to researchers, and the
material has been used in various publications by myself and more
especially by my then research associate, Dr W.D.Rubinstein,
whose labours produced the information in 3,227 incumbents of
4,484 elite positions between 1880 and 1970 on which the more
than 500 tables were based.89
259
At the halfway stage in this history of English society since 1880,

looking before and after, this information on the recruitment of
elites becomes particularly relevant, and a summary of the main
results is given here in Tables 6.2.1–6.2.6.
The tables show that, apart from the trade union leaders and the
Labour Cabinet ministers, the university vice-chancellors and
national newspaper editors, the elites were recruited to a large extent
from the upper and middle classes, that is, from families constituting
3.3 per cent and 18.8 per cent of the occupied population as defined
by the Registrar-General’s classes 1 and 2 in the census of 1951. They
were also educated predominantly at public schools and to a
disproportionate extent at the eleven major public schools (Eton,
Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Rugby, St Paul’s, Charterhouse,
Merchant Taylors’, Shrewsbury, Marlborough and Wellington). Yet
when we turn to family wealth as measured by father’s estate at
death or (where deceased) the elite person’s own probate return, the
picture changes dramatically. Only the median returns are given here,
which means that half of each elite and of their fathers left less than
260
261
262
the amounts shown, and in many cases nothing at all. There was,
first of all, an immense difference between the elites defined by their
wealth, the millionaires, great landowners and, to a lesser extent, the
big company chairmen, and the elites not defined by ownership of
property. Between the wars, no elite amongst the latter except the
Conservative Cabinet ministers and the newly created peers had
fathers who left median estates reaching five figures at 1913 prices,
and only the senior judges left (slightly) more than £10,000. Neither
at the outset nor at the end of their careers were most of the elites
rich in any sense acceptable to the plutocracy. Not one of them, for
example, on average, could have lived more than modestly on the
interest of their father’s wealth, supposing it could have been
realized. Compared with the plutocracy they were on average poor
men without the economic power to buy large amounts of the labour
of others. And yet in their own spheres they were extremely
powerful, making decisions which had important implications for
the lives and careers of many of their fellow citizens.
263
The modesty of their backgrounds can be confirmed in

individual cases. The Archbishops of Canterbury, the most
powerful men in the Church of England (not in the original study
but surveyed later by Rubinstein), were all technically from Class 1
and all except one (Cosmo Lang of Park School, Glasgow)
educated at elite schools, yet only one archbishop between 1880
and 1945 was not from a comparatively modest home, and he a
‘second generation’ archbishop. Archbishop Archibald Tait (served
1868–82) was the son of a small Scottish landowner who ‘ruined
himself by unremunerative agricultural experiments and had to sell
his estate’, leaving nothing at his death; Edmund Benson (1883–
96), was the son of a Birmingham chemical manufacturer in
‘reduced circumstances’, who also left nothing; Frederick Temple
(1896–1902), the son of an army major who rose to be Governor
of Sierra Leone but died when Frederick was 13, leaving a widow
and fifteen children ‘in narrow circumstances’; Randall Davidson
(1903–28), the son of a small Edinburgh merchant who left £4,145;
and Cosmo Lang (1928–42), the son of a Scottish Presbyterian
minister and Principal of Aberdeen University, who left £3,866.
Only William Temple (1942–45), son of Frederick, was born in the
purple as the son of an elite father, and he was a rare episcopal
socialist.90
High civil servants were becoming an increasingly powerful elite,
yet one of them, H.E.Dale, asked in 1941:
What kind of young man enters the Home Civil Service? He is

nearly sure to possess both ability and industry above the
average of his contemporaries at school and the University.
Secondly, many of the entrants are poor and without family
influence—the sons of country parsons or small tradesmen or
widows living on tiny incomes who for years have made
sacrifices in order that their clever boys may not be robbed of
a university career and the chances it offers. A young man of
this origin must earn his living from the moment he leaves the
University…. In any case [his family] can do nothing for him
and he knows it.91
This inside assessment is borne out by the backgrounds of three

literally average heads of departments, the median cases in terms of
father’s probate valuation in the cohorts 1920–39, 1940–59 and
264
1960–70 (all in post at some level in the inter-war period). The

father of Sir Maurice Holmes, Permanent Under-Secretary for
Education (1937–45), was an inspector of elementary schools who
rose to be chief inspector and left £1,781 in 1936. The father of Sir
Frank Lee, PUS at the Ministry of Food, the Board of Trade and the
Treasury between 1949 and 1962, was a schoolmaster at
Brentwood, Essex who left £2,125 in 1928. And the father of Sir
Douglas Haddow, PUS at the Scottish Office from 1965, was a
schoolmaster in Lanarkshire who died in 1919 when his son was 6,
leaving £2,375.92
Vice-chancellors of universities, especially Oxford and
Cambridge, were from more modest backgrounds. Benjamin
Jowett’s father was a Fleet Street printer, while others included the
sons of a druggist, a naval surgeon, a tea dealer and, in more recent
years, a stone mason, a chauffeur and a Post Office sorter. Only just
over one-quarter came from upper-class families, mostly
professional. Their fathers left median estates of £2,600 (at 1913
prices) and they themselves £7,100. Even the heads of the
professional institutes, arguably the most successful practitioners of
their kind, who came almost equally from upper and middle-class
families and were overwhelmingly educated at public schools, had
fathers who left on average £7,700 (at 1913 prices) and themselves
left no more on average than £15,200.
Thus the professional as distinct from the landed and business
elites between the wars, even when they came from the upper
reaches of society via privileged education, were often born into
families of modest wealth and, though they tended to outdo their
fathers in accumulating property, left only modest estates
themselves. What is more telling, however, especially considering
the rise in real National Income per head (which approximately
doubled between 1880 and 1939 and doubled again by 1980), is
the steady decline in average wealth both of their families of origin
and of the incumbents themselves. In real terms, only the fathers of
millionaires, great landowners and (in the inter-war period only)
Conservative Cabinet ministers made gains down to and beyond
the Second World War, when even they began to lose out.
Meanwhile, in terms of their own median probate valuations, every
elite group without exception endured an unrelenting diminution in
real wealth throughout the period from 1880 to 1970.93 In this
265
respect the inter-war period was halfway down the slide, at the end
of a steady glissade and before the steep plunge of the post-war era.
This pattern of decline in elite family wealth is compatible with
the transition from the unequal class society of Victorian to the
more professional and meritocratic society emerging in the
twentieth century, in three demonstrable ways. Firstly, the opening
up of the elites to entrants of modest background, mainly from the
middle and lower middle class rather than the working class, was
reflected in the decline in their fathers’ median estates. Secondly, the
decline in incumbents’ median estates reflected the narrowing
differential incomes of the middle classes, both propertied and
professional, over the wage earners, and the effect of graduated
taxation on their ability to accumulate capital. It may also have
reflected, thirdly, the swing towards pensionable salaries and, for
some, self-funded pension plans, which absorbed savings but
expired at death and left no trace in the probate returns—another
symptom of a more professional society. Against all three must be
set the growth in owner-occupation of houses, especially in the
middle class, which would tend to raise the probate return, though
not enough apparently to stem the decline. All told, there can be
little doubt that, for the non-wealthy elites as well as for the
plutocracy, the inter-war period was the middle stage of the
transition.
5 SPIRALISTS AND BURGESSES

One effect of the rise of large-scale business and of the more
interventionist state in the twentieth century is what might be called
the ‘nationalization’ of the middle class. As local industrialists sold
out to or merged with giant, nationwide corporations and the
central government began to open local offices in every sizeable
town, a new kind of cosmopolitan or rootless middle class of
managers and administrators began to appear, different from the
local business and professional men who constituted the traditional
middle class. This was particularly noticeable after the First World
War, when many of the old town bosses in the industrialist areas,
like Lord Ashton, the ‘linoleum king’ of Lancaster, the Woods and
Sidebottoms of Glossop, the Peases of Darlington, and the Palmers
of Jarrow, abdicated and left their once paternalistic domains to
face the rigours of depression with only the local ‘shopocracy’ and
266
trade union leaders at the helm. The new managers and civil
servants had no roots in the town and looked elsewhere for
promotion or career advancement. This led one sociologist in the
1950s, William Watson (based largely on a social and political
survey of Glossop), to distinguish between the ‘spiralists’, the career
professionals who would move up by moving round, and the
‘burgesses’, the traditional local business and self-employed
professional men—traders, builders, doctors and solicitors, and the
like—whose whole careers would be spent in the locality.94
There was often tension and mutual disdain between the locals
and the ‘offcomers’ (as they were called in the north), because of
differences in outlook, values, horizons, and even speech. The old
middle class, educated at the local grammar school and dominating
the local Rotary Club, the Freemasons, and the Conservative and
Liberal Associations, were fiercely loyal and defensive about the
local community and involved in its politics, while the newcomers
tended to be detached, aloof from local squabbles, with their eyes
on their next promotion to a ‘better’ (usually a bigger) place.
The newcomers also tended to speak differently. Whereas the
burgesses clove to an educated version of the local accent, the
spiralists, even if they came from the same or similar backgrounds,
had ‘corrected’ their accents at public school or university and
aspired to a version of the ‘received standard English’ being put out
by BBC radio. They did not perhaps go all the way with the stilted,
braying, arrogant tones then affected by BBC announcers and
newsreel commentators—an affectation which when played back
now only provokes disbelieving laughter—but they eschewed the
regional accents spoken by their neighbours. ‘Received standard
English’ was not the speech of the aristocracy, who spoke in a much
gruffer, clipped, down-to-earth, less pretentious manner. It was the
speech of a new, aspiring middle class who believed themselves to
belong to a nationwide elite. Its affectations can still be heard in
repeats of Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 ‘We are at war’ broadcast,
so nervous, tinny and insincere compared with Churchill’s rousing,
aristocratic prose. Only the educated Scots and Welsh were immune
from it: Ramsay MacDonald and, ironically, Sir John Reith,
Director-General of the plummy-voiced BBC, Lloyd George and
Thomas Jones, Secretary of the Cabinet. It was not, as many
believed, hallowed by tradition—few Victorians spoke like that—
but a new invention, created in the reformed public schools and the
267
southern grammar schools and now imposed on the new middle

class by the BBC.
In the large cities as distinct from the smaller industrial towns it
became the speech of the ‘posher’ suburbs—the Surrey commuter
belt, Birmingham’s Edgbaston, Manchester’s Wilmslow and
Altrincham, Edinburgh’s ‘refained’ Kelvinside. For the real social
division between the wars was not between the prosperous south
and the depressed north but between the inner cities and industrial
towns and the new outer suburbs of housing estates and by-passes.
J.B.Priestley in his English Journey in 1933 noticed that, in addition
to the old, romantic, idealized, rustic pre-industrial England of the
posters and picture books and the dirty, depressed and depressing
nineteenth-century industrial England of the dole queues and
belching chimneys, there was a third England of chromium and
glass, art deco and functional architecture:
This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling

stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of
giant cinemas and dance halls and cafés, bungalows with tiny
garages, cocktail bars, Woolworth’s, motor coaches, wireless,
hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing
and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away
for cigarette coupons.
This newer England was a ‘large-scale mass production job, with

cut prices’, cheap and accessible, without privilege or deference, in
which the young people at least
do not play chorus in an opera in which their social superiors

are the principals; they do not live vicariously, enjoy life at
second hand…; they get on with their own lives. If they must
have heroes and heroines, they choose them for themselves,
from the ranks of film stars and sportsmen and the like.
It was ‘as near to a classless society as we have got yet’.95

But it was not yet a classless society. On the contrary, suburban
England was more visibly graded into discrete social layers than
either the old, traditional countryside, in which the rich at least
knew the poor, or the nineteenth-century industrial towns, in which
the boss lived up the hill, overlooking the crowded cottages of his
268
workers. The explosion of urban expansion brought about between

the wars by the motor car, the motor bus and the delivery van was
much more dispersive than the railway and the tramcar. It almost
doubled the amount of land under bricks and mortar and concrete
in a generation, from 6 to 11 per cent of the total acreage. Nearly
4 million houses were built between the wars, over 1 million by
local authorities, most of them on suburban housing estates.96 The
new suburbs sprawled outwards from the cities, filling in the green
spaces between the railway suburbs, flooding the gaps between the
towns, and bringing in an ugly new word for an ugly new concept,
the conurbation. The suburbs were only classless in the sense that
each catered only for the class that could afford that price of house
and no more, or that level of rent on a council estate. The classes
and subclasses sorted themselves out more neatly than ever before
into single-class enclaves which did not know or speak to each
other. The life of the ‘stockbroker belt’ with its big cars and
detached houses and private infant schools was more remote from
the white-collar semi-detached private estate than ever the squire
was from the village almshouses or the cotton spinner from his
operatives’ cottages.
Yet this new social geography fitted the life of the spiralist much
better than the old. As he moved up, whether in the same city or a
different one, he could move unnoticed from one anonymous
suburb to a slightly better one, acquiring the accoutrements of the
better life—a ‘modern semi’, a detached house, a car, a telephone,
a refrigerator, and so on—as he went, without his co-workers even
knowing, much less remarking. The burgess had always lived in the
eye of the community. The spiralist lived anonymously.
The middle class as a whole has expanded in the twentieth
century, from about 25 per cent in 1911 to 31 per cent in 1931, 41
per cent in 1951, and 43 per cent in 1971. Much of this, it is true,
was due to the huge expansion of office jobs for women, and male
white-collar jobs rose only from 26 to 29 and 32 per cent. But it
was still sufficient to increase the chances of upward mobility
significantly beyond what they would otherwise have been. As the
Oxford social mobility project noted:
The increasing ‘room at the top’ created by the growth of

professional, higher technical, administrative, and managerial
positions could provide the occasion…for inequalities of life
269
chances to be reduced, but without the members of any class

having to become less advantaged than before in absolute
terms.97
What has been less noticed, however, is the changeover within the
higher middle class, from a predominance of owner-managing
business men to one of professionals, managers and administrators.
Employers and proprietors shrank from 7.7 per cent of the male
occupied population in 1911 and 1921 to 7.6 per cent in 1931, 5.7
per cent in 1951 and to 5.2 per cent in 1971. Meanwhile, higher
professionals (both salaried and self-employed) and administrators
and managers grew from 5.4 per cent in 1911 and 5.9 per cent in
1921 to 6.2 per cent in 1931, 9.6 per cent in 1951 and to 16 per
cent in 1971. To put it another and more appropriate way, Guy
Routh has shown that, while the self-employed employers and
(higher and lower) professionals shrank from 1,459,000 (7.5 per
cent of the occupied population) in 1921, to 1,248,000 (5.5 per
cent) in 1951, the salaried professionals, managers and
administrators grew from 1,438,000 (7.4 per cent) to 2,609,000
(11.6 per cent). Between 1921 and 1951 the ratio of the salaried
professionals and managers to the employers and self-employed
increased from near equality to about 2:1.98 While the change
proceeded more slowly between the wars than later, the trend was
undoubtedly from an entrepreneurial towards a salaried
professional and managerial society.
Yet, curiously enough, middle-class incomes were not keeping up
commensurately with the expansion. Annual average money wages
rose 103 per cent between 1911–13 and 1938, average annual
salaries by only 71 per cent, while prices rose by 56 per cent.
According to Routh, the average money earnings of a typical group
of higher professionals (lawyers, doctors, dentists, the clergy, army
officers, engineers and chemists) rose between 1913–14 and 1935–
37 by 93 per cent, compared with 97 per cent for skilled workers
and 105 per cent for unskilled. Public administrators were still
more depressed, and the typical first division civil servant (principal
grade) suffered a nearly 50 per cent decline in real income. Only
business managers gained substantially, with a rise of 120 per cent.
In general, the differentials between the classes were narrowing
somewhat, in line with the trend towards greater equality. Higher
professional earnings for men, 4.1 times the average for all
270
occupations (male and female) in 1913–14, were only 3.9 times in

1935–36 and 2.9 times in 1955–56. Managerial salaries, on the
other hand, were gaining, rising from 2.5 times the average in
1913–14 to 2.7 times in 1935–36 and 2.8 times by 1955–56.99
What was happening was that management, once very much
second best to owner-enterprise, was becoming more professional
and becoming professionally paid. Meanwhile, certain traditionally
high professions, once paid at aristocratic levels, were falling in real
income and pulling down the average. Bishops’ average incomes
fell from £3,400 in 1913–14 to £2,700 in 1924, a fall of 55 per cent
in real terms; high court judges’ and senior Cabinet ministers’
remained at £5,000 till after the Second World War, a fall in real
terms of 36 per cent by 1938 and 74 per cent by 1955.100
Routh explains the rigidity of the national pay structure,
together with the tendency of low-paid workers to more than keep
up despite their weak position in the labour market, by socio-
psychological causes, the conservatism of all social classes in the
face of change and, more especially, the quasi-medieval belief in a
‘just wage’. Every occupational group, he quotes Elliott Jacques,
had an intuitive knowledge of what they ought to be paid, and
struggles hard to defend it and to restore it whenever it is
undermined. Unfortunately, it does not mesh with what others
intuitively feel they ought to be paid, and they struggle just as hard
to restore differentials, thus perpetuating an unstable and
constantly changing equilibrium. In certain situations, like the
inter-war period, when there is sympathy for the underdog, flatrate
increases become the norm for some trade unions, and the pay
‘floor’ is raised by general agreement.101
This theory fits the experience of an incipient professional
society in which there is a stronger sense of the justice (equity rather
than equality) of rewards. Each profession, including business
management, believes that its remuneration should be linked to its
social function rather than to its fluctuating values in the labour
market. At the one end, the unskilled should not be allowed to sink
to their almost negative value in an overloaded free market. At the
other, outrageously high traditional salaries for judges, bishops and
politicians should not be raised in line with inflation but allowed to
fall to ‘reasonable’ levels. To anticipate Chapter 8, we may say that
the revival of the ‘just wage’ is an aspect of the professional social
ideal of a functional society based on the just reward of merit and
271
service. The ‘moralization of incomes’ was already beginning to

express itself between the wars in pulling down the mighty and
raising up the meek.
Spiralists and burgesses could also be found expanding and
contracting at lower levels of the middle class. On the one hand,
small business men, shopkeepers, local builders, workshop
manufacturers and self-employed craftsmen were shrinking in
numbers as the multiple stores, big construction contractors and
great corporations outcompeted them. On the other, there was a
huge expansion of clerical workers, minor civil servants and local
government employees, school teachers, technicians, inspectors,
supervisors and foremen.
Clerical workers were the fastest expanding occupational group
in the first half of the twentieth century, growing from 887,000, 4.8
per cent of the workforce, in 1911 to 1,465,000, 7 per cent in 1931
and 2,404,000, 10.7 per cent in 1951. Most of this expansion, it is
true, was among women office workers, who increased from
179,000, 3.3 per cent of women workers, in 1911, to 648,000, 10.3
per cent in 1931, and 1,413,000, 20.3 per cent in 1951, but this
was partly due to the greater (and no doubt discriminatory)
promotion of male clerks to administration and management.102
Office workers of both sexes were often paid no more than skilled
manual workers—in 1935 Civil Service clerks earned almost
exactly the same as engine drivers—but in outlook, dress and even
speech (due to grammar school education) were often very
different.
They were also treated differently by their employers. As one
candid employer noted in 1947:
By a process of usage the workers in this country have been

divided into two classes:
(a) those who are expected to work something under forty
hours a week and are, in general, trusted by the community
and their employers to put in a reasonable amount of work
during their working day; and
(b) those who are expected to work about forty-eight hours
per week and also are, in general, not trusted by their
employers. As a result they are paid strictly according to the
hours spent at their place of work.103
272
The first group, the office workers, often had holidays with pay,
paid sick leave and even pensions, besides cleaner and safer
conditions of work and closer relations with the boss, and many
repaid the trust by rarely forming trade unions, except in large-
scale offices like the Civil Service and the railways. The second, the
manual workers, as we shall see, retaliated with the same lack of
trust, which led to what Alan Fox has called the ‘low-trust
industrial relations’ which have bedevilled British industry and
contributed to its decline.104
The office workers were not immune, however, from the rise in
the scale of organization. Already before the First World War the
large groups of clerks in the Civil Service, local government, the
Post Office and the railways, without the personal employer and
paternalism of the small family business, had begun to organize
white-collar unions. Between the wars, the rise of the large
corporation ‘created the monster office in which vast numbers of
clerks are herded together for their daily work, just as the
concentration of capital herded the former craftsmen or cottage
workers in the factory.’105 As a result, clerks began to join unions in
larger numbers, which increased to 204,000 members in the new
white-collar section of the TUC in 1946.106
Meanwhile, the office workers and the lesser professions like the
teachers, nurses and technicians acted out the spiralist dream at the
lower levels of the middle class, pursuing safe jobs with pensions
and promotion up the career ladder by changing jobs and homes,
while the lesser burgesses, the small business men and shopkeepers,
strove to keep afloat against the competition of the growing
corporations. But whatever the mutual disdain between them, their
common bond of middle classness was their consciousness of
superiority, in appearance, status and education, to what was still
the great majority, the manual working class.
6 THE ROAD FROM WIGAN PIER

In the Preface to George Tomlinson’s autobiographical Coal-Miner,
published in 1933, Sir Arthur Bryant, the upper middle-class
historian, takes to task George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier:
It was written by a young literary man of refined tastes who

at some apparent inconvenience to himself has ‘roughed it’ for
273
a few weeks at Wigan and Sheffield. The impression left by

the first part of the book is that Wigan and Sheffield are Hell:
the corollary worked out with great skill in the second part,
that every decent-hearted man and woman, sooner than allow
such conditions to endure a day longer, should at once enrol
in the ranks of those who are seeking change by revolutionary
methods…
But there is an even more fatal weakness in the premises,
for though Wigan and Sheffield may perhaps genuinely seem
Hell to a super-sensitive novelist paying them a casual visit,
they do not seem Hell to the vast majority of people who live
there.107
This passage gives an insight into the two most common attitudes
to the working class held by those upper middle-class observers
who bothered to notice in the 1930s. Both assumed that the
working class were ‘all the same’, but one believed that they lived
in pig-sties and liked it that way while the other thought that pig-
sties ought to be abolished. Even the sympathetic George Orwell,
an old Etonian from a very modest middle-class family, could not
realize how insulting his picture of the filth and squalor of the
lumpenproletariat slums of Wigan was to the average respectable
working man, while Bryant’s belief that they actually liked it
because they knew no better was degrading.
What both, like most of their class, lacked was discrimination.
The inter-war working class even more than its Victorian
predecessors had a prickly sensitivity to the nuances of status more
refined than The Tatler or Country Life. It was not just the
traditional distinction between the ‘roughs’ and the ‘respectables’
reported by Margaret Stacey in her study of Banbury. There was a
finely graded social value attached to each district, every street,
even two ends of the same street. It was of course an intensely local
feeling. Richard Hoggart found in Hunslet, an inner suburb of
Leeds, in the 1930s the same kind of urban village that Robert
Roberts described in Salford before the war: ‘The more we look at
working-class life the more surely does it appear that the core is a
sense of the personal, the concrete, the local: it is embodied in the
idea of, first, the family and, second, the neighbourhood.’ The
obverse of this was that the world outside the family and the
neighbourhood was often strange and hostile, and the working
274
class were just as undiscriminating about the classes above as vice

versa. Society was divided into ‘Them’ (with a capital T) and ‘Us’:
‘They’ are ‘the people at the top’, ‘the higher ups’, the people
who give you the dole, call you up, tell you to go to war, fine
you, made you split your family in the thirties to avoid a
reduction in the Means Test allowance, ‘get yer in the end’,
‘aren’t really to be trusted’, ‘talk posh’, ‘are all twisters really’,
‘never tell yer owt’ (e.g. about a relative in hospital), ‘clap yer
in clink’, ‘will do y’ down if they can’, ‘summons yer’, ‘are all
in a click [clique] together’, ‘treat you like muck’.108
‘They’ were represented by the local authority figures, the doctor,

the clergyman, the relieving officer, the magistrate, and their
minions and surrogates, the policeman, the Labour Exchange clerk
and the rent collector. George Tomlinson, the Nottinghamshire
miner, equated them with the local Conservative Party:
All that the ordinary miner understands about Conservatism is

that local jumped-up people, with a small car and an equally
small mind, and who live in the residential part of town, as
they love to call it, are Conservatives (or pretend to be). They
who have made their money by selling him bacon, pit boots,
and insurance policies, are now able to sit back in comfort
and write to the local press pointing out how the miner is
wrong on each and every occasion, but who never in their
lives entered a miner’s home in order to get a proper
understanding of him and his problems.109
The miners, whether of Wigan or Nottingham or of Scotland,

Wales, Yorkshire and elsewhere, once part of the high-paid labour
aristocracy, were the hardest hit by the inter-war depression, with
unemployment rates running at 18 and 22 per cent in the good
years 1929 and 1938 and no less than 42 per cent in 1932. Their
plight epitomized the experience of the long-term unemployed. A
Rhondda miner spoke to investigators of the feeling of being spied
upon by officials from the Labour Exchange: ‘To men who had
worked in the only industry they had known for anything from
fifteen to fifty years, this was a new experience, of the most
humiliating and degrading kind.’110
275
Other skilled workers, too, in the Lancashire cotton and

engineering industries of Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole
(1935), the unemployed shipbuilders of Ellen Wilkinson’s Jarrow,
The Town that was Murdered (1939), or in the distressed areas
generally in the Pilgrim’s Trust’s Men Without Work (1938),
suffered unwonted privation and degradation in the 1930s. At the
bottom of the depression in 1932 when unemployment averaged
22.9 per cent, it was only 13.1 per cent in London and the south-
east but 26.3 per cent in the north-west (cotton and engineering),
29 per cent in Scotland (coal, engineering and shipbuilding), 30.6
per cent in the north-east (wool, coal and shipbuilding), and 38.1
per cent in Wales (coal and tinplate).111 The despair and deprivation
of the distressed areas rightly became a legend, which helps to
explain both the enthusiasm during the Second World War for
rebuilding a better world with full employment and also the Labour
victory of 1945.
But Wigan Pier was not the whole truth about the working class
between the wars. As David Lockwood has observed:
the working class which suffered disproportionately from

poverty and unemployment was the working class of the
communities of the older, declining heavy industry. What is
lacking is a description of the remainder of the working class,
particularly that not inconsiderable part of it that was
relatively secure in its employment, working in the slowly
expanding new light industries, living in better homes and less
cohesive communities, enjoying stable real incomes and
limiting its family size.112
These were the workers in the brand new car factories of

Birmingham, Coventry, Oxford and Luton, the radio, vacuum
cleaner and cigarette factories of West London, the aircraft
factories of Bristol, Yeovil and Preston, and in many others making
cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, petro-chemicals, rayon, electrical
components and household consumer goods in many parts of the
country. There were also thousands of car mechanics and home
appliance repairmen, building workers erecting houses in every
region including the depressed areas, shop assistants and delivery
men distributing the new consumer goods, gas fitters and
electricians installing cookers, wiring and meters, and bus
276
operators and utilities men serving the new suburbs. These new,
expanding industries were thicker in the Midlands and the south,
but by no means confined to them. New shops, new bus networks,
new house building and new services were found everywhere,
electric power and radios, for example, increased as fast in
Liverpool and Cardiff as in Birmingham or Portsmouth, and
expenditure on football pools and cigarettes may have been greater
there.113
Despite the high rates of unemployment, averaging 10.6 per cent
in the 1920s and 16.1 per cent in the 1930s, the great majority of
the working class were employed throughout the inter-war period,
and only a small minority were unemployed for more than twelve
months. Surprisingly, apart from coalmining, wages did not fall
except temporarily in the early 1930s even in the worst hit
industries, and on average money wages in both the old industries
and the new were rising moderately and real wages considerably
between the wars, in 1938 by 30 per cent over 1913 and 18 per cent
over 1920.114 Most of this gain was due to increased productivity in
the new industries and, surprisingly, even in the old as outworn,
inefficient factories and plants were closed down, and also to the
cheaper food and raw materials imported with the improved terms
of trade between manufacturing and primary producing countries.
Both of these gains were, in a sense, paid for by the unemployed:
increased productivity meant that the new industries employed
fewer workers than they might have done (though without it they
might have priced themselves out of world markets altogether); and
improved terms of trade meant that overseas customers could buy
fewer British exports, thus reducing employment in the export
industries. But for most of the working class they meant falling
prices and rising spending power.
In addition to the rise in real wages there was, as we have seen, an
increase in the social income going mainly to the working class, in the
form of insurance benefits and pensions, medical treatment,
education, and the like, totalling £596 million or 11.3 per cent of
GNP on 1938. In individual terms this averaged £12.5 per head in
1938, or about £46 per household.115 Since most of it went to the
working class, this added the equivalent of about £1 a week per
family to an average wage of only £2.5 per week. Or, rather, it added
more than that to those families who needed it, in sickness,
unemployment, widowhood, old age, and so on. Although the
277
working class contributed part of that sum—in addition to insurance

contributions, no less than two-thirds of all indirect taxation, as
opposed to income tax, was paid by the 88 per cent earning less than
£250 a year—they were net gainers, paying only 79 per cent of what
they received. All told, the effect was to raise the incomes of the
working class by 8–14 per cent in cash terms, plus the value of the
various social and educational services in kind.116
Finally, this increased income had to support a smaller average
family. The decrease in the average number of children from 3.4 to
2.2, collectively dependent on their parents for only about two-
thirds as long, and the decline of the average household from 4.4
persons in 1911 to 3.7 in 1931 (and to 3.2 in 1951), meant that the
wage now had to support 20 per cent fewer people. Adding all
these gains together, the average family may have been about two-
thirds better off in 1938 than before the war.117
The raising of the average, still more of the floor of unskilled
wages, helps to explain the lifting of about half of the very poor,
and most of those in work, out of the harsh, grinding poverty of the
pre-war surveys. In a repetition of his five towns survey in 1924, Sir
Arthur Bowley found that:
The improvement since 1913 is very striking. Even on the

assumption that all the families suffering from unemployment in
a particular week had no adequate reserves and that their
unemployment was chronic, the proportion in poverty in 1924
was little more than half that in 1913 [6.5 per cent against 12.6
per cent]. If there had been no unemployment the proportion of
families in poverty in the towns taken together would have
fallen to one-third (3.6 per cent against 11 per cent) and of
persons to little over a quarter (3.5 per cent against 12.6 per
cent). All the towns except Stanley [a Lancashire coal mining
town] show an improvement in nearly the same ratio; and it is
also found for both sexes and all ages.118
Other surveys confirmed Bowley’s finding. A New Survey of

London Life and Labour by a team led by Sir Hubert Llewellyn
Smith, the great civil servant who began as one of Charles Booth’s
assistants, found that nearly 10 per cent were in poverty compared
with 31 per cent in Booth’s late Victorian survey. A Bristol survey
in 1937 found 10.7 per cent of the working class (perhaps 7.5 per
278
cent of the whole population) in poverty, and surveys of Merseyside

and Southampton during the Depression found 17.3 and 20 per
cent of the working class (about 13 and 15 per cent of the whole
population) below their poverty lines. The most comparable study,
Rowntree’s second survey of York, found that ‘primary’ poverty
had fallen from 9.9 per cent of the city’s population in 1899 to 4.2
per cent in 1936.119
Here we come upon the paradox of rising standards, however.
As conditions improve and the worst kind of poverty diminishes,
the minimum acceptable level at which people can be expected to
live also rises. Rowntree was not content to accept that the 1899
standard was applicable to the poor in a more prosperous and
hopefully more humane society, and so he applied to the same data
a new ‘Human needs’ standard, allowing not merely for the
maintenance of ‘physical efficiency’ but also for an improved diet
(based on the British Medical Association’s recommendations),
slightly more for clothes, housing, heating and lighting, insurance
and trade union subscriptions, travel to work, and even ‘luxuries’
like newspapers, writing paper and stamps, a radio licence, beer,
tobacco, books and holidays. By this new standard Rowntree found
that 17.8 per cent of the population of York (31.1 per cent of the
working class) were now in poverty.120
What Rowntree had done, without naming it, was to invent the
concept of relative poverty, which would be rediscovered in the
1960s by Peter Townsend and Brian Abel Smith.121 As applied by
them it would, as we shall see, become a ‘Catch-22’ both for the
poor and for the welfare state: every time the state raised its
standard of provision (as measured by the minimum standard of
social security) it would thrust more people down into poverty. But
the fact that it was necessary for Rowntree to raise his poverty line
in 1936 is a measure of the improvement that had occurred and of
the possibility of further reform.
None of this means that the affluent society had already arrived
or that large numbers of working people were not suffering from
hunger, bad housing, and ill-health. Sir John Boyd Orr in 1936
claimed that only 40 per cent of the population were well fed, and
10 per cent (including 20 per cent of the nation’s children) badly
fed, leaving the rest, half the population, to some extent
undernourished—though he later reduced this to one-third.122
Despite the building of over 4 million houses between the wars,
279
nearly 4 per cent of working-class houses in England and Wales and

no less than 23 per cent in Scotland were found to be overcrowded
in 1936.123 On the new council estates, because of the higher rents,
Dr M’Gonigle found in Stockton-on-Tees that the new tenants
might be worse fed than in the old slums.124 Despite the fall in the
(standardized) death rate, from 13.8 per thousand in 1913 to 9.3 in
1937, there was still a great deal of ill-health, especially amongst
working-class women (wives and children of insured workers were
not covered by national insurance for medical treatment). In one
1930s survey less than one-third of working-class wives were found
to be in good health, more than one-fifth in ‘indifferent health’, and
the rest, nearly one-half, in ‘bad’ or ‘very grave’ condition.125
Despite the steep fall in infant mortality, from 154 per thousand
live births in 1900 and 110 in 1910 to 57 in 1935, it was still two-
thirds higher in the unskilled working class than in the professional
and managerial classes.126 Despite the enormous reduction in
infectious diseases like scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles and
whooping cough, they still killed far more children of the poor than
of the rich, and child deaths in the slums could be relatively twice
as numerous as in the better-class suburbs.127 And despite the
increase in the average height of children aged 10–14 by one inch
per decade since 1900, there was still a marked difference between
boys at public schools and those at state elementary schools.128
Nevertheless, despite the depression, the signs of improvement
could be seen everywhere, even in the distressed areas. It was now
rare to see children, even in the slums, with wizened, old men’s faces,
in rags and without shoes.129 In the Sunday school anniversary
processions each spring many working-class children turned out with
new clothes and shoes, and their parents went to church or chapel for
that once. Rowntree found at York that while religious attendance
had halved since 1899, from 36 to 18 per cent of the population,
attendance at the pub had also declined: ‘One may walk through
working-class streets every evening for weeks and not see a drunken
person.’130 National beer consumption had dropped from 34 million
barrels a year in 1910–13 to 20 million in 1930 and even to 13
million in 1933 during the Great Depression.131 Mass Observation
noted that while in a typical industrial town like Bolton ‘the pub had
more buildings, holds more people, takes more of their time and
money, than church, cinema, dance-hall, and political organizations
put together’, only one-third of the voting population were regular
280
pub-goers.132 One at least of Rowntree’s causes of secondary poverty

had steeply declined.
On the other hand, his two other major causes, tobacco and
gambling, had enormously increased. Cigarettes, popularized by the
‘sophistication’ of movie stars and by free gifts and cigarette cards,
became chic for all classes, and tobacco consumption almost doubled
between 1914 and 1938. Gambling, so far as it could be measured,
on horse racing and the new crazes of greyhound racing and the
football pools, more than trebled, from £63 million in 1920 to £221
million in 1938, a large part of it by the working class. Over sixteen
times as many people gambled on football as paid to watch it, and
some 5 to 7 million people a year spent over £30 million on the
pools. The cinema became the most popular of entertainments, with
nearly 1 billion attendances in 1938, nearly twice as many as all
other forms of paid public entertainment (including the theatre,
racing, football and cricket) put together; about 40 per cent of the
population went to the ‘flicks’ once a week, and 25 per cent went
twice. At home over 9 million households bought radio licences by
1939, and 95 per cent of the population could listen to the BBC or,
for lighter fare, to Radio Luxembourg or Frecamp, and many
working-class families could afford a gramophone as well.133
Working hours were shorter, about forty-eight hours a week
instead of fifty-four before the war, and so other inexpensive forms
of leisure became popular. Dancing to the big bands at the ‘palais’
and to the gramophone in youth clubs, even those attached to
churches and chapels, became all the rage. Hiking was enshrined in
popular song. Cycling, once confined to the middle class, became a
universal pastime. Reading was transformed by the new cheap
paperbacks and expanded public libraries, and book sales increased
to 7 million by 1939, while public library loans more than
quadrupled from 54 million in 1911 to 247 million in 1939.
Gardening was brought within reach of the masses by the
allotments movement and the new private semi-detached housing
and council estates. Only the car, except for a favoured few skilled
workers often with working wives, remained a middle-class
passport to trips to the country and the seaside—with the cheapest
Ford at £100, nine months’ wages, and petrol at 1s. 9d. a gallon,
nearly two hours’ earnings for an average worker, motoring, except
perhaps by motorcycle or the family motor bike and sidecar, was
still an expensive hobby.134
281
Holidays, however, were coming more within reach of the

working class. Holidays with pay, except for white-collar workers
before the 1930s, were stimulated by the 1938 Act and increased
from about 4 million (out of the 18.5 million workers earning less
than £250 per annum) in 1937 to 11 million in 1939. Already in
1937 about 15 million people took holidays away from home,
many taking advantage of the new motor coaches at about half the
cost of the railway, and still more took cheap day excursions by bus
or rail. Holiday camps were pioneered by Cunningham’s for young
men in the Isle of Man from 1935 and Butlin’s for the whole family
at Skegness from 1937. Only a third of the population, however,
could afford to holiday away from home, and in this too the inter-
war period was still in unfinished transition.135
In more basic ways standards of comfort were rising, and the
working class were getting an increasing share of amenities. By
1939 one family in three was living in a house built since the war,
many of them working-class. Most houses, both old and new, came
to have gas and/or electricity, and all the new housing estates
including those for the working class had hot water, fixed baths and
indoor lavatories, and usually a small patch of garden back and
front. Expenditure on furniture rose by half between 1924 and
1935, and on electrical appliances nearly trebled.136 Home, even for
the working class, was becoming a place of comfort and relaxation.
Despite votes for women in 1918 and 1928 and the Sex
Disqualification (Removal) Act in 1919, home was still the sphere
of most married women, especially in the working class. Women
office workers might be increasing and a few more women making
their way into the professions, but there were relatively fewer
women at work between the wars than before or since—barely a
third of those of working age. Most married women workers went
back home after the frenetic activity of wartime, many driven out
of jobs by male hostility, and scarcely one in ten remained at work.
The traditional skilled working-class ideal of keeping the wife at
home to look after the house and children spread downwards to the
less skilled, and male chauvinism, always strong in the working
class, was little dented before the Second World War. Many poorer
families made ends meet by the wife taking in lodgers or washing or
doing part-time work unknown to the census enumerators, but
only the poorest of mothers, except in the traditional strongholds of
women’s factory work like Lancashire and the Potteries, faced the
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indignity of going out to work full-time. Those who did so were ill-
paid, often accused by the male-dominated trade unions of taking
men’s jobs away, and were the first to be dismissed when work was
short. Only domestic service, still the largest occupation for women
despite its relative decline, kept up its numbers, and there were
more servants in 1931 than in 1911. These were mostly single
women, and for most working-class girls in service or in industry
the height of ambition remained a husband and family not too far
removed from the home of their mothers who, in a culture still
marked by separate spheres and different leisure activities for
husbands and wives, gave the emotional and material support they
needed in a tediously narrow and solitary life.
Much has been made, especially since the Second World War, by
nostalgic scholarship boys like Richard Hoggart and middle-class
sociologists like Michael Young and Peter Wilmott of the supposed
decline of the working-class community and the comforting
nearness of ‘our Mam’, both in the old inner cities like Leeds with
the incursion of mass-produced culture and on the new housing
estates with the move from cosy, integrated urban villages like
Bethnal Green to the featureless anonymity of the suburbs like
Greenleigh, nearly twenty miles away.137 Such judgments, by the
upwardly mobile and romantic outsiders, underestimate the
resilience and social inventiveness of the working class. The spirit
which had created the rich Victorian culture of working-class
institutions of the supposedly ‘insensate industrial towns’—the
trade unions, co-operative stores, friendly societies, building
societies, working men’s clubs, and church and chapel bible classes,
mothers’ meetings and youth clubs, brass bands, tonic-sol-fa choirs,
dog- and pigeon-fanciers’ societies, gardening clubs, football and
cricket teams, and even the public house darts, domino and
bowling matches—was still alive and thriving between the wars,
even on the new housing estates. As James Cronin has observed on
the ‘class blindness’ of middle-class surveyors:
It is possible, however, to read the apparent impenetrability of

working-class life in quite a different way, as proof not of the
paucity of friendships and institutions but of their richness. It
is clear, after all, that by about 1920, British workers had
elaborated a broad array of institutions—unions, cooperatives,
local political parties, working-men’s clubs and a plethora of
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groups devoted to sports and hobbies—running through the

neighbourhoods and factories and centred upon the family, the
pub or the place of work. It is unlikely that this culture
disappeared during the inter-war period, but it does appear to
have become less aggressive and self-confident.138
Self-confident or not, it certainly did not disappear. If anything, it

was reinforced by the rise of the Labour Party to major electoral
status, not only at the national level but in the industrial towns and
inner cities and even in a few counties like Durham and Glamorgan
where it came to dominate local government, and it was able to
improve educational opportunities and encourage youth clubs, old
people’s clubs and homes, and music and the arts. Even on the new
council estates like Dagenham, where sociologists lamented that
‘by removing families from tenement buildings they have destroyed
that compulsory neighbourliness which was a feature of the old
system’,139 the evidence showed the opposite. On the London
County Council estate at Becontree near the Ford Works at
Dagenham, which grew from 2,000 residents in 1922 to over
100,000 ten years later, Terence Young reported in 1934 that the
newcomers quickly founded tenants’ associations, Labour and
Conservative Party branches, consumer co-operative societies,
working men’s clubs, two Salvation Army halls, seven churches,
four pubs (owned like the houses by the London County Council),
three co-operative guild branches, two Independent Labour Party
branches, and the Dagenham Trades Council representing all the
local trade unions.140 On a similar estate, Ruth Durant found in
1939:
Today Watling is still distinguished by its successful social

activities. It appears that even now, although local unity has
been lost, there is more neighbourliness, more corporate life
on the Estate than in adjacent suburbs or in the parent town.
In London’s inner suburbs clubs have been established for the
people; the community centre at Watling was planned and is
run by the people themselves.
While some inveterate Cockneys would ‘sooner be back in

London’, most liked their new homes, with their bathrooms and
gardens.141 A Mass Observation report on twelve old and new
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communities in the same year showed that a larger majority of the

new suburban residents than of their old neighbours in the parent
towns were satisfied with their homes and neighbourhoods.142
It seems likely, in fact, that the working-class suburbs were more
community-minded and more socially alive than the more affluent
suburbs, where the middle classes, despite their Conservative,
Rotary, bridge, golf and tennis clubs, lived a more private life, more
wary of contamination by neighbours ‘not quite like us’.
Nevertheless, as rising incomes gave more freedom to choose
leisure pursuits and friends and less economic dependence on
neighbours and relatives, the prosperous working class, naturally
and without conscious emulation, began to aspire to that more
home-centred, privatized life which had long been a feature of the
suburban middle class. In social life, the inter-war working class
looked both ways, backward to the solidarity of Victorian class
society and forward to the affluent society of the post-war world.
For an increasing number of them the road was not towards but
away from Wigan Pier.
That new world, little noticed by them, was already being
created all around them, in the new corporate economy and society
which were beginning to emerge between the wars, and which was
to affect the lives of all classes more profoundly than any
development since the Industrial Revolution.
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Chapter 7
TOWARDS A CORPORATE
SOCIETY
The crisis of class society which culminated in the General Strike

owed its demise, we saw in Chapter 5, to the tacit entente between
the employers, the trade unions and the state which later
commentators on politics, the economy and society have come to
call corporatism. Corporatism is an extremely ambiguous concept
with unhappy associations with Mediterranean fascism (though not
with German Nazism), and has since been variously applied to
regimes as different as Mussolini’s Italy and Swedish social
democracy. In essence the concept is an attempt to describe an
ordering of society, economy and the state which cuts across the
structures of class, individual capitalism and parliamentary
democracy. On the continent it had its origins in nineteenth-century
Catholicism’s reaction against liberal democracy and reached its
most formal expression in the statutory representation of the
‘corporations’ of employers, trade unions and the professions in
Franco’s Spain or contemporary Austria. In more recent discussion
it has been called by Pahl and Winkler ‘fascism with a human face’
and by Colin Crouch, who applied it to industrial relations in
contemporary Britain, a ‘bargained corporatism’ in which
employers’ representatives, trade union leaders, and representatives
of the state negotiate with one another outside the channels of
parliamentary democracy.1
Most definitions of corporatism have been as nebulous as the
concept itself. Philippe Schmitter, the political scientist who revived
interest in it in 1974, defined it as:
a system of interest representation in which the constituent

units are organized into a limited number of singular,
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TOWARDS A CORPORATE SOCIETY
compulsory, non-competitive, hierarchically ordered and

functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if
not created) by the state and granted a deliberate
representational monopoly within their respective categories in
exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of
leaders and articulation of demands and supports.2
Colin Crouch reduced this drastically to:
the operation of putatively representative organizations as the

intermediaries regulating their own membership within a
wider system of order3
with the implication that the system of order involved the state.
Pahl and Winkler, whose approach was through the sociology of
the mixed economy, saw it as:
a comprehensive economic system under which the state

intensively channels predominantly privately-owned business
towards four goals… Order, Unity, Nationalism and ‘Success’.4
Keith Middlemas, a historian more alive to its empirical failures in

Britain than to its theoretical niceties, talked rather of ‘the
corporate bias’ of the triangular relation between big business,
trade unions, and the government, all three of which preferred
informal, backstairs bargaining to institutionalized procedures.5
The unifying strand running through all these definitions is the
representation of organized interest groups—particular
occupations, industries and professions—rather than individuals or
classes. This has a curious echo of the ‘virtual representation’ of the
‘great functional interests’ which lobbied government in eighteenth-
century England not for a share of power but for patronage of their
group needs and desires.6 That echo is not fortuitous, since modern
English society is beginning to recapitulate the structure of its pre-
industrial origins, to re-emphasize the vertical threads of interest in
its social fabric, so long obscured by the horizontal threads of class.
The interest groups of contemporary society, however, though they
bear some resemblance to eighteenth-century functional interests
like the General Chamber of Manufacturers or the landed and East
India interests, differ from them in one important respect: they are
287
fundamentally bureaucratic career hierarchies with leaders whose

interests overlap but do not wholly jibe with the interests of those
they profess to represent. The leaders are primarily career
professionals of an increasingly—which is not to say completely—
meritocratic stripe, motivated as much by their need to justify their
existence and that of their organization as by their role as
spokesmen for a particular interest group. This applies equally to
the trade union officials representing their members and to the
professional managers representing their shareholders—not to
mention a whole range of representatives of particular professions,
voluntary organizations, local government and the other lobbies—
as it does to the government ministers and civil servants with whom
they deal. For that reason corporatism can best be regarded as the
institutional framework of professional society.
It is only, however, the institutional framework, not the driving
force which propels it in the direction of increasing corporate
organization nor the spirit which animates it. The driving force is
the collective self-interest of professional hierarchies seeking to
expand their status and span of control. The animating spirit is the
professional social ideal which defends and justifies their collective
self-interest in terms of the service performed for society by each
professional hierarchy and the principle of social justice which it
upholds.
Such a claim to superior social service and exclusive moral
rectitude does not prove that professionalism is in fact a superior
principle of social organization, any more than similar claims by
other social groups. All classes, all interest groups, all social
groupings make such claims. What matters in any particular society
is which social grouping manages to impose, by persuasion, bribery
or brute force, its own principle of organization and social ideal
upon the rest. In pre-industrial society it was the landed elite which
imposed its own structure of property and ideal of the leisured
gentleman upon the rest. In Victorian industrial society it was the
entrepreneur, the individual owner-managing capitalist, who
imposed his belief in the competitive free market and in the moral
superiority of self-help and active labour on both landlord and
labourer. In post-industrial corporate society, it is the professional
bureaucrat, private and public, who increasingly seeks to impose
his principle of social organization—la carrière ouverte aux talents,
the stable career hierarchy, and management by experts—and his
288
social ideal—a functional society efficiently organized to distribute

rewards according to personal merit professionally defined—upon
old-fashioned individual capitalist and proletarian worker alike.
Just as in industrial society the capitalist saw no necessary function
for the landlord, so in post-industrial society the professional
bureaucrat, not least in corporate business, sees no necessity for the
individual capitalist, who is simply an irritant, a quixotic element,
an unpredictable maverick in an otherwise stable system of
bureaucratic imperialism. Likewise, the traditional, insecure, wage-
earning proletarian, without career expectations, staff status or
pension rights, is an evolutionary throwback, to be gradually
transformed into a professionalized worker with statutory rights
and responsibilities.
If, in the midst of a neo-Ricardian backlash against public
bureaucracy, state intervention and welfarism, the professional
ideal seems to be temporarily losing ground, that is perhaps because
it has already gained so much ground to lose, and the ebbing tide
has taken back much less than at first sight appears. Privatization
of nationalized industries, for example, has merely transferred
control from public to private bureaucrats or, more commonly,
relabelled the same managers private instead of public
functionaries, no longer responsible to government but to
shareholders too scattered and numerous to control them. The
welfare state has not been dismantled so much as subjected to a
larger measure of selectivity, which only gives more work and
power to social administrators. And the much-vaunted attack on
public expenditure since 1979 has only led to a larger percentage of
GNP flowing though the sluicegates of the state, leading to higher
taxation for all but a small percentage of the population.7
Why this paradox should occur we must examine in the final
chapter. Here it must suffice to say that the professional hierarchy
has already imposed itself so firmly on contemporary society that,
like the stricken whale, every effort to throw off the harpoon
merely serves to make its barbed grip the stronger. Or, rather, the
struggle is not about whether but about which professionalism will
triumph, the public, the private or the quasi-private variant, the last
being that of the non-profit-making corporations, neither corporate
capitalist nor corporate state, such as the universities, the leading
charities, and the professional bodies themselves.
But this is to anticipate. In this chapter we shall be concerned
289
with the three dimensions along which corporatism, the

institutional vehicle of professional society, has advanced since the
inter-war period. First in logic and chronology is the rise of the
corporate economy, which has not only made British industry and
business the most concentrated in the post-industrial world but has
transformed its structure from an individual capitalist to a
professional, managerial model. Here we shall be dealing with the
‘true’ corporation, the original from which the rest have been
plagiarized, but we shall take it beyond the usual structural
concerns of the business historian to what may be called the
professionalization of management and, still more remote from
them, the professionalization of the working class.
The second dimension is the rise of the corporate state, not in the
formal sense of the institutionalization in Britain of anything
approaching the replacement of parliamentary democracy by a
structure of corporate representation, but in the sense of the
informal involvement of powerful interest groups in government
decision making. These include not only the professional
representatives of the major employers and trade unions but also
those of other interest groups and lobbies spanning the whole
breadth of British society. Here we shall be primarily concerned
with the special interests of the professional representatives
themselves, with their increasingly separate interests from those
they represent, and with the paradox that, while they have their
raison d’être in the corporate relationship, they stand to lose by
formalizing that relationship and making it visible and therefore
vulnerable to their constituents.
The third dimension, at once concrete and nebulous, may be
called the rise of corporate society itself. In its concrete form it is
encapsulated in the rise of the welfare state. By this is not meant the
Whiggish notion of inevitable progress towards a more caring society
but the struggle both to achieve a more efficient functional society
and to create a field in which rival professional empires compete for
control and domination. In its more nebulous form it can be seen as
the effort to impose on Britain the professional ideal of a society
based on human capital and personal merit rather than on material
property or idealized labour. Here we shall be concerned with the
part played by intellectual and welfare professionals in the rise of the
welfare state, and with the concept of social citizenship, or what it
means to be a member of society under a professional regime.
290
All three dimensions necessarily overlap and interpenetrate as

economy, politics and society necessarily overlap and interpenetrate
in every community. All three are increasingly suffused by the
professional ideal as it struggles, sometimes consciously, more often
unconsciously, to oust and replace both the once dominant ideal of
the individual capitalist and its rival ideal of the potentially socialist
worker. The irony of the struggle is that the evolution of both
capitalism and socialism, in their corporate and statist forms, were
paving the way for the triumph of the man at the helm of each, the
professional manager and the state or union bureaucrat whose
interest would inevitably come to be different from that of the
owners of capital, the electors and the sellers of labour power who
had placed him in control. To this extent the triumph of the
professional man and his ideal was prepared by the very opponents
over whom he triumphed.
1 THE CORPORATE ECONOMY

The rise in the scale of organization, especially but by no means
exclusively the organization of industry, was one of the central
features of the Industrial Revolution.8 Its most obvious form was
the transition from the small domestic workshop to the large
factory, but even greater rises in scale took place in transport from
the stagecoach or wagon to the national railway network, in
banking from the local country bank to the nationwide joint-stock
branch banking system, in insurance from the self-dissolving
tontine to the giants of industrial life assurance, in trade unionism
from the tiny trade club to the national amalgamations, and in the
scale of the community itself in which most people lived, from
village and tiny town to great city and suburb, metropolis and
conurbation. No aspect of life was untouched by it. Church and
chapel, school and university, friendly society and social club, retail
shop and public house, organized sport and entertainment, all were
affected by the drive towards large-scale headquarters and branch,
regionally or nationally organized institutions. The rise in scale was
a logical increase in size and wealth but it was not the cause of the
Industrial Revolution. Rather it was the effect of an explosion of
collective but increasingly specialized human energy which, in
unleashing what Marx called the enormous forces of production
291
slumbering in the lap of social labour,9 demanded a new and larger

framework of institutions to harness and contain them.
(1) Concentration in British industry

When that apparently once-for-all revolution in social organization
had taken place, few Victorians could imagine that in a competitive
system any further increase in scale was necessary or desirable.
John Stuart Mill thought that the contemporary joint-stock
company had reached the limit of acceptable size under private
enterprise and that any further advance would require the
substitution of state management. Only Alfred Marshall could see
no limit to the growth of joint-stock organization: under free
market competition and increasing returns to scale there was
almost ‘nothing to prevent the concentration in the hands of a
single firm of the whole production of the world’.10
Yet the rise in the scale of economic organization in the
twentieth century was to leave that of Victorian Britain far behind.
In 1880, when joint-stock organization was still in its infancy, the
hundred largest firms in Britain probably accounted for less than 10
per cent of national production.11 In 1909, after the first great wave
of industrial mergers which so impressed Alfred Marshall, the
hundred largest industrial firms accounted for about 15 per cent of
manufacturing output. By 1930 at the end of the second wave the
largest hundred firms accounted for 26 per cent. Falling back to 21
per cent in 1948, the hundred largest firms by 1970 after the third
great wave of mergers produced no less than 45 per cent of total
output.12
Some of these firms became gigantic concerns. In 1919 the forty-
eight largest companies each had a market value on the stock
exchange of over £4 million, eleven of them over £10 million, and
the largest, the cotton thread manufacturers, J. and P.Coats, £45
million. By 1930 the top eleven were valued at over £20 million
each and the two largest, Unilever and Imperial Tobacco, at over
£130 million. That meant that a mere handful of large firms
already dominated each major industry. By 1930 five firms in each
major industrial group accounted for more than half the
production, except in drink (49 per cent) and metal manufacture
(46 per cent). In building materials (83 per cent), chemicals (86 per
cent), metal goods (87 per cent), shipbuilding (90 per cent), and
292
tobacco (no less than 99.7 per cent) it rose to five-sixths or more.13
After a pause during the Depression of the 1930s and the Second
World War the trend towards industrial concentration was
resumed. The share in capital assets (book valuation) of the largest
hundred companies increased from 60 per cent in 1957 to 75 per
cent in 1969, and (on another measure, market valuation of the
equity) from 79 per cent in 1969 to no less than 91 per cent in
1976. Over much the same period the share of total assets held by
the ten largest firms in 1969 exceeded 65 per cent in each major
industry except non-electrical engineering (32 per cent), and in all
but five industries out of fourteen exceeded 75 per cent.14 By 1985
the top fifty industrial corporations each had a stock market
valuation of over £800 million, and of these sixteen were valued at
over £2 billion.15 At the same time Britain came to have the lowest
proportion of small manufacturing firms in any advanced country:
the 27,000 firms with less than ten employees each in 1963
accounted for only 2 per cent of the workforce.16 Concentration in
private industry could hardly go further without becoming outright
monopoly.
Concentration was not of course confined to industry. It was still
more marked in banking, where the major London clearing banks
were reduced to no more than four by 1968; in insurance, where a
mere handful of companies like the Prudential and Guardian Royal
Exchange out of the 500 operating in Britain dominated the field;
in property and shipping, where giant mergers such as Trafalgar
House-Cunard and P. and O.-Bovis exploited the tax advantages of
setting off ship depreciation against capital gains on office blocks;
and in retail trading where department stores, chain stores and
supermarkets with familiar names came to dominate every high
street.17 In coal mining, transport, and communications, energy
supplies and public utilities concentration reached its ultimate form
of monopoly in the shape of nationalization, a monopoly which the
recent privatization of Cable and Wireless, British Telecom, Britoil,
and the rest has done nothing to diminish. In single-industry terms
the scale of organization could go no further.
Although part of the trend towards fewer and bigger firms was
due to the technical economies of scale from larger plants, vertical
integration, central purchasing, or national distribution, the
overwhelming cause was the amalgamation of firms by purchase
and merger. The first large amalgamations began in the late
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Victorian ‘Great Depression’ of 1874–96 as defensive measures

against the rigours of competition at a time of falling profit
margins. Some of these, like United Alkali or the Calico Printers
Association, were large, loosely integrated combines of no great
profitability. By the 1920s, however, came the day of the huge
‘efficiency combines’ like Unilever and Imperial Chemical
Industries, nursing their reputations for innovation, good
employment practices, concern for the consumer, and public
responsibility. By the 1960s and 1970s mergers were being
midwifed by government, even by a Labour government in the case
of the General Electric Company, British Leyland and International
Computers Ltd, as the supposedly best strategy for technological
innovation and national economic growth, even though the
economic arguments and practical results remained in doubt and in
some cases were disastrous. Only a small number of giant firms,
like Ford, Courtaulds and Rank-Xerox, grew primarily by the
classic model of reinvestment and internal expansion, though even
they swallowed many rival firms.
The driving force behind the trend of both internal and external
growth, it appears, was not technological necessity or competitive
economic advantage. It was, rather, something in the structure of
the business corporation itself which drove it on to become even
bigger, either by ploughing back profits or, more commonly, by
swallowing more and more of its competitors whole. That
something was no impersonal, abstract feature of the corporate
structure, but the very human collective self-interest of the
managers in the process of professionalization.
(2) The professionalization of management

The trend towards what was in the early stages very properly called
monopoly capitalism began with the ambition of traditional
capitalists to dominate their respective industries and eliminate
competitors. Business men like W.H.Lever who tried to monopolize
the soap trade in 1906 or Sir Alfred Mond (Lord Melchett),
founder of ICI, who in 1926 was accused by the press of trying to
amalgamate everything in sight, were playing the traditional game
of capitalist competition.18 In the Social Darwinian survival of the
fittest the free market was bound to lead to fewer and larger
survivors. What the owners did not bargain for was that the vast
294
enterprises they came to preside over would become literally

unmanageable without the aid of a new breed of men who
specialized in the management of corporations. Far more than
important than Mond, Brunner, or Nobel to the chain of mergers,
ultimately of 600 companies, which culminated in the creation of
ICI was Sir Harry McGowan, the career manager of obscure
Glaswegian origin in Nobel’s Explosives, who had learned how to
midwife large-scale amalgamations by consolidating into one
enterprise in 1911 the whole explosives industry of Canada.19
As Deputy to Sir Alfred Mond and later Chairmen of ICI,
McGowan represented the new professional career manager without
substantial capital who rose by sheer ability through the ranks to
control giant corporations far beyond the dreams of Victorian
entrepreneurs. His like became increasingly familiar in the figures of
Sir Josiah Stamp, the economist and civil servant who became
chairman of the largest inter-war railway, the London, Midland and
Scottish, Sir Paul Chambers, the Inland Revenue official who ended
as Chairman of ICI, Lord Stokes, the Leyland mechanic who created
British Leyland (now the Rover Group), Lord Kearton, son of a
bricklayer who became Chairman of Courtaulds, the British Oil
Corporation and the British Enterprise Board, and Lord Armstrong,
son of a Salvation Army officer, who rose to be head of the Civil
Service and Chairman of the Midland Bank.
More significant than the superstars of career management was
the professionalization of management itself. The ‘divorce between
responsibility and ownership’ noted by the Liberal Industrial
Inquiry in 1928 and the separation of ownership from control
analysed by Berle and Means in America in 1932 did not in itself
abolish capitalism or lessen the concentration of wealth in
comparatively few hands. As Berle remarked in 1954, ‘The capital
is there and so is capitalism. The waning factor is the capitalist.’20
What it did do was to transform the structure of business and
increasingly transfer day-to-day control over vast capitals owned
by other people to career managers in bureaucratic hierarchies.
Although individual capitalists or families continued to own
immense wealth—between 1911–13 and 1960 the share of
personal wealth held by the top 10 per cent of the adult population
declined only from 92 per cent to 83 per cent—the average
shareholding in 1928 was only £301, and it soon became unusual
for any single family to own a majority of the shares of any large
295
company.21 The very process of growth by amalgamation militated

against individual ownership and control. Multiple mergers
obviously diluted family holdings in the ensuing holding company
or combine, and although with a fragmented equity a minority of
25 per cent, or even 5 per cent of the shares if skilfully managed,
could give ultimate control, this could only be achieved by the
owners becoming themselves in effect professional managers of
other people’s assets. A few chose that path, and there are still Van
Den Berghs at the helm of Unilever, Fords in command at Ford, a
Pilkington (admittedly related to the main family fourteen
generations back) recently retired as chairman of Pilkington’s
Glass, Sainsburys in control of the Sainsbury chain stores, not to
mention the new self-made tycoons of the post-war retailing,
property and merchant banking booms at Tesco, Grand
Metropolitan, Trafalgar House, Hill Samuel, and Slater Walker. But
the great majority of giant corporations are now managed by
career managers with very little capital of their own. In 1969 the
chairmen of the top hundred British industrial companies owned
only 2.5 per cent, and their entire boards of directors only 7.5 per
cent, of the equity of their companies.22
Furthermore, the largest holdings in the biggest companies were
increasingly held not by individuals but by other institutions,
notably insurance companies, pension funds and trade unions. In
1982 individuals owned only one-third of all equities quoted on the
Stock Exchange. The rest, over £100 billion, were held by
institutional investors. The pension funds alone held £40 billion,
including those of great nationalized industries such as the Post
Office and the National Coal Board, each with over £4 billion. The
Prudential Insurance Company held shares worth over £10 billion
in 600 companies, including £259 million in GEC, £221 million in
ICI, £158 million in RTZ and £125 million in Shell. The men who
controlled these vast investments were all salaried career managers,
often without a single share of their own: Ronald Artus, son of an
aircraft fitter, chief investment manager of the Prudential with £3
million a day to invest; Ralph Quartano, of Sherborne School and
Cambridge, chief executive of the Post Office Staff Superannuation
Fund; and Hugh Jenkins, Llanelli Grammar School and no college
education, controller of the NCB pension fund. The power of veto
such men wield, when they wish to exercise it, over the companies
they invest in is final. In 1982 Quartano blocked the Thames
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Television tycoon Lord Grade’s attempt to give a ‘golden

handshake’ worth about £1 million to a retiring executive; in 1978
Jenkins forced Allied Breweries, and by extension all public
corporations, to ballot the shareholders before making or accepting
a take-over bid; and in 1956 Kenneth Usherwood, an earlier ‘man
from the Pru’, which held 5 per cent of the equity of Birmingham
Small Arms which in turn owned 25 per cent of the Daimler car
company, fired Sir Bernard Docker, flamboyant Chairman of
Daimler and husband of the incorrigibly extravagant Lady Docker
of the gold-plated Daimler car.23 The rise of the institutions, whose
funds derive not from capitalist investors but from the insurance
premiums and pension contributions of millions of non-
shareholders, symbolizes the emancipation of the professional
manager from capitalist control.
Once in command of the vehicle of control and expansion, the
large corporation, the professional manager had every incentive to
expand his empire. Although called into existence as the main prop
and support of the capitalist and even more dedicated to making a
profit, his ultimate interest was by no means the same. Profits were
important not for their own sake but as a test of managerial success
and as the means to further expansion of managerial power. The
First World War, in which capitalists like Lord Devonport, food
retailer turned government food controller, Sir Eric Geddes, railway
director turned inspector-general of war transport, and Sir William
Weir, engineering employer turned director of Scottish munitions
and controller of British aeronautical supplies, were drawn into
‘war socialism’ for their managerial experience, showed that there
were other objectives of production than profit. 24 Efficiency,
maximum production and the skilful avoidance of strikes and other
labour troubles, all for the sake of winning the war, came first.
In the changed economic conditions of the inter-war period, with
increased foreign competition in the 1920s and world depression in
the 1930s, even the capitalists lost faith in the doctrine of free
enterprise and began to look to cartels, price rings and mergers to
put an end to wasteful internecine competition. As early as 1919
John Maynard Keynes wrote of ‘an extraordinary weakness on the
part of the great capitalist class, which has emerged from the
industrial triumphs of the nineteenth century’:
The terror and personal timidity of the individuals of this class
297
is now so great, their confidence in their place in society and

in their necessity to the social organism so diminished, that
they are the easy victims of intimidation. This was not so in
England twenty-five years ago, any more than it is now in the
United States. Then the capitalists believed in themselves, in
their value to society, in the propriety of their continued
existence in the full enjoyment of their riches and the
unlimited exercise of their power. Now,…they allow
themselves to be ruined and altogether undone by their own
instruments, governments of their own making, and a Press of
which they are the proprietors.25
The survival of British capitalism and its salvation from socialism

came to be seen to depend on the new organizers of large-scale
industry, the professional managers. Their watchwords were
‘rationalization’ and ‘scientific management’. Rationalization
meant the pursuit of efficiency by the reduction of ‘wasteful’,
‘unfair’, ‘destructive’ or ‘ruinous’ competition, by mergers and
amalgamations, often with government encouragement and
support, to buy out and close down ‘overcapacity’, and the cutting
of costs, which often meant in the last resort the cutting of wages.26
Rationalization has a bad name because of its association with the
rationalization of the coal industry which led to the General Strike,
of the cotton industry and the closing of scores of cotton mills, and
of the shipbuilding industry and the closing of yards like Palmer’s
at Jarrow, ‘the town that was murdered’. But its undoubted
successes, particularly in the new mass-produced consumer goods
industries of the Midlands and the south-east, were a triumph for
the new managerial approach and were responsible for the not
inconsiderable creation of new jobs and rising living standards in
the inter-war period.
Scientific management, stemming from the Americans F.W.
Taylor and F.B.Gilbreth before the First World War, also earned a
bad name with the workers for its emphasis on time and motion
study and the speed-up of assembly lines, but from the point of
view of the new managers it was the symbol of their new
professionalism. What expertise could the line manager, as distinct
from the specialist accountant, company lawyer or works engineer,
claim if not the scientific application of means to ends, the marriage
298
of finance, administration, technology and labour to the efficient

production of goods and services? Scientific management:
provided for some businessmen an ideology to replace the

doctrine of competitive free enterprise, whose ethical
foundations and claims to be a gospel of human freedom were
being undermined by socialism, a rival doctrine which in some
respects overlapped the ideology of rationalization.27
As Lyndall Urwick, doyen of managerial theory in the inter-war

years, put it, rational scientific management ‘is intellectually
possible; it is in line with our tradition; it is materially profitable; it
will save our economic system from disaster.’28 It represented the
substitution of intelligent planning within the large corporation for
the vagaries of the external competition of the free market.
It was for that reason, as well as the overwhelming competition
of the big corporations, that many private business men, owner-
managing capitalists of the traditional sort, deeply suspected the
rationalization and scientific management movements. For The
Economist in 1924 one aim of rationalization was ‘the
enhancement of profits by the elimination of competition’.29 An
accountant involved in many mergers noted in 1926:
Men who have been accustomed to personal domination

almost amounting to dictatorship in their own businesses do
not take kindly to a change of circumstances whereunder they
themselves become members of a Board of Directors, and may
find themselves subject…to the control of others.30
Sargant Florence, who talked to many of them, recorded in 1930

how they preferred power in their own small works to a share in a
large amalgamation, how they relished the game of competition,
cherished a petit bourgeois attitude to property, and clung to their
own little business with a dynastic desire to hand it on to their
family.31 They were, perhaps instinctively, engaged in a battle of
ideologies, between the entrepreneurial ideal of the owner-
managing capitalist dominant in the Victorian age and the
professional ideal of managerial expertise applied regardless of
family sentiment or loyalty to twentieth-century mass production.
It was a losing battle, not merely because their ideal was
299
obsolescent but because the very competition which was its main
principle and justification had been too successful and was in
process of evolving them out.
The battle was long drawn out, however, and even affected the
structure of the new enlarged corporation. In most cases down to
and beyond the Second World War, unlike most American
examples, it took the form of a loose grouping of subsidiary
companies under a holding company concerned primarily with
financial, especially investment policy. This was a structure that
suited the ex-owning family managers of the constituent units, who
could enjoy the benefits of scale, increased financial security and
reduced competition, while pretending that nothing had changed. It
also discouraged the new professional managers from reaching
their full potential, since the small holding company headquarters
did not have the resources to measure their performance and pull
them up to the mark. Apart from a few giant concerns like ICI and
Unilever which were forced by the diversity of their constituent
parts or their geographical spread to operate from the start with
separate divisions, only the American companies operating in
Britain, like Ford, General Motors, or IBM, adopted a multi-
divisional structure before the Second World War.32 The unitary
holding company tended to operate along functional lines, with
specialist managers at central headquarters in finance, production,
marketing, industrial relations, and so on, leaving the subsidiaries
little autonomy or scope to innovate. The multi-divisional type was
not only more efficient, with the divisional managers allowed more
opportunity to develop new ideas and products and even to
compete against one another, but was also more purely managerial
in that the multiple bureaucracies needed to run it finally did away
with the individual capitalist altogether, except in a very few cases
where an owning family member became assimilated to the ethos of
professional management.
Only after the Second World War did the major British industrial
corporations adopt the multi-divisional structure, chiefly under
American example and advice—no less than twenty-two of the
hundred largest companies employed the American consultants
McKinsey and Company.33 In 1950 only eight of the top hundred
firms were multi-divisional; by 1970 seventy-two of them had
adopted that structure, and all but six had diversified their
production to some degree in that direction.34 They had learned
300
that the American firms operating in Britain were simply more

professional: more profitable, more capital-intensive, paying more
attention to sales and marketing, more concerned with the
academic and technical qualifications of their managers, and
planning their operations more professionally:
First, and perhaps most important, US firms in Britain have

access to more knowledge and expertise…. Second, they tend
to use such knowledge and expertise as is available…more
effectively. These two considerations give them the power to
be more efficient. Third, US subsidiaries would appear to have
a more dynamic and professional attitude to management and
decision taking. They are usually under considerable pressure
from their parent companies which encourage a spirit of
competitiveness among their offshoots. This is reflected in
their greater will to be efficient.35
By contrast, British management cherished a cultivated

amateurism. The average British director in the late 1960s at the
end of the managerial revolution has been described by a
management survey as ‘56 years old, not particularly mobile, most
likely educated at a public school and, having only a 50 per cent
chance of a university education, most likely graduated from
Oxford or Cambridge’. Only 9 per cent of the sample had received
any business education other than professional training, mainly in
accountancy. Yet they were nevertheless overwhelmingly
professional employees rather than owners of the enterprises. Only
15 per cent had family connections with important shareholders,
and the great majority owned few or no shares in the companies
they managed. Their main reward was in the form of salary,
perquisites were few, and stock options, common in America, were
almost unknown.36
Britain’s industrial managers, in brief, had undergone a
revolution, but a reluctant one. As compared with the self-
confident Americans (before the Japanese undermined their
confidence), they were defensive about their status and even about
their commitment to their profession. They have been accused,
along with their predecessors back to the late Victorian age, of
being responsible for ‘the decline of the industrial spirit’ and
therefore for much of Britain’s economic decline. Martin Wiener
301
has attributed this trahison des clercs to the influence of British elite
education in pre-industrial aristocratic values at the public schools
and Oxford and Cambridge,37 but we shall see in the next chapter
that the values taught there were modern professional rather than
traditional aristocratic.
However reluctant, the management revolution was real enough
nonetheless. For good or ill, the controllers of twentieth-century
business in Britain have ceased for the most part to be individual
owner-managing entrepreneurs in the Victorian mould and have
become professional managers owning little capital other than the
human capital derived from their abilities, education and
experience. Their human capital, like that of other professions,
gave them material gains in the form of a continuing flow of
income, a high degree of security of employment or compensation
for dismissal, substantial pension rights, and even some material
wealth in the shape of cars, houses and, sometimes, a small but
significant share in the corporate equity. Amongst occupational
elites, career managers were more successful in amassing personal
wealth than any other, except for those defined by mainly inherited
properly, the great landowners and the millionaires. The
managerial revolution (in the narrow sense of the control of
industry) is reflected in the sharp decline in median wealth left at
death by the chairmen of the largest 200 companies: in real terms
at 1913 prices, from £572,300 in the 1880s and 1890s to £226,000
between the wars and to a meagre £14,800 (£76,400 in current
terms) in the 1960s. Yet at the end of the decline their median
wealth at death was still nearly three times that of other leading
professional men in the same survey, which was only £4,800 in real
terms (£26,500 in current terms).38 In their case human capital
acquired a material value which carried beyond the grave.
The professionalization of management had implications for the
workers as well as for traditional capitalists. Managerialism as a
theory has always been resisted by Marxist intellectuals because
they fear that it undermines their interpretation of the exploitive
nature of industrial capitalism and the egalitarianism of post-
revolutionary society. So it does, but not in quite the way they
suppose. It certainly changes the exploiters, from the owners of the
means of production to the controllers of the corporate
bureaucracies. To the workers, however, there is no particular gain
in being exploited by professional managers rather than by
302
old-fashioned capitalists, and indeed there may well be loss.

Successful capitalists could often afford the luxury of paternalism,
as evidenced by a well attested tradition of benevolence stretching
from Samuel Greg and Robert Owen down to the Cadburys and
Rowntrees, whereas professional managers were paid to maximize
profits by cutting wage costs and overheads. Some professional
managers, nevertheless, like some paternalist owners, had a longer-
term vision of profitability as it was affected by industrial relations,
and believed that loyal, contented workers were more productive
and therefore more profitable.
This approach, often associated with the American ‘human
relations’ school of Elton Mayo and his ‘Hawthorne experiments’
at the Western Electric factory near Chicago in 1927–32, began in
Britain before the First World War. As the leading historian of
management thought, John Child, has put it, ‘By the early
twentieth century a few British employers, dismissed as
sentimentalists by most of their peers, were challenging the
practical and moral bases of laissez-faire.’39 Benevolent firms like
Lever Brothers, Hans Renold, Mather & Platt, and Cadburys
pioneered enlightened labour management policies which
emphasized high wages, shorter hours, improved communications
between management and workers, joint consultation, and
employee counselling. Edward Cadbury believed that ‘business
efficiency and the welfare of the employees are but different sides of
the same problem’, and, although other paternalist employers often
pursued this line in order to outflank the trade unions, he conceded
the workers’ right to a dual allegiance:
The test of any scheme of factory organization is the extent to

which it creates and fosters the atmosphere and spirit of
cooperation and good-will, without in any sense lessening the
loyalty of the worker to his own class and its organizations.40
The First World War, with its manifold problems of evoking the co-
operation of the industrial workers in the war effort, proved him
right, and led to the far-reaching schemes of industrial consultation
embodied in the Whitley Councils. Although these failed to survive
in peacetime in most industries, with the significant exception of
the Civil Service, the war had a profound effect on management
thought. This was summed up by John Lee, the Director of the
303
London Telegraph and Telephone Centre, in his pioneering book

Management: A Study of Industrial Organization in 1921.
Industrial managers, he argued:
are an expert professional group, and the new science of

industrial management is coming to recognize them as that
factor in industry which is calling for study and consideration.
This evolution of a separate management…brings experience
and special training to bear on the work of management in a
way which was never possible to the old-fashioned owner who
‘could do what he liked with his own’.
He looked forward to university-based management education in a

‘synthesis of the sciences’ and in ethics for ‘a trained body of
administrators, proud of their calling as professional men
themselves reasonably paid but not personally benefiting from the
profits’.41 In The Social Implications of Christianity he argued for ‘a
priesthood in industry, just as there is a priesthood in worship’, who
would encourage worker participation and eschew autocracy but
would nevertheless exercise tight control by imposing an ‘intelligent
subordination’. 42 In this way Lee foreshadowed the
professionalization of management and its separation from both
capital and labour over the next forty years, down to the founding
of the business schools of the 1960s.
Management thought between the wars was dominated by the
pursuit of two not always compatible goals, industrial harmony
and rationalization. Management spokesmen came to argue that
industrial unrest was due to outmoded conflict between capital and
labour which could be resolved by the ‘third factor in industry’, the
‘dispassionately free’ managers who ‘hold the balance and see fair
play’. On the other hand, they emphasized the role of scientific
management in the rational reorganization of industry, which often
meant loss of jobs through labour-saving investment and industrial
concentration at a time of high unemployment, and ignored or
rejected the role of the trade unions in the productive process,
particularly after their defeat in the General Strike.43 During the
1930s, under the leadership of Lyndall Urwick, much influenced by
F.W.Taylor’s scientific management, industrial administration
became a technical study in which the ‘human factor’ was merely
one aspect of ‘a pure theory of organization’ applicable equally to
304
‘governments, churches, or armies’ as well as to production. At the

same time, British management thought came to incorporate the
Harvard human relations school of Elton Mayo, Mary Parker
Follett and T. N.Whitehead and their belief that ‘the contentment
of the individual is the greatest single factor in efficient
production’.44
It would be a mistake to think that most managers avidly read
and imbibed such ideas, any more than most Victorian capitalists
had read Ricardo, Samuel Smiles or Herbert Spencer. Very few
belonged to the various management associations, the Institute of
Personnel Management (1946, founded as the Welfare Workers’
Association in 1913), the British Institute of Management (1947,
founded as the Institute of Industrial Administration in 1920), or
the Works Managers’ Association (1931).45 As late as 1948 only
about 20,000 managers out of more than 400,000 in Britain
belonged to management institutes. The BIM still had only 19,000
members in 1963.46 But all managers were increasingly forced to
pay attention to the detrimental effects of bad industrial relations.
In particular, the stresses and demands of the Second World War
and the subsequent period of full employment forced on managers
a growing realization that autocratic or coercive management was
no longer effective and that skilled personnel management was not
peripheral but central to production.
Much of this new approach may have been self-interested or
manipulative, but that only underlined the need for professionalism
in organizing their collective enlightened self-interest. The post-war
difficulties of the British economy and the alarming gap between
British and American levels of productivity revealed by visiting
delegations of managers and trade unionists made British managers
more open to American influence and example, and it was at this
stage that the ideas and practices of the American business schools
began to have an impact in Britain, culminating in the movement
for management education in the 1960s.
Management theory, the basis of the new professionalism, did
not come into its own in Britain until the founding of the new
business schools in the universities and polytechnics of the 1960s.
Even then it was looked on with suspicion by many, if not most,
practising business men, who regarded management as an art to be
learned on the job rather than a science based on intellectual theory.
When one of the first management schools, cautiously called the
305
Administrative Staff College, invited an academic sociologist to

provide them with a text on ‘management and the social sciences’,
the Principal recorded:
We needed to overcome in the minds of members attending
the College’s courses the distrust which many of them felt for
the social sciences; this was not always easy to accomplish,
especially where managers had behind them a successful
record of management in human terms.
Five years later, in 1972, he continued, ‘the problem of distrust is
markedly less’ but ‘has not been removed entirely.’47 Nevertheless,
the creation of the London and Manchester Business Schools as full
university institutions with special government funding marked the
arrival of management as a distinct profession with its own body of
expert knowledge and formal means of acquiring it.
By that time the change was so familiar that it had even come to
be recognized by the Labour Party. While only the revisionists
agreed with Anthony Crosland that ‘Britain had, in all essentials,
ceased to be a capitalist country’, the party as a whole recognized,
in Industry and Society, part of Hugh Gaitskell’s attempt to
modernize the party’s attitude to the mixed economy in 1957, that
a new class of managers had replaced ‘power-hungry’ capitalists:
as companies grow larger and their affairs more complex,
management becomes increasingly important, increasingly
hierarchical, increasingly specialist, and increasingly
professional. More and more it assumes a life of its own. In
the large companies, it is the managers who now undertake
the functions once performed by capitalist owners.48
However much management’s pretensions to intellectual autonomy
were doubted by sceptics, its claim to professional status was
founded, no less than that of other professions, on the creation of
human capital, and on that test it was supremely successful. The
professionalization of management and the bureaucratization of
industry were the necessary concomitant of the corporate economy.
(3) The professionalization of the working class

More relevant than management theory to the actual experience of
workers under the new system was the practice of managers
306
striving to get more work and profit out of them. On the one hand,
most British managers looked on trade unions with distaste as at
best a necessary evil. On the other, in so far as they themselves were
employees who were justified by their work rather than their
ownership of the means of production, they were open to the moral
pressure of their own professional ideal, that other employees too
who loyally served the corporate purpose were deserving, not
indeed of equal treatment but of rewards and privileges graduated
according to their worth. Such rewards and privileges came to
include holidays with pay, pension rights, paid sick leave, and
security of earnings and employment.
After the managers themselves, such rewards and privileges were
accorded first, naturally enough, to the ‘staff, the office workers
with whom the managers worked most closely and on whom they
depended for the carrying out of their primary functions. As early
as 1916 The Clerk, the organ of the National Union of Clerical
Workers, could claim:
It should be remembered that, although by reason of their

unorganized state, clerks suffer many economic disabilities, yet
they have a great many economic advantages not enjoyed by
manual workers. Among them may be cited permanency of
employment, periodical increases of salary, payment of salary
during sickness and holidays, comparatively reasonable hours
of work, and in certain sections superannuation. These
advantages, chiefly matters of custom and usage, constitute a
powerful common interest among clerks, and should be an
equally strong reason for protective organization.49
‘Custom and usage’ in this early plea for quasi-professionalization

underlines the fact that the largely unorganized clerks had not
gained their advantages by trade union pressure but by the
enlightened self-interest of their employers, anxious to bind these
managerial auxiliaries to willing service. Though some had
achieved them at the whim of individual capitalists, they had been
institutionalized first in the larger companies of the late Victorian
age and early twentieth century, notably the railway companies,
banks, insurance houses, and such consciously paternalist industrial
companies as Courtaulds, Brunner Mond, and Pilkingtons, and the
large-scale public employments like the Civil Service, the Post
307
Office and the co-operative societies. 50 In the new enlarged

corporations, public and private, bureaucratic rules easily turned
concessions into permanent rights, especially for the permanent
staff of white-collar workers.
For long the gulf between white-collar and manual workers
remained unbridgeable, however, and it was with the greatest
reluctance that, except for a handful of ex gratia concessions of
paid holidays, paid sick leave or tiny pensions to particularly loyal
and long-serving workers on an individual basis, employers
extended such privileges to ordinary wage earners. Nor were such
gains demanded by the trade unions, who long showed a marked
lack of interest in fringe benefits, preferring to concentrate their
efforts almost exclusively on improving wages and hours of work.
Thus most improvements in fringe benefits for manual workers
until well after the Second World War were concessions by
management, usually designed to improve workers’ morale and
productivity, especially in periods of labour shortage.
Before the First World War holidays with pay were rare for
manual workers, but between the wars they became the norm. In
1920 the Ministry of Labour reported that paid holidays were
enjoyed by about 2 million workers. During the sittings of the
Amulree Committee on Holidays with Pay in 1938 they spread to
nearly 8 million, 42 per cent of those earning less than £250 per
annum, two-thirds of whom were manual, shop and domestic
workers; and the numbers increased to over 11 million after the
Holidays with Pay Act, 1938.51 After the Second World War two
weeks’ paid holiday became standard for most full-time workers
until the early 1970s, when Britain’s impending entry into the
Common Market led to a further round of increases, to three or
four weeks in most cases.52 More significant was the increasing
demand by manual workers, often ahead of their unions, for ‘single
status’, equality with the non-manual workers not only in the
amount of time off but in all other conditions of work.
A similar but later pattern was followed with regard to
occupational pensions, sick pay, and security of earnings and
tenure. Pension schemes for non-manual workers were pioneered
by the Civil Service in 1834, by the local police forces as they came
into existence in the mid-nineteenth century, the larger railway
companies in the 1870s, local government from 1895, and by the
more paternalist private companies like Courtaulds and
308
Pilkingtons, often on an ex gratia basis, in the last years of the

century, but they were almost unknown for manual workers. For
them the main expansion, led by the newly nationalized industries
and larger private corporations, came after the Second World War.
By the late 1950s nearly 9 million workers, over a third of the
workforce and more than half of them manual, belonged to
occupational pension schemes. By 1975 the total had risen to 11.5
million, about half the workforce, two-thirds of them in the private
sector, and nearly half of them, 5.2 million, manual workers. Most
of the latter were in the public sector and those industries like
chemicals, transport and communications dominated by giant
corporations.53 The manual trade unions continued to prefer
adequate state pensions to occupational ones, which they suspected
as devices of management control, but their own members began to
press for more equality with the non-manuals and for company
pensions as a normal right to be negotiated.54 It would appear
therefore that until recently, mainly since the non-manual unions
led by imaginative officials like Clive Jenkins became influential in
the TUC, occupational pensions evolved more as a management
strategy for retaining employee loyalty than under pressure from
the trade unions.
Contributory sick pay schemes, in which the workers paid most
of the cost through deductions from their wages, were pioneered in
the eighteenth century by benevolent employers like Ambrose
Crowley in coalmining, Arkwright & Strutt in cotton, Boulton &
Watt in engineering, and John Christian Curwen the Cumberland
land and coal owner, who unsuccessfully introduced a national
insurance scheme, based on the practice at his Workington mines,
in Parliament in 1816.55 Most workers who could afford to
preferred to pioneer their own friendly societies, which became
much the largest working-class institutions of the nineteenth
century and which formed the model for Lloyd George’s national
health insurance in 1911. Paid sick leave as a right, not based on
contributions, came first for non-manual workers and was only
recently extended to manual workers. According to the Ministry of
Labour in 1964, industry-wide schemes existed in only three small
industries and none of the larger ones before the Second World War.
During that war eleven more such schemes were introduced and
between 1947 and 1963 a further twenty-three, by which time
nearly a million workers were covered by them, in addition to more
309
local and non-manual arrangements which brought the total up to

57 per cent of the male labour force. By 1970 three-quarters of
adult male and two-thirds of women workers were so covered,
including 90 per cent of non-manuals, 65 per cent of male manuals
and 48 per cent of women manual workers.56 The trade unions
played little part in this development, at least until recently, and
once again it seems to have been motivated primarily by the
managerial desire for employee loyalty during the post-war period
of full employment.
The sharpest distinction between manual and white-collar
workers in Britain has always been, and still remains, their
differential security of earnings and employment. Managers and
other professional people, and indeed most office workers, enjoy a
career, that is, a planned course of employment in which income is
not only secure but rises by annual increments, formal or
customary, and tenure is protected by long periods of notice and/or
compensation for redundancy. Most manual workers, by contrast,
have traditionally been paid hourly or weekly wages, fixed
according to ‘the rate for the job’, and have been dismissable at a
week’s notice or sometimes less. Insecurity, the ever-present threat
of unemployment and cessation of earnings, has been the habitual
lot of the manual worker. This accounts more profoundly than
lower income or inferior working conditions for the collective
psychology of the British working class, their constant fear of
change, suspicion of management, restrictive practices, and
opposition to any kind of labour-saving innovation. Unlike
America, where there was nearly always the possibility of moving
on to other jobs or opportunities, and unlike Japan, where the large
corporations which dominate the economy provide life-long
employment and rising pay scales even for manual workers, Britain
has never solved the problem of insecurity of earnings and
employment for the working class. This may indeed be the most
important cause of its economic decline and industrial malaise.
Nevertheless, from an early date the demands of industrial
efficiency made it impracticable to dismiss all the workers
whenever orders fell of and there was always a need to preserve a
core of skilled men, along with the office staff, against a recovery of
trade. There was also the problem of piece work, introduced for the
benefit of managerial control and productivity, but requiring
incentives to retain the workers during slack times by guaranteeing
310
a minimum wage. Attempts to deal with such problems go back to

the Industrial Revolution and the depression after the Napoleonic
Wars, but apart from a few redundancy payment schemes in
paternalist firms like Cadburys and Pilkingtons between the wars,
little formal provision was made for guaranteed earnings or
compensation for dismissal until the Second World War. The
Essential Works Order, 1941 guaranteed war workers a ‘normal’
week’s earnings to discourage absenteeism and high labour
turnover. After the war the guaranteed week was extended by the
mid-1950s to cover the engineering industry, transport and
communications, agriculture and forestry, mining and quarrying,
pottery, chemicals, food and drink, catering, distribution, and
public administration. The guaranteed annual wage, however,
which became widespread in the United States under union
pressure, never made much headway in Britain, except for one or
two American subsidiaries like Ford or Thomas Hedley, but greater
security of earnings, or at least of a percentage of basic rates, was
enshrined in the Conservative Party’s Code of Industrial Relations
Practice of 1971 and endorsed by the Labour government in
1974.57
The British approach to security of employment has not been
through negotiation of annual guaranteed wages but through
compensation for redundancy. Compensation for loss of office (the
‘golden handshake’) has long been normal practice in the case of
directors and other high managerial staff, which underlines the
concept of human capital invested in the corporation by the
managers. Office workers, too, have long been protected by long
periods of notice or payment in lieu. For manual workers, however,
despite isolated examples at Kenrick’s hardware in 1891 or the
resettlement scheme in flour milling in 1931, redundancy pay was
almost unheard of before the Second World War.58 Redundancy
only became a problem with the full employment of the post-war
period, when efforts to reduce overmanning in old industries and
switch labour to new ones led to schemes in mining, gas, railways,
engineering, vehicle manufacture, chemicals, textiles, and
shipbuilding to pay workers to go elsewhere. By 1962 over 5
million workers were covered by redundancy agreements.59 The
trade unions resisted redundancy on principle, so that severance
pay was a managerial device for overcoming worker resistance to
productive efficiency. This was backed up by the Labour
311
government between 1964 and 1970 which, having set out to

encourage employers to ‘shake out’ labour by such devices as the
selective employment tax, passed the Redundancy Payments Act,
1965 which enshrined the principle of a property right in the job.
This right, together with compensation for unfair dismissal, was
reinforced by the Conservative and Labour Industrial Relations
Acts of 1971 and 1974, and by the Labour and Conservative
consolidating Employment Protection Acts of 1978 and 1980.
Although the amount of compensation was small, one week’s pay
after two years for each year of service (two weeks’ pay for each
year over fifteen), the principle of human capital and compensation
for its loss was extended from the managerial to the working class.
The cause was not pressure from below but the pursuit of
managerial efficiency: it was ‘part of an overall manpower policy
aimed at securing a greater acceptance by the workers of the need
for economic and technological change’.60
The direction of all these trends, in holidays with pay,
occupational pension rights, paid sick leave, and security of
earnings and employment, was towards ‘single status’ for manual
and non-manual workers.61 Equality of fringe benefits did not
guarantee equality of status, and the non-manual unions fought for
their customary differentials in these as in hours and pay or at least
for compensation for their loss.62 Nevertheless, the trend went
beyond fringe benefits to the treatment of workers on the job, in
such matters as hours of work and ‘clocking on’, canteen and toilet
facilities, method of payment (by monthly cheque rather than
weekly pay packet), and so on. An investigation by the Industrial
Society in 1966 showed that 180 firms had a policy of progressively
equalizing the terms and conditions of employment of manual and
non-manual workers. Two surveys by the British Institute of
Management in the 1970s showed that the policy was being put
into practice by more and more firms.63 To some extent this was
due to the belated demand of manual workers, often ahead of their
unions, for an end to class divisions at work, an aspect of
‘embourgeoisement’, the ambition of some workers for middleclass
status. But the conclusion of the most thorough study of the subject
is that ‘the introduction of staff grade or single status schemes is an
interesting example of change in manual workers’ status initiated
from above’, based on the managerial belief that equal treatment
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was not merely just but also the best policy for increasing worker
co-operation and productivity.64
Indeed, the whole movement towards the assimilation of both
kinds of worker to a common status can be regarded as a spin-off
from the professionalization of management. It is part of the
philosophy of modern management that, as the 1971 Code of
Industrial Relations Practice expressed it:
Differences in the conditions of employment and status of

different categories of employee and in the facilities available
to them should be based on the requirements of the job. The
aim should be progressively to reduce, and ultimately to
remove, differences which are not so based.65
The Industrial Society in 1966 saw it as a radical advance from an

earlier philosophy. Traditional distinctions, it said:
are frequently illogical and unsupportable by any evidence.

Too often they are relics of an outworn social and industrial
system. Their removal would do much to remove the petty
disagreements and resentments that bedevil industry and
would help strengthen the responsibility, loyalty and unity of
purpose in industrial undertakings of all sizes.
Whether such sentiments will be powerful enough to overcome the

most important remaining distinction between ‘staff and
‘shopfloor’ occupations, Alan Fox’s division between ‘high-trust,
high-discretion’ and ‘low-trust, low-discretion’ jobs, remains to be
seen.66 Pessimists argue that the trend is in the other direction,
towards reducing discretion and increasing managerial control
amongst routine non-manual workers and reducing them to the
same low-trust, discretionless situation as most manual workers.
But fringe benefits have become both a customary expectation for
most workers and a useful instrument of managerial policy, so that
their rapid demise would seem to be unlikely even under the current
swing towards greater managerial authority.
In the virtual absence until recently of trade union interest, ‘most
types of fringe benefits seem to have spread from causes other than
collective bargaining or union efforts.’67 Amongst those causes was
the desire by the larger and more successful firms, especially in
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conditions of full employment, to attract and retain better workers

while not appearing to break tacit understandings on wage
competition, their wish for the same reason to enhance their
reputation as ‘good employers’, their belief that such benefits
would facilitate ‘a change in manual worker attitudes and make
them a valuable asset to the company’, and ‘possibly even a
reduction in industrial strife’.68 Whatever the ulterior motivation,
there can be little doubt that the underlying philosophy is based on
the needs of professional management and the belief that an
extension of managerial values to the manual workers will facilitate
the work of management and increase the efficiency and
profitability of industry. To that extent managerial self-interest is
the main factor in the professionalization of manual work.
The professionalization of the working class as a whole must be
set in a wider context. In so far as most manual workers in Britain,
despite the efforts of the larger corporations, have not yet achieved
professional status in the sense of a career with security of tenure,
rising scales of pay, and the customary white-collar fringe benefits,
they have increasingly looked to the state to provide them with the
basic security that the professional middle class take for granted. If,
as Engels and later Marxists have argued, the failure of the
proletariat to pursue social revolution is to be explained by their
emulation of bourgeois values, it is manifestly not the traditional
capitalist bourgeoisie whom they have emulated, with their
insecure and fluctuating profits, but the career-oriented, employed,
professional middle class, with their security of income, control of
their own work schedules, and occupational pensions. From one
point of view the welfare state, however inadequate to the task, is
an attempt to provide for the working class some of the same
conditions of work and life that the professional middle class have
achieved for themselves. That aspect of the professionalization of
the working class, however, takes us beyond the corporate economy
to the rise of the corporate society, and will be dealt with in Section
3 of this chapter.
Meanwhile, the professionalization of industry, both managers
and workers, was the main, if unintended, consequence of the
corporate economy, and in turn it had major implications for
corporatism itself, in the triangular relationship between
employers, trade unions and the state. Though the corporate state
is much wider than that narrow triangle, it cannot be gainsaid that
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without the involvement of the professional managers and

employers’ representatives, the professional trade union officials,
and the professional politicians and civil servants, it surely could
not exist.
2 THE CORPORATE STATE

Large-scale enterprise in industry and commerce, in the trade
unions and in most other institutions of twentieth-century Britain
was more than matched by the rise in the scale of government.
Government expenditure as a proportion of Gross National
Product rose from 12.7 per cent in 1910 to 26.1 per cent in 1930,
to 39 per cent in 1950, and to 49.3 per cent in 1974. Including
transfer payments such as social security and the capital
investments of the nationalized industries, it increased from about
45 per cent in 1950 to no less than 60 per cent by 1975.69 A large
part of this expenditure, of course, consisted of transfer payments
in the form of national insurance benefits, old age pensions, and the
increasing interest on the National Debt, but even allowing for
these the role of the state in the direct production of goods and
services had enormously increased. By 1961 the nationalized
industries alone employed nearly one in ten of the labour force.
Altogether, government employment rose from 6.9 per cent of the
total workforce in 1931 to 24.9 per cent in 1950 and, after a slight
decline to 23.5 per cent in 1961, to 26.2 per cent in 1973.70
At the same time, in order to pay for this expansion, there was
a matching increase in taxation to levels inconceivable to the
Victorians. It was not a uniform rise but took place in sudden steps,
during the two world wars and their preceding rearmament phases.
The standard rate of income tax (only a partial measure of
taxability) rose from less than 1 shilling in the £ (5 per cent) in 1901
and 1s.2d. (6 per cent) in 1910 after the ‘People’s Budget’ to 6s. (30
per cent) in 1919. After falling back between the wars, but only to
4s. (20 per cent) in 1926–30, it rose during the 1930s rearmament
to 5s.6d. (27.5 per cent) and then during the Second World War to
10s. (50 per cent). From 1909 onwards ‘supertax’ on higher
incomes also increased, from 6d. in the £ to 9s.6d. at the end of the
Second World War, making a top rate of 19s.6d. (97.5 per cent).
The standard rate fell back by the 1970s to 33 pence in the new
decimal £, with a top rate on high incomes of 83 per cent.71 Since
315
1979 the standard rate has fallen still further, to 27 per cent, and
the marginal rates for high earned and unearned incomes to 60 per
cent and 75 per cent, but the decline has been more than
counterbalanced by increases in value added tax and social security
contributions.72 More to the point for most people, the proportion
of the active population paying income tax at all—very few wage
earners paid income tax until the Second World War—has risen
from about one in nine (11 per cent) in 1904 to over 90 per cent
during and after the Second World War.73
Whether or not this rise in the state’s direct provision of goods
and services and redistribution of income through taxation and
social security was an inevitable accompaniment of post-industrial
welfarism or the fortuitous result of a particular conjunction of
political and social forces—and the parallel rise of state expenditure
in other advanced countries suggests that it is the former—the
effect has been to expand the scale of government and the
involvement of the state in every aspect of the national life. Not
only has the state come to provide the incomes of a large and
increasing section of the population, from the government
bureaucracy and the workforce of the nationalized industries to the
changing beneficiaries of the welfare state, but it has become
increasingly involved in guiding and subsidizing private industry
and in controlling through fiscal and monetary devices the whole
economic system. However reluctantly, governments of every
political hue have been drawn into an intimate relationship with
business and other institutions of social and economic life far
beyond the classic concerns of the nineteenth-century ideal of the
minimal state. Above all, they have been unable to ignore the
conflicts between increasingly powerful groups in society whose
threats of non-co-operation can in a complex, interdependent
system bring the economy to a halt. The most powerful of these
groups were, of course, the great corporations which came to
employ a majority of the workforce and the institutions
representing most of that corporate labour, the trade unions.
(1) Informal corporatism

The expansionist twentieth-century state, as it impinged upon
wider and wider areas of social and economic life, found itself
having to treat with a widening range of organized groups, like the
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professional bodies representing the medical doctors, the social

workers and the teachers, and the voluntary associations
representing philanthropic activities of every kind, from the
protection of consumers to the protection of the environment.
From the beginning, however, the core concern of the state was
inevitably with the groups at the centre of the economy, the
industrial corporations and the trade unions. The triangular
relationship which developed between the government, the
employers and the trade unions so came to dominate the thinking
of those concerned about the way modern society was going that
the term corporatism came to mean that relationship alone. As the
inheritors of the intense class conflict between capital and labour
which, indeed, precipitated the government’s involvement in the
‘corporate triangle’, the corporate business men and the trade
union leaders were bound to loom large in both the practice and the
theory of corporatism, and they will do so here.
The corporate state, however, while embracing this triangular
relationship, is a much wider concept. As a leading American
student of British political institutions has expressed it, the
producers’ organizations are but a part of ‘a vast, untidy system of
functional representation that has grown up alongside the older
system of parliamentary representation’.74 Where the state controls
so large a proportion of society’s resources and the environment in
which they are deployed, self-interest impels almost every group to
organize collectively to lobby the state for a larger share of what it
has to hand out. The late Richard Titmuss’s complaint about ‘the
growth of a “Pressure Group State” generated by more massive
concentrations of interlocking economic, managerial and self-
regarding professional power’ was provoked more by the welfare
professions, the doctors who wanted bigger capitation fees for
health service patients, the teachers who wanted higher salaries and
fewer responsibilities outside the classroom, and the social workers
who wanted carte blanche to deal with their ‘clients’, than by the
industrial producers.75 Representatives of consumers of social
welfare like the National Federation of Old Age Pensioners
Associations, the Claimants’ Union, Shelter, the Child Poverty
Action Group, and the organizations of the unemployed, must also
organize to make their demands heard. All interest groups in a
society in which the state pays so many pipers must compete to
have their tunes noticed and rewarded.
317
The interest groups, nevertheless, with the strongest and most

continuous need to influence the managerial state are the corporate
employers and the large trade unions. The state, too, needs to
influence them, since failure to obtain the co-operation of
management and/or labour can lead to social and economic
breakdown or even to military defeat. This had become obvious
before the First World War, when prime minister Asquith and the
ubiquitous Lloyd George had felt impelled to intervene personally
in 1911 and 1912 to defuse national coal and railway strikes at a
time of increasing international tension. The ensuing war had
forced the state to take both sides of industry into partnership, by
no means an always equal or harmonious partnership, as state
managers of war industry on one side and as procurers of labour
co-operation on the other. Wartime collaboration did not survive
the post-war renewal of class conflict, and Lloyd George’s attempt
to introduce a formal corporatism in the shape of the National
Industrial Conference of 1919 was a failure. The ensuing crisis of
class society culminated in the General Strike of 1926.
The General Strike played a key, if paradoxical, role in the rise
of the corporate state. The origins of the triangular relationship
between government, unions and employers lay in the efforts to
construct a modus vivendi out of the ruinous industrial relations
left behind by the strike. Ignoring their Bourbon extremists,
moderate men on both sides of industry and in government, like
Walter Citrine and Milne-Bailey of the TUC, Lord Weir of the
National Confederation of Employers’ Organizations, and Steel-
Maitland, Conservative minister of labour, realized that a peaceful
industrial future required some sort of entente between the
combatants about the limits beyond which conflict should not be
pushed. There was some attempt to institutionalize this entente in
the Mond-Turner talks between representatives of the TUC and the
NCEO in 1928, but these foundered on the militant opposition of
class warriors like A.J.Cook of the Mining Federation of Great
Britain and Allan Smith of the Engineering Employers’ Federation.
Instead, the NCEO, the Federation of British Industries and the
TUC began informal meetings in 1929 which grew into a
permanent joint sub-committee to discuss common interests,
including industrial legislation, unemployment and national
economic policy. Through this machinery they gave joint evidence
to the Macmillan Committee on Trade and Industry in 1930, to the
318
Imperial Conference in 1931, and to the Imperial Economic

Conference at Ottawa in 1932.76
In the process of collaboration the tripartite representatives
learned from one another the central problem of a corporatist
structure, the fear and suspicion on the part of their constituents
that they would become ‘incorporated’ in the system and sell them
out. There was a growing gap between the increasingly professional
officials of the employers’ associations and trade unions and their
constituent firms and worker members, still wider between the
‘peak organizations’, the TUC, FBI and NCEO, and their respective
affiliates. This gulf was what continually undermined any high-
level institutionalization of corporate relations, which worked best
when the contacts were informal, low-key and addressed to the
solution of immediate practical problems.
What Keith Middlemas has called the ‘corporate bias’ of British
industrial politics is in effect a description of the informal
corporatism which grew out of the need of professional
representatives—including professional politicians and civil
servants—to cover their flanks against the barbs of hostile
constituents. Their predicament was a delicate if familiar one.
Employed to negotiate with one another and increasingly skilled in
that art, they came to understand one another too well and to share
a common interest in finding peaceful solutions to potentially
disruptive problems. Yet their professional interest did not lie in a
fully institutionalized corporate structure, which would have taken
the mystery out of their art and exposed them even more patently to
the charge of conspiring with the other two sides of the triangle. To
the contrary, what Walter Citrine, General Secretary of the TUC,
called ‘a friendly intimacy and a confident relationship without
sacrifice of principles by any of the parties or any interference with
the autonomy of the respective constituents’77 was precisely the
formula suited to their professional interests. To their purist critics,
the militant unionists, the unabashed free marketeers, and the more
partisan politicians on either side, even this degree of intimacy
equalled betrayal. In their own terms the critics were right: the
professional negotiators did have a separate interest. It was not that
they were in some way wiser or more far-sighted than their
opponents, only that their objectives were different. Class war was
less likely to sustain their position and perpetuate their status and
rewards than the quiet pursuit of accommodation. The particular
319
form that corporatism took in Britain owed more to the professional

self-interest of its protagonists than to any theory of corporatism.
Corporatist theory there was in plenty between the wars, but it
had little influence on developing practice. Most of the theorists were
convinced that parliamentary democracy had somehow failed to
understand or represent the economic forces in actual or potential
conflict in society and that some alternative institution was needed to
represent those economic interests alongside or instead of
Parliament. They were mainly divided between those who were
concerned to save industry from democracy and those who wished to
make it more democratic. The first group, the authoritarian Tories,
had begun by admiring Mussolini, though they were soon
disillusioned by Mosley and Hitler, whose authoritarianism left little
room for any corporation other than the state. Their aim was to
solve industry’s problems on managerial terms, by an appeal for co-
operation between management and labour on the basis of a new
moral order, national unity and voluntary self-discipline. They
included Lord Melchett of ICI, better known as Sir Alfred Mond of
the Mond-Turner talks, Sir Basil Blackett, Governor of the Bank of
England, Sir Arthur Salter, archetype of financial civil servants, the
Tory imperialists Leo Amery, Hugh Sellon and Lord Eustace Percy,
and Roy Glenday, economic adviser to the FBI.78 In 1934 Melchett
introduced a bill in the House of Lords, drafted by the new research
organization Political and Economic Planning and backed by his new
Industrial Reorganization League, to permit industries to reorganize
themselves for more efficient production, but it was blocked by the
FBI’s fear of formal corporatism.79 Right-wing corporatists looked
back to a mythical traditional England free from class conflict and
aimed to embrace labour in a paternalist framework which would
make such conflict well-nigh impossible. If they had any influence it
was through some of their number, like Melchett and Glenday,
engaging in the informal dialogue with the trade unions which was
emerging anyway.
The second group were a handful of Tory democrats valiantly
striving to keep alive the natural alliance of patricians and people so
successfully preached by Disraeli. In 1927 a quartet of Conservative
MPs from depressed northern constituencies connected with the
Weekend Review, Harold Macmillan, Robert Boothby, Oliver
Stanley and John Loder, published a corporatist symposium, Industry
and the State, which questioned the free market’s ability to correct its
320
own errors and imbalances. During the ensuing decade they put
forward schemes for self-governing industries each guided by a
Planning Council, the whole economy guided by a National Planning
Commission or even an Industrial Parliament, though without
executive powers.80 Although the group had some success in
softening the hard-faced image of Conservatism in the 1930s, its
major influence lay in the future when these young turks came of age,
and it came to full fruition only in Macmillan’s national Economic
Development Council in 1961.
In The Next Five Years (1935) Macmillan was joined by a third
group, not of Tories but of moderate socialists who also looked for
a less class-ridden and more harmonious society, though on a rather
different basis. These men, including the MacDonaldite renegades
from the Labour Party Clifford Alien and Alien Young, who
became Macmillan’s secretary, drew their inspiration from a deep if
eccentric spring, G.D.H.Cole’s guild socialism.81 But mainstream
Labour passed by on the other side. Like the FBI and the NCEO,
the TUC toyed in the early 1930s with the idea of a National
Industrial Council, but backed down under the attacks of Harold
Laski and the Labour Party National Executive who preferred the
informal corporatism which rearmament evoked from a
government desperately in need of the co-operation of the trade
unions.82 As the Chairman of the Conservative Party told a
recalcitrant right-winger in 1938:
It may seem strange to you, with your right-wing views, that

we have to tolerate such a position that we cannot defend the
nation against the will of the trade unions, but there it is. It is
part of the price that we have to pay for this alleged
democracy.83
Once again it was the dual self-interest of the corporate

representatives, on the one side their need for willing co-operation
and on the other for an ‘arms-length’ approach to it, that made
informal corporatism the obvious response to their ambivalent
situation.
(2) The triple entente at war

The Second World War, much more than the first, was a triumph for
321
the triple entente between government, employers and workers, at

least after the politically unacceptable and militarily incompetent
Chamberlain had been ditched as the price of Labour and TUC co-
operation. This was partly due to the unity of the country against the
fear of Nazi invasion, more to the need for Labour’s involvement in
the Churchill Coalition to ensure the co-operation of the working
class, most of all to the lessons of the First World War and the
informal corporatism of the 1930s. Ernest Bevin, who as Coalition
minister of labour made himself the apex of the triangle, persuaded
the trade unions at a delegate meeting in May 1940:
virtually to place yourselves at the disposal of the state. We

are Socialists and this is the test of our Socialism…. If our
movement and our class rise with all our energy now and save
the people of this country from disaster, the country will
always turn with confidence to the people who saved them.84
Since labour rather than capital was the scarce resource of wartime
production, Bevin was able to set up a new tripartite Production
Council and impose on the War Cabinet, the Treasury, and the
supply and service departments his demands for his own ministry’s
control of conscription and direction of labour, for a 100 per cent
excess profits tax, higher wages for low-paid workers in agriculture
and the railways, and a host of industrial relations improvements,
including the appointment in war industries of medical, welfare and
personnel staffs.85 Though he could not, any more than other
corporate operators, always deliver the full co-operation of his
constituents, the war workers, he was able to extend on more equal
terms the tacit social contract that had been emerging before the
war. Speaking for the War Cabinet, he told the tripartite National
Joint Council, representing the government, the TUC and the
British Employers Confederation (as the NCEO had now become):
We came to the conclusion that, with the goodwill of the TUC

and the unions, and the Employers’ Federation, a little less
democracy and a little more trust, in these difficulties we
could maintain to a very large extent the peace-time
arrangements, merely adjusting them to these extraordinary
circumstances.86
322
As an earnest of that trust, the National Joint Council was replaced

by a seven-a-side Joint Consultative Council meeting twice-
monthly under Bevin’s chairmanship, which became the main
instrument of government industrial policy. It successfully opposed
a Treasury proposal for a wage freeze, and upheld collective
bargaining, banned strikes and lock-outs, negotiated dilution of
skilled labour and, with a combination of food subsidies, rationing,
price controls and moderate wage increases, kept the cost of living
down and real wages gently rising throughout the war.87 Compared
with the industrial unrest of the First World War, the Second was,
except for a small amount of militancy in the coal mines, a time of
industrial peace. Continuous co-operation between both sides of
industry and the government was ensured through the formal
corporate institutions, both at the top and in the revived Whitley
Councils for individual industries covering over 15 million workers.
As a leading historian of trade unionism expressed it, ‘the records
of the [TUC] General Council begin to read like the records of some
special government department, responsible for co-ordinating
policy in the social and industrial spheres,’ and, Middlemas
comments, that was equally valid for the British Employers’
Confederation.88
On the employers’ side, leading spokesmen like Sir Cecil Weir of
the BEC began to accept the principles of collective bargaining and
joint consultation, and even to acquiesce in the inevitability of
nationalization of some industries:
Public ownership was not of itself the bogey which it had been.
We had to ask whether a particular enterprise would work
better under public or private ownership and it was also clear
that there were cases where the former could not be avoided.
The only, significantly professional, condition was that ‘the control,

administration and management should not be bureaucratic, and
should be recruited from the right sources, under terms of
remuneration which would attract the best men’.89 The new
managerial elite had arrived, and were prepared to abandon their
capitalist masters provided only that their own power, status and
rewards were to be safeguarded.
Yet no more than the trade union leaders could the managerial
spokesmen deliver their constituents’ consent to repudiate conflict
323
when the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ of the war came to an end.

Even before victory ended the desperate need for collaboration, the
employers and the trade unions began to prepare for a post-war
world in which, despite the euphoria of Reconstruction, they
expected a recrudescence of depression, unemployment, low profits
and a consequent struggle over diminishing returns. The reluctance
of Churchill and the Conservatives to commit themselves whole-
heartedly either to the Beveridge Report or to Keynesian full
employment determined the rank and file of the Labour Party and
the TUC to force their leaders to abandon the Coalition
government as soon as the war in Europe ended. The return to
party politics and the landslide Labour victory marked the limits of
wartime corporatism, but they by no means spelled its end. On the
contrary, it was to be the post-war evolution of party politics and
its paradoxical effect on democracy that were to make the
corporate state all the more necessary and inevitable.
(3) The decline of democracy

The Second World War was fought by the Western powers to save
parliamentary democracy from plebiscitary dictatorship. Yet in
Britain there has since the war been a decline in the power of
Parliament over the executive. Politics has become (despite the rise
of the Alliance in the 1980s) largely a contest between two major
parties whose members constitute small and shrinking minorities of
the electorate, controlled by even smaller oligarchies of activists.
The aim of the parties is to obtain a ‘mandate’ from the electorate
to enable a tiny group of professional politicians to carry out a set
of policies for up to five years with little or no further reference to
the people or even, except in the last resort, to the people’s
representatives in Parliament. The party caucuses completely
control voting in the House of Commons so that, through its party
majority, the government controls Parliament rather than
Parliament the government. This amounts to a system of
plebiscitary democracy in which the people make a very occasional
choice between two groups of leaders, one of which then imposes
its will on the other without hindrance from a complacent majority
in the legislature. When, as has been the case in every election since
the war, the governing party attracts the votes of a minority of the
electors and even of those actually voting, and the combined share
324
of the electorate voting for the two major parties has fallen from 77
per cent in 1951 to 55 per cent in 1974 and 61 per cent in 1979,90
the result can hardly be said to be democracy at all.
Not surprisingly, the decline of parliamentary influence over
governmental decision making has been accompanied by a decline
in the quality of the MPs. In contrast to the Victorian age or even
the inter-war period, few leading figures in other walks of life have
been attracted to a parliamentary career (except for those who
crown a successful non-political career with a seat, since 1958
normally a life peerage, in the House of Lords). In particular,
leading business men and trade unionists, and indeed leading
professional people of all kinds, have increasingly shunned party
politics, with the result that the House of Commons no longer
directly represents the great functional interests of the country, least
of all the two sides of industry. In contrast to the Baldwins and
Bevins of the inter-war parliaments, the large industrial
corporations and trade unions have preferred to sponsor second
rankers as candidates, who increasingly become professional
politicians dedicated to a full-time career in politics rather than in
business or the trade unions. The last active major business man in
the Cabinet (aside from employers’ association officials like John
Davies of the Confederation of British Industry, secretary of trade
and industry in the Heath government of the early 1970s) was Lord
Mills, minister of fuel and power in 1957–59, and the last major
trade union leader Frank Cousins, minister of technology in 1965–
66. Both had to be provided with ad hoc seats, Mills in the Lords
and Cousins at a specially created parliamentary by-election. Both
failed as ministers and chose early resignation.91
Paradoxically, this avoidance of Parliament by leading
professionals was largely due to the professionalization of politics
itself. As not only management and union administration but also
politics became full-time careers, the former two became too busy
and the latter too demanding to combine them. Only a few
occupations with ‘unstructured time’ like law and journalism could
accommodate the increasing demands of parliamentary attendance
and constituency duties. It is significant that in a class-based party
system in which Conservative voters are more bourgeois and
Labour voters more working-class than in any other country,
business men have never been a majority of Conservative MPs and
current workers never since the war a majority of Labour ones. In
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both parliamentary parties the largest single occupational group

has increasingly come from the professions, particularly from those
professions like law, journalism and teaching which earn their
living by talk and argument. By 1974 and 1979 worker MPs had
shrunk to 14 per cent of the House and business MPs to 19 per cent
and 22 per cent.92 Apart from a few landlords and farmers, nearly
all the rest were professionals of one kind or another.
It was not their professional provenance, however, that made
them a separate profession. Increasingly an MP’s life cut him off
from his previous career or reduced his chances of returning to a
high place on its ladder, at least until he could retire from high
government office. His ambition was transferred not to Parliament
but to ministerial office, for which service in the Commons was
almost (except for the ‘slip road’ through the Lords) the sole
avenue. Politics became, like the bar, a ‘jackpot profession’ in which
a few win all the prizes and the rest trudge on with mediocre
reward. Without government office an MP is mere ‘lobby fodder’,
voting not according to his conscience or his constituents’ interests
but to the dictates of the government or the shadow cabinet. Unlike
Edmund Burke’s independent representative or the American ‘pork
barrel’ senator, the British MP has become a machine politician,
and the machine that pulls his levers is the party.
The decline of democracy in fact begins at the grass roots in the
constituency parties, where a parallel system of intermittent
elections, at annual general meetings attended by small minorities
of the membership, of a local executive committee ensures that a
small oligarchy controls the selection of the parliamentary
candidate. In the Labour Party, for example, where a typical
constituency management committee consists of thirty members, a
caucus of sixteen can impose its candidate, often on a constituency
with a safe Labour majority. This system has so disillusioned
ordinary party members that membership of both major parties
slumped during the 1970s—the Conservative Party from about 2
million to about 1 million, the Labour Party from 1.3 million to
600,000—thus enabling even tinier minorities of determined
activists to take over constituency parties. Since activists tend to be
more extreme than the ordinary members, still more than the
habitual voters, the opting out of involvement in the annual
election of executive committees accounts for the take-over of
many Labour parties by the Bennites in their various guises and of
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Conservative parties by Powellites, later after Enoch Powell’s

defection to be transformed into Thatcherites. In this way the
constituencies, which should be the bulwarks of democracy at the
grassroots level, have become the instruments of factions of the
central parties and, when one faction wins control, of the national
party itself. The hijacking of both major parties in the 1970s—of
the Conservative Party by Sir Keith Joseph and his friends to the
benefit of Margaret Thatcher and of the Labour Party by Tony
Benn and the disaffected left to the (temporary) benefit of Michael
Foot—was made possible by the capture of the constituency parties
by the right- and left-wing activists of the two parties, many of
them new to the parties and with allegiances to more extreme
bodies outside. The ultimate threat to a would-be independent-
minded MP is to withdraw the party whip, which will almost
automatically ensure that he loses his seat at the next election. Thus
the national leadership controls the MPs, not the MPs the
leadership, and democracy is converted into oligarchy. And through
control of patronage, notably access to the highest offices of state
and still more the threat of dismissal, the prime minister controls
the national leadership, thus accelerating the trend towards prime-
ministerial dictatorship.
The final phase of the corporate state owed its development to
the decline of parliamentary democracy. Since at least the 1920s
both sides of industry have been convinced that Parliament is out of
touch with the real world of business. In 1926 Milne-Bailey of the
TUC secretariat argued that ‘inadequate knowledge is very real and
constitutes a genuine defect in any parliament elected on a
territorial basis’. He proposed an Economic Council, less grandiose
than the Tory corporatiste’ Industrial Parliament, which ‘merely
seeks to do well what parliament at present does badly, and in so
doing achieves the full recognition, by the community, of the claims
of vocational groups.’ Through such an Economic Council the
trade union movement ‘would exercise far greater influence on the
economic and industrial affairs of the nation than they can possibly
do at present.’93
It was not only with the rise of the oligarchic party system since
the war, however, that the vocational interests were forced to
bypass Parliament and take their grievances, demands and threats
of non-co-operation direct to the government. The House of
Commons became a theatre for the presentation of government
327
policy and legislation, and for belated and usually ineffectual

criticism by the Opposition, only after discussion behind the scenes
between ministers and civil servants and the functional interests
concerned. The real decisions were agreed on behind closed doors
by ‘unassuming experts’, as Sidney Webb called his ideal Fabian
rulers, on both sides of the table.
The only officially published clue to this process was the endless
stream of reports from parliamentary committees and royal
commissions on particular services and occupations issuing from
the Stationery Office: on the Civil Service, the police, the press, the
National Health Service, doctors’ and dentists’ remuneration,
electricity supply, port transport, public libraries, higher education,
the aircraft and shipbuilding industries, and so on.94 Far more
important than these exceptional problems needing official inquiry
were the almost continuous and rarely documented meetings at
particular ministries with representatives of interests lobbying the
government for aid, protection, exclusive privileges, changes in
taxation, in the social services, in the publicly funded infrastructure
(especially roads, airports and dock facilities), and the like. One
enormously expanding area involved the government as employer
(after the war) of up to a quarter of the occupied population in the
growing public sector, where ministers and civil servants came to
negotiate incomes and resource provision directly, in the National
Health Service, school and higher education, the armed forces, and
the Post Office (until it became a public corporation), and
indirectly, through the state-appointed managements of the
nationalized industries.
Conversely, the increasing involvement of the state in the
management of the economy, its responsibility (until recently) for
maintaining full employment, containing inflation, safeguarding
the balance of payments, upholding the value of sterling, and
encouraging national economic growth, forced it in turn to seek the
co-operation of the major economic interests, notably the corporate
employers and the trade unions, and in effect to take them into
partnership. The TUC, for example, was represented by 1958 on no
less than 850 tripartite committees alongside representatives of the
government and the employers, culminating at the top in the
National Production Advisory Council on Industry and the various
economic planning boards.95 The triple partnership was crowned
by the creation in 1961, under the premiership of the inter-war
328
corporatist Harold Macmillan, of the National Economic

Development Council. With its own secretariat and its dependent
‘little Neddies’ for particular industries, this was a landmark in the
public recognition that a planned economy required a corporate
structure. As Andrew Shonfield remarked:
All planning of the modern capitalist type implies the

acceptance of some measure of corporatism in political
organization: that follows from basing the conduct of
economic affairs on the deliberate decisions of organized
groups of producers, instead of leaving the outcome to the
clash between individual competitors in the market.
The NEDC, representing the TUC, the CBI and the government
and normally chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Shonfield
regarded as ‘a second parliament with a corporatist character’, and
it would seem to justify Middlemas’s description of the two
industrial partners as ‘governing institutions’.96
There were limits to formal corporatism, however. The NEDC
was not and never became an industrial parliament. It had no
legislative or executive powers, it could only advise on relatively
marginal matters of policy, and it was not involved in what became
the most contentious issue of tripartite relations in the 1960s and
1970s, prices and incomes policy. The various attempts by
governments of both parties between 1959 and 1979, through such
bodies as the (Conservative) National Incomes Commission and the
(Labour) National Board for Prices and Incomes, to pursue
competitive economic growth while restraining inflation tested the
triangular relationship almost to destruction.97 The resultant cycle
of pay pauses followed by pay explosions and runaway inflation
nearly wrecked the understandings between the trade unions and
both Labour and Conservative governments and helped to bring
down the Heath ministry in 1974 and the Callaghan ministry in
1979. This breakdown of the tripartite understanding led to the
popular belief that Britain had become ungovernable, in the sense
that the government could no longer impose its will on what
Dahrendorf called ‘the unsleeping veto groups’.98 It led to the
unsuccessful attempts by both the first Wilson and the Heath
government to ‘tame the trade unions’ by coercive legislation,
followed by a government dedicated to neo-Ricardian free market
329
economics and the confrontational politics of the 1980s. As we

shall see later, the Thatcher government, though contemptuously
opposed to corporatism, was to practise it covertly, if selectively, as
assiduously as its predecessors.
Meanwhile, the breakdown of formal corporatism did not end
the need for informal co-operation between government and the
functional interests. Indeed, Britain’s economic decline relative to
the other advanced nations has been due less to a lack of innovative
ideas and skills than to the mutual frustration of the distrustful
partners in the triangular relationship. Much of the failure stemmed
from the inability of the professional representatives of the interest
groups to ‘deliver the goods’. While this failure occurs daily in
industrial relations on the shop floor, where trade union officials
cannot guarantee acceptance by their members of productivity
deals, the most spectacular example was the ‘Social Contract’
signed by the Labour Party and the TUC in 1973, which committed
the next Labour government to specific measures of social and
industrial reform in return for voluntary wage restraint.99 Against
the background of the world-wide oil crisis and the consequent
‘stagflation’ (the unprecedented coincidence of recession and
inflation), the TUC could not hold wage claims in check. Record
wage increases and inflation reached a peak in 1975, and militant
rank and file dissatisfaction culminated in the ‘winter of discontent’
in 1978–79, which helped to bring down the Callaghan
government in the May election.
Even so, informal corporatism had not been without some
success. The TUC under Jack Jones and Vic Feather had helped to
bring the wage explosion under control and the CBI had obtained
for the employers important modifications of the Industry Act,
1975, concerned with state investment in private industry through
the National Enterprise Board.100 Even the revival of free market
policies in the 1980s was not, as we shall see, brought about by old-
fashioned individual capitalists but by professional spokesmen for
corporate business, for whom free enterprise meant freedom for
professional managers like themselves. Just as the trade union
corner of the triangle had come to mean not the workers but the
professional officials, so the business corner had come to mean not
the shareholders but the managers of the great corporations and the
officials of the employers’ associations. To them the rhetoric of
socialism and capitalism, public and private enterprise,
330
nationalization and privatization had come to represent the very

real interests, in power, status and rewards, of the public and
private sector professionals who ran the tripartite institutions of the
corporate state.
Meanwhile, much of the content of the tripartite dialogue
between government, unions and employers, like much of the
equally corporatist interaction between government and the
publicly employed professionals in the health service, education,
the social services, and the like, was concerned as much with social
as with economic matters. This concern might be called the moral
distribution of resources in society, the allocation of income and
services not determined by the market but ultimately by political
decisions about the moral claims of vital services and their clients
upon the state. Viewed in this way, the welfare state becomes an
outgrowth of the corporate state, an expression of the bargaining
between different social interest groups, the taxpayers, the welfare
professions, and the potential beneficiaries. Beneath the struggle for
public resources it comes down to conflicting moral assessments of
competing claims upon the community, of the rights and
responsibilities of different members of society, of what it means to
be a citizen. In this sense we can talk, next, of the rise of a corporate
society.
3 THE CORPORATE SOCIETY

Before the rise of modern social science the commonest way to
describe society was as the body politic.101 Men and women were
members, unequal members to be sure, of a common entity, the
community or commonwealth. All members were recognized as
interdependent and could not survive without one another’s help,
although the extent of that help and of one man’s right to call upon
another for it might be debatable. Only with the triumph of the
market and of an individualist philosophy in the eighteenth century
could mutual service be left to the cash nexus and the self-interest
of the individual. Even then, Adam Smith believed that the survival
of the body politic overrode other considerations and that, since
‘defence is of much more importance than opulence’, the
Navigation Acts, for example, should take precedence over the free
market.102
331
The rise of the corporate society, which if it were not for the
intervening age of individualism would come close to being a
tautology, is in a sense the return of the body politic. During the
twentieth century we have all, officially as it were, become
members one of another. At the risk of taking a somewhat
Whiggish view of social policy—which will be amply redressed
later—we can say that we have in a single lifetime expanded the
concept of ‘Who is my neighbour?’ from the parochial (or poor law
union) level to that of the whole nation. This development has best
been expressed by T.H.Marshall in a famous essay, ‘Citizenship and
Social Class’, published in 1950. He saw the newly completed
welfare state as the culmination of a centuries-old concept of
expanding citizenship: ‘the modern drive towards social equality is,
I believe, the latest phase of an evolution of citizenship which has
been in continuous progress for some 250 years.’ The seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries had seen the rise of civil or legal
citizenship: ‘liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and
faith, the right to own property and conclude valid contracts, and
the right to justice’. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
had added political citizenship: the universal right to vote for
elected representatives in central and local government and thus
participate in political decision making.103 These legal and political
equalities in an age of competitive individualism, however, had
increased the possibility of becoming more unequal. ‘Differential
status, associated with class, function and family, was replaced by
a single uniform status of citizenship, which provided the
foundation of equality on which the structure of inequality could be
built.’104 It had been left to the twentieth century to reverse what Sir
Henry Maine had called the movement of progressive societies
from status to contract105 by adding social rights to the legal and
political ones. Thus was created a single status of citizen which
guaranteed a civilized social life for every member of society.
In practical terms social citizenship meant guaranteed rights to a
minimum income in time of need, to decent housing, medical
treatment, education suited to ability and needs and, via a full
employment policy, to a job for all those who needed one. This
combination of minimum rights was provided for the first time on
a comprehensive basis by the welfare state. It was neither socialism
nor the pursuit of an egalitarian society, but primarily a species of
‘class abatement’, a way of mitigating the inequities of the free
332
market by ensuring a minimum ‘social income’ to all those in

need.106 It did not cure inequalities of income and wealth except in
the sense of raising the ‘floor’ below which people were not allowed
to fall, but by making money income less relevant to the services
they could call on it made them more equal in real terms. ‘The
unified civilisation which makes social inequalities acceptable, and
threatens to make them economically functionless, is achieved by a
progressive divorce between real and money incomes.’ In the major
social services like health and education, in grammar school and
university scholarships, in legal aid, in rent controls with security of
tenure, and with (then contemporary) food rationing, food
subsidies and price controls, ‘The advantages obtained by having a
larger money income do not disappear, but they are confined to a
limited area of consumption.’107
To his colleague Lionel Robbins’s objection that by mixing the
free market based on money incomes with an egalitarian real
income system we were getting the worst of both worlds, Marshall
replied that, far from being illogical, the apparent inconsistencies
were in fact a source of stability and sprang ‘from the very roots of
our social order in the present phase of the development of
democratic citizenship’.108 In other words, in modern society people
wanted both the chance to earn more than the next man and the
assurance that failure to achieve that would not undermine their
ability to survive the contingencies of life. It was a subtle
compromise dictated by social not by economic logic, and the best
guarantee of social peace and a civilized social life.
Marshall’s analysis is justly famous, but no one seems to have
asked why he came to make it. It became so self-evidently part of
the common sense of twentieth-century social thought—even when
that common sense is under attack—that its provenance went
unquestioned. Marshall was in fact a spokesman for the
professional ideal as it applied to social policy. His analysis
perfectly combined the elements of that ideal: a belief in the
inequality of monetary rewards based on personal merit and effort
modified by an underlying equality of ‘real income’ in services
based on mere membership of society. He was not of course the
only spokesman. Half a century before, large numbers of New
Liberals, Fabian socialists and even Tory and Liberal imperialists
had been groping towards a concept of fairer shares and more
equal opportunities for all, in pursuit not so much of greater
333
equality as of ‘National Efficiency’ and ‘the rearing of an imperial

race’.109
After the First World War such thinking did not die away, despite
the disillusionment of many intellectuals with war and empire. On
the contrary, the double bite of international competition and
economic depression, in a world in which socialist revolution had
been transformed from a future dream or nightmare into a present
threat or promise, made the integration of society an urgent
necessity. In such an atmosphere both those who wished to defend
the status quo by pre-emptive reform and those who wished to
change it in the direction of non-revolutionary socialism sought
ways of mitigating the most glaring inequalities and injustices of
the society they had inherited. The solutions they found to the
social problems they discovered and defined involved increasing
state intervention and increased numbers of professional purveyors
of social services. These in turn soon found opportunities to expand
their services and make themselves indispensable, so that the
snowball of welfare provision acquired an additional momentum
from within. Finally, the beneficiaries of state welfare, primarily but
by no means exclusively the working class, came to regard
legislative expedients as rights contingent upon membership of
society. This sense of a right to minimum standards of provision of
social security, medical treatment, education, housing and,
ultimately, full employment, was reinforced by the Second World
War, when the need for an integrated society overrode all other
considerations. By then the theoretical, practical and democratic
origins of the corporate society all converged to make the
completion of a comprehensive welfare state irresistible. To see
how this consensus was arrived at we need to look in turn at the
intellectual, the administrative and the socio-political origins of the
corporate society.
(1) The intellectuals and the welfare state

The welfare state is commonly supposed, like Topsy, to have ‘just
growed’. According to one recent historian of its ‘shaping’, ‘There
has…been little welfare state philosophy, like those associated with
socialist or fascist structures; not even a body of ideas like those
surrounding the nineteenth-century capitalist state in its heyday.’110
In fact, a complete blueprint not only for the welfare state but also
334
for the corporate society can be found in the writings of

R.H.Tawney, co-author with Sidney Webb of the Labour Party
constitution of 1918. Tawney, from the impeccably professional
background of an Indian Educational Service family, united in
himself all three great streams of social thought inherited by the
twentieth century from the nineteenth: the Idealism of Thomas
Arnold’s Rugby and Edward Caird’s Balliol College, Oxford and its
practical application at Toynbee Hall in the East End of London;
the Cambridge neo-classical and Fabian tradition of the London
School of Economics; and the moral socialism of William Morris,
Keir Hardie and the early Labour Party.111
In his lectures on Equality published in 1931 Tawney anticipated
in a much less Whiggish way his junior LSE colleague Marshall’s
thesis on the evolution of social citizenship. The third lecture on
‘The Historical Background’ traces how the legal privileges of
feudal society were succeeded by the civil and political liberties of
capitalism, which ‘condemned the inequalities of the feudal past; it
blessed the inequalities of the capitalist future’. Equality now meant
‘not the absence of violent contrasts of income and condition, but
equal opportunities of becoming more unequal’. Equality of
opportunity, in a famous passage, was the ‘tadpole philosophy’, the
idea that, although most of them will live and die as tadpoles, a few
of them can hop nimbly on to the land and croak the virtues of a
system which can turn any tadpole into a frog.112
The alternative was not just a fairer start and a wider diffusion
of opportunity to rise or the redistribution of monetary income
from the rich to the poor but the creation of ‘a social income,
received in the form, not of money, but of increased well-being’:
What is important is not that all men should receive the same
pecuniary income. It is that the surplus resources of society
should be so husbanded and applied that it is a matter of
minor significance whether they receive it or not.
The social income would take the form of public provision: for
health, especially that of infants, children and expectant mothers;
for housing, one of the major causes of ill-health; for equal
education, not just equality of educational opportunity; and for the
contingencies of life—sickness, invalidity, unemployment and old
age—‘to mitigate the insecurity which is the most characteristic of
335
the wage earner’s disabilities’. Such social provision, growing since

the Edwardian period, ‘Dr [Hugh] Dalton has happily called
income from civil rights’, which ‘has an effect in mitigating
disparities of income out of all proportion to the expenditure
involved’.113
Tawney had already gone beyond social income from civil rights,
the intellectual cornerstone of the yet unnamed welfare state, to the
concept of ‘industry as a social function’. By this he meant industry
no longer controlled by functionless owners but by salaried
managers and workers, preferably under public ownership.114 This
was the theme of his earlier book, The Acquisitive Society (1920),
the most powerful indictment of capitalist society since Marx,
which advocated a ‘functional society’ in which every industry and
occupation would be rewarded according to its service to the
community:
the organization of society on the basis of function, instead of

on that of rights, implies three things. It means, first, that
proprietary rights shall be maintained when they are
accompanied by the performance of service and abolished
when they are not. It means, second, that the producers shall
stand in direct relation to the community for whom
production is carried on, so that their responsibility to it may
be obvious and unmistakable, not lost, as at present, through
their immediate subordination to shareholders whose interest
is not service but gain. It means, in the third place, that the
obligation for maintenance of the service shall rest upon the
professional organizations of those who perform it, and that,
subject to the supervision and criticism of the consumer, those
organizations shall exercise so much voice in the government
of industry as may be needed to secure that the obligation is
discharged.115
This passage encapsulates his concept of a professional society, in

which the redundant capitalist is replaced by professional managers
and professionalized workers.
Yet if Tawney was the prophet of professional society, it does not
follow that he was the cause of it. His brand of Fabian, gradualist
socialism did indeed permeate the Labour Party, more so than the
communism of Karl Marx, and was one of the inspirations of the
336
legislative programme of the Labour government of 1945–51; but

the welfare state was evolving long before that, and mostly under
governments which owed little or nothing to his influence. The idea
of government intervention to maintain individual income was a
principle advocated before the First World War both by Fabian
socialists like the Webbs, a generation older than Tawney, and by
neo-classical economists like Alfred Marshall’s pupil and successor
at Cambridge, A.C.Pigou.116 Between the wars it was accepted by
intellectuals in all three parties, by the Webbs and their disciples in
the Labour Party, by the Liberals Beveridge and Keynes, and by
corporatists like Harold Macmillan in the Conservative Party.117
The social ideal uniting these political rivals, most of whom
belonged to the professional middle class, was, whether consciously
or not, the ideal of a society which tried to avoid the waste and
inefficiency which they saw in traditional capitalism and which
pursued a policy of professional efficiency and social unity.
The Webbs’ contribution to the evolution of the welfare state,
much trumpeted by them and their admirers, was a largely negative
one, ‘the break-up of the poor law’. Apart from the Wheatley
Housing Act of 1924, which expanded the provision of public
housing, the two minority Labour governments of 1924 and 1929–
31 in which Sidney Webb served (as Lord Passfield) were powerless
to make fundamental changes in social policy, and most of the
advances in welfare were made by their opponents: notably Neville
Chamberlain’s old age, widows’ and orphans’ pensions in 1925,
based on the insurance principle which the Webbs rejected, and his
replacement of the poor law in 1929 by public assistance, the very
scheme which the Webbs had fought against in 1909.118 For the
provenance of national insurance, the main pillar of the emerging
welfare state, we must turn elsewhere.
As we have seen, the last Liberal government had grasped at
insurance as a means of extending the resources available to the
state without extending the income tax further down the social
scale or breaching the (to them) sacrosanct principle of free trade.
Lloyd George had learned ‘the magic of averages’119 from the
Victorian friendly societies which pioneered sickness and burial
insurance. Churchill had learned it from the trade unions which
paid unemployment benefit, via William Beveridge whom he had
met through the Webbs in 1908 and soon recruited to the Board of
Trade to advise on labour exchanges and unemployment insurance.
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Beveridge came from precisely the same background as Tawney.

Son of an Indian Civil Service judge, educated at Charterhouse and
Balliol, drawn into social service at Toynbee Hall which he used as
a base for scientific investigation into the causes of unemployment,
he was more strongly convinced than the ever-modest Tawney of
the unquestionable superiority of the professional expert.120 He
became the embodiment of the strong-willed reforming civil servant
in the classic mould of Edwin Chadwick, John Simon or Robert
Morant.121 Lacking Tawney’s empathy with the working class, he
saw himself as the quintessential social engineer, designing a social
policy which would be proof against both the temptations and the
demoralization of the old poor law. National insurance fitted his
specification perfectly: it forced the working man to save against
the inevitable rainy day so that when it came he could receive his
benefit not as a charitable dole but as an earned but deferred
right.122 Thus the Victorian virtues of independence and self-respect
were preserved and, equally important, the social system was saved
intact at minimal cost.
Beveridge lived to see this clever principle extended to cover,
first, unemployed returning veterans (1920), then the whole
manual working class and their dependants (1923, 1936), old age,
widows’ and orphans’ pensions (1925), and, finally, as the result of
his phenomenally popular Report on Social Insurance and Allied
Services (1942), to the whole population (1948).123 But by that time
the insurance principle was already an anachronism. Between the
wars mass unemployment had undermined the capacity of
insurance contributions to carry the burden. A disillusioned
Beveridge criticized the Labour government of 1924 for indefinitely
extending ‘uncovenanted benefit’ to the long-term unemployed,
and the Conservative government of 1927 for divorcing the claim
to benefit from payment of contributions.124 He complained bitterly
to the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance in 1931:
The present system bears no resemblance to the practice of

trade unions or to the scheme of 1911 that was meant as an
extension of it. Every important idea in either has gone by the
board. The benefit has been made unlimited in time and
practically divorced from the payment of contributions: it has
become neither insurance nor a spreading of wages, out-relief
financed mainly by a tax on employment.125
338
This ‘insupportable tax’ led to the cutting of the benefit in 1931,

which split the Labour Party and brought down the government,
and to the introduction in 1934 of the means test for those on
‘uncovenanted benefit’.
Beveridge was equally perturbed after 1948 when inflation
eroded the real value of the benefits he had proposed, and the
National Assistance Board was transformed from a safety net for
those few expected to fall through the system into a permanent
support providing ‘supplementary benefit’ to old age pensioners
and other claimants who could not live on the basic scales.126 But
the problem was inherent in any insurance-based system of social
security: some members of society would inevitably fail to pay
enough qualifying contributions, while others would have needs
which no insurance scheme could meet. Thus Beveridgean social
insurance could never be more than a halfway house towards a
fully corporate society in which membership alone was sufficient
qualification for an adequate social income from civil rights. That
only arrived by the back door in the 1970s when social security, as
a matter of administrative practice rather than legislative policy,
began to be paid to almost anyone who could show need, whether
or not they had paid the insurance contributions.
In some respects Beveridge did go beyond the principle of
insurance. His 1942 Report on Social Insurance laid down three
essential assumptions: a comprehensive health service provided
mainly out of taxation, a tax-based scheme of family allowances
for second and subsequent children, and a policy of full
employment without which unemployment could undermine any
system of insurance as it had done between the wars.127 This last
assumption was a startling departure from the free market which
could not have been made without the contribution of another
great Liberal civil servant, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes too came
from an impeccably professional background. Son of a Cambridge
don and, after a brief apprenticeship at the India Office, a
Cambridge don himself, he was drawn back into public service by
the urgent demands of the First World War.128 At the Treasury he
brilliantly managed the wartime foreign exchange policy, before
becoming Lloyd George’s chief financial adviser at Versailles and
chief critic of the resultant peace treaty and its unrealistic German
war reparations.129 Like Beveridge an incorrigible elitist and
defender of traditional social structure, he derived from his mentor
339
Alfred Marshall, the founder of Cambridge economics, as

Beveridge had derived from the Balliol Idealists, that hatred of
social injustice and belief in the duty of public service which Oxford
and Cambridge then taught to the best of their sons. ‘He was keenly
alive to great social evils and sensitive to suffering. He was by
nature a progressive and reformer. He believed that by thought and
resolution things could be made much better, and that quickly’.130
Neither an egalitarian nor a socialist, he was enough of a capitalist
to have made half a million pounds on the stock exchange and to
have restored the finances of King’s College, Cambridge by shrewd
investment. His mission was to rescue capitalism from its own vices
by teaching it how to prevent the alternating evils of unemployment
and inflation. To achieve this, ‘I bring in the State; I abandon
laissez-faire…not enthusiastically, not from contempt for that good
old doctrine, but because, whether we like it or not, the conditions
for its success have disappeared.’131
In his lecture on The End of Laissez-Faire in 1924 he declared,
‘The important thing for the Government is not to do things which
individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a
little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at
all.’ These included actively managing the economy so as to
encourage saving and investment along the most actively
productive channels. The aim should be the full employment of
both capital and labour to achieve optimal production without
either unemployment or inflation. Thus capitalism could be
preserved but only by transforming it into a professionally operated
system:
For my part, I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can

probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends
than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is
in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to
work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as
possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way
of life.132
This social organization was to be neither socialist nor capitalist, at

least in their Marxist or Ricardian senses. As he told Bernard Shaw
in 1935, ‘I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory
which will largely revolutionise…the way the world thinks about
340
economic problems.’ The final upshot, not immediately but in the

course of the next ten years, would be that ‘there will be a great
change, and, in particular, the Ricardian foundations of Marxism
will be knocked away’.133
The book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money (1936)—long foreshadowed by his earlier writings and by
his evidence to the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry
in 1930–31—solved (to Keynes’s satisfaction and that of the first
post-1945 generation of economic policy makers) the economic
riddle of the Sphinx, how to achieve full employment without
national bankruptcy or raging inflation.134 The solution involved
the government in stimulating spending and investment during
depressions and—an aspect underplayed at the time and neglected
since the war—damping them down during booms. Thus the state
and its professional advisers would become continuously
responsible for monitoring and managing the economy.
The Keynesian revolution, resisted by the government in the
1930s (though already beginning to percolate through the back
corridors of the Treasury) took hold during the war, when Keynes
himself was called back to the Treasury to perform the same service
as in the First World War. Afterwards, ‘the Keynesian ideology’
swept all before it, until the failure of what some latter-day
Keynesians like John Eatwell claim to be a bastard form of the
master’s theory was attacked by the revival of the free market
ideology in the stagflation of the 1970s.135 Meanwhile the belief
that unemployment could be cured by the professional
manipulation of the economy was the prerequisite of the
Beveridgean welfare state and of the new professional organization
of society. Although anti-Keynesians do not agree, it is still arguable
that the long secular boom for a quarter century after 1945, in
contrast to the two decades of depression after 1920, can be
credited to Keynesian demand management and the management
of the world’s currency which he negotiated at Bretton Woods in
1944, and that the return to an unregulated world economy has
manifestly failed to maintain the same degree of prosperity.136
The third and final stream of social thought contributing to the
corporate society was, surprisingly, that of Conservative
intellectuals. A strain of paternalism had run through Conservative
thinking from Peel and Disraeli through Salisbury and Balfour
down to Churchill and Macmillan. It saw in the protection of the
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poor the best hope of social cohesion and the defence of property.
Between the wars it was best represented at the intellectual level by
Harold Macmillan and the small group of MPs from depressed
industrial constituencies who contributed to the corporatist
symposium Industry and the State (1927), mentioned above.
Macmillan was already edging towards Beveridgean and Keynesian
solutions. Recalling his reaction to the hunger marches of the
1930s, he declared:
There was, of course, national, local, individual relief and

assistance, on a scale unequalled in the history of this or any
other country. But charity, whether of the nation as a whole
or from their neighbours, was not what the men wanted. They
wanted work.137
There were also other Conservative voices, deriving not from the
paternalist tradition but from its opposite, the Liberal laissez-faire
tradition of Ricardo, Cobden and Bright, which had infiltrated the
Conservative Party along with the renegade Liberal Unionists of the
1880s and the various National Liberals and Liberal Conservatives
of the inter-war period. They found expression in anti-statist
polemics like Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State (1911), Lord Chief
Justice Hewart’s The New Despotism (1929), and Friedrich von
Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). Hayek, part of the ‘white
immigration’ from Hitler’s Europe which was nearly as anti-
communist as Hitler himself, bore witness in 1935 to the decline of
laissez-faire and the rise of the corporate state:
For more than half a century, the belief that deliberate

regulation of all social affairs must necessarily be more
successful than the apparently haphazard interplay of
interdependent individuals has continuously gained ground
until today there is hardly a political group anywhere in the
world which does not want central direction of most human
activities in the service of one aim or another.138
For the time being they were muted or disregarded, but continued
to work below the surface towards their revival in the more
favourable conditions of the 1970s. Their very despair at this time
is evidence of the success of their opponents’ philosophy.
342
Since most of the inter-war evolution of the welfare state was

enacted by Conservative statesmen who belonged to neither of
these extremes of the party and who, like the architect of all the key
changes in welfare provision from 1925 until the war, Neville
Chamberlain, were anything but intellectuals, we are left with a
paradox and a puzzle. If overt social thought counts for so little in
the acts of practical politicians, what part, if any, did it play in the
legislative rise of the welfare state? The answer lies in the extent to
which social thought defines both the problems needing to be
tackled and the range of solutions which can be seriously
contemplated. In establishing contributory pensions in 1925,
abolishing the poor law and replacing it by public assistance, local
authority hospitals and municipal child care in 1929, and
transferring responsibility for the long-term unemployed to the
central government in 1934, Chamberlain was consciously
pursuing ‘the full circle of security for the worker’ accepted as an
objective on all sides.139 Clement Attlee observed to Harold Laski in
1944 before the great Labour welfare programme of 1945–51:
I count our progress much more by the extent to which what

we cried in the wilderness five and thirty years ago has now
become part of the assumptions of the ordinary man and
woman. The acceptance of these assumptions has its effect
both in legislation and administration, but its gradualness
tends to hide our appreciation of the facts.140
But legislation and administration did not merely reflect or absorb

increasingly professional thought. They also interacted with
increasingly professional administrative practice.
(2) The welfare professions and the welfare state

In 1958 an American student of the British welfare state observed
of British socialism, ‘Utilitarianism and the managerial aspects of
Fabianism have gradually triumphed over Utopian socialism,
revolutionary socialism and Christian socialism’.141 All three
socialisms, however, believed in managerialism in the sense of
control by expert elites, whether the Webbs’ ‘co-efficients’, H.G.
Wells’s ‘new samurai’, Lenin’s ‘inner party democracy’, Tawney’s
professional functionaries, or indeed Beveridge’s explicit ‘rule of the
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expert’.142 What they perhaps did not bargain for was the extent to
which the welfare state would come to exist as much for the
welfare professions as for their ‘clients’, the ostensible beneficiaries.
In his Essays on ‘The Welfare State’ (1958) one of the pioneers of
the academic study of social administration, Richard Titmuss,
asked whether the social services were ‘being artificially developed
by the professional, administrative and technical interests upon
whose skills the services depend’:
What, to put it crudely, are we getting for our money? Is it an

increasing proportion of the cost going, first, to those who do
the welfare and, second, for treating at a higher standard the
symptoms of need rather than in curing or preventing the
causes of need?
He instanced the huge total of future expenditure mortgaged to

fund the retirement pensions of some 1,500,000 professional and
technical workers and administrators in the Health Service.143 He
foresaw in the drift towards professional control the threat of
irresponsible power:
As the social services become more complex, more specialized

and subject to a finer division of labour they become less
intelligible to the lay councillor or public representative. A
possible consequence is that, collectively, more power may
come to reside in the hands of these interests. The question
that needs to be asked of professional associations is whether
they are prepared to assume greater responsibilities to match
their added knowledge and the power that accompanies it.144
The knife cut both ways of course, and most welfare professions
claimed that they wished to increase their power and
responsibilities precisely in order to provide a more caring and
efficient service. Either way, the welfare professions were not
passive spectators of the rise of the welfare state: they were active
partners whose influence on the kind, pace and structure of
provision was often crucial, if not indeed decisive.
Nowhere was this partnership more clearly seen than in the
evolution of the National Health Service. Of all the caring
professions the doctors have always been regarded as the most
344
indispensable and therefore the most powerful, whenever they were

united. Their power was manifested in 1911 when the British
Medical Association forced Lloyd George to modify his health
insurance scheme and increase the capitation fee per patient paid to
the panel doctors as the price of their co-operation.145 Between the
wars, however, when the foundations of the NHS were laid, the
doctors were not united but split between three rival interests, each
of whom hoped to dominate the emerging service: the voluntary
hospitals, the insurance-based panel doctor system, and the local
authority health services including the newly transferred poor law
hospitals.146 After 1929 the voluntary hospitals, ancient, venerable
and staffed by the leaders of the medical profession (usually on an
honorary, part-time basis), began to lose ground to the old poor
law infirmaries, now operated by the city and county councils with
public funds and full-time staffs. The local authorities, with their
other responsibilities for preventive public health, tuberculosis,
venereal diseases, and school, child and natal clinics, bid fair to
become ‘a state medical service by instalments, almost by
stealth’.147 The panel doctors feared they were on the way to
extinction, but were given a boost by the Dawson Report of the
new Ministry of Health’s Consultative Council on Medical and
Allied Services in 1920, which called for the grouping of general
practitioners into ‘primary health centres’ as the first line of
medical care.148
The Dawson Report is an excellent example of the influence of
a leading professional on policy in his own field. During the war Sir
Bertrand Dawson (from 1920 Lord Dawson of Penn), physician to
King George V, had become the major-general responsible for
organizing army medical services in Europe, where his experience
had taught him the need for the detailed co-ordination of health
care. Although far from socialist, his ideas were naturally taken up
by the socialist State Medical Service Association and the Labour
Party, but his own outlook was simply professional: the ‘increasing
conviction that the best means of maintaining health and curing
disease should be made available to all citizens’.149 Dawson’s
‘utopian picture’ went too far for most general practitioners, who
feared the loss of their autonomy and the right to sell their practices
on retirement, then their only source of superannuation. The
BMA’s Report on A General Medical Service for the Nation in
1938—a further example of welfare policy making by the
345
profession, though a defensive one—concentrated on extending

health insurance treatment to cover workers’ families, and on
making the ‘family doctor’ the centrepiece of a co-ordinated
national health system, controlling access to the consultant and
specialist services.150
Meanwhile, many working-class families were deserting the
general practitioner for the cheaper outpatient departments of the
hospitals, both voluntary and public, and for the many specialized
services of the local authorities, including the school, child and
antenatal clinics. In the hospital sector, the local authority
institutions in the 1930s rapidly overtook the voluntary hospitals in
numbers of beds, medical technology and range of services. They
were backed by the Ministry of Health, where the Chief Medical
Officer of Health in the late 1930s, Sir Arthur MacNalty, aimed at
the ‘growth of the National Health Service…provided by local
authorities for all classes of the population’. Their speed of advance
took the voluntary hospitals by surprise, and in 1939 the latter
belatedly set up the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust to pursue
the co-ordination on a regional basis of hospital services.151
By the time the Second World War arrived, with its imperative
demand for an integrated hospital system to cope with the expected
massive casualties from air attacks, the need for a national health
service was universally accepted, but the three rival interests had
fought one another almost to a standstill over who should
administer it. The BMA for the GPs and consultants set up a
Medical Planning Commission which reported in 1942 in favour of
a planned service but opposed anything which stood in the way of
autonomy for the individual doctor and the voluntary hospital.152
The Ministry looked to a public salaried service based on health
centres and the local authorities. Yet such was the power of the
rival factions of the profession that the resultant National Health
Service was itself fragmented into three independent sectors, the
hospital service, the general practitioner service, and the personal
and public services of the local authorities.153
The National Health Service Act of 1946 has been described as
‘a “doctor’s measure” much more than a “patient’s measure”; that
is to say, it was intended to correct certain desperately serious faults
in the organization and quality of the British medical services rather
than in their class distribution.’154 As in 1911 so in 1948 the BMA
got its way in negotiations with the minister, now Aneurin Bevan,
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over scales and methods of payment.155 It was also a doctor’s

measure in the sense of ensuring that at every level of organization,
from the Ministry through the Regional Hospital Boards down to
the Local Medical Committees for general practice, the profession
was represented and was generally deferred to by the lay members.
In an astonishing example of reluctant corporatism the minister
promised to submit all draft regulations to the BMA before
promulgating them.156 Harry Eckstein, the American historian of
the NHS, concluded:
What the BMA had been denied during the drafting of the
NHS Bill, it got immediately after its enactment…. What was
granted, in effect, was the right to argue a case rather than
merely to present it, and an assurance that agreement with the
profession would be earnestly sought, not just that its views
would be taken into consideration.157
According to Brian Abel Smith, historian of the nursing profession,

the power and privilege of the doctors were now entrenched
because ‘ministers did not dare to challenge a profession which had
by now too high a standing in the eyes of public opinion’.158
This verdict has been amply borne out by the subsequent history
of the NHS. In the allocation of resources the doctors’ priorities
override the patients’ needs. Hospital medicine predominates over
primary care; high technology medicine such as cardiology and
transplant surgery takes priority over mental health or geriatrics;
under the 1959 Mental Health Act doctors have absolute power to
incarcerate patients indefinitely; and under the 1967 Abortion Act
this ‘great social responsibility is placed firmly on the shoulders of
the medical profession’ by law. 159 Despite the increase in
malpractice suits and criminal cases in which the General Medical
Council has usually failed to act until forced to by court decisions,
an official Committee of Inquiry into the Regulation of the Medical
Profession in 1975 concluded that ‘the medical profession should
be largely self-regulated’ because ‘the most effective safeguard of
the public is the self-respect of the profession’.160 Even though a
survey in 1977 showed that most ‘improvements’ in the doctor-
patient relationship were for the benefit of the doctor rather than
the patient, the BMA in 1979 was still seeking payments for
services beyond a narrowly defined norm, which in effect redefined
347
and limited the responsibility of the GP to the patient.161 Above all,

a doctor-dominated service had turned health care from a broad
social concern with the whole lifestyle, conditions of work and the
environment of the population into a narrow concern with the sick
individual.162
Nevertheless, despite the cynical criticism of the ‘disabling
profession’ by Illich and others,163 this had been done in all good
faith: every profession defines its problems in terms of the solutions
it is qualified to offer and the service it believes in. A health service
defined and dominated by treatment specialists was bound to be a
sickness-oriented system rather than a programme for positive
health.
What applies to the health service applies equally to the other
social services. One observer wrote in 1965:
Over the past fifty years the treatment of social problems has
been dropped into the professional lap and has been held on
to tightly. The propaganda about the professional’s exclusive
right to treat social problems has reached its high mark. The
professionals, the public and even patients are firmly
convinced that the only ‘bona fide’ treatments and ‘cures’
available come from ‘legitimate professionals’ with the right
set of degrees.164
Most of the social services have been organized around professional

skills rather than client needs, for the obvious reason that the
professionals came with the rise of public welfare to control access
to the service and allocation of its resources at the point of
provision. The key role of the caring professions in the rise of the
welfare state can be illustrated in relation to social work,
education, and town planning.
Professional social work was invented by social workers. The
attempt by the Charity Organization Society in late Victorian
England to discriminate between the ‘deserving’ and the
‘undeserving’ poor—later softened to the helpable versus the
hopeless cases—led to a training course for ‘case workers’ at
Southwark from 1892 which, transferred to the new London
School of Economics in 1912, was the foundation of the profession
at the heart of both voluntary charity and the growing social
services of local government.165 Between the wars it tended to
348
fragment into the specialisms dealing with the elderly, the sick and
convalescent, the mentally ill, the handicapped of various kinds,
children in need of care, delinquents of all ages, ‘problem families’,
and so on. The classic process of ‘feedback’ came into operation,
with every extension of welfare legislation serving to reveal still
more social problems requiring treatment. Titmuss’s remark in
1965 could have applied to any part of the twentieth century:
‘during the last twenty years, whenever the British people have
identified and investigated a social problem there has followed a
national call for more social work and more trained social
workers.’166 This ad hoc method of growth led to a proliferation of
officials treating individuals rather than the families in which the
problems originated, and the Seebohm Committee on Personal
Social Services in 1968 recommended an integrated profession with
a single generic training.167 A Fabian critic commented, ‘A citizen
reading the report might indeed conclude that it had more to do
with the work satisfaction and career structure of the professional
social worker than it had to do with his own needs or rights in the
modern welfare state.’168 Another professor of social administration
remarked, ‘Each additional social worker appointed revealed the
need for two more.’169 The unintended consequence was a further
expansion and bureaucratization of the system, with more
administrators and fewer field workers in contact with the public.
The ensuing 1970 Act was ‘a charter for social workers’, who
became in effect a court without appeal in the disbursement of
relief in money or kind to emergency applicants, in decisions to
take children into care, and in preparing social inquiry reports on
convicted delinquents for sentencing purposes. Although social
workers do not have the prestige or the rewards of doctors—they
are known to the public for their failures rather than for their
successes—they have to a large extent taken control of the lives and
fate of large and vulnerable sections of the public. To society at
large they have become the most visible representatives of the
welfare state, so that the profession and the system have come to
appear identical.
Teachers are a much less successful profession than doctors or
social workers, but they have nevertheless had considerable
influence on the development of education under the welfare state.
Much of that influence, however, has been self-frustrating, because
of the fragmentation of the profession into quarrelling factions
349
reflecting the divisions of the English education system by social

class and educational level. The National Union of Teachers,
founded by the elementary teachers in 1878, came to represent the
bulk of non-degreed teachers in the state elementary schools (until
1944 for most children to age 14) and, since 1944, in the primary
and secondary modern schools, most of them underpaid women,
while the grammar and public boarding school teachers tended to
join the Assistant Masters’ and Assistant Mistresses’ Associations,
or the (until recently) single-sex Association of School Masters.170
At the higher education level there was a similar division between
the university teachers in the Association of University Teachers
and the other college lecturers, represented by the Association of
Teachers in Technical Institutions and its predecessors, and more
recently by the new Association of Polytechnic Lecturers.171 These
entrenched bodies helped to perpetuate the institutional divisions,
so that it became almost automatic for the 1944 Education Act, for
example, to be interpreted, despite its neutral language, as laying
down a tripartite division of state secondary education into
grammar, technical and secondary modern schools.
The transition to the supposedly classless comprehensive school
in the 1960s and 1970s, opposed by many grammar school teachers
but pushed through by the NUT and its allies in the Labour Party,
was partially thwarted by the teachers’ practice of ‘streaming’,
which had the same self-fulfilling effects on the children’s
performance as the old tripartite schools.172 This was possible
because, more than in any other advanced country, it was the
teachers who decided how and what should be taught. As a Chief
Education Officer said in the 1970s, ‘Within reasonable limits the
headmaster and his staff are free to run the school as they think
best.’173 In few other countries do parents have so little knowledge
or influence over what is done to their children inside school or
have the teachers been so successful at resisting parental demands
for involvement or change (a position now under challenge by
education secretary Kenneth Baker and the Thatcher
government).174 The NUT were able to emasculate the Plowden
Committee’s 1967 proposals for educational priority areas with
greater resources in inner cities, and A.H.Halsey’s 1977 proposals
for parental participation in pre-school nursery centres.175
Nevertheless, the teaching profession has never been able to
achieve the same autonomy as the more prestigious professions.
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They were able to exclude untrained (including degreed) teachers

from state schools only in the late 1960s when a prominent NUT
member, Edward Short, became Secretary of State for Education,
but his support for a Teachers’ Registration Council on the lines of
the General Medical Council failed to overcome the divided views
of the teachers’ organizations.176 Their problem was not merely that
the profession was fragmented but, paradoxically, that it was too
enthusiastic for its own good about the value of the service it
provided. In pressing governments to expand education, unlike the
medical, legal and other professions which limited entry in order to
control the labour market, the teachers recurrently overproduced
themselves, thus overstocking the market and reducing their own
employability.177 The profession nevertheless played a vital role in
the welfare state and in the reproduction of professional society.
Town planners, a much more recently established profession
stemming from the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, have
achieved even less autonomy than the teaching profession. Yet they
have collectively become one of the most powerful of professions,
since their decisions in the post-war period have had a visible effect
on the largest numbers of people. Given their traditionally narrow
view of their function as concerned primarily to control mixed land
use and to end overcrowding and urban sprawl by planned
dispersal to suburbs and new towns, their ability to overwhelm the
public and their elected councillors with technical expertise, and the
enormous impact their decisions had on property values, they were
able to reshape whole communities according to their vision of the
future. They certainly had the most influence on the development
of further planning legislation, since only they understood the
technical complexities of the law and its administration.178
Unfortunately, the consequences were not as benign as their
intentions. Not only did planned dispersal of the population
intensify the class segregation which had from the beginning been a
feature of industrial society, yielding amorphous public and private
housings estates with ever more finely graded social strata, but the
condition aptly called ‘planners’ blight’ came to infect the inner
cities, where slum clearance and zoning laws caused large areas to
fall into decay. 179 Whether or not the criticism was wholly
deserved—and the inner zones of many unplanned American cities
like Houston and Los Angeles could be equally blighted—town
planners by the 1970s became the most bitterly attacked of all the
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public service professions. Their alienation of both the powerful

propertied interests and the general populace underlined the
leading role they had played in the expansion of the interventionist
state.
The doctors, social workers, teachers and town planners amply
illustrate the way in which the welfare professions contributed
directly, both in policy making and in day-to-day practice, to the
development of the welfare state. As Titmuss put it in 1965, ‘In the
modern world, the professions are increasingly the arbiters of our
welfare fate; they are the key holders to equality of outcome; they
help to determine the pattern of redistribution in social policy.’180
They were able to use their strategic position at the point of
decision making and delivery of vital services to increase their
power, status and rewards. They could not have done so, however,
unless their services had been perceived as indispensable and as
contributing directly to the needs of the citizen of the increasingly
corporate society. They therefore needed the faith and support of
the public, the beneficiaries of the welfare state, and to the role of
the latter in its evolution we must finally turn.
(3) Citizenship and the corporate society

T.H.Marshall’s concept of social citizenship was a brilliant
distillation, after the fact, of half a century of developing moral
claims upon the state on behalf of all its members. As we have seen,
the welfare state represented a moral revolution, a widening of the
notion of ‘my neighbour’ from the extended family, the parish, the
poor law union, and the county and county borough, to the whole
national community. From this point of view it was more than a
patchwork of devices to secure the unfortunate against the
exigencies of life in the mature capitalist economy, or even to buy
off the discontent of capitalism’s victims. It was an integral part of
the growing corporate society, in which ‘we are all members one of
another’ and each has a claim upon all the rest to a minimum social
income, access to educational opportunity, health care, decent
housing and a clean environment, and even (until recently) to full
employment, all in the name of citizenship itself. Thus corporate
society restored, as an ideal if not always in practice, the ‘body
politic’ of pre-industrial tradition, now informed by an egalitarian
rather than a patriarchal spirit. Interdependence between its
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organically related parts came to replace the atomic individualism

of the intervening period of industrialism. In the eyes of its
protagonists the moral ideal of mutual responsibility had replaced
the enlightened self-interest of free market capitalism.
Of course, it is worth repeating, all classes, all interest groups, all
social groupings of whatever kind claim a moral superiority to all
their rivals, based on the belief that their particular contribution to
society’s well-being and survival is superior to all others’ and that
what is good for themselves is good for all the rest. The principle of
social justice upheld by the welfare professions differed from other
such principles only in its marriage of a comprehensive acceptance
of the claims of social citizenship with the self-interest of the
professionals who existed to meet them. As in pre-industrial society
dominated by the landed aristocracy and in industrial society
dominated by the owner-managing capitalist, so in post-industrial
professional society the moral ideal of the dominant elite came out
on top—or, rather, the interest which could impose its ideal upon
the rest became the dominant elite. It was, as we shall see in the
next chapter, the professional belief that human capital in the shape
of educated professional expertise devoted to society’s needs and
functions was morally superior both to the passive property of
traditional landlords and rentiers and to the active capital of the
owner-managing business men that underlay the rise of
It would be tempting to think that this revival of the body politic,
of a more cohesive, organic model of society, was the direct result of
pressure from the welfare professions’ clients, of the demand of an
increasingly democratic electorate for the care and support of all
citizens who fell into difficulties beyond their own means to avert.
Yet Bentley Gilbert’s observation that ‘welfare legislation never
figured as an electoral issue in the years before World War I’181 might
be extended down to the Second World War, in the sense that no new
initiative in social legislation was put before the electorate before it
was introduced. It was not until the 1945 election that a general
programme of welfare legislation was voted on by the electors—by
which time all parties claimed to support it so that there was in effect
no choice. Before that the role of the voters, where it impinged on the
growth of the welfare state at all, was to defend rights already
granted, as in the call for the restoration of unemployment benefit
cuts and the rejection of the means test in the 1930s.
353
This reflects a surprising paradox, that although the mass of the

people were often indifferent if not opposed to the introduction of
welfare measures such as national insurance or a raised school-
leaving age, they almost always vehemently resisted the withdrawal
of such gains. There was, and indeed still is, a sort of ratchet effect
(frequently complained of by the free market lobby) by which the
level of welfare provision was steadily and easily notched up but
was only painfully, and usually temporarily, pushed down again.
What Tawney called the social income was not demanded
beforehand or even welcomed when it came, but once it was in
place any attempt to reduce it was bitterly opposed.
The reason for this paradox is simple enough. As we have seen,
social problems might be keenly felt but were not intellectually
realized until they were articulated by social reformers and the
increasingly professional bureaucrats who succeeded them, and
the choice of solutions depended on the way they were defined.
The definitions and possible solutions were offered by what may
be called professional solutionmongers: self-appointed reformers
like the Fabians, the Family Welfare Association (the old Charity
Organization Society), or the Child Poverty Action Group, elected
politicians like Lloyd George, Churchill or Aneurin Bevan, and
masterful civil servants like Morant, Llewellyn Smith or
Beveridge. Whichever solution was chosen for enactment from
among those on offer—and many of them, like that of the Webbs
versus Churchill and Beveridge’s solution for unemployment,
were diametrically incompatible—rapidly became the benchmark
from which there must be no falling back. What had often been a
mere ad hoc solution soon became an established right of
citizenship.
Not everyone, of course, would accept this view of the growth of
social citizenship as a reluctant but self-reinforcing moral revolution.
The radical New Right, led by Hayek, Milton Friedman and the free
marketeers, have seen it as the road to statism and economic ruin
brought about by well-meaning but misguided liberals and social
democrats.182 The Marxist New Left, on the other hand, have seen it
as a subtle attempt to legitimate capitalism and ensure its survival.
The neo-Marxist Claus Offe has gone further and argued that ever
since capitalism began welfare institutions have been a precondition
of its existence: ‘under modern capitalist conditions, a supportive
framework of non-commodified institutions [i.e. services not sold on
354
the market] is necessary for an economic system that utilizes labour

power as if it were a commodity.’183 Neither the free marketeers nor
the Marxists, however, can explain, except by the machinations of
a supposed conspiracy of their enemies, how so popular yet
unsolicited a framework came into existence, or why after the
recent period of unprecedented right-wing reaction in Britain and
the United States the welfare state not only survives but continues
to grow in terms of public expenditure. The hostilities of both New
Right and New Left to ‘welfare socialism’ cancel each other out and
are evidence against both conspiracies. Some other explanation
must be sought.
The true explanation is the growing role of professionalism in
modern society and the growing influence of the professional social
ideal. The seemingly ad hoc solutions to social problems which
went into the making of the welfare state had a cumulative effect
because there was a coherent social philosophy underlying them.
That philosophy was neither capitalist nor anti-capitalist but
different from both. It was the philosophy of a functional society
based on expertise and the avoidance of waste, especially waste of
the most valuable asset in a complex, highly specialized economy:
human resources.
Curiously enough, both the New Right and the New Left
subscribe, unwittingly, to this philosophy. The neo-Ricardians
justify the free market by its efficient allocation of resources and its
fair distribution of rewards to those who perform most efficiently
the functions that society needs to survive and prosper. The neo-
Marxists are incensed that the free market does not function
efficiently but is shot through with self-defeating inefficiencies or, in
their terminology, ‘contradictions’, which will bring about its
inevitable downfall. Although they disagree diametrically as to the
organization of their alternative societies, they both claim to apply
the same criteria, functional efficiency and the fairest distribution
of rewards. If we allow, as we must given the nature of the
corporate economy and the corporate state, that the two sides
speak for the private sector and the public sector respectively, we
can understand why the first should argue for a free market (that is,
a free corporate market) and the second for a statist bureaucratic
(that is, a state corporate) solution to the problem of social
organization. In each case their chosen solution would maximize
their own power, status and rewards.
355
Returning from the two extremes of professional casuistry to the

middle ground inhabited by most British opinion, we have already
seen something of the role played by professionals in the intellectual
theory and practical development of the welfare state. What
connected the ad hoc and often disparate remedies adopted for the
solution of social problems was not so much any readymade theory
as a common set of assumptions about how a social problem was
defined and what constituted a tolerable solution to it. A social
problem was a situation which was intolerable not merely because
it offended against humanitarian sentiment but because it created
avoidable waste and militated against social efficiency. Thus
poverty, overcrowded slums, and unemployment became social
problems only when they came to be seen as avoidable and as
creating idle, sickly families with underfed children who made poor
workers and unfit soldiers and so undermined national efficiency in
world trade and the defence of the country. The costs of ill-health,
including childish ailments, tuberculosis and venereal disease, in
lost wages, foregone production and belated and therefore more
expensive medical treatment, were higher than those of school
clinics, sanatoria and VD treatment centres, and national health
insurance was cheaper than supporting a poverty-stricken and
broken-down workforce. Neglect of education, beginning with the
lack of secondary education for the intelligent children of the poor,
was a waste of human resources and an encouragement to the
bright and able young to use their talents anti-socially. Even old age
pensions could be justified as a cheaper as well as a morally more
defensible system of support for the elderly than the universally
dreaded workhouse.
Such arguments were not new but at least as old as Edwin
Chadwick’s belief that sanitary reform was a cheaper and more
efficient preventive of ill-health and poverty than urban neglect.
What was new in the twentieth century was the belief that most
social problems, not just the obvious public ones like sanitation and
water supply, were the products of social organization rather than
individual inadequacy. Unemployment, in Beveridge’s subtitle, was
‘a problem of industry’ rather than individual fecklessness. Poverty,
according to Booth, Rowntree, Bowley and Burnett-Hurst, was
caused by low wages, sickness or death of the breadwinner,
unemployment or old age, much more than by drink or gambling.
Slums and urban squalor, according to expert witnesses before the
356
Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904), were caused by

inadequate town planning and the side effects of the casual labour
market. Problems thus defined as institutional and societal rather
than moral and individual cried out for collective, professional
solutions rather than moral discipline or exhortation. And once the
legislative and administrative treatment began, the process of
professionalization and feedback set in, by which the welfare
professionals uncovered new problems which demanded further
legislative and administrative solutions and the recruitment of still
more welfare professionals.
The process, however, went deeper than the self-interested
empire building of the welfare professions and their supporting
bureaucracies. It entailed the application of a new mode of thought,
or the wider-ranging extension of an old one. Over against the
social ideals of the three major Victorian classes—the aristocratic
belief in the sanctity of property and privilege, the capitalist belief
in active capital and competition, and the working-class belief in
labour as the sole source of wealth and the primacy of solidarity—
the welfare professions set up their own professional ideal of
justification by expertise and functional service. Like all class ideals
it represented a challenge and a threat to the other classes. Just as
the original capitalist ideal had been a moral reproach to the
idleness and corruption of the landed aristocracy and the working-
class ideal had been a moral protest against the confiscation of
‘surplus labour’ (a pre-Marxist concept) by both capitalist and
landlord, so the professional ideal, at least in its public sector form,
was a moral condemnation of the social irresponsibility and
functional inefficiency of the unregulated free market which it
accused of producing most of the problems of industrial society.
After a century of hegemony (to use Gramsci’s neo-Marxist
terminology), the entrepreneurial ideal was by the mid-twentieth
century in retreat. Its principal tenet that the individual standing
alone could solve all his own problems was manifestly
inappropriate to a corporate economy in which the individual
business man was everywhere yielding to the corporate leviathan,
and to a corporate society in which social problems were held to be
structural and organizational. To the professional ideal capitalist
individualism was disingenuous—corporate capitalism no longer
practised competition either within the corporation or in the
market place. Where it stood in the way of ‘obviously needed’
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reforms, such as wartime rent controls, slum clearance or social

security, it had to be converted, coerced or pushed aside. Not that
the entrepreneurial ideal was defeated overnight or harried out of
existence. On the contrary, a struggle between the ideals ensued
which is still going on, in which capitalism in a sea-changed form
is currently making a determined counter attack. If we wish to
understand the transformation of modern society from an
individualist to a corporate basis, from an individual capitalist to a
corporate professional society, we must now turn to the struggle
between the class ideals and the triumph of the professional ideal.
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Chapter 8
THE TRIUMPH OF THE

PROFESSIONAL IDEAL
Underlying the emergence of the corporate society, we saw in the

last chapter, lay the rise of a professional society. A professional
society is one structured around career hierarchies rather than
classes, one in which people find their place according to trained
expertise and the service they provide rather than the possession or
lack of inherited wealth or acquired capital. This definition is an
ideal type to which the real world can only approximate. In
practice, every society contains elements of both horizontal class
and vertical interest. Whether the weft of class or the warp of
interest predominates in the social fabric (in the now familiar
metaphor) will depend on the nature of the cloth and, in the shot
silk of transition where both are striving for prominence, on the
play of the light and the angle of vision. In late twentieth-century
English society with its heavy hangover of class feeling and rhetoric
it is exceptionally difficult to discern the emerging threads of
professional interest through the remnants of declining class.
The difficulty is intensified by two further factors. Firstly, the
concomitants of class—accent, deportment, dress, lifestyle, and the
peculiarly English use of ‘good manners’ to put down social
inferiors—have been perpetuated by a divisive educational system
which segregates the traditional classes from an early age. Secondly,
and more importantly, the transition from a class-based to a more
professional society is not a clean break with a completely fresh
start, but a gradual change in which the already advantaged have
the best chance of getting a foot on the most attractive professional
ladders and climbing them faster than others. The rich and well-
connected use the old class-based education system to give
themselves a head start in the new race for power and status and
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THE TRIUMPH OF THE PROFESSIONAL IDEAL
help one another to compete for the best positions. The difference
is that now wealth alone is not enough: talent and training are
required to climb the ladders, and although privileged entrants may
have the edge they have to compete with other, sometimes more
talented people climbing up from below.
To many of the disadvantaged this may seem to be a distinction
without a difference, especially as the professionals tend to replace
the entrepreneurs as the ‘bosses’ with whom they still have to deal.
Handicapped by extraneous factors unrelated to innate worth, like
social background, regional speech and lack of that indefinable self-
assurance which is the chief benefit of a public school or Oxbridge
education, the manual workers may well think that the new system
is as class-ridden as the old. Those like themselves who do reach the
top tend to acquire on the way up a veneer of ‘upper classness’ as
self-protection. Moreover, there are still career hierarchies in which
wealth and connections are decided advantages, such as merchant
banking and higher management, though even here newcomers
from modest backgrounds, like the unit trust pioneers Jim Slater
and Peter Walker and the pension fund managers Ralph Quartano
and Hugh Jenkins mentioned above, can call the shots. Equally,
there are career hierarchies, like professional sport or pop music,
where an upper-crust accent is a positive disadvantage and has to
be disguised. Nevertheless, in the new dispensation even the
advantaged must qualify by talent and training, and the test,
usually overlooked, is what happens to the public school educated
without the necessary talent and qualifications, whose downward
mobility is rarely recorded. Professional society is not less
meritocratic if some acquire merit more easily than others. Fairness
is not necessarily the first aim of the system and, if it were, is it fair
that some at every social level will always be abler and more
diligent than others? The aim of the system, if it has one, is social
efficiency, the performance of certain services by the most expert in
talent and training. To put it more concretely, the object of the
professionals manning the system is to justify the highest status and
rewards they can attain by the social necessity and efficiency they
claim for the service they perform. That on occasion the service is
neither essential nor efficient is no obstacle to the principle. It only
needs to be thought so by those providing and receiving it.
Justification by service to the client and society lies at the root of
the professional social ideal.
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Social conflict, of which class conflict is a special case, I argued

in the earlier book, is at bottom a struggle for income, status and
power.1 Crude material self-interest, however, is neither very
flattering to the ego nor very persuasive of the rest of society. Any
group seeking to improve its position in the societal market for
people will present a conscious image of its ideal self and the ideal
society to which it aspires. The group whose ideal image most
permeates what may be called the texture of social thought—not so
much conscious, academic social philosophy as the terminology, the
concepts and criteria, above all the unquestioned assumptions in
which everyday talk about society is carried on—will itself
dominate society and enjoy the highest status and rewards. In pre-
industrial times the aristocratic ideal of the leisured gentleman and
his hierarchical society, based on the unearned income from passive
property and on selection by patronage, justified the hegemony of
landed gentry who, to the admiration of Malthus, ‘consumed more
than they produced.’ Industrial society was dominated by the
individual owner-managing entrepreneur, whose ideal was a society
based on active capital, the engine which drove the whole machine,
and on free market competition, which selected the fittest to survive
and provided goods and services at lowest cost. The entrepreneurial
ideal challenged its aristocratic precursor as immoral and corrupt:
passive property was considered idle wealth and patronage was
labelled ‘Old Corruption’.
Both ideals were challenged by the working-class ideal based on
labour as the source of all wealth, and on co-operation as the
alternative to competition, in the shape of either small-scale
Owenite socialism or state collectivism. In terms of that ideal both
landlord and capitalist were parasites, living on the surpluses, rent
and profit, extracted from the working class with the aid of the
monopoly of land and the unequal competition of the labour
market. Although the working-class ideal never succeeded in
dominating society, it was not altogether without effect: its claims
were, very partially, met by the collectivist legislation which
restricted the rights of property owners and factory masters and
recognized the bargaining position of trade unions.
The history of nineteenth-century England can largely be written
in terms of the struggle between these three ideals, in which the
entrepreneurial ideal came out on top but the other two survived to
continue the fight. Yet it cannot be fully understood without the
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contribution of a further class and its ideal. In the earlier book I

called the professional or non-business class the ‘forgotten middle
class’ of Victorian England not only because it was then largely
ignored as a class by contemporaries, but because, although it
provided most of the social theorists and commentators of the age,
it ‘forgot itself in the social theories it invented and popularized.2
John Stuart Mill, one of the more sceptical, said of the political
economists:
They revolve in their eternal circle of landlords, capitalists,

and labourers, until they seem to think of the distinction of
society into those three classes as if it were one of God’s
ordinances, not man’s, and as little under human control as
the division of day and night.3
The political economists were not alone. All the professional

thinkers of the day thought about society in tripartite terms:
Carlyle’s ‘Workers, Master Workers, and Master Unworkers’, F.D.
Maurice’s ‘the aristocracy, the trading classes, and the working
classes’, Karl Marx’s landowners, bourgeoisie and proletariat,
Matthew Arnold’s ‘Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace’.4 Only
the last, in an obscure place, his report on continental education to
the Taunton Commission on middle-class schools in 1868, found it
necessary to distinguish between the two parts of the middle class,
the professional class ‘with fine and governing qualities, but
without the idea of service’ and ‘the immense business class which
is becoming so important a power in all countries’ but which in
England was cut off from the aristocracy and the professions, and
‘without governing qualities’.5
Yet this self-neglect did not prevent the Victorian professional
class from having a social ideal and a role in the development of
society. Even when providing ideals for the other classes and
considering themselves as individuals raised above the economic
battle, they referred to their own kind in flattering terms: James
Mill’s middle rank exempt from labour, ‘the chief source of all that
has exalted and refined human nature’; Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ in
charge of ‘all the so-called arts and sciences, the possession and
application of which constitute the civilization of a country’; John
Stuart Mill’s ‘learned class’ which ought to be endowed by the
state; Carlyle’s ‘Aristocracy of Talent’; and so on down to the
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Webb’s ‘Co-efficients’, H.G.Wells’ ‘new samurai’ and Beveridge’s

‘rule of the expert’, noted above.6
What all these images had in common was the ideal of educated
talent in the service of society. In nineteenth-century terms this was
a very radical ideal. It was just as hostile to ‘Old Corruption’ as the
entrepreneurial ideal, and indeed helped to undermine and replace
it by the selection of public officials by examination; it also became
critical of its main ally, the business ideal, and helped to curb the
excesses of the free market in the realms of public health, factory
reform, food and drug adulteration, and so on.7 In the process,
what had appeared to be a unified bourgeois ideal became
bifurcated and turned against itself. The anti-industrial spirit which
Martin Wiener has discerned in English culture since 1850 is, as we
shall see next, nothing less than the triumph of the professional
ideal.
1 THE PROFESSIONAL IDEAL AND THE

DECLINE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SPIRIT
In a deservedly famous book, Martin Wiener attributes the relative
economic decline of Britain since 1850 to ‘the decline of the
industrial spirit’.8 Since the Industrial Revolution when inventors
and entrepreneurs were the cultural heroes of popular works like
Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help and Lives of the Engineers and the Great
Exhibition of 1851 was a celebration of Britain’s technological
leadership, the educated elite, according to Wiener, has become
increasingly anti-industrial, increasingly ashamed of the
materialism and money-grubbing of dirty-handed industry,
increasingly hostile to technological progress and economic
growth. The educated young took to industrial employment only as
a last resort, if they failed to find employment in the Civil Service,
the army or the church, the liberal professions, or the government
of the empire. A climate of opinion developed amongst the upper
and middle classes which looked back to an old, pre-industrial,
agricultural and craft-based countryside as the ‘real’ England, and
regarded the industrial towns in which most people came to live as
an aberration, a ‘city of dreadful night’ through which the nation
must pass from a bright, ‘natural’, moral past to a hopefully post-
industrial future of leafy housing estates and garden cities. This
rustic, folksy myth was not confined to conservative, nostalgic
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paternalists like Richard Jeffries or Stanley Baldwin, but

constituted the ‘English dream’ of radical critics like John Ruskin
and William Morris:
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,

Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean.9
(Filthy, smelly, disease-ridden medieval London would have been

much flattered by Morris’s vision of a Utopia that never was.)
Wiener continues:
In consequence of this anti-industrial myth, England became

an industrial society led by men who were deeply opposed to
what they saw as the industrial ethos with all its effects and
ideas. Business men increasingly shunned the role of
entrepreneur for the more socially rewarding role of
gentleman…. Gentry values, and the gentry myth of England,
domesticated industrialism in political thought and action as
they did in the wider culture, separating the ‘acceptable’ from
the ‘unacceptable’ face of industrial capitalism. There was, as
a result, little commitment by political leaders to the whole-
hearted pursuit of economic expansion.10
Leading industrialists, like Samuel Courtauld in 1942, came to

believe that ‘the worship of material values is the fatal disease from
which our age is suffering’; and the president of the Institute of
Industrial Management told his members the following year that ‘the
old conception of industry was based on the amount of money to be
made out of it, and he suggested that the proper outlook was how
much happiness sprang from it.’11 Many British business men
thought of themselves either as gentlemen-farmers more concerned
with their milk yields than their industrial investment capital/output
ratio, or as public servants skilfully maintaining the status quo.12
Their leisurely, gentlemanly attitude to business, which viewed the
too avid pursuit of profit as sordid, ended in the relative stagnation
of the British economy, which by the 1960s had been overtaken not
only by the Americans but by the West Europeans and the Japanese.
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The Wiener thesis has been much criticized by economic

historians, who have pointed out that it is the actual behaviour of
business men, not the brave, benevolent face they put on it in public
relations exercises, that determines economic growth; that the rate
of British economic growth, although declining since the 1870s,
was as fast as the country’s resources warranted; that a nation as
small as Britain could not indefinitely continue as the workshop of
the world; that the pace of growth for a generation after 1945 was
faster than in any period since the Industrial Revolution; and that
in the same period, in which Britain was overtaken in production
and national income per head, the overtaking countries, notably
West Germany and Japan, were not burdened with heavy defence
costs and a declining empire.13 Others have pointed out that the
public schools and universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge,
which Wiener blamed for their lack of interest in science and
technology, began to introduce those subjects and to send more of
their graduates into industry and commerce at precisely the period,
the generation before the First World War, when Britain’s relative
industrial decline began.14
Whether or not there are other causes of Britain’s economic
decline, there is still enough truth in Wiener’s description of the
anti-industrial outlook of the British to warrant investigation. Two
problems, however, arise with his aetiology. Wiener puts down the
nostalgic, conservative, gentlemanly attitudes of British business
men to the survival of pre-industrial aristocratic values in a country
which never experienced the overthrow of the aristocracy by war or
revolution. These values were absorbed by the new industrialists
both directly, through emulation by business men themselves
buying land and setting themselves up as country gentlemen, and
indirectly, through the education of their sons in the public schools
and the older universities. The problems with this explanation are,
firstly, that it assumes that aristocratic values were in fact anti-
industrial and, secondly, that they were the values taught in the new
and reformed public schools and universities of the Victorian age.
Contrary to the first of these assumptions, the aristocracy and
gentry before and during the Industrial Revolution were the most
economically progressive and profit-oriented ruling class in Europe.
They invested eagerly in agricultural improvement and enclosure,
in trading ventures, mining, roads, river navigations and canals,
docks, early railways, urban development and even, where
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circumstances permitted, in manufacturing such as brick-making,

iron-founding, and textiles.15 It is true that they preferred not to
manage such enterprises in person but through managers or
leaseholders, but so little did they despise wealth from whatever
source that they would marry anyone for her money. It was the
smaller gentry on the fringes of the landed class, like some of Jane
Austen’s characters, who felt threatened by nouveaux riches
‘tradesmen from Birmingham’, but the self-confident aristocracy
felt no such insecurity.
Curiously enough, the emulation of the landed class which
Wiener blames for the ‘gentrification of the bourgeoisie’ was one of
the driving forces of the Industrial Revolution, leading inventors
and entrepreneurs alike striving to join the ruling elite and ‘found a
family’. While this might have diverted their energies and capital
away from industry, as it had for generations of new men before
them (only to be replaced by others coming up behind), the solid
permanent nature of the new fixed industrial capital made the
break increasingly difficult, while the increasing scale and wealth of
the late Victorian company made it perfectly possible to unite a
landed estate and country house with a permanent base in industry.
Sir Julius Wernher, Sir John Guest (Lord Wimborne), W.H.Smith
and Lord Leverhulme were only the best known of the newcomers,
who bought land without giving up business and were welcomed by
London ‘society’ at the highest level. Meanwhile, the great
landlords drew an increasing proportion of their wealth from
mines, docks, railways and urban property, far outdistancing their
agrarian country cousins suffering from the agricultural depression
in the south and east, and were not averse to investing their
surpluses and even themselves in business itself.16 In 1896 167
noblemen, a quarter of the active peerage, held directorships of
companies. 17 Far from despising one another, the wealthier
landowners and the neocorporate capitalists joined together in a
new plutocracy.18 If at the very time that Britain’s relative economic
decline was supposed to have begun the most prosperous and
successful landowners were throwing in their lot with big business,
that decline could hardly be due to the anti-industrial influence of
the aristocracy.
Contrary to the second assumption, that the anti-industrial
values taught in the public schools and older universities were the
surviving aristocratic values of an earlier epoch, the schools and
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colleges of the Victorian age were newly reformed institutions

consciously reacting against the old, pre-industrial society. From
the point of view of the new society, imbued with middle-class
values both entrepreneurial and professional, the Oxford and
Cambridge colleges and the old endowed schools were nests of vice,
idleness and inefficiency.19 If they were to serve the needs of a new,
more serious and progressive age they had to be reformed, their
vice and corruption suppressed, and their indolent fellows and
masters turned into hard-working career professionals with a
mission to educate efficient, responsible Christian gentlemen rather
than effete aristocratic rakes and loungers. They even transformed
the idea of a gentleman, from a man of good birth and prickly
military honour into a ‘gentle man’, honest, upright, considerate
and dedicated to the service of his fellows and his country.20
Bertrand Russell grasped the wrong end of the stick when he said
that ‘the concept of the gentleman was invented by the aristocracy
to keep the middle classes in order’.21 Its modern version was
invented by the Victorian middle classes to keep the aristocracy up
to the new moral mark and incidentally end the adolescent practice
of duelling, and was imposed by the reformed public schools and
universities.
The reforms were at first chiefly moral and disciplinary, the
introduction of Thomas Arnold’s system of forming ‘Christian
men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make’: ‘What we
must look for here is, first, religious and moral principles; secondly,
gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability’.22 Arnold has been
given too much credit for the whole revolution, and there were
other reforming headmasters, Vaughan at Harrow, Cotton at
Marlborough, Irving at Uppingham, and many more, but the moral
reaction against the Hogarthian education of the old society was
the same everywhere. Traditional bullying was to be sublimated
into the responsibility of senior boys as monitors or prefects for
discipline, including corporal punishment. The spontaneous
savagery of the old free-for-all playing fields was replaced by
organized games, which fostered team spirit and loyalty to the
house and school as well as individual prowess. Daily chapel, three
times on Sundays, inculcated a serious unaristocratic attitude to
religion which emphasized duty to God and man. The study of the
classics, formerly a pointless ‘mental discipline’ and a source of
Latin tags for church sermons and parliamentary speeches, was
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transformed into an education in the history, literature, philosophy

and politics of the model ruling elites of the ancient world. The
whole system came to be aimed not at socializing a leisured class
for a life of cultured idleness and aristocratic field sports (the
individual sports of hunting, shooting and fishing), but at forming
an active, responsible, physically fit, self-disciplined elite of
professional men and administrators for public service in church
and state, the empire and the liberal professions.
The system spread rapidly to the older public boarding schools
and the new model ones which were being founded on all sides.
Contrary to popular opinion and their own snobbish propaganda,
most of them catered for middle-class boys rather than the
aristocracy and gentry. At Winchester, for example, the most
intellectual of the nine great Clarendon schools, the overwhelming
majority of the boys from 1830 to 1914 came from families in the
church, the law, the armed forces, and other professions—admirers,
no doubt, of the aristocracy but in process of becoming rather a
different class. Only about one in five or six of their fathers were
‘gentlemen of leisure’, and fewer still, one in twenty rising to one in
seven, were in business.23 The new and reformed schools were not
just a middle-class but a professional-class phenomenon. The
aristocracy sent their sons overwhelmingly to Eton, with a small
minority—less than 10 per cent—to other Clarendon schools. The
gentry were perforce more catholic in their choice, but wherever
they went were rarely more than a minority. Business men until the
last decades of the nineteenth century rarely sent their sons to
boarding schools at all unless, like Sir Robert Peel or
W.E.Gladstone, they were intended for public life rather than the
family business.
For the professional middle class the new schools were attractive
because of their economy. They were a cheap and affordable means
of obtaining what was claimed to be an upper-class education at
middle-class prices. Not every school was a Dotheboys Hall, but
the poor food, hard beds, unheated rooms and inadequate
plumbing universally reported kept down the cost. The original,
pre-industrial aristocratic form of education had been by private
tutor, culminating in the frighteningly expensive and morally
dangerous grand tour of Europe, for which ‘schooling in public
with a mob of boys’ was a poor substitute reluctantly resorted to,
especially during the Great French Wars. The railways of the
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Victorian age, together with the system of boarding pupils in

masters’ houses, often to take advantage of the cheap, endowed
teaching at ancient grammar schools, brought the new and
reformed schools within geographical and financial reach of a
burgeoning professional middle class more dependent than their
business counterparts on education and paper qualifications for
their careers.
The careers followed by public school alumni were as strikingly
professional as their fathers’, with some adjustment for
generational changes in fashion. Whereas clerical fathers of
Wykehamists declined from nearly half at mid-century to one in
seven by the end, their clerical sons declined from a third to one-
twentieth or less; but the professions as a whole, including
government service and the armed forces, continued to take about
three out of every four Wykehamists.24 If Winchester is typical—
and lesser public schools took even fewer sons of the aristocracy
and gentry and no more of the business class until the twentieth
century—the reformed public schools of Victorian England were
overwhelmingly staffed by professional men educating the sons of
professional families for professional careers.
The same is true, if to a lesser degree, of the ancient universities.
Reformed from without by the pressure of largely middle-class
public opinion, led by James Heywood, the Manchester Unitarian
banker, and the Benthamite partisans of the Westminster Review,
and from within by Thomas Arnold (after his elevation in 1841 to
the Oxford chair of history), Mark Pattison and Benjamin Jowett at
Oxford and Adam Sedgwick, Henry Sidgwick and the elder Baden
Powell at Cambridge, the two universities were transformed in a
generation from clerical-run seminars for the Anglican clergy and
finishing schools for leisured gentlemen into professionalized
institutions. They were operated by career dons for the sons of the
landed and professional classes preparing for careers in the public
service, including politics, the home and Indian Civil Services,
colonial government, and the liberal professions.25 They still
retained a place for ‘gilded youth’, from the ‘heavy swells’ of
Victorian Oxbridge to the ‘bright young things’ of the Brideshead
Revisited period between the wars, but they were more a decorative
excrescence than a predominant feature. Two-thirds of the
undergraduates at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1843 to
1914 whose backgrounds are known came from professional
369
homes, and no less than 94 per cent of the graduates of Balliol

College, Oxford between 1832 and 1914 went into government
service or the learned professions. Only sixty-five out of 983 Sidney
Sussex men came from the landed gentry, 153 from the business
classes, and fifty-one from the working class; all the rest were from
the professional middle class. Only twenty-nine of the Balliol men
went into business, none into industry but all twenty-nine into
banking and land agency.26 If Sidney Sussex and Balliol were
typical, Victorian Oxbridge, like the public schools, was a
professional-class phenomenon.
What, then, were the values taught in the public schools and
ancient universities of Victorian and Edwardian England? They
were the values of the men who reformed and ran them, the new
breed of career professional masters and dons. They were only
incidentally anti-industrial; their positive aspect, far more
important than the negative, was the belief in education for the
public service. In contemporary terms this meant service of the
public in politics, the home Civil Service, administration of the
empire, and the liberal professions including, not least, the teaching
profession in the public schools and universities. We have seen in
Chapter 4 how great Oxford and Cambridge tutors like T.H.Green,
Arnold Toynbee, Alfred Marshall and A.C. Pigou aimed to send out
into the world, in Marshall’s words, strong men with cool heads
and warm hearts to grapple with the social problems of their age.
T.W.Heyck has argued that ‘the ideal of disinterested public service’
began with the landed gentry, and ‘noblesse oblige’ was certainly a
part of their ideal.27 Yet for them it was optional, and under ‘Old
Corruption’ it was rarely completely disinterested. For the
professional middle class, on the other hand, it was the heart of
their ideal, since their status depended on persuading the public
that they had a disinterested service to offer. Social and educational
work at Toynbee Hall and other university settlements in the slums
was only one way of serving the public. More could be done by
occupying positions of power and influence, as Beveridge did at the
Board of Trade and Keynes at the Treasury. It was not that such
service could not be performed at all in industry—as Rowntree
pioneered social surveying from his base in the chocolate factory; it
was simply that in the opinion of men so educated industry offered
less scope, less excitement, less sense of moving the world in a
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morally progressive direction and, not least, less psychic reward in

the shape of visible prestige and invisible self-respect.
The great African administrator Frederick Lugard expressed it
well when, as a young product of Rossall School, he was offered in
1875 a job in his brother-in-law’s sugar refinery. He wrote to his
sister:
If I go in for this I have to throw overboard the ICS [Indian

Civil Service] which if I passed it would be an infinitely better
thing besides being a thoroughly gentlemanly occupation, and
look at it how I may, I can’t bring myself to think that an
Assistant in a Sugar Factory is such. Of course, a gentleman is
still a gentleman wherever he is, but still the Lugards have
been in the Army and the Church, good servants of God and
the Queen, but few if any have been tradesmen.28
Lugard failed the ICS examination and went to Sandhurst, the

army college, and after service in India, Uganda and Burma became
colonial Governor of Nigeria and Hong Kong. Wiener reads this as
an example of aristocratic values in action, but nowhere did Lugard
hint at the leisured life of the landed gentleman. On the contrary, he
sought and achieved the strenuous life of a great public servant.
The links between the public schools and Oxbridge and the
public service were strengthened by the competitive examinations
for the Indian Civil Service from 1858 and for the home Civil
Service from 1870, by the Cardwell reforms in the army in 1871,
the continuing expansion of the empire, and by the growth and
increasing formalization of the professions. Professional-class
education and the public service were a perfect match: the schools
and ancient universities consciously prepared their students for a
life of service, and the public service provided appropriate
employment for young men with high-grade education but little or
no capital. As a later colonial administrator in Lord Cromer’s crack
Sudan service put it:
My schooling was an excellent preparation for my career in

the Sudan Political Service. From an early age one was taught
to be self-reliant and to accept responsibility. The virtues of
self discipline and physical fitness, both essential elements in
public school training, were to prove of estimable value as
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also was the exercising which one gains from being a house
and subsequently a school monitor.29
The public schools and ancient universities were not intended to

educate business men or their sons and, far from setting out to
convert them to the public service ideal, did what they could to
keep them out and to embarrass them with contempt for ‘trade’
when they insisted on coming. Between 1752 and 1886 only 0.1 per
cent of Oxford entrants and rather more but still only 9.4 per cent
of Cambridge students came from business families.30 University
men were the academic elite of the schools, intent on professional
careers. The schools themselves took rather more business men’s
sons but still only 11 per cent of Wykehamists born between 1820
and 1922 came from business families, increasing to a peak of 15
per cent for those born between 1900 and 1910. Winchester
actually sent more boys into business—an average of 16.4 per cent,
increasing to a peak of 27.9 per cent in 1900–14—than it took
from there.31 Even Oxford and Cambridge, especially after the
establishment of Appointments Committees in 1892 and 1901 to
encourage recruitment to industry, began to send graduates into
business. By 1913 nearly 20 per cent of Oxford graduates and by
1903–07 24 per cent of Cambridge pass men (those without
honours degrees or much hope of passing public entrance
examinations) went into business careers.32
Since the First World War and more particularly since the Second
the public schools and Oxbridge have attracted increasing numbers
of business men’s sons (and, latterly, daughters) and sent more of
them into business. Of boys at Winchester born between 1900 and
1909 and between 1910 and 1919 and at school (mostly) between
the wars, 14 per cent and 15 per cent came from business families
and 28 per cent and 19 per cent went into business.33 The Oxford
and Cambridge University Appointments Boards strengthened the
links with industry, particularly with the larger corporations
coming into existence like ICI, Courtaulds, Unilever, and their kind,
to the distaste of many dons and students who, like Sir Ernest
Barker, thought that the university should be ‘a stronghold of pure
learning’ and of ‘long time values against the demands of material
progress’. 34 Statistics are hard to come by and the Royal
Commission on Public Schools in 1968 muddied the issue by
compounding the professional and business classes: ‘Over ninety
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per cent of boarding pupils in boys’ public schools (excluding

children of armed forces personnel who are not allocated to any
social class in the official classifications) had parents in the
professional or managerial classes’.35 By that time, however, the
professionalization of management had gone so far as to assimilate
the managerial to the professional class, so that the public schools
were catering for much the same sort of people.
The Commission gave no statistics of careers in general but its
survey of ‘Who gets to the top?’ showed that over 70 per cent of the
‘directors of prominent firms’ and of the Bank of England came
from public schools (which catered for 2.6 per cent of 14-year-old
boys) and most of the rest from the other independent and direct
grant schools (which catered for another 4.8 per cent). At the same
time it showed that the public schools provided over a third (and
the other independent and direct grant schools nearly another
third) of the students at Oxford and Cambridge, over two-fifths of
entrants to the Administrative Class of the Civil Service, nearly
two-thirds of the entrants to the Foreign Service, a third of the vice-
chancellors, heads of Oxbridge colleges and university professors, a
fifth of the Labour MPs and two-fifths of the 1967 Labour Cabinet,
over three-quarters of the Conservative MPs and nine-tenths of the
1963 Tory Cabinet, over half of the admirals, generals and air
marshals in the armed forces, two-thirds of the physicians and
surgeons at the London teaching hospitals and on the General
Medical Council, three-quarters of the Anglican bishops, four-fifths
of the judges and QCs, and a quarter of the Fellows of the Royal
Society.36 By that time the public school men were dominating the
commanding heights of all the major professional and managerial
hierarchies, and it was no longer true that they neglected business.
The most that could be claimed was that they showed a marked
preference for the City—banking, insurance, stockbroking,
investment companies, and the commodity and currency markets—
and for the larger commercial corporations over traditional
manufacturing industry. In this they displayed a keen sense of the
drift of the modern economy away from manufacturing and
towards finance and commerce.
This realistic adjustment was in line with the traditional
flexibility of elites in English society. In recent years, especially
since the generational revolt of the 1960s, there has been what a
progressive headmaster, John Rae of Westminster School, has
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called a ‘public school revolution’.37 On the academic side Latin

has become optional, Greek has almost disappeared, mathematics
and science, economics and computing have come to the fore, and
current affairs and general studies have taken a more formal place
in the curriculum. Compulsory chapel and compulsory games
have been much reduced or abolished, and individual sports like
tennis, squash and golf are offered as alternatives to cricket and
rugby. Fagging for prefects and official beating of younger by
senior boys have practically disappeared. Beginning with
Marlborough in 1969, girls have been admitted to the sixth form
in many boarding schools and to the lower school in a few (much
to the chagrin of the headmistresses of competing girls’ schools).
Restrictions on contact with the extra-mural world, including the
female sex, have been eased though not abolished, and
community service (such as helping old people and deprived
children) has become a prominent feature of spare-time activities.
The unisex youth culture of the post-1960 generation has invaded
the schools, bringing with it anti-authoritarian attitudes, pressure
group politics like the environmental and anti-nuclear
movements, pop music, drink and drugs. Exclusiveness remains,
but the over-confident ‘effortless superiority’ of public school
boys of the past towards their age mates has been somewhat
dented, especially when scholarship boys and girls from state
schools often get better degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, still
more when young pop stars with working-class accents have
shown how to make fortunes larger than those of dukes,
merchant bankers and, certainly, of most professional men. Above
all, in a world of career hierarchies in both business and the
professions there is no more prejudice against business amongst
public school boys and Oxbridge graduates than in society at
large. Indeed, there may well be less, since the higher rewards of
the City and big business are more within their grasp.
What, then, remains of the Wiener thesis? Paradoxically, a great
deal. The professional ideal of public service, a sense that service to
the community should come before the pursuit of profit, has
permeated society far beyond the public schools and older
universities and has infiltrated business itself. What Wiener called
the gentrification of the industrialist is really his
professionalization. When the director-general of the Institute of
Directors said that ‘directors are a kind of aristocracy: they should
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be men of parts, and they should have interests outside their

business’, he meant an educated aristocracy, with an ideal of service
to the world outside. ICI executives compared themselves not to
leisured aristocrats but to the prestigious professions. ‘We think of
ourselves as being a university with a purpose,’ said one, and
another, ‘We are very similar to the Administrative Class of the
Civil Service.’ According to W.J.Reader, the social structure of ICI’s
predecessor Brunner Mond’s management at Winnington, Cheshire
‘reproduced the split in the English middle classes between “the
professions” and “trade”.’ ‘Technical men of graduate standing’
could take election to the Winnington Hall Club for granted; no
one else could, least of all engineers (not normally at that time
graduates) and commercial men.38 Since the 1920s more and more
managers and technical men have been to public school or become
graduates: a survey of 400 managers in 1956 showed that while
only 7 per cent of those born before 1895 were from public schools,
38 per cent of those born after 1925 were old boys; and while only
7 per cent of the oldest cohort had degrees, 58 per cent of the
youngest group were graduates.39 The proportion has steadily
increased since then. Professionalization has meant more than an
increase in qualifications: it has meant the importation into
business of the professional principles of a stable, progressive
career, security of tenure, and the tradition (if not always the
reality) of public responsibility.
To be sure, there has been a reaction against this weakening of
the profit motive by free marketeers of the ‘Selsdon man’ and
‘Grantham woman’ variety, but these have often been politicians
and propagandists rather than business men themselves, and their
very stridency is evidence of their exasperation with the
uncapitalistic attitudes of traditional British business managers.
Perhaps the best evidence of the permeation of British capitalism by
the professional ideal comes from traditional self-made men who
succeeded without the aid of elite education or professional
training. William Morris, Lord Nuffield (the Henry Ford of the
British motor industry), Isaac Wolfson of Great Universal Stores,
and Sir David Robinson (pioneer of rental television), all crowned
their careers by founding Oxbridge colleges.40 There bright young
men like themselves would be syphoned off from making
entrepreneurial fortunes into the public service, the professions or
managerial careers in established corporations. To this extent even
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the most entrepreneurial of business men came to be imbued with

the professional ideal.
The decline of the industrial spirit, then, was in reality the retreat
of the entrepreneurial ideal before the incursions of
professionalism. Business itself became permeated with the
professional ideal, in two ways: firstly, through the
professionalization of management, which attracted a different
kind of business man educated, often at public school and/or
university, in the tradition of public service; and secondly, through
the conversion of traditional business men not so educated to an
ideal of public responsibility which manifested itself in handsome
gifts to universities and other public charities. There were of course
exceptions to this idealistic picture, and there were still traditional
capitalists who pursued ruthless efficiency and naked competition
in the old-fashioned way. But it is striking how many of them began
as outsiders to the British system, men like the Scottish American
Ian McGregor of the British Steel Corporation and the National
Coal Board, central European Arnold Weinstock of the General
Electric Company, the Australians Sir Michael Edwardes of British
Ley land and Rupert Murdoch of The Times and Sun Newspapers,
and Czechoslovak Robert Maxwell of the Mirror group, and they
have found few imitators among native British business men. Noel
Annan, himself a pillar of the intellectual aristocracy whose
influence he has pointed to in Victorian England, correctly
diagnosed that the one common assumption shared by the whole
spectrum of opinion makers in modern Britain, ‘that the career of
money-making, industry, business, profits or efficiency is a
despicable life in which no sane and enlightened person should be
engaged’, became ‘the accepted gospel of the country’ through ‘the
propaganda of the intelligentsia’.41 The success of that propaganda
was in effect the triumph of the professional ideal.
The professional ideal, however, penetrated much deeper than
the career preferences of public school boys and university
graduates or the inferiority complexes of business men. It went to
the very heart of the concept of property. As we shall see next, it
transformed property from the absolute concept created by pre-
industrial English landlords and inherited by industrial capitalists
into the more contingent form appropriate to the professional
society of the late twentieth century.
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2 PROFESSIONALISM AND HUMAN CAPITAL
All societies turn on their concept of property.42 Where one man, as

in Pharaoh’s Egypt, owns all the property, there the structure of
society is monolithic and all power and resources flow to the
centre. Where nature’s goods are free or held in common, as
amongst the Australian aborigines before Captain Cook, there
power is diffuse and resources are distributed, if not equally, then
according to the daily efforts made to appropriate them. Coming
nearer home, medieval society in England was based on the feudal
concept of contingent property, held directly or indirectly from the
king in return for service, military, spiritual or servile, and (in
theory at least) forfeited on failure to perform the service. Between
the Black Death and the Civil War this was replaced by the concept
of absolute property, by means of which the English landlords
turned lordship into ownership and defeated the claims of crown,
church and tenants to service, loyalty and protection. This same
concept of absolute property was seized on by the incipient
capitalists of pre-industrial England as the basis of contract and the
free market, and laid the foundations of industrialism, under which
those who owned the resources absolutely could buy the labour of
those who did not. The concept of property, enshrined in custom
and law, determined the relationships between the members of
society and decided who got what, when and where.
The protean nature of the concept, its ability to change its shape
and nature from one society or one period to another, is due to its
infinite flexibility. Best conceived not as the ownership of things
fixed and immovable but as the right to a flow of income from a
scarce resource, that flow is capable of being divided and diverted
into a myriad channels and can therefore sustain an infinitely
variable congeries of relationships. Even at its most absolute,
property still had to yield taxes to the king, tithes to the church,
rates to the poor, repairs to the highways, and contributions to the
local defence of the country. It varied also according to the nature
of the scarce resource. Absolute property in land yielded rent, an
unearned income which supported an elite of leisured gentlemen,
free to do what they liked, including governing the localities and
the country. Absolute property in industrial capital demanded
active management, so that capitalists were less free to govern and
often had to employ others to do it for them, as in the end they
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came to employ others to run their businesses. Passive

landownership and active capital thus produced competing elites
and contrasting social structures. For much of the nineteenth
century many business men attacked the landlords for their
‘idleness’ and ‘corruption’ and supported schemes of land reform
designed to clip their wings and make them conform to their own
entrepreneurial ideal. Only when more extreme reformers,
demanding confiscatory taxation of land or outright land
nationalization, began to threaten the principle of absolute
property itself did both kinds of property owner rally to the
common defence. These more extreme land reformers, I have
argued elsewhere, were led by men from the professional middle
class like John Stuart Mill and Alfred Russel Wallace, who were
opposed to completely absolute property, and helped lay the
foundations of the professional approach to the concept.43
The professional concept rests as much on a scarce resource as
the landed or capitalist, but instead of controlling land or capital it
sets out to control the supply of expertise. Human capital may at
first sight seem to be more evanescent than land or machines, but
in practice it is the only form of property capable of enlarging itself
and, in the last resort, of self-reproduction. Human capital theorists
have generally assumed that investment in education of itself yields
a differential flow of income, and great ingenuity has been applied
to calculating the additional increment produced by different levels
of qualification—usually with disappointing results.44 What such
calculations have ignored has been the element of scarcity of the
resource. Some kinds of expertise may be scarce by their very
nature, like that of a Kiri Te Kanawa or a Barbara Hepworth, for
which the famous opera singer or sculptor may charge a rent. But
most professional expertise does not enjoy a natural scarcity, and
its value has to be protected and raised, first by persuading the
public of the vital importance of the service and then by controlling
the market for it. That is why the organized professional bodies are,
as much as trade unions, institutions for educating the public and
for closing the market, and operate ‘strategies of closure’ including
control of entry, training and qualification, and seek a monopoly of
the name and the practice. Even the ‘unqualified’ professions like
the Civil Service, journalism and the theatre try to make early entry
and practical experience stand in for qualification.
When such devices succeed, they create an artificial scarcity of
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the resource, the particular expertise, and produce a flow of income

in the form of a rent, in the true Ricardian sense of a payment for
the use of a scarce resource. Scarcity may appear long before a
complete monopoly is attained (the landed class never had a
complete monopoly of the land) and the element of rent may be
larger or smaller accordingly; but some element of rent accrues
from any degree of control of the market, which is why organized
professions are paid more than unorganized occupations. Since the
essence of property is a right to (some portion of) the flow of
income from the resource owned, professional capital—which is
manifestly more tangible than corporate shareholdings, less
destructible than buildings and machinery, and capable of self-
renewal and improvement—is thus a species of property in the
truest sense.
It is, nevertheless, not an absolute but a contingent form of
property, contingent, that is, upon the performance of a service. It
is this principle of justification by service that lies behind the
professional right to property and the professional social ideal. It is
also the foundation of the claim to moral superiority which, like
other classes before them, the professional class make over their
rivals. Just as the landed aristocracy claimed superiority for their
monopoly of the leisure in which to guide society and pursue the
high culture of ‘civilization’, and the business class claimed
superiority over the idle rich for the productive use of wealth, so the
professional class claimed superiority over both for their provision
of expert services without which society could not thrive or even
survive. It is not necessary to take sides in this invidious moral
competition to see that, in the increasingly complex society of
twentieth-century England in which a vast and increasing range of
expert services are necessary to social survival and well-being, the
professional ideal of justification by service has the edge over
justification by wealth, whether active or leisured. The very defence
offered by landlords and business men, that they too provide a
social service in the shape of conservation of the land and the most
efficient provision of goods, bears witness to the professionals’
assumption of superiority.
The importance of property in this sense to the professional man
went beyond moral self-confidence and self-respect. It gave him
independence, security of tenure, a firm base from which to criticize
without fear of the consequences, a secure position of leverage from
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which to move society, or his own particular corner of it, in the

direction of change and reform. Above all, it gave him the psychic
security to press his own class ideal, his own view of what society
should be and how it should be organized upon the rest of society.
The ideal as it emerged in the nineteenth century was based on the
primacy of expert service and selection by merit, measured no
longer by aristocratic opinion, the competition of the market or
popular vote but by the judgment of the qualified expert. As such
it challenged the aristocratic ideal of the primacy of passive
property as being idle wealth and patronage as favouritism and
corruption. It challenged the working-class ideal of the right to the
whole produce of labour and co-operation in place of competition
as not distinguishing between more and less qualified labour or
between equality of opportunity and equality regardless of merit.
And it came to challenge its old ally, the capitalist ideal of active
property and the survival of the most meritorious through
competition, as putting profits before social responsibility and the
blind selection of the market before the expert assessment of true
merit. After beginning in harness with the capitalist ideal in
attacking the abuse of aristocratic power in government
(parliamentary, financial and administrative reform), taxation (the
corn laws and other hindrances on free trade), and religion (tithes,
church rates, control of education), it rapidly turned against the
abuse of capitalist power in children’s employment, unsafe factories
and mines, insanitary housing, adulteration of food and drugs,
pollution of the environment, and so on. The collectivist legislation
of the Victorian age can be read as one long assault on the
irresponsibility of capital and competition by a public opinion
moralized by the professional social ideal.
The logical outcome of that assault, as was pointed out in
Chapter 1, was an attack on the concept of capital itself. This has
occupied most of the twentieth century and, although the struggle
is not yet concluded and is indeed subject to the backlash we shall
explore in Chapter 10, the professional concept of property has
made sufficient inroads into the absolute concept to have modified
it beyond recognition. Since the concept of contingent property
based on professional service is an echo of the feudal concept based
on military, spiritual or labour service, we can think of this process
as a species of ‘subinfeudation’, the slotting in of new ‘tenants’ in
the hierarchy of property holders or of intermediate claimants on
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the flow of income from a scarce resource. The process of

subinfeudation can be discerned in relation to six different kinds of
property, notably rented houses, leaseholds, farms, land generally,
property in jobs and, finally, industrial capital itself.
Most privately rented house property in Britain has been subject
to rent control since 1915, when it was introduced under threat of
rent strikes beginning in Glasgow to protect soldiers’ wives and
munitions workers from exploitation by profiteering landlords
during the wartime housing shortage. It was maintained, often
reluctantly, for the majority of rented houses between the wars,
when every attempt to reduce or abolish it was met by the
argument that this would cause hardship to a great number of
tenants, and that people must come before profits. Rent control and
tenant security were extended to nearly all unfurnished houses
during the Second World War and more recently to furnished
lettings (other than short-term holiday accommodation and the
like).45 Even those free marketeers who disliked the policy could
only plead for a wider distribution of home ownership, with the
implication that until there were sufficient homes to go around at
low enough prices the system of rent controls was unavoidable.46
The unintended consequences were the withdrawal of the private
landlord whenever he could from the housing market, which meant
when controlled tenants with security of tenure died or voluntarily
removed, so that privately rented accommodation shrank from 91
per cent in 1914 to 53 per cent in 1957 and 11 per cent in 1984,
and a consequent upsurge of owner-occupation, from about 9 per
cent of the housing stock in 1914 to 29 per cent in 1951 and 61 per
cent in 1984. The difference was made up by the supply of public
housing by the local authorities, negligible in 1914, rising to 18 per
cent of the housing stock in 1951 and 32 per cent in 1978, a
measure of the failure of the policy to solve the housing shortage.47
The result has been that not only the remaining ‘statutory
tenants’ of private houses and flats have come to share the
beneficial ownership with the landlord but even the council tenants
of the new towns and local authorities have (less formally) acquired
the same share of the property rights. When a privately owned
house is sold to the sitting tenant the price is normally about half
the value on the open market. The same applies as official policy to
the sale of council housing under current (1988) government
schemes, which also provide for subsidized mortgages at below
381
market interest rates. Thus the tenant has acquired approximately

half the value of the property and has become a ‘subinfeudated’
tenant sharing the benefits of ownership with the landlord, whether
public or private. It may of course be argued that under the
pressure of the market and under current government policy, both
private and public housing stocks are decreasing, to be replaced by
owner-occupation, but the principle of the protected tenant sharing
ownership with the landlord remains and has actually been
perpetuated by the Housing Act, 1980, which provides for a new
type of protected shorthold tenancy, albeit for a limited duration of
from one to five years.48 It is significant that even a Conservative
government committed to the free market did not feel strong
enough to restore in full the absolute property rights of housing
landlords. What it will do in its third term remains to be seen.
Under the Leasehold Enfranchisement Act, 1967 the ground
landlord of residential property in London and elsewhere, who used
at the end of the lease to possess the building even where it was
built by the tenant, is obliged to sell the freehold of a house (not as
yet of a flat) or grant an extended lease to the lessee at the latter’s
option, at an arbitrated price or rent based on the current market
value of the ground rent.49 This makes the purchasing or continuing
leaseholder co-parcener of the beneficial ownership with the
ground landlord and, in effect, a subinfeudated tenant.
Tenant farms in Britain have been subject to rent control with
security of tenure since their introduction during the Second World
War to safeguard the production of food, subject to eviction for bad
farming by the County War Agricultural Committee. They were
continued at the behest of the National Farmers’ Union—a good
example of corporatism at work—by the Agricultural Holdings
Act, 1948. The surviving wartime disciplinary power of eviction for
bad farming was transferred from the County Agricultural
Committees to the Agricultural Land Tribunals by the Agriculture
Act, 1958, under which and subsequent Acts in 1963, 1968 and
1970 the tenant could defeat a notice to quit by a counter-notice
invoking the protection of the tribunal, which could also fix the
rent by arbitration.50 Thus the good farm tenant was nearly as
secure as the house tenant, and similarly shared the beneficial
ownership with the landlord and with a similar result, that tenant
farms have shrunk from about two-thirds of the holdings at mid-
century to about 41 per cent in 1981. It is surprising that, both
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under Labour governments which gained little political support

from farmers and under Conservative governments traditionally
tender to landlords, the absolute property rights of agricultural
landlords have been thus whittled away. An unintended
consequence is that many new owner-occupiers have sold out to
large ‘agro-business’ corporations which now farm an increasing
proportion of the available land and are assimilating agriculture to
the corporate structure of industry.
Formerly, landlords would have been able to recoup their losses
by selling or leasing part of their land for development for
industrial, commercial or residential purposes, even at the cost of
bribing farm tenants with a share of the capital gains. But since the
Conservative Town and Country Planning Act, 1932, all land has
been increasingly subject to planning controls by local and central
government and, since the Labour Town and Country Planning
Act, 1947, to a fluctuating series of development charges and
similar taxes on the incremental gains from changes in land use
which have had the effect of syphoning off from the landlord part
of the benefits of ownership.51
The history of land and property policy in twentieth-century
Britain is exceptionally tangled. It is not, as is often thought, a
straightforward conflict between a Conservative Party dedicated to
the defence of property and opposition parties bent on clipping the
wings of property owners. All three major parties have been
divided. The Liberals, who became concerned in the late Victorian
age with the problems of the unearned increment and variants of
the single tax but feared outright land nationalization, lost the
landlords and many of the business men to the Tories without
gaining the working-class voters, and consequently lost also their
hopes of office.52 The Conservatives represented not only the
landowners but also the developers, the construction industry, and
the advocates of a property-owning democracy, all of whom felt
threatened by the landlords’ absolute right to withhold land from
the market or charge a monopoly price for releasing it. The Labour
Party was divided between the protagonists of land nationalization
and the pragmatists who saw the best hope of solving the housing
shortage and winning a fair share of the capital gains created by the
community in a judicious combination of planning regulation,
compulsory purchase, and taxation of betterment. Unfortunately,
all three parties pursued their vacillating policies with little regard
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to the constraints of the market and the powerful interest groups

which could defeat government pressure by withholding land or
development funds or construction skills in what amounted to a
strike of capital. Those interests could also respond to relaxation of
pressure by commercial property booms in the 1950s and 1970s
which not only made a killing for property speculators but diverted
funds from productive to unproductive investment.53
Despite the consequent twists and turns of policy, the principle
has been established that landowners do not have the absolute right
to do what they would with their property and to unlimited capital
gains arising therefrom. They have not been fully compensated for
loss of betterment for denial of planning permission or for
‘worsenment’ arising from development on neighbouring
properties, and they have been forced to share the capital gains
arising from development with the community. As freeholders they
have watched their mineral rights disappear (under a Conservative
government in 1939) as well as their ownership of the air space
above them. Although they have not been constrained or penalized
nearly as much as some of their critics desired or opponents
threatened, there can be no doubt that the absolute property rights
which landowners enjoyed for upwards of three centuries have
been severely curtailed in the twentieth.
In certain parts of the country they have been curtailed even
more and shared more directly with the community. In the National
Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty planning
legislation has restricted development within the narrowest bounds
and opened up large tracts of the countryside to access by the
public. Where landlords and their tenant farmers can no longer
exclude the public from their land, their exclusive enjoyment of
their property has been reduced to a mere stewardship for the
community.54 Even where public access is restricted, the principle
that the government, on behalf of society, can invade to flood land
for reservoirs, build motorways, lay gas pipes, erect power lines,
sterilize land for military purposes, and in other ways interfere so
deeply with the rights of property means that the concept is no
longer absolute.
The absolute rights of industrial capital have been undermined
from a different direction. Interference with the industrialist’s right
to do what he liked with his property began in the nineteenth
century with the Factory Acts, the Mining Acts, the Alkali Acts,
384
and the Workmen’s Compensation Acts. Even his right to control

the distribution of his gross income, subject to contracts of
employment with his workers, began to be limited before the First
World War, with the originating measures of the welfare state. He
was forced to insure privately against industrial injuries in 1897,
and to pay his share of National Insurance for health and, in certain
cases, for unemployment in 1911. These compulsory levies were
extended in 1920, 1925 and 1936 to cover health and
unemployment insurance for the great majority of workers and old
age, widows’ and orphans’ pensions for workers and their families,
and from 1948 for the whole employed population and their
dependants.55 It has been argued that employers’ national insurance
contributions are a tax on employment which falls ultimately on
the worker, but this is not the experience of trade union negotiators
in this country nor of the more expensive schemes in the continental
Common Market countries.56 In practice the state has established
the right to determine for certain, admittedly limited, purposes the
distribution of the product of industry between employer and
worker.
That principle has been extended much further by incomes
policy and dividend restriction, which have been in intermittent, if
hotly debated, operation since the war (1948–51, 1961–62, 1966–
72, 1973–74, 1975–76, and 1977–79).57 Whatever the political
arguments for and against such policies—and most governments up
to 1979 have tried the case both ways—no one disputes the right,
as distinct from the wisdom, of the state to limit increases in
earnings and dividends and thus to determine in large measure the
distribution of the flow of income from business.
Taxation policy has moved in a similar direction. Below a
certain threshold taxes do not encroach on the concept of
property; above that threshold they do, as witness the deliberately
confiscatory nature of Henry George’s ‘single tax’ or the intention
of the highest rates of modern death duties. 58 Victorian
governments set their face against ‘progressive taxation’, except
to relieve low-income earners altogether, and believed that in
principle everyone should contribute an equal proportion to the
expenses of the state. Since 1894 death duties have risen from 8
per cent at the maximum to 80 per cent, and if Burke’s Landed
Gentry has characterized death duty as ‘a voluntary tax’ it is
surprising how many millionaires and great landowners still
385
volunteer to pay it.59 Though no doubt ingenious ways are found

to avoid the new capital transfer tax which has replaced it, that
does not detract from the acknowledged right of the state to tax
capital at confiscatory rates. Similarly, graduated income tax has
increased since 1909 from 8.8 per cent to 97.5 per cent at the
highest marginal rate during and after the Second World War,
falling back to 83 per cent before 1979, and then to 75 per cent
on unearned and 60 per cent on earned income in the 1980s.
Though there has not been a vast redistribution of wealth between
individuals, mainly because governments continue to use capital
windfalls as current income, there has been a large redistribution
from individuals to the state.60 Thus the state has become the final
arbiter of the division of the product of industry to an extent
which would make most Victorians turn in their graves.
All this may be dismissed as restricting the absolute rights of
capital rather than transforming them. The same cannot be said of
recent employment legislation, which has eaten more deeply into
those rights. The whole trend of employment law in the 1960s and
1970s was, under both political parties, towards the
‘subinfeudation’ of industrial property itself. The ‘statutory
employee’, as we may call him, has come to share in the ownership
of his job in the same way as the statutory tenant of his house. As
Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, said in a case in 1969:
a worker of long standing now has an accrued right in his job;

and his rights gain value with the years. So much so, that if
the job is shut down, he is entitled to compensation for loss of
a job—just as a director gets compensation for loss of office.
Still more explicitly, the Norwich Industrial Tribunal in 1968,

chaired by the President of the Industrial Tribunals of England and
Wales, declared:
A redundancy payment is compensation for the loss of a right

which a long term employee has in his job. Just as a property
owner has a right in his property and when he is deprived he
is entitled to compensation, so a long term employee is
considered to have a right analogous to a right of property in
his job, he has a right to security and his rights gain value
with the years….61
386
This was the position under the Redundancy Payments Act, 1965.
Since then the principle of compensation has been extended to
cover unfair dismissal under the Conservative Industrial Relations
Act, 1971 and the Labour Trade Union and Labour Relations Act,
1974. The Employment Protection Acts, 1975 and 1978 confirmed
the employee’s proprietary right in his job: full-time workers
declared redundant after two years in the job must be paid
compensation according to their length of service. It is true that the
compensation is not enormous—one week’s salary for each year of
service, rising to two weeks for each year over fifteen—and that the
courts have developed fairly sophisticated limitations on
entitlement. But the principle remains that the state has taken it
upon itself to make the claims of labour a first charge (after tax
debts) upon industrial capital in cases of redundancy or
bankruptcy, and has thus eaten deeply into the absolute rights of
capital.
The final inroad—short of nationalization—will come if and
when the British government implements the famous Fifth Directive
of the European Economic Community, which enjoins industrial
democracy upon the member states. Under this the workers would
share with management and shareholders direct control of industry
itself. In 1976 the Labour government, in response to that directive,
appointed the Bullock Committee of Inquiry on Industrial
Democracy. Its report recommended a form of controlling board
for each large corporation—‘2x+y’, i.e. two equal groups of worker
and management representatives with a balancing group of
independents, ‘little Lord Bullocks’—which would have allowed the
management side, representing the legal owners, the shareholders,
to be outvoted. The Wilson government was not prepared to go so
far, and its White Paper substituted the EEC’s preferred German
system, under which a supervisory board with a minority of
employees’ representatives oversees an exclusively managerial
executive.62 Under the Thatcher government all such schemes have
lapsed but many Conservatives and business men still believe in
worker participation and, in whatever form industrial democracy
eventually comes, it will be a long step towards sharing the control,
and to that extent the effective ownership, of industrial capital
between the nominal owners and the workers.
Meanwhile, the concept of absolute ownership of capital is being
undermined in a more direct and subtle way. The decomposition of
387
capital, in Dahrendorf’s telling phrase, the familiar separation of

ownership and control identified by Berle and Means and
advocated by Tawney half a century ago, is in daily and increasing
operation. 63 The rise in the scale of the modern business
corporation discussed in the last chapter inevitably increases the
distance between the multiple shareholders and the executive
directors, whose span of control over resources far exceeds their
nominal ownership of the corporate enterprise. In 1969, as we have
seen, the directors of the hundred largest British companies owned
only one-thirteenth of the equity.64 Every take-over bid, merger and
amalgamation increases the number and impersonality of the
shareholders, for whom their shares become no more than
negotiable paper, traded at fluctuating values in a market as far
removed from productive industry as the reflecting moon from the
sun. Moreover, individuals in 1982 constituted only one-third of all
shareholders of companies quoted on the Stock Exchange. Two-
thirds of shares were owned by institutions: banks, insurance
companies, pension funds, unit trusts, trade unions, holding
companies, and the like. 65 The resulting fragmentation of
ownership meant that, through these institutions, the ultimate
owners or beneficiaries of the flow of income from capital were the
bank depositors, insurance policy holders, pensioners and pension
fund contributors, unit trust holders, trade union members, and so
on situated at the end of the channels of flow, who had no notion
whence their anonymous dividends ultimately derived. Those who
did know, the professional intermediaries who made the
investments, were by no means passive conduits but active
controllers of the flow, wielding power in proportion to the funds
they manipulated. They were in a real sense the archetypical
subinfeudated tenants of the whole quasi-feudal system. Having
inserted themselves at key points in the hierarchy of ownership,
they potentially represent the new feudal lords and knights whose
power and status rest on the indispensable function they perform.
Thus the decomposition of capital is the result of the
professionalization of management, and specifically of investment
management. The absolute ownership of the flow of income has
been literally fragmented into a myriad irrigation channels, but the
controllers of the sluice gates retain the power to alter the flow, to
fertilize one area and dry up another, according to the advantage
they can see for themselves and their institutions. Any one
388
controller may have limited autonomy, and a mistaken investment

policy can leave him high and dry or drown him in unprofitable
liquidity. But there are nodal points in the system where a few
large-scale investors make decisions which can make or break
whole industries or towns or occupations. It is conceivable that
these key controllers, the barons of the system, may abuse their
power to make their fortunes at the expense of the other
beneficiaries, as some of them already do, by ‘insider trading’,
dealing on their own account, and so on.66 The main hope is that
professional office will limit their tenure of exploitation and impose
institutional discipline within it. Beyond that the only hope is
eternal vigilance, and the policing of the financial institutions by
the countervailing professional hierarchies, notably those of the
state in the shape of security and exchange commissions and the
like. Unless this is done effectively and conscientiously, we may end
at the mercy of the robber barons of this new version of bastard
feudalism.
Be that as it may, the twentieth century has seen the dissolution
of the concept of absolute property invented by English landlords
between the Black Death and the Civil War and exploited by
English capitalists from then down to the early twentieth century. It
has been replaced by a contingent concept of property based on
professional service, which has fragmented the flow of income and
other benefits from land and capital, and inserted a series of
intermediate subinfeudated tenants or beneficiaries into the
hierarchy of ownership. This quasi-feudal system is in danger, like
the original feudal system, of lapsing into a further round of
exploitation by would-be absolute owners if they are allowed to
turn their human capital into large-scale material capital, but
meanwhile it offers at least the opportunity of a wider
dissemination of the benefits of ownership than any previous
system and of a higher moral justification of property by functional
service.
As with all previous classes which rose to dominance, however,
the success of the professional class in imposing its own ideal and
its version of property upon the rest could easily spill over into a
species of arrogance or ‘effortless superiority’. In the final section of
this chapter we must deal with the chief drawback of
professionalism, its condescension towards the rest of society,
including other professions.
389
3 THE CONDESCENSION OF
PROFESSIONALISM
The superiority claimed by the professional social ideal, much more
than the other class ideals, was apt when it expressed itself in
individual rather than collective ways to border on arrogance and
condescension. This stemmed from the structural character of
professionalism which based itself on human rather than material
capital and on trained intellectual rather than manual labour. The
professional had to assert the high quality and scarcity value of the
service he provided or forgo the status and rewards that went with
it. And since that service took a personal form it could not be
detached from the superior person who provided it. This indeed
was the Achilles’ heel of professionalism, through which entered
the spears of individual arrogance, collective condescension
towards the laity, and mutual disdain between the different
professions. On all three levels professionalism was weakened by its
own vanity and elitism, which often infuriated other individuals,
classes, and rival professions. Above all, it prevented the
professionals from dominating the new society as a class. Instead,
professionalism contrived to restructure society on a different
principle from class as traditionally understood, in a new vertical
structure of rival career hierarchies, a fragmented society of
competing elites in which a single dominant elite or ruling class was
hard to find. At the same time, the arrogant assumption of
superiority was to produce a backlash against professionalism, not
only from those who claimed to speak for the traditional classes of
capital and labour but, by an internal division within
professionalism itself, by recrimination from within between two
warring factions which each claimed superiority over the other.
These two warring factions were, roughly speaking, the public
sector and the private sector professions. In this section we shall
deal with the provocative condescension of the professions, and
only touch on the backlash against and between them, leaving their
bifurcation to the next chapter and the backlash to the final chapter
of the book.
The individual critics of traditional society drew on a long
legacy of social criticism of industrialism going back to Coleridge,
Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, William Morris, and beyond.
Like their Victorian predecessors they were ‘a sort of classless
390
class, relatively detached from the everyday struggles of the

market-place’, who thought of themselves as lone intellectuals
raised above the crowd by their talent for perception. In fact, this
very detachment was one of the chief identifiers of the
professional class, which, as we shall see, was marked by
fragmentation and mutual competition between professions.67
Intellectuals in particular, though drawn almost exclusively from
the professional middle class, tended to think of themselves as
free-floating mental operators set apart from their social origins.
Some intellectuals, like the Bloomsbury group, were in fact
Victorians of a familiar rebellious kind but saw themselves as
raised above the common herd by their revolt against their
parents’ generation. Their attitudes and behaviour, especially in
sexual matters, were all too Victorian, at least at the leisured
aristocratic level to which they aspired.68 They were all convinced
of their superiority to the money-grubbing business men and
benighted workers outside the magic circle of the arts and
literature. Virginia Woolf, for all her empathy for poorer women,
realized that between ‘my comfortably capitalistic hand’ and the
working-class women of the Cooperative Guild she met in
Newcastle in 1913, ‘the barrier is impassable.’69 J.M.Keynes, who
did more for the working class than any other capitalist
economist, could not join the Labour Party because it was a ‘class
party, and the class is not my class…. I can be influenced by what
seems to me to be Justice and good sense; but the class war will
find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie’.70 But the real
disdain of Bloomsbury for the productive classes is summed up by
one of its lesser lights, Clive Bell, who pleaded in Civilization
(1928) for an unconsciously Marxist extraction of surplus value
from the many for the support of the civilized few:
Civilization requires the existence of a leisured class, and a

leisured class requires the existence of slaves—of people…
who give some part of their surplus time and energy to the
support of others…. The trade unionist is as good as the
profiteer; and the profiteer is as good as the trade unionist.
Both are silly, vulgar, good-natured, sentimental, greedy and
insensitive; and as both are very well pleased to be what they
are neither is likely to become anything better. A will to
civilization may exist among the Veddahs of Ceylon or the
391
Mege of the Gold Coast, but no sign of it appears on the

Stock Exchange or in the Trade Union Congress.71
A similar condescension towards the industrial classes can be found

amongst most of the fashionable writers of the inter-war period.
T.S.Eliot warned against ‘the pagan society’ with its strange gods of
‘Compound Interest and Maintenance of Dividends’ on one side
and ‘an illiterate and uncritical mob’ on the other. 72 Using
Coleridge’s terminology, he looked towards the clerisy of
intellectuals like himself ‘both to maintain inherited ideas, and alter
the sensibility of their time’:
…one of the chief merits of the clerical elite is that it is an

influence for change. To some extent, therefore, there is, and
I think there should be, a conflict between class and clerical
elite. On the one hand, the clerical elite is dependent on
whatever is the dominant class of its time; on the other
hand, it is apt to be critical of, and subversive of, the class in
power.
But they are not united in their ideas or criticisms:
It is not the business of clerics to agree with each other; they

are driven to each others’ company by their common
dissimilarity from everybody else, and by the fact that they
find each other the most profitable people to disagree with, as
well as to agree with. They differ from a class in having very
different backgrounds from each other, and by not being
united by prejudices and habits. They are apt to share a
discontent with things as they are, but the ways in which they
want to change them will be various and often completely
opposed to each other.
They are, however, united on one significant object: ‘They have at

least one common interest—an interest in the survival of the
clerisy.’73
His fellow clerics went beyond their mere survival. W.B.Yeats
advocated ‘the despotic rule of the educated class’, while D.H.
Lawrence preached the need for a governing elite to control and
raise the cultural standards of the masses from which he himself
392
originated. 74 Wyndham Lewis saw an inevitable separation

‘between creative man and his backward fellow’, between ‘those
who decide for the active intelligent life, and those who decide
(without any stigma attaching to the choice) for the “lower” or
animal life’. 75 Bertrand Russell attacked both ‘the error of
aristocracy’ and ‘the error of democracy’ and called for what
amounted to a meritocracy, a world ruled by the best brains drawn
from all classes.76 Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932)
satirized the meritocratic divisions of a materialistic, Ford-
worshipping society into clever, professional ‘alphas’, obedient
executive ‘betas’, and happy-go-lucky hard-working ‘gammas’.77
The Marxist writers of the 1930s, Christopher Caudwell, John
Strachey, Stephen Spender and company, had, to match their
disillusionment with the capitalist bourgeoisie, an almost Leninist
conviction that the proletariat was incapable of knowing its own
destiny unless led and guided by the ‘active intellectuals’.78 Even
George Orwell, despite his sympathy for the unemployed of the
depressed areas, could hardly suppress his disgust for the lifestyle of
his Wigan slum host dispensing the tripe with an unwashed thumb,
or his disdain both for the educated southerner who goes north
‘with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing
among savages’ and for the northerner who ‘comes to London in
the spirit of a barbarian out for loot’.79
Less scornful intellectuals, more concerned with practical
democracy and economic justice like the predominantly liberal
‘Next Five Years Group’ of 1935, including J.A.Hobson, Ernest
Barker, A.D.Lindsay, Norman Angell and H.G.Wells, advocated
purely professional solutions to the social problems of the day;
while committed socialist reformers like Harold Laski, Douglas Jay
and Barbara Wootton assumed that democratic socialism could
only be operated by professionals.80 In Laski’s words,
Any system of government, upon the modern scale, involves a

body of experts working to satisfy vast populations who judge
by the result and are careless of, even uninterested in, the
processes by which these results are attained…. A democracy
in other words must, if it is to work, be an aristocracy by
delegation.81
And, as we have seen, the doyen of Labour intellectuals, R.H.
393
Tawney, specifically advocated a professional society in which

industry, as well as all other economic functions, would be run by
professional managers and professionally organized workers.82
These attitudes were reinforced by the influx of continental
intellectuals, characterized by Perry Anderson in a now famous
essay as ‘the White emigration’ [see]: Friedrich von Hayek in
economics, Lewis Namier in history, Karl Popper in social
philosophy, Isaiah Berlin in political science, Hans Eysenck in
psychology, Karl Mannheim in sociology, Bronislaw Malinowski in
anthropology, Ludwig Wittgenstein in philosophy, and so on, who
came to dominate English intellectual culture in the twentieth
century.83 It was almost as if the English establishment, having lost
confidence in the aristocratic and capitalist ideals which had so
long supported it, had run out of ideas and of the intellectuals who
had traditionally supplied them, and were forced to turn to the new
wave of intellectuals fleeing from Hitler’s Europe to fill the
vacuum. There were, of course, left-wing as well as right-wing
immigrants—Isaac Deutscher, Nicholas Kaldor, Thomas Balogh,
Eric Hobsbawm, Sidney Pollard—but for the most part the left-
wingers, like Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer and Fromm, passed on
to the United States where, paradoxically, the academic free market
gave them greater opportunities for self-expression, in New York’s
New School of Social Research (‘Frankfurt on the Hudson’) and
elsewhere. Meanwhile, their counterparts in Britain were taken to
the bosom of the establishment, which expressed its gratitude in a
shower of university chairs, fellowships and knighthoods. The
white immigrants had an even greater, continental conviction of the
superiority of academics and intellectuals, combined with a healthy
respect for the power of the state, which they knew how to
manipulate even as they warned against it. In their own way they
represented the condescension of the professional elite even more
than their British rivals.
Eliot, himself a white immigrant though in a reverse direction,
had made a distinction between the employed and the unemployed
clerisy, between those who were paid to pursue intellectual careers
and those who had to earn their living, like himself, by other means
(such as banking or publishing) or by ‘the sale of their clerical
produce (books, pictures)’.84 With the decline since the Victorian
age of unearned incomes and of the rewards of freelance authorship
and art, more of the clerisy had come to concentrate in the
394
universities where clerical disdain for the unintellectual laity could

thrive in segregation.85 Thus began the paradoxical role of the
modern university, at once increasingly the gatekeeper to the career
hierarchies of modern professional society and the hermetically
sealed preserve of the professional specialist. One profession after
another, from medicine in 1858, through engineering, law,
accounting, architecture, estate management, social work, and
finally down to business management itself in the 1960s,
transferred the bulk of its training from apprenticeship on the job
and/or privately provided vocational courses into the ambit of the
university. In a more specialized world it was cheaper and more
efficient, especially after the establishment of the University Grants
Committee in 1919 when the state began to subsidize university
education on a larger scale, to get the universities to take over the
training function of most professional bodies. Meanwhile, the
professions endeavoured to keep as much control over entry as
before by recognizing university courses, offering exemption from
their qualifying examinations and, where they could as with the
medical schools, obtaining formal representation on university
bodies. In this way, university teaching became the key profession
which educated for, controlled access to, and did much of the
research for the other professions.86
There was another, more detrimental aspect of this
development. In order to preserve their separate function and
existence, it became necessary for the university disciplines to
emphasize their separation from the professions they served
outside the walls and also, inside the walls, from the other
university disciplines. All professions use strategies of closure to
segregate themselves from the laity and from one another—
control of entry, training and examination, use of a privileged title
or nomenclature, state monopoly of the name or practice, and so
on. University disciplines have come to use more rigorous devices:
access to research, an esoteric jargon, the possession of a PhD,
scholarly publication, a national or international reputation
within a narrowly defined field, and the like. Segregation has
become all the more attractive and necessary in those fields whose
subject matter is most accessible to the laity, that is, in the
humanities and social studies.
Perhaps the best example is the study of English literature,
which only became a university discipline in the early twentieth
395
century, but has since tried to become the humane discipline, the
modern substitute for theology and philosophy. In the hands of F.
R.Leavis and the Cambridge English School it became (in their
own opinion) the exclusive guardian of ‘high culture’, the
preserver of ‘the great tradition’, the defender of humane values
from the ‘technological-Benthamite’ horrors of industrial society,
mass production and Americanization. Leavis and his followers
looked back to a golden age before ‘the dissociation of sensibility’
when people of all classes responded to a unified culture.87 The
difficulty was that they found it in different ages: Leavis himself
before Milton, his wife Queenie in the pre-industrial eighteenth
century, Richard Hoggart in the working-class culture of his
boyhood before the depredations of the modern popular press,
and so on.88 Leavis objected to the word elitism—‘a product of
ignorance, prejudice and unintelligence’—but not to the idea of an
elite, especially the second or educated elite which was responsible
for checking and controlling the first, the political or ruling elite.
Culture, narrowed to a rarefied great tradition of the ‘picked
experience of ages’, was in their keeping: ‘In any period it is upon
a small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and
literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the simple and
familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand
judgement.’ All literature and art, indeed all human experience,
outside the authenticated stream of pure high culture belonged to
the ‘muddled mass-society’ which, by definition, was beneath
consideration. 89 Small wonder that ‘good literature’ in the
twentieth century has become a minority cult, written by the few
cognoscenti for the discerning few.
Most other university disciplines, some like nuclear physics or
genetic engineering with more justification, some like structural
linguistics or philosophy less so, have gone the esoteric way of
English literature and become almost inaccessible to what Leavis
saw as the defunct common reader. Peter Scott, editor of The Times
Higher Education Supplement, has chronicled in The Crisis of the
University (1984), the decline of the traditional university which
stood for a broad education in a unified and unifying culture and its
replacement by the modern university, plagued by ‘academicism’
and ‘instrumentalism’, i.e. by fragmentation into increasingly
hermetic and esoteric specialities on one side and by self-absorbed
professional training and industrially commissioned research on the
396
other. The Visible college’ of the academic community, sharing a

common language and values and passing them on to the next
generation of concerned citizens under their care, has been
fractured into a myriad ‘invisible colleges’ of the ever more
splintered disciplines, each determined to hold its ground against
all-comers by means of an exclusive jargon and mind-set or to
corner the market in an enclosed and lucrative career. Having
rejected communication with one another outside their narrowing
specialisms, they have totally lost the capacity to reach, educate
and persuade the public on whose financial and moral support they
depend. An unintelligible intelligentsia, according to Scott, retreats
from reality into a self-indulgent world of verbal disputation, while
a professional technocracy pursues its amoral, mechanistic
philosophy of scientific progress oblivious of its implications for
mankind.
Beneath this intellectual failure, Scott believes, lies a deeper,
moral one. It is nothing less than the prospect of ‘the repeal of
modern society’, the unravelling of its political, intellectual and
moral fabric. In this the university is both victim and accomplice:
victim because the hostility of modern politicians of both right and
left has singled it out as a threat either to the social order or to
fundamental reform; accomplice because it has frivolously cut itself
off from the popular sources of its support. The task of higher
education, at which in Britain it has clearly failed, is to recreate in
each generation an intellectual culture accessible to the common
man and woman and a moral order that is a guarantee of both
freedom and social progress.90
Scott’s indictment is a portent of the backlash against
professionalism to which we shall return. For the moment, it
points to a symptom of that collective condescension of the
professions for what they perceive as the uncomprehending
masses incapable of understanding their message. This was the
real trahison des clercs, the treason of the intellectuals, against
which the masses were right to revolt.91 But, more in Britain than
elsewhere, the professionals within the university and without are
not content to disdain only the non-professional laity, who cannot
aspire to professional status. In the fragmented world of
university disciplines as amongst the disparate career hierarchies
outside, the rival professions come to disdain one another. To
adapt the aphorism of Bernard Shaw about Englishmen in
397
general, one professional cannot open his mouth without being

despised by another one. Far from standing together against the
world, each profession sees every other as outside the pale, part of
the uninitiated mass banned from the mysteries of its own
exclusive altar. Lawyers and doctors respect one another only if
they maintain respectful distance, and have recently clashed over
their respective responsibility for the increase in medical
malpractice suits. Academics from different parts of the ‘hard-
soft’ spectrum suspect one another’s competence: ‘Physics is
fundamental knowledge; chemistry is only applied physics’;
‘natural science is science; social science is organized prejudice’;
‘economists deal in facts; political scientists think the plural of
anecdote is data’; ‘social science produces testable theories;
history is mindless empiricism’—and so on down the line. The
mutual incomprehension between the ‘two cultures’ was
proverbial before C.P.Snow discovered it and was chastised by
Leavis. Within the humane sciences historians are at odds with
both sociologists and literary critics dealing with the same period.
As for the fine arts, academics ‘in the lump’ are no more and no
less philistine than the man in the street, who tends to think that
abstract painting and twelve-tone music are bad cases of the
emperor’s new clothes.
All this of course is to say no more than that all professions
justify their existence by claiming superiority in their chosen field
of expertise over all others. But the implications for a society
based on human capital and specialized expertise are profound
and surprising. Far from working together to consolidate their
leverage on the rest of society, as landlords, capitalists and even
workers, less successfully through their trade unions, have tried to
do, the professions, despite abortive attempts in the early 1970s,
have never managed to unite in the professional equivalent of the
Confederation of British Industry or the Trades Union Congress.
For that reason, although their ideal, operating through
individuals and collective interests, has achieved much in shaping
professional society, they have failed to become a ruling class or a
unified elite. Instead, modern society is becoming a congeries of
parallel career hierarchies. Some of the hierarchies are indeed
higher and more powerful than others, but none has yet become
the master interest overbearing all others. It is possible, of course,
that the state bureaucracy or the corporate managers might try to
398
usurp control over all the rest, and the pendulum seems to swing
towards first one and then the other, but neither has yet been able
to assert exclusive mastery. Nor does it seem to be in the nature of
rival specialisms, each claiming superiority over all others, to
accept such a single master interest. Although still half-obscured
by the horizontal solidarities of class, the new society has a
different architecture from the old. It is not so much a layered
pyramid rising to a needle point, more a giant’s causeway, its
obsidian columns rising indeed to different heights but all vertical,
parallel and discrete.
Even in a giant’s causeway some vertical planes are more
gapingly obvious than others. The sharpest discontinuity by far is
not the traditional one between the employed and the self-
employed professions, which still has some importance, though
more between members of the same profession such as law,
medicine or accountancy than between distinct professions. It is
within the employed or salaried professions, now far
outnumbering the self-employed, between those who perform a
public service, paid for out of taxation or voluntary contributions
not derived from their immediate clients, and those employed by
private corporations. At the risk of some oversimplification, we
may call these the public sector and private sector professionals
respectively. The public sector includes not only the Civil Service
and local government officers, the employees of the various
welfare services from health to state education, the nationalized
industries, and the armed forces, but also the quasi-independent,
non-profit making public institutions such as the universities, the
BBC, the charitable foundations, and the officials of the trade
unions. The private sector, of course, includes the managers and
other professional employees of the private corporations in
industry and finance, the manufacturing companies, the banks,
insurance and investment companies, the newspapers and
independent television companies, the private airlines and
shipping companies, and also their collective representatives in
the trade associations, the Confederation of British Industry, the
British Institute of Management and the specialized managerial
associations, and so on.
The line between public and private is a shifting one, as
industries and services are nationalized or privatized, or are
commercially or philanthropically oriented, and it obviously differs
399
from country to country. Medicine, for example, is predominantly

a public service in Britain but predominantly a private one in the
United States, which makes for a profound difference in the
outlook of British and American doctors. Higher education is
almost wholly a public service in Britain but almost equally divided
between public and private in America and Japan, though with
different apportionments of prestige between state and private
universities in the last two countries. Broadcasting is divided
between public and private corporations in Britain, wholly public
in France and almost wholly private in the United States, with
consequent differences in self-perception on the part of the
broadcasters. This is not to say, of course, that the attitudes of
professionals are wholly determined by their employers or their
terms of employment. Their loyalty to their profession and its ethic
normally come first. But as with all social roles, the structure of
their rewards, their source of income, job opportunities and
chances of promotion are bound to influence their outlook and
performance, whether or not their employers overtly pressure them
in specific directions. By and large, the public sector professions in
Britain have emphasized the need for expansion of the services they
provide, at whatever expense to the taxpayer or voluntary
contributor, while conversely the private sector professions have
emphasized freedom from taxation and from state interference with
their operations.
This dichotomy between their interests vis-à-vis the state has
set up the sharpest tension within professional society.
Superficially, it parallels the traditional battle between the
competitive individualism and the collectivism of Victorian class
society, which is why it can be fought out in the obsolete terms of
the Ricardian free market versus Marxist or Fabian socialism. Yet
at a deeper level it is clearly a struggle between professionals
providing essentially the same services—management, medicine,
education, broadcasting—over how those services are to be
provided and whether professionals gain more by controlling a
state service and presenting the bill to the community or by selling
their services privately to those who can best afford to pay for
them. The answer is not predetermined for the individual
professional by his current position on one side of the line. It is
perfectly possible for a private doctor to think he would have
more security and higher pay in a public health service or
400
conversely for a public doctor to hope for bigger rewards in a

private system, and for a manager in a nationalized enterprise to
hope for more freedom of decision and stock option bonuses from
privatization. Human nature being subject to inertia, however,
there is a strong tendency for professionals to opt for the devil
they know, and to press for enhanced prestige and reward within
the institutional framework in which they find themselves.
Doctors in the British National Health Service press for more
state resources; American doctors lobby against ‘socialized
medicine’. British professors complain of cuts in government
grants to universities and research councils; American professors
in state universities do much the same, while in the private
universities they solicit charitable donations and lobby for federal
research grants and contracts. British corporate managers bitterly
oppose nationalization but, once they are nationalized,
immediately behave like public servants; when they are privatized
they revert instantly to corporation type.
What the rivalry is not about is old-fashioned free enterprise
versus socialism. Free competition of the Ricardian kind was
between individual capitalists so numerous that no one or small
group of them was in a position to corner the market. The modern
market is dominated by at most 200 great corporations, which
means that most industries are dominated by three to five giant
corporations which can if they wish determine the volume, price
and quantity of the product or service. Overseas competition helps
to keep oligopoly within bounds, but also ensures that new internal
capitalist interlopers, except perhaps in very new products or
services for a short period of time, have next to no chance to
compete. The cry for less state intervention is therefore a cry for
more freedom for giant corporations, or rather for the professional
managers who run them. It is just as much a case of professional
special pleading as the demand of public sector professionals for
more state resources. The main difference depends on which side of
the public/private sector they stand.
In professional society, therefore, the old ideological conflicts
between small-scale capitalism and state socialism are
obsolescent—though not always recognized as such—and
overtaken by the rivalries of the professions, and specifically by the
opposition between the public sector and private sector
professionals. What both sides want are much the same things:
401
autonomous control of a particular service and the status and

rewards which flow from it. The difference lies in their strategies
for achieving them. While the public sector professional starts from
the belief that his service is so essential to society that it must be
provided gratis (or nearly so) and society must pick up the bill, the
private sector professional starts from the belief that his service is
so attractive that the customer will willingly pay. Problems arise at
the margin, where some customers cannot afford to pay for a
service which society deems essential, like health or education,
while others demand the right to pay for a higher quality of service,
especially for ‘positional goods’ which confer advantages which by
definition cannot be open to all. There is therefore no agreed line
between public and private provision, and the struggle pushes it
back and forth according to the success of the public and private
sector professionals in persuading the community to prefer their
particular approach.
Yet both equally represent the professional social ideal, of a
society which distributes rewards according to desert and social
justice. The difference turns on their approach to social justice.
Both believe in a basic equality among citizens, but the public
sector professionals tend to seek greater equality of outcome,
basing their case on the right of everyone to a reasonable share of
society’s resources to be guaranteed by people like themselves,
while the private sector professionals stress equality of
opportunity, not only to reward the merit in which they
themselves excel but also to enlarge the total resources to be
shared by everybody. Given that the welfare state as it had
evolved was ambivalent and had never clearly distinguished
which of the two equalities deserved priority, it is easy to see how
they could agree to support it, though for different reasons. One
side concentrated on raising the floor of inequality for the
underprivileged, the other on the opportunity for some of them to
make themselves ‘more unequal’ than the rest. It was to be an
uneasy compromise, but for a generation after the Second World
War there was to be sufficient agreement to maintain a mutually
suspicious consensus. When economic growth decelerated and
prosperity declined in the 1970s and 1980s, consensus broke
down and confrontation ensued.
For twenty-five years after the Second World War, however, a
reasonable equilibrium was reached between the two sides, under
402
the name of the ‘mixed economy’ or ‘Butskellism’ (from the

supposed consensus between the two opposing Chancellors of the
Exchequer of the early 1950s, R.A.Butler and Hugh Gaitskell).
This compromise was immensely successful both politically, in
gaining substantial support from all parties, and economically, in
supporting an unprecedented rate of economic growth with
moderate inflation and full employment. Unfortunately, that rate
of economic growth, though neck and neck with the benchmark
country, the United States, was inadequate when compared with
other competitors, notably the six original partners of the
European Economic Community and Japan, and seemed to
threaten not merely relative but ultimately absolute failure and
decline. The threat, flagged by increasingly frequent balance of
payments crises, became acute when, with the oil crises of 1973
and 1979, world depression exposed the lack of competitiveness
of the British economy. The compromise of the mixed economy
had never been accepted by the extremists on the fringes of both
major parties, the committed nationalizers on the left of the
Labour Party and the committed free marketeers on the right of
the Conservative. As disillusion with the old Butskellite
compromise grew in the 1970s and with it disillusion with
traditional party politics, the extremists seized their chance and
began to move towards control of their parties. They did so in the
name of the nostalgic ideologies inherited from Victorian class
society, Ricardian free enterprise and its alter ego, Marxian state
capitalism.
This backlash against the mixed economy was also, at bottom, a
backlash against professional society itself. It was a protest by the
self-styled champions of that threatened species the private
entrepreneur, the small owner-managing capitalist superseded by
the giant corporation, and by the equally self-appointed champions
of the proletariat, the supposedly revolutionary working class
which, they complained paradoxically, was in process of being
incorporated within the corporate economy and society. At the
same time, the backlash derived its energy from the clash between
the two professional sectors: the private sector professionals rallied
to the cry that they supplied the material wealth which the public
sector ‘squandered’, while the public sector professionals resented
the social costs which the private sector shouldered on to the
public. It was, therefore, the mutual hostility of the public and
403
private sector professions which fuelled the political struggle of the

1970s and 1980s. But first we need to look at the social changes
since the Second World War, which transformed not only the
terrain of the battlefield but also the nature of the armies locked in
combat.
404
Chapter 9
THE PLATEAU OF
PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
Between 1945 and the early 1970s professional society reached a

plateau of attainment. This did not mean a utopia based entirely on
merit, social efficiency and social justice. It meant, rather, a society
which accepted in principle that ability and expertise were the only
respectable justification for recruitment to positions of authority
and responsibility and in which every citizen had the right to a
minimum income in times of distress, to medical treatment during
sickness, decent housing in a healthy environment, and an
education appropriate to his or her abilities. No society has ever
lived up to its ideal—neither the aristocratic society of pre-
industrial England to its ideal of the leisured gentleman practising
paternalism nor the industrial society of Victorian England to its
ideal of the self-made man practising fair competition—and
professional society was no exception. Selection by merit was still
distorted by inherited wealth and privileged education for the few.
Social security was eroded by inflation and the failure of national
insurance to prevent an unfortunate minority from falling into
poverty. There remained gross disparities in medical treatment
between different classes and different regions under the National
Health Service. Decent housing and a healthy environment were
limited by scarce resources and the obstruction of vested property
and industrial interests. And education remained the main source of
unequal life chances between those who could pay for it or obtain
the best of state education and those who could not.
Nevertheless, if societies can be categorized by their ideals, by
their self-imposed objectives and their criteria for success in
attaining them, post-war British society differed from preindustrial
aristocratic and Victorian entrepreneurial society in consciously
405
THE PLATEAU OF PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
pursuing the ideal of a welfare state, in which society accepted

responsibility for the minimum support, health, accommodation,
environmental cleanliness, education, and even employment for
every member. As the first official handbook on Britain in 1949 and
its annual editions for many years declared:
In Britain the State is now responsible for a range of services

covering subsistence for the needy, education and health
services for all, housing, employment or maintenance, the care
of the aged and the handicapped and the nutrition of mothers
and children, besides sickness and industrial injuries benefits,
widows’ and retirement pensions, and children’s allowances.
None of these services has been imposed by the State upon
an unwilling public. All of them are the result of cooperative
effort between successive governments and the people whom
they governed.1
The very fact that there was disagreement on how best successive
governments should carry out their responsibilities and what
precisely the ideal meant proves that the ideal was taken seriously.
Constant criticism from one side that the state was not doing
enough to achieve the ideal and from the other that it was
undermining the means, social efficiency and economic growth, of
achieving it, shows that the ideal was accepted in principle,
however inadequate the practice. And the struggle between the two
versions of the ideal, the one stressing public intervention to ensure
as much equality of outcome as possible, the other stressing
individual initiative to evoke as much equality of opportunity as
could be, guaranteed that the ideal would remain at the forefront of
public discussion. To that extent the professional ideal was the
organizing principle of post-war society.
It would remain so for as long as that society remained
prosperous and moderately proof against the strains of economic
depression and unemployment, as it did with increasing difficulty
down to the early 1970s. With the oil crisis of 1973 and the
subsequent world recession the consensus on ends gave way to
increasing confrontation, until 1979 brought to power a
government pledged to destroy the consensus and put the clock
back to the enterprise society of an earlier age. There is reason to
doubt, as we shall see in the final chapter, whether its expressed
406
ideal was truly entrepreneurial or did not mask an exaggerated

version of one form of the professional ideal—that of the corporate
professional masquerading as old-fashioned owner-manager—
trying not to put the clock back but to swing the contemporary
pendulum further its own way. But that is to anticipate a wider
question, whether the plateau reached in the quarter-century after
the Second World War led on to an escarpment plunging down to
a renewed trough of capitalist enterprise and devil-take-the-
hindmost competition, or whether it was the upland approach to a
still higher range of professional society. Was it, to push the
geographical exploration metaphor perhaps too far, the Alleghenies
leading to the Mississippi basin or the High Plains leading to the
Rocky Mountains? Judging by the further increase in the 1980s in
public spending and the failure to dismantle the welfare state, it
was at least as likely to be the latter as the former.
Before we climb to the plateau, however, and explore its further
side, it will be necessary to approach it through the dark valley of
the Second World War and the revolution in expectations which
pointed the way.
1 THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE

REVOLUTION IN EXPECTATIONS
The Second World War was an even greater turning point for
Britain than the First. Although it was much less destructive of
life—the British came off lightly, with only 305,000 killed in the
forces and the merchant navy plus about 60,000 civilians killed in
the air raids (less than half the dead of the First World War)
compared with over 25 million lives lost by other belligerents—it
was a much more total war involving the whole population, and
much more completely changed the course of history. Britain put
more manand womanpower in proportion to population into the
war effort than Germany or any other belligerent except Russia.
Nearly 8 million people were in the armed forces by the last year of
the war, every man between 18 and 60 was either called up or
directed into the war industries, and every unmarried woman
between the same ages. Government expenditure increased sixfold,
from £1 billion in 1938–39 to £6.2 billion in 1944–45, 83 per cent
of which was spent on defence. The Civil Service nearly doubled,
from 388,000 to 705,000, not counting ‘industrials’, as government
407
tried to control every aspect of life from war supplies and the
direction of labour to food and fuel rationing and the design and
quality of ‘utility’ furniture and clothing.2
The war cost £28 billion in taxes and domestic borrowing (repaid
only years later in much smaller pounds), nearly twice the real cost
of the First World War, plus massive loans from the United States,
Canada and the Sterling Area (the empire and Commonwealth
which supplied much of the resources for the war outside Europe, as
India did in the Burmese campaign against Japan). Overseas debts
multiplied sevenfold, from under £500 million to £3,500 million, and
nearly all the gold and dollar reserves and foreign investments
disappeared.3 Practically all the export markets went, either taken
over by the Americans and Canadians or supplied perforce by the old
importing countries themselves. In addition to about 4 million houses
damaged, nearly half of them destroyed, much of the industrial
base—factories, mines, railways, power stations, gasworks, and so
on—had either been bombed or was worn out and needed
replacement. In short, Britain was transformed overnight from a
first-rate (if no longer the largest) military, political and economic
power to a near-bankrupt nation completely outclassed by the United
States and Soviet Russia.
It is true that other countries, including Russia, Germany,
France, Italy and Japan, had suffered more and faced a harder task
of recovery. Yet in a sense Britain had fallen further, from a world
imperial role which would never be recovered. The costs in men,
money and military equipment of hanging on to that role, down to
the final withdrawal from East of Suez (except for Hong Kong) in
the early 1970s, were to divert resources from reconstruction and
recovery while other countries, including the ex-enemies West
Germany and Japan with exiguous defence spending, forged ahead
in economic growth. There were other and more deep-seated
reasons why Britain, after the first American-aided recuperation
and export boom, failed to keep up with the leaders in post-war
recovery. The war can be blamed for too much. But whether or not
it was the cost and destruction of the war or the way in which the
war transformed the world political and economic context to
Britain’s detriment, there can be no doubt that it closed one chapter
of history in which Britain was a world-class power and opened
another in which decline to a middle-range European power, and by
no means the strongest or most prosperous, seemed inevitable.
408
There was another side to the story, however, and that was how
the war prepared the way for a more state-interventionist, more
equal and caring society after it ended. It produced a revolution in
expectations, about what the nation could do when roused to meet
a common threat, about how far the state could go in organizing
people for a common purpose, about the capacity of government to
organize large-scale production and distribution, about what the
community owed its members in times of emergency and distress,
and about the possibility of planning for a fairer, less wasteful,
more productive world in the future. Many of these expectations,
as we have seen, had been growing between the wars and, like
‘homes for heroes’ and the nationalization of the coal mines, had
even been unsuccessfully anticipated in the First World War. The
Second World War gave an even stronger practical demonstration
that state intervention and mutual responsibility between citizens
on a large scale could work and that the war could not have been
won without them.
State intervention in production and distribution was planned
from the first, unlike the First World War when it was only
gradually and reluctantly forced upon the government. Aside from
the massive expansion of Royal Ordnance Factories, engineering,
aircraft, motor vehicles, shipbuilding, coal, iron and steel, gas and
electricity, railways, road transport, and construction were all
brought under government control as essential war industries. All
other industries were subordinated to the war effort. Textiles,
clothing, furniture, domestic utensils, and so on, essential to the
civilian population as well as to the armed forces, were subjected to
the closest controls, to limit their use of manpower and raw
materials and keep them only to essential production.4
Food production was given the highest priority since every extra
ton of food produced was a ton of cargo space saved on the
transatlantic convoys. Every available acre was ploughed, old
grassland turned into wheat and potato fields, and the arable fields
climbed up the Downs and the Pennines to heights not ploughed
since the Middle Ages. County War Agricultural Committees
ensured that inefficient farmers either improved or ceased to farm.
The Women’s Land Army—whose down-to-earth motto was
‘Backs to the Land’—took over part of the work, and with
government subsidies 6 million more acres were brought under the
plough. Increased grain and potato production was at the expense
409
of the livestock, especially pigs and poultry, which drove down the
meat and egg ration even further. Despite the demands of war the
number of agricultural workers grew from about 600,000 to
750,000, including 80,000 Land Girls and 40,000 prisoners of war,
and tractors increased almost fourfold from 56,000 to 203,000.
Even industrial workers became ‘farmers’; under the ‘Dig for
Victory’ campaign garden allotments grew from 815,000 to
1,400,000, and there were hundreds of thousands of domestic
poultry keepers and pig club members.5
Food rationing had been planned in 1938 and January 1940,
bringing a sense of equal sacrifice to the most sensitive area of
consumption. The rich could still spend up to 5 shillings (half a
day’s average manual wage) on a hotel or restaurant meal, but the
government soon introduced cheap meals for most school children
and ‘British Restaurants’ where anybody could get a good, plain,
three-course meal for little more than a shilling. The weekly rations
fluctuated, but from August 1942 were down to 1s. 2d. worth of
meat, 4oz. of bacon, 8oz. of butter, fats and margarine, 8oz. of
cheese, one egg, 8oz. of sugar, and (over a month) 16oz. of soap,
8oz. of sweets and 16oz. of jam or other preserves. A ‘points’
system allowed for a monthly choice of canned goods, such as
salmon, fruit or vegetables. Orange juice and cod liver oil, free to
poor families, were provided for expectant mothers and young
children. Bread and potatoes were off ration until 1946, when the
dollar shortage forced bread rationing for the first time. The whole
dietary system was designed by the scientific expertise of Sir Jack
Drummond, who calculated the protein and vitamins required by
adults and children (with extras for miners and other heavy
workers), with carbohydrate ‘fillers’ like bread and potatoes ad lib,
so that a large part of the population was better fed than before the
war. ‘The biggest shop in the world’, with 50 million customers, a
£600 million turnover and 50,000 civil servants by 1943, the
Ministry of Food became the sole importer of basic foodstuffs, and
purchaser of most domestic food supplies. Under Lord Woolton,
career manager of a chain of department stores, it was also
responsible for keeping the black market within bounds.6 The
feeding of the nation, so vital to morale, was one of the success
stories of the war and helped to give state intervention a good
name.
Recruitment to the armed forces and the direction of civilian
410
labour was also far better organized than in the First World War.
Conscription was planned before war began and the first 21-year-
olds were called up on 1 September 1939. The age of conscription
was gradually extended downwards to 18 and upwards to 51.
From December 1941 unmarried women between 18 and 25 were
conscripted too, for non-combatant though often dangerous duties
in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the Women’s Auxiliary Air
Force, and the Women’s Royal Navy Service; far more women of
all ages were directed into munitions and other vital industries.
Direction of labour was introduced in the crisis month of June
1940, when France fell and the bulk of the British Expeditionary
Force was evacuated from Dunkirk, and gave Ernest Bevin, the
redoubtable union boss who became minister of labour, power to
direct any person to perform any service he thought fit and to set
the pay, hours and conditions of the job. As the Labour leader,
Clement Attlee, now deputy prime minister to Winston Churchill,
explained, ‘It is necessary that the Government should be given
complete control over persons and property, not just some persons
of some particular class of the community, but of all persons, rich
and poor, man or woman, and of all property.’ It was often
unnecessary, since men and women sought patriotic (and high-paid)
work, and many married men with children were only too anxious
to work in reserved occupations. Only about 1.1 million directives
had to be issued in 1940–45, only 88,000 of them to women. It had
to be extended, late in 1943, to the most unpopular work of all, in
the coal mines where some 21,000 ‘Bevin boys’, including some
appalled middle-class youths, were sent in 1944–45, mainly to
work on underground haulage and maintenance.7 Conscription
threw men and women of different classes into the melting pot of
war together, and though their military ranks often, though not
always, reflected the civilian structure it gave a consciousness of all
being in it together.
Evacuation of some 3.5 million children and mothers of infants
from London and the large cities in 1939–41 and again in 1944–45
during the V-weapon attacks also threw the classes together, in
closer proximity than some of them liked. Although great efforts
were made to match socially children and hosts, some middle-class
foster parents were shocked at the poor health, inadequate
clothing, and what they took to be the slovenly speech and bad
habits of some working-class children—and the children were often
411
equally appalled at the stern discipline and, sometimes, the

unappetizing food of their hosts. Some mothers and children could
not stand it and repatriated themselves back to their bomb-
threatened homes, but for most the enforced cohabitation was an
illuminating experience on both sides.8
It was also mutually illuminating for the adults, chiefly women,
who volunteered or were directed to the armaments factories of the
Midlands and the north and for their hosts and neighbours. In
many cases easy-going ‘roughs’ from city slums came into close
contact for the first time with the puritanical ‘respectables’ of the
industrial working class, and the mutual horror surpassed anything
experienced by the innocent middle-class foster parents of evacuees.
The upper working-class locals were amazed and fascinated by the
personal (and sexual) habits of the newcomers, and the
neighbourhoods buzzed with gossip about them.9
Both sides worked enormously long hours, as in the First World
War, at dangerous work for unprecedentedly high wages, which
they began to make the most of in their short leisure time, especially
from 1942 when the American GIs began to arrive. Dancing,
particularly the new jive and jitterbug, had never been so popular,
nor the pub or the cinema. There was a renaissance in light
entertainment and in classical music and the performing arts as two
state-supported organizations, ENSA (the Entertainments National
Service Association), which brought popular comedians and
singers, and CEMA (the Council for Education in Music and the
Arts), which brought classical music and art exhibitions to the
munitions workers and the troops.10 For the people at home—and
until the North African landings of late 1942 most of the troops
were not overseas but in Britain preparing for the Second Front—
there was a remarkable camaraderie which took in grumbling at
the black-out and rationing, a gritty determination to ‘see it
through’, and an increasing belief that so much work and sacrifice
deserved to be rewarded.
At what point the expectations of a better post-war world took
over from the mere hope of national survival is difficult to
determine. The initiative certainly did not come from the
government. Churchill made no secret of his belief that Lloyd
George in the First World War had made promises he could not
fulfil, and that the blood, sweat, toil and tears he offered had no
other reward than escape from Nazi enslavement. In a speech in
412
March 1943, he envisaged expansion of national insurance for all

classes for ‘all purposes from cradle to grave’, a national health
service, ‘broader and more liberal education’, and alongside ‘a
widespread healthy and vigorous private enterprise…a broadening
field for state ownership and enterprise, especially in relation to
monopolies of all kinds’, but he warned against ‘attempts to
overpersuade or even to coerce his Majesty’s Government to bind
themselves or their unknown successors…to impose great new
expenditure on the state’.11 The Queen caught the spirit as early as
October 1940, in a letter to her mother-in-law Queen Mary
towards the end of the Battle of Britain: ‘The destruction is so
awful, the people so wonderful—they deserve a better world.’12
The one area in which people could not afford to wait for a
better world was in the social services. At the beginning of the war
the government expected fearsome casualties from air attack: at
least one quarter of a million casualties in the first fourteen days.13
They also expected—surprisingly, as it turned out—increased
unemployment from industrial dislocation and a massive increase
in destitution. The government was therefore driven to emergency
measures: in addition to evacuation, a take-over of the hospitals,
both voluntary and local government, in the name of coordination
and the provision of subsistence without strings to the expected
victims of bombing and industrial distress. The Unemployment
Assistance Board became plain Assistance Board with responsibility
for everyone in need without application of the means test (finally
abolished in 1941). As Richard Titmuss, then a civil servant
concerned with the emergency hospital service, came to observe:
by the end of the Second World War the Government had,

through the agency of newly established or existing services,
assumed and developed a measure of direct concern for the
health and well-being of the population which, by contrast
with the role of the Government in the nineteen-thirties, was
little short of remarkable. No longer did concern rest on the
belief that, in respect to many social needs, it was proper to
intervene only to assist the poor and those who were unable
to pay for services of one kind and another. Instead, it was
increasingly regarded as a proper function of Government to
ward off distress and strain among not only the poor but
almost all classes of society.14
413
Long before that, however, planning for a future in which there

would be ‘no more distressed areas, no more vast armies of
unemployed, no more slums, no vast denial of equality of
opportunity’, as Harold Laski put it in 1940,15 had become the
chief way of boosting morale and making the struggle seem
worthwhile. PEP (Political and Economic Planning), which had
published a report on The British Social Services in 1937, set up a
Post-War Aims Group even before the war began, and by July 1942
had produced a pamphlet, Planning for Social Security, which
anticipated the post-war legislation. G.D.H.Cole got Treasury
backing for the Nuffield College Reconstruction Survey, one of
many planning groups set up by professional interests, including
the British Medical Association, the Town and Country Planning
Association, the three main political parties, and a general pressure
group under the chairmanship of J.B.Priestley, then a popular
broadcaster and morale booster (much disliked for his socialist
views by part of the government, which persuaded the BBC in 1940
to stop his weekly broadcasts).16 Priestley’s group went public on 4
January 1941 with a special issue of Picture Post devoted to A Plan
for Britain, with articles by Thomas Balogh the economist on
‘Work for All’, A.D.K.Owen, a political scientist, on ‘Social
Security’, Maxwell Fry the architect and town planner on ‘The
New Britain Must Be Planned’, A.D.Lindsay, Master of Balliol
College, Oxford on ‘A Plan for Education’, Julian Huxley the
biologist on ‘Health for All’, Dr Maurice Newfield on ‘A Real
Medical Service’, and Priestley himself on holidays and leisure.17 It
was a professional blueprint for a professional society.
Arthur Greenwood, Labour minister of health, was connected
with these groups and sympathetic to their aims. Responding to the
TUC’s request for better coverage of health insurance, he persuaded
the government to set up in June 1941 an interdepartmental
committee of civil servants under Sir William Beveridge, a pioneer
with Churchill of national insurance, on the first prerequisite of any
plan, social security. Beveridge was an elitist, self-important, rather
humourless man, who did not welcome the job and wrote to his
sister, ‘I am Chairman also of a Reconstruction Committee on the
Social Services: but I’m not doing much about that while I can do
anything about the war.’18 He offended his civil servant colleagues
on the Committee by circulating without consultation a
memorandum laying down his dogmatic proposals, derived from
414
his long-held beliefs on national insurance, and the Cabinet decided

that the report, still thought of as internal technical advice, should
be in the Chairman’s name alone. Fortunately, the Committee had
a secretary, D.N.Chester, a temporary civil servant from a working-
class background recruited from Manchester University and later to
be Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, who understood the
importance of the subject to the working class and its morale.
The report, its publication delayed by government doubts, came
out in November 1942 under the driest of titles, Social Insurance
and Allied Services. It was an instant best-seller, selling along with
its shorter summary 635,000 copies. Within two weeks, a Gallup
poll found that nineteen people out of twenty had heard of it, and
nine out of ten believed that its proposals should be adopted. It
declared roundly that ‘a revolutionary moment in the world’s
history is a time for revolutions, not for patching’. Social insurance
was one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress, and
all ‘five giants on the road to reconstruction’, Want, Disease,
Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness, should be tackled together. It
noted that the state already made provision in the exigencies of life
for most of the population, but that there were obvious gaps in the
coverage, such as medical treatment for workers’ families, and
maternity and death benefits. Want could be finally abolished by a
comprehensive system of social security on the insurance principle,
everyone contributing and everyone receiving benefits as of right in
the exigencies of life, sickness, unemployment, widowhood and old
age. The state scheme would provide for a national minimum; it
should leave room and encouragement for individuals to provide
more than the minimum for themselves and their families. There
were three assumptions without which the scheme would fall short
of its aims: children’s allowances for all after the first (to solve the
old problem of large families in poverty); a comprehensive health
and rehabilitation service for all citizens, not just for the insured
workers; and a plan for the maintenance of full employment, to
prevent mass unemployment from bankrupting the system. The
whole scheme would be funded by a single weekly stamp, paid for
jointly by the worker and the employer (or by the self-employed
person alone), and the benefits should be adequate and proof
against inflation. The aim of the plan was ‘to abolish want by
ensuring that every citizen willing to serve according to his powers
has at all times an income sufficient to meet his responsibilities’.19
415
The excitement and acclamation with which the Beveridge

Report was received can only be understood in the context of the
time. It came at ‘the turning of the tide’, just after the battles of El
Alamein and Stalingrad. As Churchill put it with understandable
simplification, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After
Alamein we never had a defeat’.20 People, already oriented to
postwar reconstruction by the public discussion of planning, were
looking for light at the end of the tunnel, and Beveridge seemed to
shine that light. Archbishop Temple in broadcasts had popularized
the term ‘welfare state’ to contrast Allied governments, who
supposedly put the welfare of their people in a very general sense
before military might, with the ‘warfare states’ of the Axis Powers
(in fact the Germans put proportionately less effort into warfare
than Britain until the closing stages of the war).21 The term
instantly attached itself to the Beveridge proposals, and ‘the welfare
state’ became a shorthand way of referring to the whole
programme, including social security, a national health service,
educational opportunity, and full employment. Any politician who
promised these was for the welfare state; any who dragged his feet
was against it.
Churchill, unfortunately for the Tory Party and its hopes of
winning the post-war election, was perceived as dragging his feet,
although some of the younger, more perceptive Conservatives, led
by Quintin Hogg, saw it as ‘a flag to nail to the mast, a symbol, a
rallying point for men of good will—above all, an opportunity to
re-establish a social conscience in the Tory Party’.22 The war
minister even refused to allow ABCA (the Army Bureau of Current
Affairs) to distribute a summary of the report to the troops because
it was too controversial. The Labour Party, the TUC, the Liberal
Party, and the British Council of Churches enthusiastically
endorsed it. In the parliamentary debate on the report in February
1943 the government, led on the domestic side by the poker-faced
ex-civil servant Sir John Anderson and the penny-pinching
Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Kingsley Wood, half-heartedly
endorsed about half of it and, at Churchill’s insistence, left the
necessary legislation to a post-war government. They provoked a
revolt of 119 Coalition MPs, ninety-seven of them Labour, and led
the mining MP, James Griffiths, the future minister of national
insurance, to remark that ‘This makes the return of the Labour
Party to power at the next election an absolute certainty’.23
416
Churchill and the Tory leadership had misread the mood of the
people.
To some extent the enthusiasm was misplaced. The Beveridge
Plan looked backward rather than forward, to the Edwardian
conception of national insurance as a provision for the deserving
poor who had paid their dues rather than to society itself as one
great family responsible for all its members. It left many loopholes
through which non-contributors could fall into distress, and the
safety net, the old (Unemployment) Assistance Board transformed
into the National Assistance Board in 1948, was to apply the old
means test and even, unintended by Beveridge, to prop up the
inadequate insurance benefits with supplementary benefits.
Nevertheless, the report contributed greatly to the revolution in
expectations which seized hold of the British people in the midst of
this most total of wars and prepared them to demand a new kind
of society when it ended.
The Labour Party gained most from these expectations. As in the
First World War, it benefited enormously from its entry into the
Coalition government in 1940 and particularly from the increased
stature of Clement Attlee as deputy premier, Ernest Bevin as
minister of labour and Arthur Greenwood as minister of health,
who between them dominated the control of manpower and the
social services. The trade unions gained, too, from the shortage of
labour, growing from 6.3 million members and 31 per cent of the
eligible workforce in 1939 to 8.8 million and 43 per cent in 1946,24
and from the further growth of corporatism as the government and
employers were forced to seek their co-operation. By 1941 Pit
Production Committees in the coal mines and Yard Committees in
shipbuilding were established, and by 1942 even the reluctant
Engineering Employers’ Federation, under pressure from the
government, signed an agreement with the Amalgamated
Engineering Union to establish Joint Production Committees in
works with over 150 workers. Even the Ford Company, after a
brief strike early in 1941, was forced to recognize the union at their
Manchester works, and at the main works at Dagenham two and a
half years later. Outside the mines there were relatively few strikes
during the war, and nothing like the Red Clydeside and other
labour unrest of the First World War. The shop stewards were as
anxious to keep up production to defeat the Nazis as the union
leaders and the government, and even the Communist Party gave
417
up their agitation against a capitalist war after Russia was invaded

in July 1941. As James Cronin has expressed it, ‘With Bevin
formulating state policy…the unions were accorded a status and a
dignity scarcely imaginable before 1939,’ and both they and the
Labour leadership ‘emerged from the war stronger and more self-
confident.’25
The Labour Party and the working class were not the only ones
looking for a better post-war world. Opinion polls showed that the
middle classes, too, supported the Beveridge Plan and a Gallup poll
in April 1945 even showed a majority of them in favour of the
nationalization of key industries.26 Civil servants, teachers and
other public employees had suffered pay cuts during the inter-war
Depression, and the salaried middle class was united with the
manual workers in not wanting to return to the 1930s. Despite the
Coalition government’s Education Act and the White Paper on
Employment of 1944 committing the government to ‘the
maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the
war’, the Conservative Party became tarred with the brush of
depression, cuts in social services and, of course, Munich and
Appeasement. Even the army, in North Africa, Italy and, finally,
France and Germany, was caught by the passion for social reform.
In June 1945 the revolution in expectations swept the Labour Party
into power with a landslide majority, and (though the atomic bomb
did not end the war against Japan until August) the post-war world
began.
2 ‘MOST OF OUR PEOPLE HAVE NEVER HAD IT

SO GOOD’
The quarter-century after the Second World War saw the
culmination of all the trends leading to professional society: the rise
of an affluent, permissive, more homogeneous society with greater
equality between the classes, the sexes and the generations, the
completion of the welfare state run by professional administrators
and experts, and the creation of a mixed economy controlled on
both sides by professional managers. Affluence was the most
obvious trend. After the immediate post-war austerity, Gross
Domestic Product rose by 2.6 per cent per annum in the 1950s and
2.8 per cent in the 1960s, enabling living standards per head to
double in real terms between 1946 and 1973.27 In 1954 the
418
Chancellor of the Exchequer, R.A.Butler, forecast that the standard

of living would double in twenty-five years. During the 1959
election campaign, Harold Macmillan, the flamboyant prime
minister, was able to claim, in a much misquoted phrase, ‘Most of
our people have never had it so good.’28
Material progress was only marred by the knowledge that other
industrial countries, including the recent enemies West Germany
and Japan, were experiencing even faster growth. The original six
members of the European Economic Community achieved an
annual rate of growth of 4.9 per cent between 1950 and 1973, but
it was not until the late 1960s that they shot into the lead, so that
British complacency remained unshaken until then.29
Success was also marred by the decline of Britain as a world
power and by the retreat from empire. Yet this too was not taken
too seriously at first. Political and military decline was cushioned
by the consciousness of victory in war, the rapid acquisition of the
nuclear deterrent as one of only three and then five nuclear powers,
by permanent membership of the Security Council of the United
Nations, high standing in the world financial system, and by the
‘special relationship’ with the heir to British hegemony, the United
States. The retreat from empire was disguised as the long-planned
evolution of self-governing colonies and their transformation into
autonomous dominions on the pattern of Canada, Australia, New
Zealand and, less happily, South Africa. The expanded
Commonwealth of Nations was heralded as a pattern of
international co-operation and mutual aid for the future of the
world. The independence of India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma in
1947 was hailed as a triumph of good sense and statesmanship
which would in due but not overhasty course be extended to the
rest of the larger deserving colonies and federations, like the West
Indies and the Rhodesias. Colonial guerrilla wars in Malaya,
Cyprus, Kenya and elsewhere came gradually to be seen as sorting
out inter-communal strife preparatory to emancipation. The Suez
fiasco in 1956 was a cold douche of reality in the face of Britain’s
diminished power, but merely accelerated the evolution of empire
into commonwealth as ‘the wind of change’ blew most of the
remaining colonies into independence in the 1960s and Britain
retreated to its home base.30
The main legacy of empire, apart from a fund of goodwill in
parts of the Third World and a number of almost insoluble political
419
problems in Palestine, Rhodesia, South Africa, Guyana and

elsewhere, was a sudden influx of immigrants from the old colonies
and new dominions, who added to the variety of what was coming
to be seen as a more open and mobile British society. Non-white
immigrants from Asia and the West Indies, some of them escaping
from a post-colonial situation they found uncomfortable, more of
them merely seeking jobs and a better life, were at first encouraged
by British governments and employers seeking cheap labour in the
post-war reconstruction boom. The welcome turned to alarm when
race riots, beginning in Notting Hill in 1958, spread to many cities
where the non-whites congregated and were treated with suspicion
and hostility by a society which, except for the easily assimilated
Scots, Irish and Jews, had experienced little in the way of alien
cultures for the last nine centuries. Whether the English were more
xenophobic than the French towards their Algerian, the Germans
towards their Turkish and Yugoslav, or even the Swiss towards
their Spanish and Portuguese ‘guestworkers’, none of whom, unlike
the British immigrants, were granted full citizenship, may well be
doubted, but Britain acquired a race problem which took it by
surprise.31
In some areas of London, Birmingham, and the textile towns of
Yorkshire, Lancashire and the East Midlands, race replaced class as
the main source of tension. Although still powerful as a cause of
difference and antagonism, class was loosening its grip on the old
rigid divisions of English society. There were still great inequalities
of income, wealth, education, speech and dress, and most people
had to work for their livings while others belonged to what one of
them called ‘that reservoir of persons economically free and used to
responsibility from an early age’. 32 There were still major
differences in people’s relations to the means of production, though
even they were becoming more alike in the sense of more dependent
on paid employment. With the spread of affluence, the decline of
domestic service and deference and, to a lesser extent, the growth of
educational opportunity, the classes were becoming more alike in
dress, in expectations of material comfort and personal services, in
leisure and holidays, and in lifestyle generally. At one end of the
scale it was no longer possible for the rich to maintain vast houses
with troops of servants totally insulated from the rest of society: as
we have seen, the Second World War saw the end of all that. At the
other more and more people came to own their own house, with
420
modern amenities better than the Victorian aristocracy enjoyed,

consumer durables like television sets, refrigerators and washing
machines, a garden, the mobility afforded by a car, more time for a
variety of leisure activities, longer holidays away from home, many
of them abroad, and so on.
There came into being a kind of average lifestyle, home-centred,
family-oriented, servantless, with leisure time devoted to home-
based activities, television watching, gardening, do-it-yourself
decorating and home improvement, with weekend car trips to the
country or the seaside, and annual holidays in Britain or abroad, a
lifestyle which encompassed a growing majority of the population.
By 1971 over half of all families owned their own home (and two-
thirds of the rest lived on secure tenures in low-rent public
housing), over half had a car (and 7 per cent more than one), two-
thirds had a refrigerator and/or a washing machine, and over 95
per cent had television. Most adult male manual workers worked
forty to forty-five hours a week, non-manual workers slightly less,
and two-thirds had three weeks’ annual holiday or more (only 28
per cent had less than two weeks). At least 95 per cent of the
members of every class spent a large part of their free time
watching television, two-thirds (except for the less skilled working
class, where it was half) spent some time gardening, and half or
more in home decorating, car cleaning, and playing with children.
Taking a drive in the car, socializing in the pub, and going for a
walk were popular activities with half or more of every class, while
the only participatory sport with more than a 10 per cent following
was swimming, with 22 per cent.33 Although there were differences
of taste in programmes viewed, music listened to, books and
newspapers read, age and size of car, destination of car rides and
holidays, and so on, there was an astonishing similarity between
the way of life of all classes, which would only become more similar
with time. By 1984, for example, 95 per cent of manual workers
would have four weeks’ holiday or more, two-thirds of every class
except the poorest (44 per cent) took a holiday away from home,
and from 89 to 94 per cent of every class took day trips in the
summer.34
Much of this convergence was due to the tendency towards
single status for manual and non-manual workers, in matters such
as hours of work, holidays, sick pay, occupational pensions, and
conditions of work, which was subsumed under the
421
professionalization of the working class in Chapter 7. It also owed

much to the rise of the so-called ‘affluent worker’, to which we
shall return, pursuing the same comforts and amenities already
enjoyed by the middle class. It was reinforced by upward mobility
from the manual to the non-manual class, especially by women
workers, an increasing proportion of whom were married. Non-
manual male workers increased from 32 per cent of those occupied
in 1951 to 41 per cent in 1971, non-manual women workers from
46 to 57 per cent, and the proportion of married women working,
manual and non-manual, from 22 to 42 per cent.35
Meanwhile, entrepreneurs continued to decline in numbers, male
employers and proprietors from 5.7 to 5.2 per cent of the occupied
population, and females from 3.2 to 2.9 per cent, while
professional administrators and managers increased, males from
12.6 to 21.5 per cent and females from 11.6 to 15.5 per cent, thus
reinforcing the change within the non-manual sector towards
professional and largely salaried occupations.36 This came to be one
of the major reasons for the steady increase in upward social
mobility without an equivalent downward flow over the previous
few decades which the Oxford Social Mobility Project observed in
1972. John Goldthorpe and his colleagues found that, amongst
men born in ten-year cohorts from 1908–17 to 1938–47, increasing
numbers were making their way from below into what they called
the ‘service class’, the professional, administrative and managerial
Class I, and its ‘cadet’ or subaltern level, Class II. Indeed, a clear
majority of each of these classes was recruited from below, 54.3 per
cent of Class I and 57.6 per cent of Class II (plus 19.1 per cent into
Class II from Class I). Because these classes were small, 14.3 per
cent and 12.2 per cent of the total population, this still left the
majority of the working class (Classes V, VI, and VII) where they
were, so that while the top classes were more open the lower classes
were relatively closed and becoming more so. The authors argued,
however, that if the division of labour had not changed, producing
more jobs at the professional and managerial level, there would
have been little or no increase in upward mobility, and the relative
chance of a working-class boy rising into the top class would have
remained much the same.37 Against this it can be said that it was
the expansion of service-class jobs produced by professional society
that brought about the undoubted absolute increase in upward
mobility. For the generation that came to maturity in post-war
422
Britain this represented at least a once-for-all increase in

occupational opportunity.
How unequal opportunity still was is made clear by the other
half of the Oxford Social Mobility Project, on educational mobility.
A.H.Halsey and his colleagues, using slightly different ten-year
birth cohorts from 1913–22 to 1943–52, found that in the first
three cohorts at least there had been a large expansion of state
selective education for first-generation grammar school boys,
which ‘gave “superior” education to vast numbers of boys from
“uneducated” homes’. But because of much greater drop-out rates
for those from less advantaged backgrounds in terms of income,
‘family climate’ and ‘cultural capital’, their life chances were
improved much less than they might have been: ‘the proportion of
working-class boys reaching A-Level, and pari passu securing
places at university, could comfortably be doubled without any
lowering of standards. ‘Moreover, boys from the service class had a
much greater share of public school and other private education
and consequently a much better chance of a university education
(though ultimate success owed more to social background than to
type of school). Only 5.1 per cent of all the men in the survey had
a university education, and a further 1.4 per cent went to a college
of education to train as teachers. Part-time further education
accounted for 45.1 per cent more, so that more than half the
sample had some form of training beyond school. The university
students were very unevenly distributed. One in five of the boys
from Classes I and II went to university, compared with one in
twenty-two of those from the lower non-manual and highly skilled
working Classes III–V, and one in fifty-six of those from the less
skilled working Classes VI–VIII. This meant that a boy from the
service class had a four times greater chance of a university
education than one from the intermediate classes, and eleven times
greater than one from the working class. When they reached the
university, because of the large difference in size between the
classes, working-class boys constituted one-fifth of all students,
intermediate-class boys over a quarter, and service-class boys over
half.
By the last cohort, born in 1943–52, the chances for all classes
had more than trebled compared with the first: 8.5 per cent (instead
of 1.8 per cent) of the age group now attended, including over one
in four of the service class sons, nearly one in twelve of the
423
intermediate group, and one in thirty of the working class.

Meanwhile, the gap between the top and the bottom classes had
slightly increased: for those born in 1913–22 it was 8:1, for those
born in 1943–52, 8.5:1. Yet in terms of merit as measured by IQ
scores (an admittedly dubious measuring rod), the service class only
achieved 14 per cent more university places than its estimated (58
per cent) meritocratic share, while the working class lost only 4 per
cent of its ‘proper’ (28 per cent) share. The 4 per cent misallocation
represented about 6,000 working-class boys every year who were
denied their meritocratic due, hardly a trivial figure, and the
absolute gains of expansion to the service class were massive
compared with those to the working class. Nevertheless, expansion
meant that large numbers of ‘first-generation’ students from all the
classes, including 88 per cent from the service class whose parents
had not experienced university education, gained access to higher
education for the first time, showing how much more they now
depended on the education system for success, and the working
class found a ladder which, however narrow, was far wider than
any previously provided.38 In other words, educational opportunity
in post-war Britain was still very unequal but much nearer to a
meritocracy than it had ever been before.
There was also an increasing similarity of incomes. ‘The
compression, at both ends, of the scale of income distribution’ after
taxes paid and benefits received, which T.H.Marshall found in
1950, came to be sharply questioned in the 1960s, as we shall see.
But there can be little doubt that the poor would have been much
poorer and the rich much richer if it had not been for the welfare
state and the graduated income tax. The Diamond Commission on
the Distribution of Income and Wealth shows that the top 1 per
cent of income earners received after tax in 1949–50 less than six
times the average income and by 1972 no more than four times—
not enough to employ a household of servants on the Victorian
scale.39 Even the poverty surveyors who challenged that finding
could only show that, allowing for every kind of fringe benefit and
income in kind, the top 1 per cent had a final income about eight
times the median, and the marginally rich (the second 5 per cent,
i.e. the sixth to tenth percentiles) about three times the median and
less than four and a half times the average income of the poor
household on supplementary benefit.40 We must return to the
controversial question of the distribution of income and the
424
incidence of poverty later, but meanwhile it is clear that by the

standards of any previous age the rich were less rich in terms of the
amount of labour of the poor they could buy, and to that extent
there was more equality.
The working class was also more affluent, certainly in absolute
terms and probably also relative to the middle class. Average
weekly earnings for adult male manual workers rose from £8.30 in
1951 to £30.93 in 1971, a rise in real terms of 68 per cent. For
manual women they rose from £4.50 to £15.80, a real rise of only
58 per cent, compared with about a 60 per cent rise in real salaries
for both non-manual men and women.41 With more dual-income
couples, more working-class families were able to live like the
middle class. Journalists and sociologists began to talk about the
affluent worker and his ‘embourgeoisement’, his emulation of the
middle-class way of life. In so far as this meant any more than the
acquisition of material possessions and advantages such as more
leisure and holidays once thought to be the privilege of the middle
class, it seemed to imply that workers as they became more affluent
would become less class-conscious, less attached to their trade
unions and the Labour Party, more individualistic in seeking
promotion for themselves and education for their children, and
more inclined to accept the capitalist economic system and its
political support in the Conservative Party.42 A team of sociologists
who studied a group of affluent workers in the motor, ball bearing
and chemical industries in the then thriving town of Luton in the
1960s found that, on the contrary, despite their enjoyment of
material gains such as house and car ownership and foreign
holidays, they were just as solidaristic in support of the trade
unions and Labour as more traditional workers. They had a more
‘instrumental’ attitude to work, i.e. they viewed it simply as a
means to making money to support a better lifestyle, and were just
as alienated from boring work on the assembly line as before. Yet
the investigators also found that they were more individualistic in
the sense of having ambitions for their families and pursuing them
in a relatively purposive and planned fashion, in marked contrast to
the fatalistic social philosophy which they associated with the
traditional working class, and that they practised a more
‘bourgeois’ family life, with more ‘companionate’ relations between
husband and wife and closer relations between parents and
children.43 Whether or not this amounted to ‘embourgeoisement’ or
425
was merely ‘convergence’ (from both directions) towards the

average or common lifestyle we saw developing above, it presaged
a narrowing of the differences between the classes and their
enjoyment of life.
In absolute terms the poor too ‘had never had it so good.’
Rowntree’s third survey of York in 1950 showed that poverty in the
old harsh Victorian sense had all but disappeared. Even by the
‘human needs standard’ of 1936 he found only 1.7 per cent of the
population (2.8 per cent of the working class) below the poverty
line. 44 Applying the same standard to the national Family
Expenditure Survey of 1953–54, Brian Abel Smith and Peter
Townsend found over twice as many, 4.1 per cent of the
population, in poverty, but still far less than between the wars.45
Poverty, however, is not so easily exorcized, and from the late
1960s a powerful lobby argued that poverty was not an absolute
but a relative concept, and that anyone who lacked the resources to
participate in the activities, customs and diets commonly approved
by society was relatively deprived and therefore in poverty by the
standards of the time.46 There were various ways of measuring
relative poverty—by a percentage, commonly 50 per cent of the
average income, or by a scale of relative deprivation including such
criteria as not having four basic household amenities (indoor flush
toilet, sink and tap, fixed bath, gas or electric cooker) or not having
a holiday away from home in the last twelve months—but the most
plausible was the state’s own standard, the social security level of
national assistance or supplementary benefit. By the latter
standard, Abel Smith and Townsend in a large sample survey in
1968–69 estimated that 3.5 million people, 6.4 per cent of the
population, were living in relative poverty. At a higher standard, 40
per cent above the supplementary benefit line, they found 11.7
million, 21.5 per cent of the population, living ‘on the margins of
poverty’.47
The problem with relative poverty is that it does not measure
poverty in the ordinary sense of lacking adequate means of
existence, but inequality, which is a fluctuating concept. Worse still,
it contains a paradox: the more generous the welfare state becomes,
the more people it thrusts into poverty. Unless the state is able to
ensure that everyone below the line knows how to claim and
actually receives supplementary benefit, the concept ensures that
the poor will always be with us and that nothing short of a massive
426
redistribution of income can cure it. It is thus in danger of

becoming counterproductive by leading people to despair of the
welfare state and consequently to reject it. The real project of the
poverty surveyors, therefore, was not merely to abolish poverty but
to set narrower limits to inequality. Hence their attack on the unfair
shares of the rich, and on the official statistics which seemed to
show that they were getting poorer, both before and after tax. They
disputed the findings of the Diamond Commission on the
Distribution of Income and Wealth that the original share of
personal income of the top 1 per cent of income receivers had been
cut by over a third by taxation and that their post-tax income had
declined from 5.8 per cent in 1949–50 to 4 per cent in 1972–73.
Taking account of all their resources including fringe benefits,
social services and private income in kind, and (much the largest
and most controversial item since some assets were unrealizable
and others double-counted since they yielded interest or dividends
in the original income) the ‘annuitized value of assets’, the survey
increased their estimated share from 5.4 per cent (before tax) to 6.7
per cent. Similarly, it increased the post-tax share of the top 10 per
cent (which the Diamond Commission found had declined less
dramatically) from 24.9 to 27.5 per cent.48
At first sight this left plenty of room for further redistribution,
but on a closer view the rich were not so very rich compared with
earlier times. The top 1 per cent had less than seven times the
average pre-tax income and perhaps four and a half times after
tax—unequal indeed, but not the fabulous wealth which enabled
their rich ancestors to buy vast amounts of the labour of the poor.
The marginally rich, meanwhile, reached far down into the middle
class. The average non-asset income of the second 5 per cent (6–10
per cent) was only £2,103, less than half the salary in 1969 of a
university professor. Put more graphically, to lift every household in
the bottom 40 per cent receiving less than £777 (79 per cent of the
mean, the line of marginal poverty, supplementary benefit plus 40
per cent) up to that level would have taken nearly twice the whole
pre-tax income of the top 1 per cent or over two-fifths of the pre-
tax income of top 10 per cent.49 Whether such a draconian (gross,
not marginal) rate of tax would have been politically viable or
administratively collectable is questionable, leaving aside its effects
on investment and the future creation of wealth.
427
What is beyond question is that the poor would have been in a

far sorrier position but for the welfare state. If we look at the
redistribution of income after all taxes, direct and indirect, paid and
all benefits in cash and kind received, we can take some measure of
how far the state helped the lower paid. In 1970 all those earning
less than £905 (70 per cent of average male manual earnings)
received more than they paid; those earning £620 received on
average £189, 30 per cent more than their original income; those
earning less than £260 received £431, or 625 per cent of their
original income of £69. In short, all those earning less than 58 per
cent of the median income (70 per cent of average male manual
earnings) received substantially more than they contributed. To
that, perhaps inadequate, extent the welfare state pursued the
principle of equality of outcome.
There was a further factor operating in the direction of equality,
and that was the increasing importance of human capital. Human
capital is as important to professional society as land was to pre-
industrial society and industrial capital to industrial society. It can
be defined as the capitalized return to human skills, or the skill
differential over unskilled labour multiplied by the number of
years’ purchase for other property (e.g. for land, twenty years’
purchase for a rent yielding 5 per cent on capital) and discounted
for depreciation or ‘wastage’. Peter Lindert has observed that the
classical economists, obsessed with rent, profits and wages, were
able to ignore this factor because ‘The relative neglect of human
capital differences as a basis for inequality was less serious in a
world in which they accounted for only about 15 per cent of
national income as compared with about 52 per cent today’.
Whereas ‘in 1867 the returns to skilled labour accounted for
between 5% and 25% of the national income’, a century later they
amounted to 46–58 per cent of pre-tax household income. More
important, by the early 1970s ‘the economic ranks had been
homogenized as far as the three factors [land, profits, and labour
earnings] are concerned’, and the top decile received very little of its
income from land, little more from other property incomes than the
other 90 per cent, and most of its income (78–90 per cent,
compared with 84–97 per cent for the rest) from personal
earnings.50 This is another way of saying that in a professional
society the dominant form of income comes from personal skill and
expertise, acquired by education and training.
428
The same applies to the distribution of wealth. The Diamond

Commission did not attempt to include human capital in its
distribution of wealth but it did elaborate its estimates to include
one element created largely by human capital, namely accrued
pension rights. The estate duty method of estimation (series B,
assuming that those not covered by the returns had no wealth)
showed that the top 1 per cent of the adult population owned 56
per cent of all personal wealth in 1936–38, 43 per cent in 1954, and
30 per cent in 1972 (and the top 10 per cent at the same dates 88,
79 and 72 per cent). The inclusion of occupational pension rights
reduced the share of the top 1 per cent in 1972 from 29.9 to 25.6
per cent (and of the top 10 per cent from 72 to 64 per cent). The
poverty surveyors attacked the Commission for making further
estimates taking account of state pension rights, on the grounds
that the knowledge that the accrued rights of 55–59-year-old
women were worth £8,577 in 1975 ‘would be news indeed to
middle-aged working-class women’; but since their state pension
rights were usually the most valuable thing they owned it would be
good news which made the prospect of old age a lot brighter than
without. Taking these estimates into account reduced the share of
the top 1 per cent to 17.4 per cent of the total wealth (and of the
top 10 per cent to 45.7 per cent).51 The inclusion of pension rights,
an easily measurable fraction of human capital, considerably
reduced the degree of wealth inequality. The inclusion of human
capital as a whole, according to Lindert, would have made the
distribution of wealth essentially the same as the distribution of
income, which is to say a great deal less unequal.52
The way in which the elderly are treated is a good test of a
professional society. Since pensions are deferred income or
accumulated human capital, they measure the proportion of the
population enabled to acquire it in this form. By 1970 75 per cent
of non-manual men and 47 per cent of non-manual women
workers were in occupational pension schemes, and 46 per cent of
manual men but only 18 per cent of manual women workers. (By
1982 64 per cent of all married pensioners were receiving
occupational pensions, though only 54 per cent of single men and
33 per cent of single women pensioners.) State pensions meanwhile
came to provide for the whole retired population, and increased
from 4.1 million (17.5 per cent of the adult population) in 1951 to
7.8 million (21.5 per cent) in 1971. (By 1987 there would be 8.5
429
million, 23 per cent of the adult population). Over that period the
value of the state pension for a married couple increased from 30 to
37 per cent of average male manual earnings (and to 50 per cent by
1981).53 Though more human capital accrued to professional and
managerial men than to their women colleagues or to manual
workers of both sexes, the professional principle of pensions as
deferred career earnings was being gradually extended to the whole
population.
In relations within the family, between the sexes and the
generations, there was less inequality. More women were marrying
(four out of five in the 1960s compared with three out of five in the
1930s) and were marrying younger but were having no more
children (even in the short-lived ‘baby booms’ of the late 1940s and
early 1960s families were no larger, the high birth rate being due to
more mothers of childbearing age) and, as we have seen, far more
married women were going out to work. This led some sociologists
to talk of the ‘symmetrical family’, with both parents working and
helping with childrearing and housework. Husbands in all classes
were helping more in the house, though least at top and bottom in
company directors’ and unskilled manual workers’ families, and
there was still much sexual division of labour, with the wife
cooking and caring for the children and the husband washing the
dishes, gardening, home decorating, and doing some of the
housework.54 But women who went out to work out of interest, to
pursue a career or simply to earn money to make ends meet or
improve the family’s living standard, soon found that they had
liberated themselves into a double burden of work, and that most
of the cares of home and children fell on them.
It did, however, give them more financial and psychological
independence, and the women’s emancipation movement of the
1960s, which followed rather than caused the expansion of
employment, was pioneered by professional career women who felt
the injustice of this new version of the double standard. Women’s
liberation owed more to the professional social ideal than meets the
eye. In a society predicated on reward according to merit it was
morally impossible to deny to women who had proved their worth
by intellectual ability and practical competence recognition of their
merit—or, if perversely denied, it became a challenge for women to
demand their rights.55 The triumphs of the movement—the Divorce
Reform Act of 1969 which made irretrievable breakdown of
430
marriage the sole ground; the Matrimonial Property Act of 1970

which made the wife’s contribution to the marriage, in money or in
kind, an equal claim on the marital property; the Equal Pay Act of
the same year which aimed at equal reward for equal work by the
end of 1975, and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, which set up
the Equal Opportunities Commission to even up job and promotion
chances—were all expressions of the principle of equal reward for
equal merit. Ideals can of course be frustrated in practice, and ways
were found by employers to evade the last two acts, but the
legislative acceptance of the principle was a revolution in the
relations between the sexes.
Teenagers were liberated too from traditional parental controls,
by affluence, possession of more disposable income than any other
age group, and the shortage of teenage labour, reinforced by the
trend for more children to stay on at school and enter higher
education, where universal student grants from 1959 based on
parental income provided adequate maintenance. With far more
money to spend on clothes, pop records, consumer durables like ‘hi-
fi’ equipment and motorbikes, and on leisure activities, a
burgeoning youth culture developed. Its cult heroes ranged from
Bill Haley and the Comets, a transatlantic import of the 1950s,
through the lovable Beatles and the rebellious Rolling Stones of the
1960s, to the ‘unisex’ David Bowie and Boy George of the 1970s
and 1980s. It was expressed in youth fashions, from the nostalgic
‘Teddy boys’ of the 1950s through the ‘mods and rockers’ to the
‘flower people’ and the (less handsome and more racist) ‘skinheads’
and ‘punks’ of the 1960s and 1970s. It was exploited by big
business, both legitimate in the shape of pop concert promoters and
record companies and illicit in the shape of drug racketeers, but it
successfully demanded a more colourful, cosmopolitan and
hedonistic life for the young.56 The significance of the youth
culture, especially by the 1960s, was not only that it was almost
classless, so that public school pop groups like the Hollies had to
fake a working-class accent to become acceptable, but that it
reversed the sociologists’ ‘principle of stratified diffusion’ (the
theory that trends in dress, music, entertainment, and lifestyle
always begin at the top and work their way down through
society).57 If it had ever been wholly true—and the past history of
the upward trajectory of trousers, the lounge suit, and casual wear
generally, not to mention American jazz and the blues, or the
431
decline of church attendance, suggest otherwise—the 1960s turned

it upside down, with the young of the middle and upper classes
emulating the denizens of Liverpool and the East End of London.
In nothing did the new fashionable classlessness manifest itself
more than in dress. If the inter-war period saw the first real
revolution in costume since the fashion cycle began, with skirts
above the knee and ‘beach pyjamas’ for women, the 1960s saw the
second, not so much the mini-skirt and ‘hot-pants’ as the ‘unisex’
jeans and T-shirts which spread right across the world from San
Francisco via London to Hong Kong. This was a perfect example of
upward diffusion: blue jeans (the fustian of the Victorian working
class) had been the working dress of the American farmer and the
‘overalls’ of the British working man. They became the uniform of
the (largely middle-class) student revolt in the universities of the
late 1960s and early 1970s. Their adoption by the middle-class
young, even with designer labels by Gloria Vanderbilt or Jordache,
was the symbol—not much accepted by their still class-ridden
elders—of the classless young.
The 1960s was the pivotal decade, too, for the so-called
‘permissive society’, the final kick of revolt against Victorianism
itself. There had always been ‘permissive behaviour’ at the highest
and lowest levels of society, amongst the Victorian Prince of Wales’s
Marlborough House set and the ‘roughs’ and amongst the inter-war
Prince of Wales’s Fort Belvedere set and the low-class ‘monkey
runs’ of the industrial towns. Yet Geoffrey Gorer in the early 1950s
found that the great majority of respondents to his newspaper
questionnaire disapproved of sex before marriage and still more of
sex outside it.58 As the Hungarian immigrant humorist George
Mikes explained, ‘Continentals have sex; the English have hot
water bottles.’59 Although their behaviour did not quite measure up
to their ideals, the British, especially of the lower middle and upper
working class, were both inhibited and censorious. Most of them
remained so throughout the ‘permissive revolution’, which affected
the young far more than the middle-aged. Contrary to popular
belief, it began before the contraceptive pill liberated women—
some women, since it was used only by a minority, and most of
them within marriage—from the more obvious consequences of
free love. The main effects were a more general acceptance of
monogamous unmarried couples living together and a small rise in
the rate of illegitimate births, from 4.8 per thousand live births in
432
1931 and 1951 to 8 per thousand live births in 1971, while the rate
of premarital conceptions scarcely rose at all. They did, it is true,
more than double in the next fourteen years, but that was because
of the rise of ‘informal’ marriage between couples living together,
and two-thirds of illegitimate infants were registered in the names
of both parents.60
There was nonetheless a vast change in public attitudes towards
sexual behaviour and the discussion of it in private conversation
and the media, which found expression in changes in legislation.
This more intellectual aspect—sex in the head, as it were—owed
something to the professional ideal of rational discourse and
opposition to ancient taboos and moral obfuscation. It began
perhaps with the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the mid-1950s, John
Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, Kenneth Tynan and company, protesting
against the fusty nostalgia and moral hypocrisy of the English. It
was taken up by enlightened professionals like Richard Hoggart,
Roy Jenkins and Lord Wolfenden, who represented a cooler and
more rational challenge to traditional puritanism. The Wolfenden
Committee in 1957 recommended greater tolerance for
homosexuals. Professional experts like Richard Hoggart queued up
to defend D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the 1960
obscenity trial which determined that pornography was legal as
long as it was art, thus precipitating the gold rush of girlie
magazines from Playboy to Hustler. Roy Jenkins as Home
Secretary in the late 1960s sponsored a raft of ‘permissive’
legislation: the Abortion Act and the Family Planning Act of 1967
which allowed abortion for medical and psychiatric reasons and
free contraceptive advice through the National Health Service; the
Sexual Offences Act of the same year which decriminalized
homosexual activity between consenting adults in private; the
Divorce Reform Act of 1969, mentioned above; and the abolition
of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of the theatre in 1968, which
led to Kenneth Tynan’s ‘Oh, Calcutta!’, ‘No Sex Please, We’re
British’, the longest-running comedy of all time, and other thespian
masterpieces.
Permissiveness was not without its critics, who called it
promiscuity and pornography. The redoubtable Mary White-house,
Birmingham housewife and self-appointed moralist to the nation,
extended her 1964 campaign against rude words on BBC radio and
naughty scenes on television into a general war against vice and
433
pornography, aided by Lord Longford, the Labour ex-minister who

subjected himself to harrowing sessions of X-film viewing in the
cause of morality. Like-minded politicians had passed the Street
Offences Act of 1959, which was designed to banish prostitution
but instead simply drove it underground. There was also
unsuccessful religious and moral opposition to free abortion and
socialized contraception, and even to freer divorce by Dr Shirley
Summerskill, MP who called it a ‘Casanova’s charter’.61 Some naive
moralists even condemned mini-skirts for encouraging instant sex,
not realizing what every Victorian seducer knew, that long skirts
and split draws (or none) gave much readier access than tights.
Despite all their efforts, by 1972 the official handbook on Britain
could say with bureaucratic understatement:
In the past twenty years the traditional pattern of life in

Britain has undergone considerable change. Not only have
distinctions of class and social habit become less rigid, but
subjects formerly taboo in public discussion are now openly
considered in books, plays and films and in ordinary
conversation. A more informed tolerance of behaviour which
deviates from the usual pattern is reflected, for instance, in the
growing popular sympathy for the difficulties of the
unmarried mother. The passing of new laws on such matters
as abortion, divorce, and homosexuality, though disliked by
many people (particularly of the older generation), is
nevertheless indicative of public unwillingness to penalize
individuals with particular social problems.62
Behind the rise of this essentially secular morality lay the decline of
religious belief. Church attendance, which had been declining
relatively during and since the Victorian age and absolutely since
the First World War, now reached diminutive proportions. In 1966
the major Protestant and Roman Catholic churches claimed in
membership only 21 per cent of the population, compared with 26
per cent in 1901. In 1967 it was estimated that only 15 per cent of
the English attended religious worship on an average Sunday.
Including these, one in four claimed to attend once a month, but
one in five attended only for weddings, baptisms and funerals, and
35 per cent never attended at all. By 1974 Anglican attendance had
declined by a further 12 per cent and Roman catholic attendance at
434
Sunday mass by a further 16 per cent. Geoffrey Gorer found in

1950 that, although three-quarters of his respondents claimed a
religious affiliation and over half sent their children to Sunday
school, less than one in six were regular attenders, and only 14 per
cent of the men and 11 per cent of the women believed in an after-
life.63 Much of the decline was due to apathy rather than active
disbelief, and the distractions of the increasingly secularized
Sunday, with television, gardening, car cleaning, car drives, the
cinema and other leisure pursuits taking precedence over church
attendance. But none of these diversions would have counted if
religion still had the emotional and intellectual power to command
belief—as the success of the more millennial and transcendental
religions such as the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the
Seventh-Day Adventists, and a levitation of Indian mystics
demonstrated—and the ultimate cause must be laid at the door of
secular science. Science had been undermining religion since
Darwin and Huxley, and scientific theology had been doing the
same since George Eliot’s translation of Strauss’s Leben Jesu and
the Tübingen school of biblical criticism. On the one hand, the
common man felt that in a scientific world he had ‘no need of that
hypothesis’. On the other, the uncommon intellectual, steeped in
theologians like Bultman, Bonhoeffer and Tillich, looked for a
‘religionless Christianity’, a God-like life force, which culminated in
Bishop Robinson of Woolwich announcing ‘the death of God’ in
1963. He would be followed later by Don Cupitt, a Cambridge
College dean, in a famous iconoclastic television series, and by
Bishop Jenkins of Durham whose induction it was popularly
believed caused York Minister to be struck by lightning.64 When the
clergy themselves abolished an anthro-pomorphic god, people
began to suspect that their own profession was killing religion—
and was about to commit suicide.
Yet in a deeper sense professionalism created a more moral
society. If the core of the Christian message without God is to love
one’s neighbour as oneself, then the twentieth-century welfare state
could claim to be more Christian and certainly more moral than
Victorian England, since it had expanded the concept of neighbour
beyond the parish and poor law union to the whole nation. The
concept had been evolving, we have seen, since the Edwardian age,
and by 1942 the Beveridge Report could claim that provision was
made for most people against most of the exigencies of life. The
435
Labour government of 1945–51, building on the revolution in

expectations during the war, extended it to the whole population.
Certain items, notably family allowances for second and
subsequent children and the Butler Education Act of 1944
providing secondary education for all, were enacted before the war
finally ended, but the Attlee government implemented them and
passed the great series of acts—the National Insurance, Industrial
Injuries Insurance, and National Health Service Acts of 1946, the
Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, and the Children Act and
National Assistance Act of 1948—which completed the universal
coverage of the system. The date 5 July 1948 became ‘the vesting
day of the welfare state’.
Thereafter, in principle if less so in practice, the state was
ultimately responsible for the welfare of every citizen ‘from the
cradle to the grave’, ‘from the womb to the tomb’ or, as the troops
irreverently put it, ‘from the erection to the resurrection’. There
was to be much debate about the adequacy of the coverage and
about the principles, of ‘universalism’ versus ‘selectivity’, on which
provision should be made, but there was almost complete
consensus between politicians and the public on the need for a
welfare state. As we shall see, the welfare state was to put the
professional social ideal to the test, and even help to split it in
two—not on the question of its existence but on the meaning of
citizenship and the claims of social justice. Nationalization was to
split it too, not so much over the merits of socialism versus
capitalism but over which professional bureaucracy, that of the
state or the private corporation, was best fitted to run large-scale
industry. This brings us, however, to the most important
development in post-war professional society, the bifurcation of the
professional ideal.
3 THE BIFURCATION OF THE PROFESSIONAL

IDEAL
Every society contains the seeds of its own decay. Just as in
Victorian England the entrepreneurial ideal which attacked the
aristocratic ideal of pre-industrial society split away from and was
in turn attacked by the professional ideal, so in post-1945 society
the professional ideal split into two rival camps which then began
to attack each other. They fought under the banners of the free
436
market versus collectivism inherited from that earlier, Victorian

conflict, but just as society had changed out of all recognition so the
conflict too was different. That earlier society had been dominated
by thousands of comparatively small owner-managing capitalists
whose greed and self-interest could be held in check by competition
as well as by minimal, if expanding, state regulation. The task of
the professional ideal had been to moralize a potentially amoral
competition and to set limits to the exploitation of workers, victims
of adulteration and pollution in all classes, and of society at large
by fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion.
Twentieth-century society, by contrast, was increasingly
dominated by large-scale organizations, not only giant private
corporations run by professional managers but also still larger state
corporations and the vast administrative organs of the welfare
state, run by very similar people. In private industry the share of the
largest 200 firms in manufacturing production rose from 73 per
cent in 1957 to 86 per cent in 1969. In the public sector the share
of the occupied population employed by government rose from 8
per cent in 1950 to 17 per cent in 1971, and to 27 per cent if the
nationalized industries are included.65
The professional managers and administrators on both sides and
the professional experts of various kinds they employed were for
the most part salaried employees carrying out much the same tasks
in much the same manner. They were certainly sufficiently similar
in social background, education and training, income, lifestyle,
conditions of work, social attitudes and motivations to represent
the same social ideal, of a society based on selection by merit and
dedicated to social efficiency and social justice.
On closer inspection, however, their relations to the system of
production were subtly different, and their structure of rewards,
not merely material but psychological, led them in different
directions. Each professional occupation or group might have a
different structure of rewards and so a different outlook and
motivation, which might also change from time to time. For
example, medical doctors in the private sector catering for rich or
insured patients would view themselves and their interests
differently from salaried consultants or general practitioners in the
National Health Service. Scientists working in private industry had
a different outlook, more geared to foreseeable returns, from those
in the universities or the Civil Service. Managers in a private
437
corporation performing exactly the same work and receiving much

the same salaries as those in a nationalized industry might still have
different ambitions and see greater opportunities of enhancing their
rewards. The main line of cleavage, therefore, ran between those
employed by the private or profit-oriented sector and the public
sector, including the non-profit-making institutions such as
universities, churches and charitable foundations.
This is not, of course, to say that all those on one side of the line
automatically and inevitably supported one version of the ideal and
vice versa. The explanatory value of an ideal is that it allows people
to choose a position different from their purely material interest,
which is what makes social and political discussion and conflict so
intriguing and unpredictable. Opinion makers and political leaders
in particular often take stances which superficially contradict their
economic interests, millionaires like Lord Samuel or Robert
Maxwell who support the Labour Party, social reformers like
Michael Young or Peter Townsend whose policies would raise their
own taxes, or academics like Friedrich von Hayek or Lord Beloff
who extol extreme versions of the free market which might
undermine state support for universities. In the earlier book I called
such mavericks ‘social cranks’, meaning people with eccentric
drives, since in a class society they espoused the interests of a
different class. I argued that ‘there was in the professional middle
class a whole ready-made class of potential social cranks’, since at
that time professional men could so easily consider themselves to be
above the main economic battle between the landlords, capitalists
and labourers, and could ignore it or take sides as they chose. It was
obvious even then that the interests of particular cranks might be
more self-serving than they appeared: Malthus’s apologia for
landlords could be linked to his connections with the old patronage
system; James Mill’s for capitalists to his hopes of employment by
the East India Company; and Feargus O’Connor’s championship of
the workers to an outsider’s hopes of political power. And the
professional class as a whole had an interest in promoting a
civilized society which would honour their exclusive privileges and
guarantee their rewards.66
As time went on and professions proliferated, however, more of
them were forced to enter the political and economic arena to press
their claims and defend their privileges. The human capital they
lived by was not, pace the economists, a more or less automatic
438
function of their education and training but had to be nurtured by

persuading the public, ultimately through the state, to let them
control the market for their service by excluding the uneducated
and unqualified. What turned human capital into property was, as
with land or industrial capital, the rent it could be made to yield,
the payment for a scarce resource over and above the immediate
labour performed, the differential value between common and
highly skilled labour for which a client, an employer or the state
was willing to pay a premium. Specialized training of itself only
yielded earned income which, if it could be offered by anyone,
would soon descend to the competitive, marginal level. To turn it
into property yielding a scarcity premium or differential rent
required some device to transform it into a scarce resource.
The device was closure, the restriction of access to the profession
by means of expensive or selective training, education and
qualification, better still by the grant of a state monopoly of the
service. That is why, in an increasingly specialized society, the
expanding service occupations so avidly sought professional
organization and control of the market for their services. The vast
expansion of the qualifying associations since 1800 was an attempt
to consolidate the financial and psychic rewards accruing from the
monopoly of certain kinds of human capital. After 1880 they came
in an accelerating procession: twenty by 1900, another twenty-
seven by 1918, forty-six between the wars, and another forty-six by
1970. To these should be added a host of aspiring professions and
semi-professions, who failed (until very recently in some cases) to
establish a monopoly of the service: from the National Union of
Teachers (1878) or the British Dental Association (1880) through
the Association of Hospital and Welfare Administration (1898) or
the Royal College of Nursing (1916) to the Advertising Managers’
Association (1932) and the British Nuclear Energy Society (1962).67
Some of the most important professions, however, had never
been self-employed and did not need that form of organization,
notably the clergy, the officer corps of the armed forces, the Civil
Service, local government officers, university teachers, and, more
recently, professional business managers. As their numbers
expanded, and as more of the qualified professionals became
employed either by other professionals or by corporations public or
private, they too began to feel the need for defensive organization.
Because of their claim to high status professional associations did
439
not, until recently at least, like to call themselves trade unions—

although the most successful like the British Medical Association or
the Law Society might be described as trade unions which so
successfully controlled the labour market that they did not need to
strike—but in the more corporate climate of post-war society it
became necessary for even the most gentlemanly to organize more
effectively to deal with their corporate or state employers. White-
collar unions affiliated to the TUC grew from 745,000 members in
1957 to 3.3 million in 1977, 4.6 million if white-collar workers in
manual unions are included, and there were many others outside
the TUC. Trade union density (membership as a percentage of all
employees) grew amongst male non-manual workers from 34 per
cent in 1948 to 43 per cent in 1970, while it declined from 64 to 61
per cent amongst male manual workers.68 More remarkable were
the undoubtedly professional unions joining the TUC, the National
Association of Local Government Officers in 1964, the Society of
Civil Servants in 1973, the Association of University Teachers and
the Institution of Professional Civil Servants in 1976, and the top
civil servants of the First Division Association in 1977. ASTMS (the
Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs), the
most dynamic of professional unions, began to recruit not only
industrial technicians and research scientists but clergymen and
airline pilots. Even managers, who had long shunned unions as
incompatible with their status, began to form staff associations,
especially when their industries were nationalized, as in British Steel
in 1968, Rolls Royce in 1973, and shipbuilding in 1977.69 The
salaried professions were coming to recognize their need for
collective negotiation with the giant corporations, both public and
private.
Nationalization brought the dichotomy between the public and
private sector professionals to a head. Their managers were forced
to confront the question of whether their interests lay with the
traditional free market outlook of corporate management or with
the public service outlook of the civil servants and other state-
employed professions. The ‘Morrisonian’ principle on which the
Attlee government had set them up (Herbert Morrison, Leader of
the Commons, had organized the London Passenger Transport
Board in 1934 as a public corporation answerable to government
and not to the workers or the consumers) modelled the nationalized
industries on private corporations, but responsible through a
440
minister to Parliament instead of to an annual general meeting of

shareholders. In all other respects (to the dismay of Aneurin Bevan
and the Labour left who hoped for some form of workers’ control
and a ‘social service’ function for the consumers) they were
capitalist organizations, expected to make a profit or at least to
break even.70 Their managers were, inevitably in the early stages,
recruited from private industry and there was considerable overlap
on the controlling boards. In 1956 106 of the 272 members of the
national and regional boards of the eight leading nationalized
industries were directors of private companies, and a further
seventy-one were professional managers and technicians whose
careers began in private industry.71 The Bank Rate Tribunal in
1957, an early inquiry into ‘insider dealing’, revealed a chain of
common membership (and considerable kinship links) between the
boards of the nationalized Bank of England, the ‘Big Five’ clearing
banks and the City merchant banks.72 A career manager like Frank
Kearton, Chairman of Courtaulds, might find himself on the
boards of several nationalized industries and part-time Chairman
of the government Industrial Reorganization Corporation
(midwifing private corporate mergers) in 1966–68 before becoming
Chairman of the state-owned British National Oil Corporation in
1976. International corporate executives like the Australian
Michael Edwardes of the multinational Chloride Group and Ian
McGregor of Lazard Frères of New York could be called in as
‘profit doctors’ for nationalized industries like British Leyland,
British Steel and the National Coal Board before returning to
private business. With such constant interchange between public
and private industry, it is not perhaps surprising that Conservative
governments down to 1974 accepted nationalization in principle
and that most public corporation managers thought and behaved
like private sector ones. The mixed economy was very mixed
indeed.
On the other side of this two-way managerial fence, the
traditional owner-managing capitalist was rapidly disappearing
and being replaced by career managers and corporate
representatives of financial institutions. Although there were still
Pilkingtons at Pilkington’s Glass, Cadburys at Bourneville,
Sainsburys in the high street stores, Ferrantis at Ferranti’s and so
on, by 1963 less than a third (29 per cent) of the largest 116
companies were controlled by traditional tycoons or family
441
business men, a third (32 per cent) by professional career managers,

and the rest (39 per cent) by ‘coordinator controllers’ representing
banks, insurance and other financial corporations (as in the case of
Shell, British Petroleum, and Vickers).73 The last group represented
the increasingly interlocking structure of the corporate economy,
with the investment managers of a comparatively few financial
institutions in control of immense investment capital and, where
they wished to exercise it, of the power to hire and fire company
boards. Where about 100 corporations accounted for three-
quarters of manufacturing production and employment, which
meant that three to five companies dominated each industry, the
power to administer prices (by ‘price leadership’ if not by
collusion), negotiate national across-the-board wages (often
through ‘joint employers’ negotiating machinery), and thus to
predetermine profits was concentrated in very few hands.74 The
only restraint on this power (apart from the trade unions’ ability to
negotiate above-average pay settlements) was exercised by exactly
similar professional managers, either by corporate raiders, take-
over bidders, asset strippers and the like who, manipulating huge
sums of borrowed money or paper securities (‘junk bonds’),
threatened managements with dismissal, ‘greenmail’ pay-offs in
aborted take-overs, or defensive efficiency drives, or by foreign
corporations out-competing them. The object of the game was not
so much profits for their own sake, since few of the players owned
more than a fraction of the vast shareholdings involved, but, at the
lowest level of success, autonomy for the management of each
corporation and, at the highest, continual expansion of the
corporate enterprise and the span of managerial control.
It is obvious, therefore, why the rhetoric of the free market
should be attractive to the private sector professionals. Although
designed for the comparatively small-scale Victorian capitalist and
a much more competitive economy, it could be readily adapted to
the world of collaborative giant corporations because of its appeal
to empire-building professional managers. Free enterprise now
meant freedom for career managers to climb to the top of large
corporations and make them still larger, by internal growth
(ploughing back the profits) or colonization (swallowing up other
corporations by friendly mergers or hostile take-overs). Since they
claimed that they did this by professional ability in the name of
economic efficiency and the common good of the whole
442
community, they could still hold to the professional ideal but with
a particular emphasis, on equality of opportunity. Just as the
Victorian entrepreneur, whether self-made or not, had justified
himself by the myth of the self-made man, so the corporate
manager, whether born in the purple of the bourgeoisie or risen
from the ranks, justified himself by belief in the deserved reward for
merit.
The contention between the private and public sector
professionals, therefore, was at bottom a dispute about equality.
The first believed in equality of opportunity, on the grounds that
rewarding merit was the most effective way of ensuring economic
growth and a larger national product to share out amongst the
community, while the second gave priority to equality of outcome,
as the only sure way to achieve fair shares for all. This is of course
a crude dichotomy, since the first (with a few extreme exceptions)
did not altogether abandon equalizing income tax or welfare for
the poor, and the second (save for a few utopian socialists) believed
in equality of opportunity for aspiring professionals like themselves
and thought of real equality of incomes as a desirable but distant
dream. Nevertheless, the two approaches to equality ran through
the propaganda of each side as the organizing threads on which all
their criteria of the good society were hung.
The dichotomy was the main dispute dividing the major political
parties. Although both parties were still largely class-based, the
Conservatives winning a majority of the votes of the middle classes,
rising to an overwhelming share at the top, and Labour increasing
their share down the scale to a less overwhelming majority of the
working class, they were both increasingly led by professional men
(and very few women). Professional MPs outnumbered business
men and farmers on the Tory side of the House of Commons in
1951 by 45 to 43 per cent, in 1979 by 55 to 40 per cent. On the
Labour side they outnumbered manual workers in 1951 by 46 to
37 per cent and in 1979 by 49 to 35 per cent—and, since most of
the worker MPs were professional trade union officials, by far more
than that. As befits a professional society, they were also
increasingly university-educated, 41 per cent of Labour MPs in
1951 and 57 per cent by 1979, 65 and 68 per cent of the
Conservative MPs, most on both sides from Oxbridge. (The few
Liberal MPs were even more professional and university-
educated.)75 The chief difference was in secondary schooling,
443
three-quarters of the Conservatives being ex-public school boys

compared with about a fifth of the Labour MPs.
Not surprisingly, the party programmes were expressed in
professional terms. Quintin Hogg (later Lord Hailsham),
advocating a property-owning democracy in 1947, defended
private property because ‘the desire to obtain it provides an
incentive for work which is morally legitimate, and at the same
time sufficiently material to operate on natures which in most of us
contain certain elements not entirely spiritual or unself-seeking’.76
Iain Macleod in 1958 thought that ‘Opportunity versus Equality’
would be the battle cry of the next election: ‘On our banners we
will put “Opportunity”, an equal opportunity for men to make
themselves unequal.’77 Timothy Raison in 1964 claimed that we
were breaking away from the fundamental injustice of class which
could deprive a man of the right to make the most of his talents:
The sons of the poor are coming slowly into their own in
industry and learning—and they do so not by overthrowing
the old order but by being incorporated in the particular
community, whether it be boardroom or high table…. One
sometimes gets the impression that Professor Titmuss and his
disciples are more interested in making the rich miserable than
in making the poor happy.78
On the other side, equality of opportunity was equated with

Tawney’s satire on ‘the tadpole philosophy’ by which the tadpoles
in the pond were asked to rejoice in the exceptional frog who made
it to dry land.79 Aneurin Bevan warned in 1952 against ‘the
managerial society’ in which the citizen might become ‘the passive
creature of a class of supposed supermen, even though these present
themselves in the guise of public servants’.80 In 1959 Hugh
Gaitskell’s seven basic principles of socialism included: concern for
the worst-off, ‘social justice, and equitable distribution of wealth
and income’, a classless society without snobbery or privilege,
equality of all races and peoples, belief in human relations ‘based
not on ruthless self-regarding rivalry but on fellowship and co-
operation’, precedence for public over private interest, and freedom
and democratic self-government. 81 The revisionist Anthony
Crosland in 1956 held, with Tawney, that ‘socialism is about
equality’ not public ownership, although the centre left, including
444
Richard Crossman, thought that equality was impossible without ‘a

true national resources budget’ in which ‘the public dominates over
the private sector’, while the far left believed that ‘the equality of
man’ could only be achieved ‘through public expenditure, public
controls, and public ownership’.82 Crosland was still arguing in
1975 that ‘Socialism …describes a set of values, of aspirations, of
principles which socialists wish to see embodied in the organization
of society’. These were essentially ‘an overriding concern for the
poor’, ‘strict control over the environment’, and
a belief in equality. By equality we mean more than a

meritocratic society of equal opportunities, in which unequal
rewards would be distributed to those most fortunate in their
genetic endowment or family background. We also mean more
than a simple redistribution of income. We mean a wider
social equality embracing the distribution of property, the
educational system, social class relationships, power and
privilege in industry—indeed all that is enshrined in the age
old dream of a ‘classless’ society.83
Although both parties continued to uphold the welfare state they

approached it from opposite directions. The Labour Party believed
in ‘universalism’, the universal provision of comprehensive services,
so that all should be eligible for the same benefits in social security,
health, education, and so on. For example, large families could best
be helped by child allowances paid to the mother for all children,
and then taxed to ‘claw back’ the cost from richer fathers. The
Conservatives, by contrast, believed in ‘selectivity’, concentrating
welfare benefits and services on those who needed them and leaving
the rest to provide additional support for themselves. In their view
large families in poverty because of the breadwinner’s low pay
should receive family income supplement, introduced by the Heath
government in 1971. The egalitarian retort was that the poor and
disadvantaged rarely knew their rights and that only about half of
those qualifying for FIS actually claimed it.84
The welfare state was a compromise between these two
approaches. While Beveridge had intended that social security
should be ‘universalist, covering the whole population, with flat-
rate contributions and benefits adequate enough to raise the
recipients out of poverty, he had also argued that ‘in establishing a
445
national minimum, [the state] should leave room and

encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide
more than that minimum for himself and his family’.85 In practice
it became still more of a compromise. The benefits were eroded by
inflation and, in the view of the egalitarians, by the rise of living
standards which left increasing numbers in relative poverty and
needing additional help. National assistance, intended as a safety
net for the unfortunate and diminishing few, became the regular
support of an increasing minority of old age pensioners and other
state insurance beneficiaries. The poverty surveyors estimated that
in 1968, while 3,995,000 people (including dependants) were
receiving supplementary benefit, 2,430,000 (including 1,315,000
elderly people over 65 and 410,000 children) were eligible for but
not receiving it.86 To the egalitarian poverty surveyors this seemed
to be intentional. Titmuss in The Irresponsible Society (1960)
attacked the myth of the ‘welfare state’ (which he always placed in
quotation marks):
Reinforced by the ideologies of enterprise and opportunity it

has led to the assumption that most—if not all—of any social
problems have been—or soon will be—solved. Those few that
remain will, it is thought, be automatically remedied by rising
incomes and minor adjustments of one kind or another. In
short, it is coming to be assumed that there is little to divide
the nation on home affairs except the dreary minutiae of
social reform, the patronage of the arts, the parking of cars
and the effectiveness of corporal punishment.
He claimed, to the contrary, that ‘universality’ had failed to bring

about economic egalitarianism: ‘Those who have benefited most
are those who needed it least,’ especially in education where the
middle class got most of the grammar school and university places,
in the National Health Service where the poorest third of the nation
got the worst medical treatment, and in housing where the subsidies
to council tenants were more than matched by mortgage tax relief
to the better-off. His main targets, however, were the ‘fringe-
welfare’ and stock options distributed by great corporations to
their senior managers, ‘as the great feudal lords distributed estates
in the Middle Ages’, the power of the insurance companies which
were coming to dominate the ‘pressure group state’ and the
446
‘massive concentrations of interlocking economic, managerial and

self-regarding professional power’ which acted as ‘accelerators of
inequality; inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth,
educational opportunity, vocational choice, pension expectations,
and in the right to change one’s job [discouraged by tied pension
rights], to work in old age, and in other spheres of individual and
family need’.87
On the other side, while ‘few Conservatives would doubt that
the social services for the most part are here to stay’, according to
a member of the progressive Bow Group, Geoffrey Howe, ‘even in
a prosperous society necessary claims on public expenditure can
only be met if the social services…are drastically refashioned, so
that their claims are diminished.’ And he attacked Sir Keith Joseph,
later known as a hard-line monetarist, who continued to seek
‘scope for sensible men to provide additional protection and
amenity for their families and themselves on top of the State
provision’.88 Neither side was consistent. Crossman as Labour
Minister of Health in 1969 proposed income-related benefits and
pensions which increased inequality between middle- and working-
class pensioners, and the Heath government enacted a similar
scheme, thus breaking the Tory principle that additions to state
benefits should be left to the private sector. It could be argued,
nevertheless, that by making the social security system less
dependent on insurance, so that anyone in need regardless of
contribution entitlement—including for example middle-class
students on summer vacation—could claim subsistence, both
parties had by 1970 come to accept the principle of social
citizenship, that mere membership of society gave an indefeasible
right to maintenance when income ceased.
The continuing struggle was over whether such maintenance
should aim at a more equal distribution of income for the sake of
a basic equality or at the prevention of poverty so as to give
everyone a more equal start in the race for opportunity. The
radical programme of the public sector professionals began with
the abolition of excessive wealth and income and the imposition
of an equitable distribution of income and other resources by the
state and proceeded to the reorganization of employment by
means of public ownership and industrial democracy and the
limitation of professional and managerial autonomy. 89 They
assumed that society as a whole ‘owned’ the national income and
447
could distribute it as the majority pleased. Their ideal society

implied a massive bureaucracy of professionals like themselves to
administer incomes and employment and prevent cheating. On
the other side, the radical programme of progressive private sector
managerialists was for a meritocracy with great social mobility
and equal opportunity for all, by no means incompatible with
considerable inequality in rewards, but providing concentrated
welfare services ‘to alleviate the patches of real hardship which
still exist’.90 They held that individuals ‘owned’ their own incomes
and, deducting only what they democratically agreed to allow to
the state for common purposes, could do whatever they wished
with their own. Their ideal society implied freedom for
professionals like themselves to become as rich and powerful as
they could without feeling guilty about it. Both sides aimed at
‘national regeneration’, the first by building an egalitarian Utopia,
the second by dynamic economic growth to provide enough
wealth for all.
The conflict crystallized, naturally enough, in the sphere of
education. There ‘parity of esteem’ versus equality of opportunity
in secondary education had been in contention since the Hadow
Report of 1926. The Education Act of 1944 which had introduced
‘secondary education for all’ appropriate to their ‘needs’ and
‘aptitudes’ had not specified how this should be done but had
been interpreted to mean a tripartite system of selective
education. This divided all children in the state sector at age 11
into those with academic, technical and other kinds of potential,
catered for in grammar, technical and secondary modern schools.
The ‘eleven-plus’ selection was based on the theory of the
educational psychologist Cyril Burt, later proved to be founded
on false evidence, that intelligence was a fixed genetic endowment
(IQ= intelligence quotient, measured as a percentage of the
median score of all those tested) which could be measured
infallibly at 10 years of age and used to separate the academic
sheep scientifically from the non-academic goats. Curiously, the
principle was not applied to the private schools where, above a
low qualifying standard, children of all abilities were educated
together. The problem with the system was that it operated a self-
fulfilling prophecy: those selected for grammar school received
academic training and learned how to pass examinations; the rest
accepted their second- or third-class status, were taught and
448
examined less, and became ‘failures’. The dilemma for reformers

was that any unselective alternative might widen the gap between
the state and the private schools and reduce equality of
opportunity.
At first hailed as a victory for egalitarianism which gave
opportunities to bright working-class children, the system came
under increasing fire in the 1950s from educationists like
Professors Robin Pedley and John Vaisey who persuaded the
Labour Party to back comprehensive education in unified state
secondary schools.91 Educational selection was brilliantly satirized
by Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) which
warned of the dire consequences of applying the principle ‘Merit=
IQ+Effort’ and ended in a revolution by the uneducated proles
against the meritocratic elite in 2034.92 Michael Shanks on the
other hand argued in 1961 that ‘a ruling class based exclusively
on merit would be less likely than any other sort to lose touch
with the mass of the people, from whose ranks it would be
continually drawing fresh recruits’.93 The Wilson government of
1964–70 increased the number of comprehensive schools tenfold,
which then catered for about a third of secondary school children.
The next development was surprising: middle-class parents who
had opposed the comprehensives came to appreciate them as
subjecting their children to less strain than selection while still
leaving the ladder of opportunity in place (enhanced by streaming
for perceived ability in some schools, which often favoured
middle-class children). By 1974 under Margaret Thatcher at the
Department of Education and Science comprehensive education
had doubled again, to cater for two-thirds of the age group. This
was aided by the geographical segregation of the classes, so that
inner-city schools were predominantly working-class and
suburban ones middle-class.
The struggle for both kinds of equality, meanwhile, shifted to the
much more intractable frontier between state and private
education. Anthony Crosland in 1956 had attacked British
education as ‘divisive, unjust and wasteful’, owing to ‘the
appallingly low quality of parts of the state system’. Even if these
were improved,
we shall still not have equality of opportunity as long as we

maintain a system of superior private schools, open to the
449
wealthier classes, but out of reach of poorer children

however talented and deserving. This is much the most
flagrant inequality of opportunity, as it is the cause of class
inequality generally, in our educational system; and I have
never been able to understand why socialists have been so
obsessed with the question of the grammar schools, and so
indifferent to the much more glaring injustice of the
independent schools.94
John Vaisey in 1962 blamed the stagnation of the British economy

on the shortage of skilled manpower at one end of the educational
system and the monopoly of elite positions by the products of the
public schools at the other. Since about a fifth of Labour MPs and
a third or more of Labour Cabinet ministers had been to public
schools, Vaisey, a grammar school boy from a working-class
background, was one of the few prominent Labour men to propose
drastic reform. He suggested that the 100–150 Headmasters’
Conference schools be put under an Educational Trust charged
with maintaining their existing religious or occupational character
but accepting without fees only boys and girls at least 15 years old
from a socially and intellectually representative pool nominated by
all the other secondary schools in the country.95 Even the Labour-
appointed Commission on the Public Schools of 1968–70 could
suggest nothing more than a socially mixed entry, and its
recommendations were ignored by both the Conservative and
Labour governments of the 1970s.96 However, the Oxford Social
Mobility Project found that ‘differences between types of school
turn out to be very largely a consequence of their differing social
composition’. Boys of the same social background achieved much
the same public examination results whether they were in public,
private, state grammar or comprehensive schools. 97 The only result
of Labour’s campaign against privileged education was the
cessation in 1974 of government funding of the direct grant
schools, the old, prestigious, endowed day grammar schools, which
were forced to choose between the public and private sectors and
mostly chose the latter, thus (except for the remaining scholarships)
cutting off one more ladder of opportunity for those who could not
afford to pay.
The most obvious advantage of a public school education was
easier access to the universities where the privately educated, about
450
4.5 per cent of the age group, constituted nearly a quarter of the
students, and especially to Oxford and Cambridge where they
formed nearly one half.98 Since in a professional society the
universities were the gatekeepers to the most prestigious and
lucrative occupations, higher education became the focus of the
dispute over equality of opportunity. Both professional ideals could
agree that equal opportunity should be encouraged for the very
able, and as a result of the Anderson Committee of 1956 on student
support Britain became the first western country to provide grants
covering both fees and (on a parental means test) maintenance for
all undergraduates accepted by a university. The penalty for this
generous policy at a later stage, however, was that Britain came to
have one of the smallest proportions of students relative to the age
group in Europe and, despite that, was the first country actually to
cut back student numbers in the 1980s.99
Meanwhile, in the late 1950s and 1960s the need of a
professional society for educated manpower expressed itself in a
demand for a great expansion of higher education. Since the rise of
professional society was a worldwide phenomenon generated by
the application of scientific expertise not only to industry but to all
the activities of society, the expansion of the universities, the
powerhouses of research and ideas as well as the producers of
professional experts, was equally international. Britain always had
fewer students relative to population than most advanced industrial
countries but had kept up as fast a rate of growth from 1956 to
1970, though it began to lag behind in the 1970s.100 What came to
be known as the Robbins era in Britain saw an explosive growth of
higher education. The number of university institutions nearly
doubled, from twenty-six in 1950 to forty-four in 1970, and full-
time student numbers more than quintupled, from 85,000 to
460,000 (plus a further 24,000 part-time students). 101 The
expansion began before the Robbins Committee on Higher
Education reported in 1963, with an attempt to meet the ‘bulge’
and the ‘trend’, the post-war bulge in the birth rate which would hit
the universities in the 1960s and the increasing trend to stay on at
school and qualify for university entrance. The University Grants
Committee had already in 1959 invited bids from local
communities for the founding of seven new universities, which
eventually grew to ten, plus the upgrading of a dozen university
451
colleges and colleges of advanced technology.102 The Robbins

Committee was an effect of the expansion rather than its cause.
It was also the first inquiry into the whole of higher education,
including the growing local authority sector of technical, art and
further education colleges and the mixed sector of teacher
education colleges owned by local government and the churches.
The report recommended a massive expansion of higher education,
in universities from 130,000 students in 1962 to 219,000 in 1973
and to 346,000 in 1980, and in both sectors together from 216,000
in 1962 to 392,000 in 1973 and 558,000 in 1980.103 In fact, the
short-range predictions were surpassed, with 247,000 full-time
university students and 482,000 advanced students in higher
education by 1973 (though the longer-term, 1980 figures fell short
at 273,000 and 482,000, plus 53,000 foreign students from outside
the European Economic Community).104 The Robbins Report based
its recommendations on the principle of equality of opportunity,
that everyone who was qualified and wished to enter higher
education should be provided with a place. Equality of opportunity
also applied to institutions: every college which could justify its
academic claim to become a university should be granted that
status, beginning with the immediate upgrading of the ten colleges
of advanced technology, and every department in a non-university
college could qualify for the grant of degrees through the new
Council for National Academic Awards. In the run-up to the 1964
election both political parties accepted the report with acclamation,
and all seemed set fair for a smooth, if elitist, escalator of
opportunity.
At this point the Labour Party won the 1964 election, on the
professional platform of ‘a new deal for the scientist and
technologist in higher education, a new status for scientists in
government, and a new role for government-sponsored science in
industrial development’.105 A new egalitarian Secretary of State for
Education, Anthony Crosland, was persuaded by his civil servants
that the Robbins approach was too elitist and would lead to
‘academic drift’, the process by which local authority colleges
escaped from state control into the ‘private sector’, as they called
the independently chartered but largely state-funded universities.
He therefore announced in 1965 the ‘binary policy’, a sort of
educational apartheid of separate but equal development by which
the public sector colleges would provide further and higher
452
education right up to degree level for those students who did not
qualify or wish to go to the university. Degrees under the CNAA
could be granted all the way up the system and at the highest level
would be taught in thirty polytechnics (upgraded technical
colleges), intended to be local people’s universities analogous to
comprehensive schools.106
The outcome in fact was very different. Instead of
concentrating on science and technology courses for local
students, the polytechnics, unable to attract enough science
students because of the overprovision of places in the new
universities and ex-CATs, found themselves catering for large
numbers of social science and humanities students unable to get
into the universities, often living away from home like most
university students. Although they took a large share of the
expansion, especially when the universities had their numbers cut
back in the 1980s, they became in effect second-class universities
with little research activity and large teaching loads, unable to
change their status, and catering not for the masses but for the
less qualified half of the 13–15 per cent of the age group who
entered higher education. Equality of outcome had foundered on
the rock of a half-hearted equality of opportunity.
Meanwhile, the universities were drawn more firmly into the
public sector. Because of their increasing dependence on
government funding, which rose over tenfold from £20 million in
1952 to £235 million (plus £79 million in capital grants and £67 in
student fees and maintenance) in 1970,107 the state was bound to
tighten its control. In 1964 responsibility for the University Grants
Committee was transferred from the light yoke of the Treasury to
the professionally expert Department of Education and Science,
and in 1968 the universities were made subject to the parliamentary
Comptroller and Auditor General.108 These changes meant that the
universities became more directly controlled by the government,
which through the UGC came increasingly to determine capital
investment, academic development, faculty and other staff salaries,
and student numbers. It was perhaps inevitable that in a
professional society the state should attempt to control the key
profession which educated the other professions. The irony was
that in Britain where the universities had always prided themselves
on their autonomy, state control was to become by the 1980s under
a ‘free enterprise’ government even heavier than elsewhere.
453
Universities had a special role in professional society, not only

because they housed the key profession but because they
increasingly provided the ammunition for the two versions of the
professional ideal. Many of the spokesmen for the two ideals were
professors who had the expertise and the research time to develop
them. This was most obvious on the public sector side, where
professors like Titmuss, Abel Smith, Townsend, Pedley and Vaisey
developed the evidence and the arguments for equality of outcome
in distribution of income, welfare policy and education. It was less
obvious on the private sector side but nonetheless crucial, as the
disciples of Professors Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman
began to colonize university economics departments and the new
business schools. Alan Peacock of Buckingham University College,
Sir Alan Walters of the LSE and Johns Hopkins University, Sir
James Ball of the London Business School and Baroness Cox of East
London Polytechnic were to become advisers to the new radical
leadership of the Conservative Party. Ironically, the radical right
affected to believe that the universities and polytechnics were full of
left-wing egalitarians who despised free enterprise and economic
growth, while at the same time recruiting authors and advisers
from them in large numbers.
The two academic camps certainly disliked each other. Since
social ideals are moral systems, each thought the other outside the
moral pale. To the protagonists of the private sector the
egalitarian academics were freeloaders on the productive system,
moralizing critics who opposed enterprise and economic growth,
‘bleeding-heart liberals’ who bit the hand that fed them and, at
the extreme, would-be dictators in the name of the proletariat. To
the pro-public sector academics the supporters of the free market
were callous and morally irresponsible, indifferent to the
sufferings of the poor, defenders of wealth and privilege and, at
the extreme, paid retainers and consultants who had prostituted
themselves to powerful corporations. In the clash of two moral
systems opponents are held to have no moral ground to stand on.
In the last resort equality of outcome and equality of opportunity
were incompatible principles. The antagonists, frozen in two
separate ethical dimensions, talked past each other. In the 1970s
and 1980s they were to come near to breaking off relations
altogether.
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4 THE PERSISTENCE OF CLASS

As with previous societies, aristocratic and entrepreneurial, a
considerable distance lay between the ideal and reality of
professional society. Other social groups, however much
incorporated into the dominant structure, did not give up their
ideals altogether, and the professional ideal itself failed to live up to
its promise in either of its forms. Complete equality of outcome or
condition, it goes without saying, was never within sight of being
achieved, and equality of opportunity was systematically distorted
by the privileged access to education and employment open to
wealth and family influence. The principle that society’s resources
should be distributed according to desert, whether defined as
intellectual or technical merit or as the right of citizenship, was the
moral ideal meant to justify the structure of rewards but, as with
the ideal of the leisured gentleman in pre-industrial England or the
self-made man in Victorian society, it was only a rough
approximation to reality. Although the vertical warp of
professional career hierarchies increasingly overlay the horizontal
weft of class, the social fabric still consisted of both elements, and
class conflict thrust itself to the surface stubbornly and repeatedly.
Indeed, by the late 1960s and 1970s, there was to all appearances
a resurgence of class conflict.
The language of class certainly persisted. Social and political
surveys never failed to elicit a response to the question, ‘What
class would you say you belong to?’ even if some respondents
were clearly pulling the investigator’s leg. National Opinion Polls
in 1972 reported that 91 per cent of their sample believed in the
existence of social classes and that 95 per cent identified
themselves with a particular class: 82 per cent of the top two
‘objective’ classes (by occupation) called themselves ‘middle-class’
(and 13 per cent ‘working-class’), as did 73 per cent of the lower
middle class (24 per cent calling themselves ‘working-class’),
while 53 per cent of the skilled workers and 59 per cent of the less
skilled called themselves ‘working-class’ (though no less than 43
and 35 per cent described themselves as ‘middle-class’).109 There
was enough correspondence and disjunction here to confirm
Margaret Stacey’s finding in her second survey of Banbury: ‘tap
the social images which Banbury people had in their minds, [and]
weak and confused conceptions of social class emerged.’110 Her
455
respondents, however, were in no doubt who was too high up the

social ladder to speak to them and who was too low to be spoken
to; for the colonel’s wife, for example, only three other families in
her village existed.
For English snobbery, the essence of class in the popular sense,
was very much a matter of speech. It was still true, as Professor
Higgins had put it in Shaw’s Pygmalion, that ‘it is impossible for an
Englishman to open his mouth without making some other
Englishman despise him’. The sociolinguists and educational
psychologists of the post-war period confirmed this: A.S.G.Ross in
1955 with his ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ English usage (popularized by Nancy
Mitford, a genuine U-speaker, who called a mirror a looking glass,
a dessert a pudding and a lavatory a loo, simply because the rest of
her tiny tribe despised those who did not), and Basil Bernstein in
1970 with his ‘restricted’ working-class and ‘elaborated’ middle-
class codes.111 Even the humorists fell into their own trap, like the
upper middle-class Jilly Cooper, who was equally uncomfortable
with the upper-crust ‘Harry Stow-Crats’ and the working-class ‘Mr
and Mrs Definitely Disgusting’, not to mention the upstart
‘Nouveau-Richards’.112 Like most observers, Anthony Crosland in
1956 attributed such differences of speech, prestige and style of life
to the divisive education system, the segregation of children into
public schools, grammar schools and secondary modern schools
marking them indelibly for life. For whatever reason, the English
certainly had the reputation for being the most class-conscious
nation in the world.113 Whether they were in fact more snobbish
than the French with their grands bourgeois and grandes écoles, the
Americans with their Social Registers and alumni loyalty to
prestigious universities, or even the socialist Scandinavians with
their snobbish use of occupational titles, the English obsession with
class and ‘received standard English pronunciation’ versus regional
accents made them seem so.
In strict usage these were not differences of class, of economic
relation to the means of production, but of status, of ranking in the
hierarchy of prestige. The two were naturally connected, but class
was a much more serious matter. Hierarchy was bound to persist in
a professional society, especially in the opportunity version, and
even in its egalitarian form prestige and differences of lifestyle as
well as income (perhaps in a narrower range) would remain, if only
to determine who was to manage the redistribution of resources. In
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practice, while professionalism in the first sense of the career

hierarchy applied only to a growing minority—a much larger
minority than landlords in aristocratic or entrepreneurs in
industrial society—and even in the second sense of extending
professional ambitions and conditions of work to the rest was still
restricted, class differences in the traditional form of landlords,
owner-managing capitalists, and manual wage earners with few or
no professional ‘perks’ were still powerful.
The major lines of cleavage remaining amongst the employed
members of society were between those with reasonable job
security and long periods of notice and those without, and between
those on rising salary and promotion scales and those on more or
less fixed or fluctuating wages. In a more fully professionalized
society like Japan where, in the large corporations at least, the
manual workers too had lifelong employment and rising scales of
pay, these lines were disappearing, but in Britain they were still
firmly in place. 114 While managers, engineers, technologists,
university academics, school teachers and other professional groups
were on one to six months’ notice and on salary scales which
peaked in the 50–60 age group, manual workers, sales assistants
and routine office workers were on one to four weeks’ notice and
earnings which peaked in their thirties and thereafter slowly
declined.115 (For male as distinct from female technicians, office
workers and sales people this pattern was more often broken by
promotion to the managerial ladder.) These patterns of job security
and remuneration continued to influence differences in outlook
between the classes, their different reactions to inflation,
depression, labour-saving innovation, the threat of redundancy,
incomes policy, and so on.
They also led to measurable differences in the demographic
experiences and material circumstances of the groups above and
below the manual/non-manual line. Professional people still
married later, had fewer babies, lost fewer by stillbirths and infant
mortality, had taller offspring with better health (less eye defect
and tooth decay), used the health services more, had less illness
and lived longer, suffered less unemployment, more usually
bought their own houses, and had more years of schooling. Much
of this was related to income differences, as one would expect,
though these were becoming narrower: by 1973 median weekly
income for households with professional and technical heads was
457
£64.60, for clerical workers’ households £50, and for manual

workers’ £48.50; moreover, because the last more often had more
than one income, the top third of manual households had higher
incomes than the bottom third of professional households.116
Indeed, the whole question of distribution of income was
becoming skewed not only by working wives who lifted their ‘tax
unit’ (married couple) into a higher bracket but also by what was
coming to be called the ‘feminization of poverty’, as larger
numbers of unmarried, separated, divorced, and widowed women
came to head one-parent families with much lower incomes than
the average households. In 1971 there were 620,000 such families
with over 1 million children, five-sixths of them headed by
women, many of them from the more divorced middle class.117
These aside, it is obvious that the security and rising incomes of
the career professionals gave material advantages apart from size
of income over the wage earner, in terms of buying a house and
other durable consumer goods, educating children beyond the
compulsory age, and generally planning expenditure further
ahead. Higher income alone could not compensate the manual
worker for lack of these advantages.
Income and wealth were still the main source of inequality,
nevertheless. Richard Crossman, a Labour minister who was
enough of a ‘social crank’ to vote for a socialist policy which might
take more of the profits of his farm, expressed the non-material
advantages of the rich very neatly in his 1967 diary: ‘Anne and I
have a facility of freedom and an amplitude of life here which cuts
us off from the vast mass of people.’118 There were still plenty of
wealthy families much richer and more cut off than the Crossmans.
Between 1945 and 1970 twenty-eight people died leaving more
than £3 million each. They included eight landowning peers (two
Dukes of Westminster, the Duke of Bedford, the Earls of Derby,
Radnor and Sefton, Viscount Portman, and Dowager Countess
Peel, whose wealth also came from linoleum), twelve industrialists
(eight in engineering, two in tobacco and two in the drink trade),
four property developers, and three from banking families.119 These
amply confirmed that the old wealth from landowning and
manufacturing was still alive and well, though the property
developers and motor manufacturers pointed to new ways of
making large fortunes.120 What the probate returns did not show
were the very newest ways: the purest forms of human capital were
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in the arts, entertainment and sporting fields, where superstars like

the Beatles, Richard Branson (pop records and air travel) or Steve
Davis (the snooker player) could make fortunes which put ordinary
millionaires in the shade. By 1984, for example, Paul McCartney
would be a quarter-billionaire. He was outshone, however, by the
Queen and the Duke of Westminster, the Vesteys, the Sainsburys,
Sir James Goldsmith and Garfield Weston (all the last four in food
distribution), the Cayzer family (Lord Rotherwick) in shipping, and
Gerald Ronson in property.121
Superstars apart, even the great landowners and millionaires as
a group were becoming poorer: in real terms (at 1913 prices) the
great landowners’ median estate at death, £275,000 between the
wars, declined to £103,000 in 1940–59 and to a mere £22,000 in
the 1960s, while the millionaires’ median estate (defined of course
in shrinking pounds) scarcely rose at all in current terms, and in
real terms declined from about £856,000 to £517,000 and to
£306,000.122 No doubt some of the landed decline was due to
avoidance of death duties, notably by creating companies to run the
estate and spreading the shares around the family. Some, like the
Duke of Bedford and the Marquess of Bath, made a remarkable
recovery by turning their homes and grounds into living museums,
pleasure gardens and safari parks. Others, like the Earl of Derby
and Lord Harlech, chairmen of television companies, went into
fashionable, up-to-the-minute business. Still others, like Lord
Lichfield the photographer or Humphrey Lyttleton the trumpet
player, made their own way into the glamorous worlds of fashion
and pop music. Furthermore, the property boom of the late 1960s
and 1970s and the spectacular rise in agricultural land prices, too
late to affect the probate returns yet, have restored the fortunes of
many landed families, and turned even gentlemen farmers with
1,800 acres into millionaires.
One cannot escape the impression, nonetheless, that the movers
and shakers of the corporate economy were not the inherited
wealth holders but the corporate managers, men like Sir Paul
Chambers, an LSE graduate and ex-tax inspector who rose to be
chairman of ICI (1962–68), his successor Alexander (Lord) Fleck,
who started as a lab boy at 14, or a more recent chairman, Sir John
Harvey-Jones, who left the navy at 33 and worked his way up from
trainee work study officer to the top job; Arnold Weinstock, the
career manager who rebuilt GEC; Donald (Lord) Stokes, the
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apprentice mechanic at Leyland Motors who merged most of the

British-owned vehicle industry into British Leyland; Frank (Lord)
Kearton, the Oxford scholarship boy who headed Courtaulds and
British National Oil, or Kenneth Usherwood, the Cambridge
scholarship boy who rose to command Prudential Assurance and a
vast investment in British industry.123 Such men leave substantial
but still modest fortunes, but their power while in office outshines
that of most dukes and millionaires. Along with the pop stars and
sporting heroes, they demonstrate the extraordinary material
potential of human capital.
While the rich deprecated the continued existence of class—
Macmillan told the Queen in 1959 that ‘the most encouraging
feature of the Election…is the strong impression I have formed that
Your Majesty’s subjects do not wish to allow themselves to be
divided into warring classes or tribes filled with hereditary
animosity against each other’124—the middle classes continued to
acknowledge it, either by sending their sons to public schools and
buying as much privilege as possible or by deprecating it as loudly
as they could, and sometimes both. The great feature of the period
was the decline of the small owner-managing business man and the
rise of the salariat. While male ‘employers and proprietors’ declined
from 888,000 in 1951 to 812,000 in 1971, higher and lower
professionals and administrators and managers had increased by 70
per cent from 1,964,000 to 3,355,000 and now constituted more
than one in five of the male occupied population. Professional
women had increased by 69 per cent from 804,000 to 1,358,000,
though more in the lower professions like teaching and nursing
than the higher ones.125 There were many kinds of salaried
professional. Beyond the distinction between those employed by the
public and the private sectors there were significant differences
between the individual professions, each with its own claim to
status and importance. After company chairmen, directors and top
managers of corporations with median salaries of £66.50 and
£69.60 per week in 1971, medical doctors and lawyers, whether
independent or employed, claimed the highest status and incomes,
and top civil servants and academics were not far behind, with
median salaries of £58 a week or more. Architects and planners,
accountants, engineers, scientists and technologists, college
lecturers, and a range of middle managers were significantly below
them, with weekly salaries from £41 to £53. School teachers,
460
technicians and draughtsmen, welfare workers, office supervisors,

works foremen, senior clerks and sales representatives were all
clearly a grade below, with weekly salaries in the £30s. All were
clearly above the manual and routine office workers, with weekly
earnings in the £20s.126 These income differentials were reflected in
the size of house, the sort of neighbourhood, the make of car, the
kinds of holiday, the type of children’s schooling and so on which
each occupational group could afford, and they still segregated
themselves by town, suburb and village to emphasize their
differences, even though those differences were less spectacular
than before.
The chief difference distinguishing the salariat from the working
class was the psychological one that flowed from greater job
security and rising scales of pay. They found it easier to plan for the
future, to obtain mortgages and loans for buying cars and
consumer goods, to invest in their own and their children’s
education, to commit savings to holidays and leisure pursuits. In
these ways they had the edge on the traditional small business man,
who had no job security, automatically rising income, built-in
occupational pension, or state unemployment or sick pay, and often
lived in fear of depression or bankruptcy. They were also separated
from one another. While the civil servants, academics, school
teachers, welfare workers, NHS doctors and nurses, and other
public employees had little or no access to fringe benefits, such as
company cars, help with school fees, low-interest housing loans and
the like, these were becoming commoner in the private sector as a
way of overcoming high income taxes, particularly during periods
of government pay restraint. On the other side, public sector
professions often had greater job security, longer holidays and,
from the 1970s, inflation-proof pensions, so that each side could
envy the other. Such mutual resentments were aggravated by the
sense of the public employees that they were better educated, or at
least better qualified, than most company managers, 58 per cent of
whom according to a 1971 study came from below the middle
class, and only 40 per cent of whom were graduates.127 Both could
rejoice in their belief in equality of opportunity, but by different
routes, via education and by climbing the corporate ladder. The
growing gap in their ideological outlook owed something to this
difference in provenance—though at the very top the two tended to
converge in educational and social background.
461
The overwhelming sense, however, was of a middle level of

society increasingly fragmented into discrete career hierarchies,
each to some extent in competition with the rest for resources.
The major split might be between those who saw each other as
controlling two rival cornucopias, one drawing its flow of
resources from the bounty of the taxpayer, the other from the
spending of the consumer, but each profession was to some extent
in competition for resources with every other. Government
expenditure was not boundless, and what one public sector
profession took another could not have. Defence, health,
education, social welfare, roads and the environment, even the
nationalized industries seeking investment, all dipped into the
same pool, which against taxpayer resistance could not be
endlessly enlarged. At the same time, private sector managers and
specialists were engaged in not one but several competitions for
resources, between themselves and between their corporations
and divisions, and also with the state over taxation, investment
grants and credits, and even subsidies. Although the struggle for
income between the classes, particularly with the manual wage
earners, was still sharp, for the middle-class salariat the struggle
was increasingly between the different specialisms. That is why
the ‘rebellious salariat’, as Clive Jenkins and Barrie Sherman
called them, came to organize more effectively to pursue that
struggle through the state and the private corporations. The
public professions in particular became caught up in the corporate
game of persuading the state to allocate more expenditure to
defence or school education or the universities or the Health
Service or the social services or such traditional and basic services
as the police and firemen. Increasingly, they found themselves
threatening ‘non-co-operation’ (a polite term for strikes or go-
slows) in, for example, the schools, the universities or the
hospitals if they did not get the salary scales and conditions of
work they wanted.
What, indeed, was the difference between this kind of activity at
the professional level and the demand from the dockers, the
railwaymen, the gas workers, the steel workers or the coal miners
for increased public resources for investment and, ultimately
subsidized wages in the nationalized industries? And how, for that
matter, did that in turn differ from the demands of the managers of
private industries such as Upper Clyde shipbuilders, the Harland &
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Wolff shipyards, the car makers British Leyland and Chrysler, Rolls
Royce aero-engines, or the machine tool makers Alfred Herbert for
subsidies or rescue from imminent bankruptcy? Admittedly, some
of these corporate crises finally came to a head only in the
economically troubled 1970s, but the logic of a corporate economy,
in which the great private corporations were as vital to the
prosperity and stability of society as the nationalized industries,
was already leading in that direction. By then government, the
corporations, both public and private, and the trade unions and
professional associations were so inextricably enmeshed in the
machinery of the corporate state that no party to the competition
for resources could afford to ignore it.
At first sight the working class seem to have been excluded
from professional society. Leaving aside the ‘professionalization
of the working class’ in the shape of professional conditions of
work and remuneration, such as single status, sick pay, paid
holidays and company pensions, discussed in Chapter 7, and the
welfare state itself as compensation for those left out, most labour
history has concentrated on their class consciousness and
potential either for revolution or at least for radical reform of the
capitalist system, and on the reasons for their failure to achieve
one or the other. In recent years a more sophisticated approach
has taken over, which emphasizes the distance between the
workplace where, especially in Britain, a continual struggle for
control of the production process was taking place, and the
official or institutional labour movement, where trade union
officials and Labour politicians repeatedly lost touch with their
members and became ‘incorporated’ in the capitalist system.128
For the more left-wing historians this represented a ‘betrayal’ of
the working class and the proletarian revolution. For the less
committed it was an almost inevitable compromise with the short-
term realities of working-class life, in which the need to get the
best possible pay and conditions now had to take precedence over
the ultimate goal of a socialist society and the abolition of
capitalism. Either way, the result was a pis aller, a failure of the
working class to achieve its historic goal, due primarily to its lack
of unity around a single class consciousness and to the
shortcomings of the political and industrial leaderships.
If, however, we do not start from this eschatological scenario but
simply ask what ordinary workers, including the militant and
463
discontented, wanted from their admittedly underprivileged

situation, we get a rather different picture. The evidence suggests
that most industrial disputes began at the grass roots, over some
particular grievance in the workplace amongst a section of the
workforce, and only then escalated, if at all, to the level of the
plant, the firm and, very occasionally, the whole industry. This was
especially true in Britain after the Second World War when, in
conditions of full employment and with the welfare state buttressed
by the tacit corporatism of the unions, the employers and the
government, most disputes were spontaneous outbreaks,
increasingly labelled ‘wildcat’ strikes, deplored by the official union
leaders as much as by the employers and the politicians.
Intense localism was reinforced by the trend towards plant and
shop floor bargaining. By 1951 it was reported that ‘the centre of
gravity in the engineering unions has moved more and more to the
shop stewards’, and the same could be said for the docks, the mines,
and a growing list of other industries.129 Wiser employers met the
demand for local bargaining part way, and a system of ‘local
corporatism’ developed that quickly settled most disputes, which
were usually over modest demands for improved pay and working
conditions. Even the strike wave of 1957–62, initially provoked by
the income restraint imposed by the government in 1956, and
composed of small-scale workplace actions, revealed how ‘the aims
and expectations of working people were stable and restrained’.130
Surveys showed that most workers were concerned with immediate
issues affecting the job, and not with management policy, pricing,
profits, or the ownership of capitalist property. Conflict was no less
sharp for that, and intense heat could be generated over ‘custom
and practice’ governing the work process, the settling of piece rates,
benchmarks for ‘measured day work’, overtime bonuses and, above
all, differential rates of pay and demarcation (who does what?)
disputes between different occupational groups. By the mid-1960s
nearly half of all strikes were over ‘working arrangements, rules
and discipline’ or managerial control issues.131 Turner, Clack and
Roberts in 1967 found there were two central motivations for
industrial disputes in a period of full employment: the demand that
wages should be ‘fair’ in comparison with other workers, and the
claim that workers had property rights in a particular job, both as
against other workers and, under threat of redundancy, against the
employer.132
464
The remarkable thing about these objectives is how closely they

paralleled those of the salaried professions. Demarcation disputes
between occupations and issues of differential pay between more
and less skilled workers mirrored professional demands for the
monopoly of a particular service and for payment commensurate
with its superior value. The manual worker’s opposition to
redundancy without adequate notice and compensation for the
worker’s property in the job was the precise equivalent of the
professional’s demand for protection of his human capital. Control
over the work process was what every self-respecting professional
demanded as of right. The local corporatism by which ‘workers are
participating more deeply in a wider range of managerial decisions’
and ‘the growing, if not yet clearly articulated, demand for greater
personal participation’133 were the basic conditions which every
profession expected. If such ‘restrictive practices’ were recognized
as inevitable by the Donovan Commission on Industrial Relations
in 1968, or condemned by employers and politicians for resisting
innovation, holding down productivity and defeating economic
growth, how did they differ from the restrictive practices of certain
professions examined by the Monopolies Commission in 1970?134
Sir Otto Kahn-Freund, an Anglophile immigrant, in his ‘thank-
offering to Britain lecture’ in 1979 saw ‘restrictive labour practices
as part of a general pattern of attitudes especially characteristic of
British society’:
Anyone coming to this country from the Continent—perhaps

also coming from America—is puzzled beyond words by the
careful and rigid division of professional and commercial
activities in Britain. This, he feels, must be a nation riddled
with demarcation lines, and with professional taboos and
rituals.
The demarcation enforced in the name of the public interest by the

barrister and the solicitor, the architect and the builder, the optician
and the ophthalmic surgeon, were species of the same genus as
those enforced by trade unionists on the shop floor, the building
site, or in the shipyard:
All these specializations may be damaging and beneficial at

the same time, they are all part of a national heritage, they
465
may all be a danger to efficiency and conducive to waste of

resources. What should not be overlooked is that this—to
some extent—pre-capitalist basis of contemporary British
society engenders what is in the strict sense an ideology: it is
the ideology of conservatism—in the non-party political
sense—an attitude which is shared by many adherents of all
political parties, right and left…. It is an ideology nurtured by
a rational desire for self-preservation and by irrational
vicarious corporate selfishness….135
The British working class, in other words, was imbued, for good or
ill, with precisely the same outlook on the terms and conditions of
work as the professional middle class. Even the most class-
conscious of industrial disputes had a ‘professional’ dimension to
them. Most strikes for increased pay, like the renewed strike wave
of 1968–72 after the pay pause of 1967, were ‘catch-up’ disputes
demanding parity with similar workers or the restoration of
traditional differentials over the supposedly less skilled. The
troubles over decasualization of dock labour settled by the Devlin
Inquiry were exacerbated by disputes over the handling of cargo by
different gangs. The Jones-Aldington Report of 1972 on
containerization showed the dockers’ union and the dock
employers, old sparring partners, surprisingly coming together to
safeguard their industry against interlopers, even where the
container packers belonged to the same union (the Transport and
General Workers). 136 Even that most militant of unions, the
National Union of Mineworkers, which claimed, debatably, to have
brought down the Heath government in 1974 with its flying pickets
and the state-imposed three-day working week, was concerned not
to wring a larger share of surplus value from a capitalist employer
(since this was a nationalized industry making no profit) but, like
any public sector profession, to obtain a larger slice of public
expenditure out of the taxpayer.137 The miners’ complaint that the
TUC and the other unions failed to rally the working class behind
them was due to an ironic recognition by the rest that the miners’
was a sectional cause which, if successful, would have imposed
costs on all of them through higher taxes and prices.138 Indeed, with
the exception of the Ford strike of 1971, significantly concerned
with national parity between car workers, most of the major strikes
of the early 1970s were in nationalized industries—electricity in
466
1971, mines and docks in 1972, mines, railways and electricity in

1973—and had the same objective of gaining a larger share of
public funds from a government determined to cut public
expenditure.139
Given the fragmentation of the industrial labour movement,
historically more divided in Britain between craft, industrial and
general unions than elsewhere, it is not surprising that sectionalism
(what Lenin called ‘trade union consciousness’) was more powerful
than working-class solidarity (‘revolutionary class consciousness’).
That helps to explain the paradox that, while the labour movement
was so powerful in the workplace that it appeared to have a veto
over innovation and change, at the national level it was often so
weak and ineffective. Opinion polls increasingly showed that trade
unions were unpopular with many unionists themselves or, rather,
that while many unionists supported their own particular union
they were deeply suspicious of other people’s unions—a very
‘professional’ attitude indeed.140 It also helps to explain why a third
or more of the working class increasingly voted for parties other
than Labour. Some political observers began to talk of ‘class
dealignment’ and the decline of class voting as class support for
both major parties began to shrink between 1964 and 1974.141
During the 1970s the share of the working-class vote going to the
Labour Party, still 69 per cent in 1964, shrank from 58 to 50 per
cent, and by 1983 it was down to 38 per cent.142 To explain this, as
some labour historians do, by the failure of the Labour Party to be
more class-conscious or revolutionary seems a strange twist of
logic: a vote for the Tories or the Liberals was hardly the way to
hasten the socialist dawn.
There was, nonetheless, some truth in the critics’ allegation
that many trade union leaders and Labour politicians had become
incorporated into the corporate system. That indeed had become
their function. In the 1960s corporatism had become
institutionalized with Macmillan’s establishment of the tripartite
National Economic Development Council in 1961, the Wilson
government’s ill-fated National Plan in 1965, and the Industrial
Reorganization Corporation in 1966 to encourage large-scale
mergers in private industry, such as British Leyland and GEC. In
all these developments trade union leaders and, when in office,
Labour politicians were intimately involved with the employers’
representatives and the civil servants. The system was to reach its
467
zenith in the ‘social contract’ between the Labour Party and the
TUC in 1973, whereby the next Labour government exchanged
welfare measures, such as price controls, food subsidies and
frozen council rents, for support and co-operation in wage
restraint. Such corporatist bargains were bound to be seen by the
militant rank and file as an unwarranted restraint on free
collective bargaining, but that was not the same as a defeat for the
working class. Free collective bargaining itself was not a socialist
but a capitalist, free labour market principle, a relic of the late
Victorian economy, endorsed by the trade union legislation of the
1870s. It is not self-evident that those demanding it in the 1970s
were more progressive or revolutionary than the corporatists who
were trying to improve by centralized bargaining the real wages
and political clout of the working class. By different sorts of
bargaining the corporatists and their critics were both playing the
professional game of ‘talking up’ the share of society’s resources
going to their own occupational group. The dispute was
paradoxically the ultimate proof that the working class had joined
the professional society.
This was not how it appeared, however, to those involved in the
increasing industrial unrest of 1968–74. To many on both sides of
industry and politics, faced with the growing evidence of the failure
of the British economy to compete in the modern world and
blaming that failure on Britain’s ‘low trust’ industrial relations and
the mutual frustration of management and labour, it seemed that
the country was plagued far more than others by a resurgence of
sheer bloody-minded class conflict. Each side blamed the other for
the failure of corporate planning to solve the problem of sustained
economic growth. Every attempt to ‘dash for growth’ by
stimulating investment evoked a short-lived consumer boom which
sucked in imports and provoked a balance of payments crisis,
followed by severe deflation, government-enforced pay restraint
and, as soon as it was relaxed, a further explosive round of pay
increases. Many employers and right-wing politicians began to
complain that full employment gave the unions too much power
and that the only way to break the cycle of boom and bust,
inflation and deflation, was a return to the classic discipline of the
free labour market—in other words, ‘a dose of unemployment’.
Many on the Labour side came to believe that corporatist planning
was simply a device for holding down wages when the market
468
favoured labour, and vied with their most extreme opponents in

demanding a return to collective bargaining in the free labour
market.
Economic recession and balance of payments crises brought out
the old class warriors on both sides. The radical right, who had
been crying in the wilderness throughout the Keynesian consensus,
began to revive and publicize the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek and
Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of free market economics,
and through Enoch Powell and his disciples to infiltrate the grass
roots of the Conservative Party. The radical left, long marginalized
in the Labour movement by the power of right-wing union barons
like Ernest Bevin and Arthur Deakin, recovered its strength through
a generation change to barons of the left like Frank Cousins, Jack
Jones and Hugh Scanlon and, with their help in the Labour Party,
through Anthony Wedgwood Benn and the leftward drift in the
constituency Labour parties. An exasperated Harold Wilson
blamed the seamen’s strike which ‘blew the Government off-course’
in 1966 on ‘a small body of politically motivated men’ intent on
furthering Marxist revolution. He was almost certainly wrong—
there were such men but they spectacularly failed to stir up trouble
except when the ordinary workers felt a strong particular
grievance—but it all added to the increasing belief in the resurgence
of class conflict. Both the Wilson government of 1964–70 and the
Tory Opposition led by Edward Heath exacerbated this belief. The
failure of the National Plan and the balance of payments crisis and
devaluation of 1967 convinced the Labour government that
exhortation was not enough to break the cycle of boom and bust
and it determined to use more coercive methods, on two fronts.
Firstly, it introduced what the radical right was already advocating,
a system of monetary controls which would in theory limit the
money supply that fuelled both pay increases and price inflation.
Secondly, it set out to reform the system of industrial relations.
Disappointed at the Donovan Commission’s voluntarist remedies
for wildcat disputes, a group of ministers led by Wilson, Barbara
Castle, Crossman and Crosland determined on penal sanctions
against premature and ill-considered strikes. The White Paper In
Place of Strife (1969) proposed government-enforced settlement of
demarcation disputes, a compulsory twenty-eight-day cooling-off
period and a government-supervised ballot of union members
before an official strike. The proposals split the government and the
469
parliamentary party, were opposed by the National Executive

Committee and the TUC, and had to be abandoned in favour of an
informal corporatist ‘solemn and binding undertaking’ that the
member unions would observe the TUC’s guidelines on unofficial
strikes. Though the attempt at regulation failed, it not only strained
relations between the government and the unions and between the
leadership of the movement and the rank and file but encouraged
the view that there was a vast upwelling of working-class
discontent which had to be contained.
The same view was held by the Tories, who welcomed In Place
of Strife and began to develop coercive proposals of their own. In
preparation for the 1970 election the Shadow Cabinet met at the
Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon to draft a right-wing programme—
promptly labelled ‘Selsdon Man’ dug up from the Victorian past—
to ‘roll back the frontiers of government’, exchange Keynesian
economic policies for monetarist controls, reduce direct taxes,
increase the police force, and introduce a coercive Industrial
Relations Bill. The Bill would enforce collective agreements, make
trade union rights including protection of union funds dependent
on obeying a code of good behaviour, regulate the closed shop,
limit peaceful picketing to providing information only and ban
intimidation and secondary picketing (of premises other than the
primary employer’s) altogether, and allow the government to
proscribe strikes it deemed injurious to the national economy.
Enacted in the Industrial Relations Act of 1971, this was to lead to
the greatest head-on collision between government and unions
since 1926, to confrontation with the whole labour movement, the
imprisonment of striking dockers (released on the intervention of
the Official Solicitor), four national emergencies leading up to the
1973 miners’ dispute and the Heath government’s fall, and to the
belief that, because of the supposed veto of the unions over any
government economic policy which they vehemently opposed,
Britain was becoming ‘ungovernable’.143
Both In Place of Strife and ‘Selsdon Man’ were symptoms of the
crumbling of the Keynesian-Beveridgean consensus on full
employment and the welfare state and harbingers of a backlash
against professional society in general. The backlash was
precipitated by the increasingly obvious failure of Britain to sustain
rates of economic growth commensurable with its rivals in Europe,
North America and the Pacific fringe, and by the fear of impending
470
economic decline, which became acute with the onset of the world
oil crisis in 1973. It took several forms. There was rising criticism
of the individual professions and their pretensions and privileges,
including some of the most ancient and venerable like the medicine
and the law. There was increasing resistance to the expansion of the
welfare state and its mounting cost in public expenditure and
taxation. And there was a parallel reaction against corporatism and
the apparent sharing of power with the lobbies and pressure groups
of management, unions, the professions, and the growing profusion
of ‘single-issue’ special interest groups, such as the poverty lobby
and the environmentalists. Finally, there was a repudiation of
consensus itself as an ideal and its replacement by the politics of
confrontation, between revived versions of the traditional war
parties of socialism and the free market. As we shall see in the final
chapter, however, the backlash was not quite what it seemed but,
paradoxically, a confrontation between the two rival factions of the
professional ideal.
471
Chapter 10
THE BACKLASH
AGAINST PROFESSIONAL
SOCIETY
Professional society thrived for over a quarter of a century after the

Second World War, that is, for as long as full employment and a
booming economy allowed it to meet all reasonable demands upon
it for rising living standards and welfare services. For twenty-eight
years it achieved a positive sum game, with almost everyone,
including most of the poor in absolute if not relative terms, gaining,
and very few losing. Such economic decline as there was was
relative, and could only be perceived in comparison with the more
rapidly growing economies of Western Europe, Canada and Japan.
Governments worried over the failure of Britain’s economy to grow
more rapidly had tried various measures, including Keynesian
demand management and, from the early 1960s, some indicative
planning of the French type to try to break through to higher rates
of expansion. But as long as ‘most of our people had never had it
so good’ there was no desire for fundamental change in the policies
which were producing unprecedented material progress. Only with
the return of hard times and world recession in the 1970s and
1980s did politicians and commentators of all shades of political
opinion begin to question the basic tenets of the system. As so often
before, in the 1830s–40s, the 1870s–80s, and the 1920s–30s,
adverse economic trends brought a new questioning and rethinking
of attitudes and policies, and old doubts and critiques which had
long been suppressed or ignored came flooding back to the surface.
The reaction was not confined to economic policy, although that
formed the cutting edge. Underlying it was a much more general
backlash against professional society in all its aspects. At the first
472
THE BACKLASH AGAINST PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
and most obvious level there was a reaction against the power,
privileges and pretensions of the special interest groups of all kinds,
but especially against the organized professions. The state-
supported professions, including the Civil Service, the university
academics, school teachers and social workers, came in for
particular attack, since they came to be seen as unproductive
occupations parasitic upon the wealth-creating private sector.
Disillusion with the ‘caring professions’ led to the attack on the
welfare state and the attempts to reform it, with mixed success. At
the second, related level, the reaction was against the seemingly
unstoppable growth of ‘big government’, with the attempt to ‘roll
back the state’ by cutting public expenditure and privatizing
nationalized industries. At the third and final level the target was
corporatism, the involvement of the special interest groups, above
all employers and trade unions, in the framing of government
policy. The ‘unsleeping veto groups’ were blamed for the unseemly
scramble for national resources in the shape of government grants,
subsidies and pay claims which stoked inflation and undermined
economic growth. At all three levels the backlash turned out to be
not a return to an earlier form of society but a reaction of
professional society upon itself, or of one set of professionals
against the rest.
This triple backlash against professionalism and the corporate
state it inspired, the subjects of Sections 1 and 2 of this chapter,
presented a marvellous opportunity for a movement of social and
economic protest which for a generation or more existed only in the
muffled form of rumbling discontent but now reappeared as the
resurgence of the old, nineteenth-century ideology of the free
market. It had the advantage of appearing to offer a positive,
coherent alternative to the corporate, high-spending welfare state
and to the Keynesian management of the economy which it claimed
had failed. In fact, as we shall see in Section 3, the resurgence was
not quite what it seemed. It was not a reaction against professional
society but a rounding of the private sector professionals who ran
the great corporations and their academic and journalistic
supporters upon the public sector professionals. The former saw the
latter as a burden upon the private sector in two senses, as
consumers of the wealth which it produced and as controllers and
regulators of its managers’ freedom of action. Allied to the
undoubted failure of the old policies to solve the new economic
473
problems of the 1970s, they were able to undermine confidence in

the Keynesian-Beveridgean consensus amongst leading politicians
in both major political parties and, more significantly, to win a
dedicated following in the group of right-wing Conservatives who
‘hi-jacked the party’ in 1975. They claimed to have a complete
answer to Britain’s economic decline, in monetarist control of
inflation, the reining in of the runaway welfare state, the
privatization of nationalized industries, and the stimulation of
private enterprise by the reduction of taxation and government
regulation. These remedies they proceeded to apply when they won
office, on a minority of the popular vote, in 1979.
As we shall see in Section 4, Britain’s economic decline is a much
more deep-seated problem than the naive analyses of the two
extremes, the free marketeers and the advocates of comprehensive
nationalization, suggest. It is rooted in professional society itself, at
least in the transitional form it has taken in Britain. The clash
between the public sector professionals, with their ideal of a
benevolent state caring for every citizen, and the private sector
professionals, with their ideal of freedom for the enterprising,
wealth-creating managers of the great corporations, is a distorted
echo of the old clash between the individual capitalist and
proletarian workers of Victorian society. As such it encourages the
perpetuation of obsolete class attitudes by unreconstructed class
warriors who are more concerned with winning old battles than
with solving the problems of contemporary society. Worse still, the
prospect of a victory for either extreme presents Britain with a
dilemma. A triumphant public sector solution would bring with it
the risk of an authoritarian state, eager to control every aspect of
the individual’s life. A victorious private sector solution would
import the more insidious threat of a corporate neo-feudalism, in
which the multinational barons of conglomerate capitalism would
control the destinies of everyone else. The dilemma is more acute in
Britain than elsewhere because of the rigid political structure and
the decline of democracy, which enable extremist minorities to
capture the vehicles of power and impose their nostrums upon the
majority. Unless we can expose this false dilemma and achieve a
sensible balance of co-operation between the state and society we
shall continue to swing between the two poles of the dedicated and
dangerously naive ‘true believers’ of right and left.
474
1 PROFESSIONALISM UNDER FIRE
The condescension of professionalism, the suspicion of individual

professions as conspiracies against the laity, and the rivalry and
mutual disdain which many professions felt for one another, all
suggest that a reaction against the pretensions of professionalism
was sooner or later inevitable. There had always been an
undercurrent of scepticism about the professions from Bernard
Shaw’s (or even Molière’s) time onwards, and this was
compounded in the 1970s by the writings of iconoclasts like Ivan
Illich, with titles like Deschooling Society (1974), Medical Nemesis
(1975) and Disabling Professions (1977).1 But it is patently difficult
to distinguish the buzzings of perennial gadflies, easily brushed
aside, from a sustained backlash by an effective body of hostile
opinion. The most obvious source of such a backlash was the
revival of the free market ideology to be dealt with in Section 3.
Professional organization was in its nature, as Magali Larson has
shown, the antithesis of the free market and meant to exclude
unqualified competitors from the service monopolized by the
qualified.2 The free marketeers displayed particular animus against
certain professional monopolies, such as the solicitors’ exclusive
right of conveyancing property or the opticians’ grip on the sale of
eye glasses.3 Yet in many ways they were already riding a tide of
popular displeasure at the pretensions and privileges of individual
professions. It was in the nature of professional society to set up
rivalries between different occupations competing for power and
resources, and it was easy for criticism of particular professions to
spill over into criticism of professionalism in general.
Surprisingly, some of the earliest and most effective criticism
came from the left rather than the right. Richard Titmuss, the
somewhat reluctant champion of the welfare state, attacked ‘the
Pressure Group State’ as early as 1960 for the self-interest of the
professional groups battening upon what he called ‘the
irresponsible society’. What aroused his ire even more than the
professional managers who awarded themselves handsome ‘perks’
over and above their already large salaries were the welfare
professionals who seemed to put their own convenience and
rewards before their patients and clients.4 Out of frustration at the
inadequacies of the welfare state, this criticism of the purveyors of
state services became a common theme with the poverty lobby,
475
down to and including Paul Wilding’s Professional Power and

Social Welfare (1982).5 It did not occur to them that their attacks,
meant to divert more resources from the providers to the
beneficiaries, would be taken literally and used to condemn state
welfare altogether.
Meanwhile, there were increasing numbers of spontaneous
attacks on what Margaret Thatcher was to call traditionally
‘immune targets’,6 including the three ancient professions of law,
medicine and the clergy. Lawyers were criticized not only for the
solicitors’ monopoly of easy but expensive procedures like
conveyancing and divorce—the Law Society was hotly condemned
for its alarmist advertisement in 1979 showing a child being ‘split
down the middle’ by a ‘do-it-yourself divorce—but also for the
unique British division between barristers and solicitors (not to
mention the further division of the bar into ‘silks’ and ‘juniors’)
which doubled the fees levied by the profession.7 It was alleged that
lawyers were so entrenched in Parliament, the Inns of Court and
the Law Society that it was impossible to reform the law or for a
wronged client to obtain redress. In one widely reported case of a
former member of the Law Society council who allegedly helped a
defendant company to defeat his own client and then charged the
latter £198,000 for his services (later reduced to £67,000 by the
courts), the Law Society found the complaint ‘unsubstantiated’,
and a judge decided that his court had no jurisdiction over the
Society.8 The law itself came in for increasing criticism. In 1974 Sir
Leslie (later Lord) Scarman in his Hamlyn lectures asserted that the
Common Law was no longer a sufficient protector of the
individual. It was incapable of protecting human rights in a manner
consistent with Britain’s international obligations. It was ill
equipped to resolve conflicts within the vast and complex field of
welfare rights. It was inadequate for the protection of the
environment. And it had demonstrated its incapacity in the field of
industrial relations. Scarman called for a modern Bill of Rights or,
later, for the incorporation in British law of the European
Convention on Human Rights. The latter was already binding on
the British government but ignored by British courts unless and
until appeals were made to the European Court in Strasbourg. In
consequence of the conservatism of British justice Britain had
provided more successful appeals to Strasbourg than any other
member country, including those for such basic rights as trade
476
union membership for civil servants and habeas corpus for mental
patients.9
The legal profession obstinately refused to reform itself or the
law. In 1968 the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, declaring that
‘much of our criminal law is obscure, confused and uncertain’, set
up a Law Commission to consider its codification. After seventeen
years’ work it published a code, but with little hope of its adoption.
Professor J.C.Smith, head of the drafting team, feared that ‘no
amount of abstract argument as to the virtues of codification is
going to overcome the conservatism, inertia and actual hostility
which will have to be faced if the code is to become a reality’.10
Even the judiciary is no longer above criticism. When in 1984 the
Centre for Criminological Research at Oxford University issued a
report on the sentencing practices of judges, Hugo Young
commented in the Guardian, ‘the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane,
backed by Lord Chancellor Hailsham, has issued one of the most
philistine diktats ever handed down by a man in his position,’ and
had forbidden further research. ‘Lord Lane’, he continued, ‘has
enshrined ignorance as a judicial virtue, and intellectual privacy as
the hallmark of the priesthood over which he presides.’11 The
almost universal ridicule of the law lords’ decision to forbid
newspaper publication of excerpts from Peter Wright’s book Spy-
catcher, already published in Australia, the United States and Hong
Kong, in July 1987 showed to what depths respect for the judicial
process had shrunk. The majesty of the law no longer guaranteed
acceptance of the infallibility of the judiciary.
The medical profession, too, was no longer immune. Although
not so deeply under suspicion of overcharging, recommending
unnecessary ‘elective surgery’, and frequent malpractice as the
American profession (partly because of their different structure of
rewards which did not charge patients directly or encourage ‘make-
work’), British doctors were no longer the god-like functionaries,
beyond questioning much less criticism, they had once been. A
spate of malpractice suits in which doctors would rarely give
evidence against medical colleagues, a number of widely publicized
drug cases involving GPs, and at least one notorious case of a
forensic pathologist convicted of rigging the evidence against a long
series of men accused of murder, contributed to a clouding of the
profession’s image in the public eye.12 Like the lawyers, too, the
doctors stubbornly resisted reform. In 1974 the Davies Committee
477
drew up a code of practice for dealing with patients’ complaints

about hospitals, and in 1978 a House of Commons Select
Committee recommended that the Health Ombudsman should be
empowered to investigate these. The British Medical Association
responded that any doctor who acted as a medical assessor to the
Ombudsman would ‘forfeit the confidence of his professional
colleagues’. The Ombudsman was precluded from investigating
about a third of all the complaints reaching him each year because
they touched on clinical judgment, and the complainants’ only
recourse was to the law courts where it was almost impossible to
get a doctor to testify on their side.13 The final blow to the prestige
of the profession was their work to rule and threat of strikes in the
1970s against the National Health Service, aggravated by actual
strikes by nurses and ancillary staff.14 Although part of a general
wave of unrest amongst the employed professions as accelerating
inflation eroded salaries, it was felt to be particularly heinous for
the leading life-and-death profession to appear to betray its
Hippocratic oath.
The clergy’s prestige, and especially that of the Church of
England, had been progressively undermined by the decline of
religious belief. The highly publicized ‘agnostic’ theology of Bishop
John Robinson of Woolwich, Dean Don Cupitt of Cambridge
University and Bishop David Jenkins of Durham, trumpeting the
‘death of God’, the irrelevance of the Trinity and the virgin birth,
and their replacement by a non-anthropomorphic life force,
contributed not so much to existing unbelief as to the questioning
of the integrity of an endowed priesthood that did not believe in
God.15 In compensation for its weakening theology, the church
came to emphasize its moral and social responsibilities. As a result
it suffered a curious inversion in its political image. Once ‘the
Conservative Party at prayer’, it now came to be associated with
the defence of the welfare state, criticism of government policy on
unemployment, the inner cities, and the miners’ strike of 1984–85,
and support for popular liberation movements in the Third World.
While by no means socialist but rather benevolent liberal or Tory
paternalist, it naturally aroused the ire of the free marketeers.
Typical of their response was a collection of essays published in
1985 by the Social Affairs Unit of the Institute of Economic Affairs
entitled The Kindness that Kills: The Churches Simplistic Response
to Complex Social Issues. Mrs Thatcher’s more forth-right
478
comment was that the church leaders were ‘cuckoos’. A

government spokesman even described a report on Life in the City
(1985) by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s committee as
‘Marxist’.16 Such predictably intolerant reactions may bear witness
to the humanity and independence of the church, but they do not
increase respect for the clergy in the eyes of the public.
Other professions came under increasing attack for not living up
to their self-acclaimed standards of behaviour. The Monopolies
Commission, set up to investigate monopolistic behaviour amongst
business corporations, extended its investigations to restrictive
practices in a range of professions in the late 1960s, but its 1970
report had little effect.17 The Director General of Fair Trading, Sir
Gordon Borrie, could still in 1983 attack ‘the unacceptable face of
the professions’, singling out solicitors, accountants, veterinary
surgeons and opticians for restricting competition and charging
clients more than was strictly justified for their services. 18
Professions often demanded self-regulation and then refused to
implement their own codes against erring members. The Royal
Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the senior association of estate
agents, met stiff resistance from its own members in 1975 when it
proposed to police its rule against conflict of interest by setting up
a register of their holdings in property companies. The Financial
Intermediaries, Managers and Brokers Regulatory Association,
established in the early 1980s in response to investigations by the
Securities and Exchange Commission into insider dealing in the
City, admitted that, while ‘it enables the honest firm to stay in
business even though it made an honest mistake’, it could do little
to prevent deliberate fraud.19
Perhaps the most surprising fall from grace was the decline in the
trust originally given without stint to those high priests of the
future, the scientific community. Once regarded as the saviours of
mankind from want, ignorance and all the ills that flesh is heir to,
scientists came to be looked upon with suspicion as the
manufacturers of side effects, including pollution of the atmosphere
and the oceans with toxic chemicals and radioactive materials,
which may make the planet uninhabitable. Every great scientific
advance seemed to bring with it a corresponding cost, such as the
erosion of the ozone layer which protects human beings, animals
and crops from cosmic radiation or the degradation of the oxygen-
replenishing powers of the biosphere which make the earth a
479
life-enhancing system. James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’ by

which life itself continually renews the means of life in a perpetual
cycle of harmony may no longer work in a world where massive
technological intervention in the environment can overwhelm the
self-recuperative forces of nature.20
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament began in 1958 in
protest at the enormity of the scientists’ bomb and its threat to
human life. For a few years CND had a tremendous impact on the
conscience of the nation, with thousands joining in its annual
Aldermaston march each Easter, converging on the great mass
meeting in Trafalgar Square. It faded as it became clear that Britain
was no longer the moral leader of world opinion, and after 1965 it
became swamped in the general protest against the Vietnam war.
Nonetheless, it helped to highlight the threat of nuclear holocaust
and the irresponsibility of the scientists who had made possible the
destruction of the planet.21
In the same year as the first Aldermaston march John Kenneth
Galbraith drew attention to the ‘private affluence, public squalor’
which resulted from unregulated economic growth, and two years
later E.J.Mishan questioned ‘the basic unwritten premise of
economic science…that economic development is a good thing….
[T]he thorny path of industrialisation leads, after all, only to the
wasteland of Subtopia.’ His later books attacked technological
development not only for its threat to the quality of life but for the
big government needed to control it and for the individual
alienation, social disintegration and spiritual imbalance that
accompanied it. Even the scientists’ boasted search for truth came
under his fire:
the disinterested pursuit of knowledge saps the spiritual

sustenance of men. It destroys also the myths that shore up
their morale, the bonds that hold them together, their ideas of
kith and kin, their pride in their history and their folk
heroes—beliefs that one by one are doomed to be shattered by
troops of eager young historians in search of professional
recognition. There is, in short, much knowledge that we
should be happy to live without.22
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on the destruction of wild life by

pesticides, published in Britain in 1963 and earnestly debated in
480
Parliament the same year, began a movement for ecological

conservation which swelled into a general attack on what science,
technology and unlimited economic development were doing to the
environment and the quality of life. Paul Ehrlich in 1968 warned
about The Population Bomb which would nearly double world
population and add 20 million people to Britain’s numbers by the
year 2000, and the Club of Rome in 1972 issued its famous report
on The Limits to Growth which questioned whether unlimited
expansion was worth the human and environmental costs. The
same year Edward Goldsmith, founder of the environmental
journal The Ecologist, attacked most scientists as the ‘priesthood of
industrial society’ who were in process of destabilizing the ‘natural
system’, in which men worked to keep their families, women stayed
home and raised children, infant mortality should be allowed to do
its work of keeping the population within bounds, and normal
racial prejudice allowed to keep out un-wanted foreign elements.
All these critiques of headlong, self-destructive expansion—the
anti-nuclear movement, the economic steady-state or no-growth
movement, the ecological movement, and the back to nature
movement (though not zero population)—were drawn together in
1973 in E.F.Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if
People Mattered, a radical rejection of the whole direction of
scientific, technological and economic development since the
Second World War. The book had an enormous success among the
mainly middle-class, non-market professional groups who were the
backbone of all these movements, and for a time it looked as if they
would have a permanent effect on the direction of British politics.
The victory of Thatcherism in 1979, however, undermined their
success and set many of them to defend themselves and their often
public sector careers against the new brutalism of the free market.23
Professional scientists, technologists and orthodox economists,
nevertheless, would never again enjoy the complacent self-
confidence they took for granted down to the mid-twentieth
century. They could not escape the accusation that, if the world
ends not with a whimper but a big bang, it will be the scientists and
technologists and their political and economic backers who have
brought us to that Armageddon. Great hopes are still centred on
science’s capacity for solving the world’s problems but more and
more people are asking: at what horrifying cost and with what
destructive side effects? The time when science was the beneficent
481
angel pointing the way to the future has gone, and now Lucifer, the
most intelligent of all the angels, is seen by many as about to fall
from the heavens in a shower of thunderbolts.
Scientists and technologists are to be found on both sides of the
public/private sector divide, and it is a moot point whether the
private sector technologists or the government, especially the
military, scientists are the more dangerous. The private sector
professions in general, as we have seen, are not immune from the
popular backlash against the privileges and pretensions of
professionalism, and indeed may have greater opportunities for
peculation and self-aggrandizement than the rest. The main brunt
of the reaction has been borne in recent years, however, by the
public sector professions. This is because higher standards have
come to be demanded of those professions supported by the state
and funded by the taxpayer, which do not generate immediate
income and are therefore seen as a cost to society rather than as
creators of wealth.24 As we have seen, this crude simplification into
‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’ occupations, a hangover from
the Ricardian and Marxist labour theories of value, and its
equation with the division between the public and private sectors,
does not stand up to logical analysis: candy floss or fruit machine
manufacture in the private sector is not obviously more productive
than antenatal care producing future workers or education
producing human capital in the public sector. But the perception
persists, fostered by a very active lobby, that the private sector
produces the wealth that the public sector consumes or, in their
emotive language, ‘squanders’. Since everyone pays taxes everyone,
quite rightly, feels entitled to demand value for money from those
professions whose remuneration and fringe benefits are
compulsorily levied by the state. But they do not ask the same
question of those private sector professionals who simply help
themselves at the expense of a hidden tax on the consumer.
While most people seem unconcerned, for example, by the
‘golden handshakes’ and large single-premium pension
contributions handed out to retiring company directors, the
inflationproof pensions negotiated in the 1970s for civil servants,
Health Service employees, local government workers, and others in
the public sector have been constantly attacked, even though an
inquiry appointed by Mrs Thatcher recommended that the
482
principle be extended to private sector pensions, where indeed it

already operated in forty-nine schemes.25
Architects and town planners, who like scientists span both
sectors, came in for increasing criticism for the high-rise council
estates which arose around the inner cities in the 1960s and within
a few years deteriorated into the vandalized and soulless slums
depicted in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. In this case
the backlash took a positive form in the community architecture
movement which involved local residents in the rehabilitation of
derelict areas. For once, under the patronage of the Prince of Wales,
the profession reformed itself, and in 1986 Rod Hackney, the
inspiration of the movement, became President of the Royal
Institute of British Architects.
No professionals have been more exactingly criticized or
resented when they failed to come up to expectations than the so-
called ‘caring professions’, the social workers, nurses and hospital
auxiliaries, teachers and youth workers, and the vast range of
health visitors, counsellors, home helps, foster parents, and so on
maintained by the modern welfare state. Even so compassionate a
journalist as Katharine Whitehorn in 1979, exasperated by the
teachers’ and social workers’ strikes and the doctors’ work-to-rule,
attacked ‘the overblown fake figure of the Caring Professional’ and
characterized them all as ‘mercenaries of care’.26 Such disputes hit
working mothers particularly hard and set up a climate of opinion
which encouraged disillusion at both ends of the political spectrum,
amongst those who wanted more and better welfare and those who
believed that welfare provision should be reduced or privatized.
They particularly encouraged those who wished, in the words of
one Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet, to Wither the Welfare
State, to challenge the Health Service, to offer ‘choice’ in education
by providing vouchers expendable at private or public schools, and
to question whether the welfare state existed for the rich or for the
poor.27 But the attack on the welfare state was only one aspect of
the larger attempt to push back the growing incursion of the state
in the life of society.
2 ROLLING BACK THE STATE?

The backlash against individual professions, especially those
employed by the state, began to merge with the second wave of the
483
backlash, the attack on government welfare in general and on the

growth of government spending in proportion to the economy.
Paradoxically, this too began on the left. The poverty lobby led by
Professors Titmuss, Townsend and Abel Smith had long attacked
the inadequacy of the welfare benefits to cure poverty, and had
demonstrated that in 1968–69 6.4 per cent of the population, 3.5
million people, were in relative poverty, that is, below the
supplementary benefit line, and 21.5 per cent, 11.7 million, were
living ‘on the margins of poverty’, within 40 per cent of that line.28
During the 1970 election they claimed that in relative terms the
conditions of the poor had worsened under the Labour government
of 1964–70, and Peter Townsend’s television appearances during
the campaign may have contributed to the surprise defeat of the
Wilson government. Townsend came to despair of the capacity of
parliamentary socialism to eliminate poverty and produce radical
social change and concluded that ‘the question left unanswered by
Labour’s rule is whether democratic socialism can be effective’.29 A
younger generation of egalitarians began to question whether some
welfare programmes, such as student grants for higher education,
mortgage taxation relief for home owners, and subsidies for
commuter rail services, did not benefit the well-to-do more than the
poor: ‘in some cases it is likely that there would be greater equality
if there was not public expenditure on the service concerned.’30
Marxist writers further left never had much faith in the welfare
state, which could only postpone the inevitable decline of
capitalism by buying off revolt, at the same time squeezing profits
and slowing up the rate of capital accumulation to pay for
welfare.31 No doubt neither the soft nor the hard left meant to help
the right-wing attack on the welfare state, but the unintended
consequence of their criticisms was to encourage the view that
public expenditure on welfare was futile.
There had long been an undercurrent of distaste for state welfare
in the Conservative Party, but this had normally taken the form of
a demand not for its abolition but for minimizing its expense by
strict economy, selective provision, and the encouragement of
private alternatives such as medical insurance, independent
education, and company pensions. Down to the early 1970s the
bipartisan consensus on the welfare state held firm, and only those
prepared to ‘think the unthinkable’, as the Institute of Economic
Affairs put it, dreamed of challenging it root and branch. Even
484
Ralph Harris, Director General of the IEA, appalled by the

apparent rise of government spending from 15 per cent of the
national income in 1900 and 30 per cent in 1930 to 50 per cent in
the 1970s and 53 per cent in 1982, did not oppose some state
provision of welfare: ‘We could all agree that no-one should be
allowed to fall below what we judge an acceptable poverty level,’
though he held that ‘the disincentive cost of the British welfare state
has now become the major obstacle to spreading prosperity
through the more effective operation of vigorous competitive
enterprise’.32
With the deadly combination of world recession and raging
inflation of the mid-1970s, however, all Western European
governments found the costs of social security, health and pensions
soaring, and all of them were forced to try to economize and slow
down, since they could not stop, the rise in public spending. In
Britain expenditure on social welfare, which had risen from 14.7
per cent of GDP in 1963 to 17.9 per cent in 1973,33 accelerated
alarmingly, and gave a new edge to the arguments of the extreme
right. Sir Keith Joseph who in 1973, on the eve of the oil crisis,
introduced a new and more generous earnings-related state pension
scheme, was suddenly moved in 1974 to set up the Centre for
Policy Studies, with Margaret Thatcher as President, to question
official Conservative Party policy on the consensus of the mixed
economy and the welfare state. Their unexpected success in
capturing the leadership of the party for Margaret Thatcher in
1975 brought to the fore hitherto ‘unthinkable’ ideas of the balance
between state activity and the free market. They set out to redress
the balance in favour of the private sector, to cut welfare provision
back to the basics, concentrate resources on the genuinely poor and
needy, discontinue the ‘frills’ above and beyond bare necessity such
as earnings-related unemployment and sickness benefits, and to
encourage as many people as possible to ‘stand on their own feet’.
This was part of a general plan’ to ‘roll back the state’, which
would go far beyond the reduction of spending on welfare.
Strangely enough, once in office, the New Right increased
spending on welfare rather than reducing it. Much of the increase
was unintended and due to the more than doubling of
unemployment to 3.5 million caused by the government’s tight
money policy, to the trebling of those among the unemployed
seeking supplementary benefit (over and above insurance benefit)
485
from 350,000 to 1.1 million, and to the increased use of the Health
Service which usually accompanies unemployment. There was also
an increase in the number of retirement pensioners, partly for
demographic reasons and partly due to earlier retirement (down to
the minimum pension ages of 60 for women and 65 for men) by
redundant workers. Despite efforts to economize, by discontinuing
earnings-related benefits for unemployment, sickness, widowhood,
and so on in 1981 and the taxing of all benefits for those with other
income from 1983, expenditure on social security increased by a
third in real terms between 1978–79 and 1985–86, and expenditure
on the Health Service by a fifth. Spending by the Department of
Employment, chiefly on job stimulation schemes, increased by two-
thirds. Only spending on education stagnated, and that disguised
an increase for schools balanced by steep cuts in spending on
colleges and universities.34
Far from trumpeting the demise of the welfare state, government
ministers began to boast, at the next two elections in 1983 and
1987, about increased public expenditure on hospitals, schools,
pensions, and the employment services. Reasons for this turn-
around can perhaps be found in the public opinion polls. Gallup
found that the percentages of respondents believing that
‘government services such as health, education and welfare should
be extended, even if it means some increase in taxes’ increased
steadily from 34 per cent in 1979 to 49 per cent in 1981, 1982 and
1983, and to 59 per cent in 1985; those favouring tax cuts, even if
it meant some reduction in such services, shrank from 34 per cent
to 20–23 per cent and to 16 per cent.35 The aspect of professional
society that centred on the social rights of citizenship had survived
the onslaught of the New Right and seemed to be entrenched in the
national psyche.
The New Right had more success in rolling back other advances
by the state. Margaret Thatcher and her allies made no secret of
their dislike for state employees (with the notable exceptions of the
police and fire services and the armed forces) and of all those
occupations dependent for their incomes on the taxpayer rather
than the market. They believed them to be parasitic upon the
creators of wealth and, undisciplined by market forces, almost by
definition inefficient if not actually incompetent. Mrs Thatcher
particularly disliked civil servants and academics (though she made
good use of some of them), whom she bracketed with the clergy as
486
representing the ‘anti-industrial spirit’ which she deplored:

‘nowhere is this attitude [suspicion of making money] more marked
than in the cloister and the common room. What these critics
apparently can’t stomach is that wealth creators have a tendency to
acquire wealth in the process of creating it for others.’ By contrast,
the new entrepreneurs whom she admired ‘didn’t speak with
Oxford accents. They hadn’t got what people call the “right
connections”, they had just one thing in common. They were men
of action.’36 There could be no clearer expression of the dichotomy
in perception between the public and the private sector
professionals.
Her government set about cutting the public services down to
size and taming their functionaries. They abolished the Civil Service
Department in 1981 and brought civil servants’ careers back under
the direct control of the Treasury. They reduced the diplomatic
establishment of the Foreign Office. They forbade the civil servants
at GCHQ, the secret telecommunications headquarters at
Cheltenham, to belong to a trade union, despite the European
Court’s ruling that their human rights had been violated. And the
Attorney-General mercilessly pursued through the courts civil
servants like Sarah Tisdall and Clive Ponting accused of leaking
government secrets to the press (though not those from 10
Downing Street who leaked a letter from the Solicitor-General, to
both his embarrassment and that of two of her ministers forced to
resign over the Westland Helicopter affair). The universities—
despite the fact that she has used more academic economists as
advisors than any previous prime minister—have learned the harsh
lesson of dependence on the state from the cuts in student numbers
and the forced redundancy or early retirement of one in six of the
academic staff scheduled in 1980—with more cuts still to come.
The unintended consequence has been not only a gap in the
academic generations which may never be repaired but a brain
drain of some of the best scholars and scientists, principally to the
United States and Australia, rivalling that from Hitler’s Germany.
School teachers, striking or working to rule to maintain their
lagging incomes, have had their salary negotiating machinery
withdrawn and have been invited to make ‘no strike’ agreements as
a condition of its restoration. By 1985 all the public sector
occupations from top civil servants and hospital doctors to nurses
and train drivers—except for police and firemen (average real
487
earnings up 9.9 per cent and 10.8 per cent)—had lost income in real
terms since 1981 (an average decline of about 5 per cent),
compared with an average rise in real income for non-manual men
in the private sector of 11.1 per cent and for non-manual women of
15.3 per cent.37 This was in part the unintended consequence of the
government’s anti-inflationary policy, which it could impose
directly on its own employees but only indirectly through monetary
policy on other occupations, but it chimed well with its animus
against the public sector.
The government could roll back the public sector most directly
by privatizing nationalized industries, and this it did, cautiously at
first but with increasing enthusiasm as the policy succeeded both in
raising large sums of capital (used to offset the public sector
borrowing requirement) and in attracting private investors (adding
to the voters with a stake in preventing the return of a
renationalizing Labour government). Nationalization of ‘the
commanding heights of the economy’ by the Attlee government of
1945–51 had become part of the post-war consensus, accepted by
both major parties and a large majority of the electorate down to
1979 (and indeed down to 1983 and beyond). But support for more
nationalization, always a minority, declined sharply in the 1970s,
from 32 per cent in 1974 to 17 per cent in 1979 (and 18 per cent
in 1983), while support for privatization rose dramatically, from 22
per cent in 1974 to 40 per cent in 1979 and 42 per cent in 1983.38
Encouraged by public opinion, its own free market ideology, and by
increased losses and worsening labour relations in such industries
as coal, steel, British Shipbuilders and British Leyland, the Thatcher
government sold off shares in British Petroleum in 1979, 1981,
1983 and 1987, in British Aerospace, British Sugar, and Cable &
Wireless in 1981, Amersham International (radiochemicals), the
National Freight Company (road haulage), and British North Sea
Oil in 1982, Associated British Ports (1983 and 1984), British Gas
onshore oil operations, Sealink ferries, and Jaguar Cars (part of
British Leyland), and (one of the largest corporations in the world,
worth £4 billion) British Telecom in 1984, and subsequently British
Airways, the National Bus Company, Shorts of Belfast, Unipart
(part of British Leyland), Rolls-Royce (aero-engines), the remaining
Royal Ordnance Factories, the British Airports Authority, and
British Gas.39 All this was done in the name of competition but, as
Lord Weinstock of the General Electric Company, one of the
488
biggest suppliers to such nationalized industries as electricity,

telephones and railways, remarked in 1983, the sale of British
Telecom merely turned a public monopoly into a private monopoly.
Since then, British Telecom has turned in record profits, but a
MORI poll commissioned by the National Consumer Council
reported in July 1987 that consumer dissatisfaction had increased
since privatization and was worse than for any other utility
service.40 As for welcoming competition, one of the first acts of the
newly privatized British Airways was to make a take-over bid in
July 1987 for its main rival, British Caledonian, to gain a 90 per
cent monopoly of British air routes.
State enterprise was thus rolled back. Employment in the
nationalized industries fell from 1,849,000 in 1979 to 1,034,000 in
1986, and from 7.3 to 4.2 per cent of the employed workforce.
Surprisingly, this made only a slight dent in the public sector: other
government employment fell by only 37,000 to 5,347,000, and the
proportion of all public sector employment to the total workforce
only from 29.3 per cent to 26.4 per cent.41 If we were to add the
unemployed at both dates as a special kind of state ‘employees’, we
should find that public sector ‘employment’ had actually risen,
from about 36 per cent to about 39 per cent.
As a well-informed political scientist, Dennis Kavanagh,
observed in 1987:
This writer’s expectation is that there will be a new

‘consensus’ on social and economic policy, though it may be
more difficult to obtain on the former, and that the new policy
mix will include most of the social and welfare elements of the
old one and some of the economic thinking of Thatcherism.
But rather than ‘rolling back the state’ the post-Thatcher era
will have more to do with holding the line on state provision
of welfare and government intervention in industry.42
Wherever the division lay between the public and private sectors,
professional society required expert functionaries on both sides of
the line. Government policy might marginally shift the line, but it
was completely unable to reduce the dependence of the state and
society on the services of the professionals.
The third and final wave of the backlash against professional
society was the attack on corporatism. This too was a form of
489
rolling back the state, away from its close involvement with the
professional groups on each side of industry. The aspect of
corporatism most resented by the radical right was that of the
corporate state, committed to central planning in consultation with
the major special interests, notably the employers and the trade
union leaders. As we saw in Chapter 7, informal corporatism of this
kind was inherent in the nature of professional society. The
competition of rival professional occupations for larger shares in
society’s resources led naturally to the lobbying of government by
organized interest groups, not merely (where appropriate) for
larger salaries, budgets, grants or subsidies but also for privileges
and legislation to bolster their position in the wider competition of
society. Thus rising professions sought self-regulation, control of
training and a monopoly of an occupational title or function, trade
unions wanted exemption from civil suits arising out of industrial
disputes and legislation in favour of employment protection or the
closed shop, and corporate managers lobbied for favourable
taxation, trading rights and industrial relations law. All the
interests had come to expect to be consulted by ministers and civil
servants before policy was finalized or legislation passed affecting
their own industry or service.
To some extent consultation between the members of the
‘corporate triangle’, the employers’ organizations and the trade
unions, had been formalized in the National Economic
Development Council and the regional ‘little Neddies’ set up by the
Macmillan government in 1961 to discuss the whole field of
economic policy. Whether this amounted to the central planning to
which the New Right so violently objected is doubtful. Central
planning, even of the non-compulsory, indicative kind practised for
example by the French, has only been tried once in Britain and that
was in the short-lived National Plan developed by George Brown’s
Department of Economic Affairs, aborted by the balance of
payments crisis of 1966 and the devaluation of 1967. Such
planning was supplementary to the market, not alternative to it,
and fell far short of the command economies of the Soviet bloc. The
New Right, nevertheless, saw any interference with the free market
as the thin edge of a totalitarian wedge. Hayek, their prophet,
claimed that there was no compromise between ‘the commercial
and the military-type society’. The ‘efforts of policy to alter prices
and incomes in the interest of what is called “social justice”’,
490
whether or not in consultation with employers and workers, were

doomed to failure, and could only result in inflation on the one side
and the unemployment of overpriced workers on the other.
Collective bargaining, a form of interference with the individual
market in labour, was the ultimate cause of inflation.43 Collective
bargaining through the state in the form of corporatism was even
more dangerous. The fault lay in majoritarian democracy itself.
Hayek’s disciple Ralph Harris observed that politicians of all
parties were prone to buy votes from large or powerful groups such
as trade unionists, farmers, old age pensioners, tenants, owner-
occupiers, and other significant minorities. Their method was to
pass laws conferring privileges or immunities on enough special
interest groups to build up a winning coalition of votes. The only
solution was a written constitution with built-in safeguards against
democratic tampering with the market.44 It is one of the ironies of
the libertarian right that its instincts often seem to come out against
democracy.
As prime minister, Edward Heath tried to apply the revived free
market philosophy, nicknamed ‘Selsdon man’ after the Croydon
hotel where the new Conservative policy was hammered out, in his
first two years of office in 1970–72, but was soon forced by
inflation and other economic difficulties to make his famous U-turn
and reintroduce prices and incomes policy. The Labour Party raised
corporatism to a higher level in the ‘Social Contract’ of 1973 with
the trade unions whereby the next Labour government would
exchange a range of social reforms and benefits for wage restraint,
but in government the massive inflation of 1974–76, the balance of
payments crisis of 1976, and the deteriorating industrial relations
culminating in the 1978–79 ‘winter of discontent’ seemed to prove
the critics of corporatism right. The Thatcher government therefore
came into office on a wave of disillusion with corporate bargaining,
determined to abolish prices and incomes policy and let the market
operate without any interference by the state save the disciplinary
control of the money supply. They clung to their anti-corporatist
line through the worst recession of the post-war period, while
unemployment rose to 3.5 million and manufacturing output fell by
more than a fifth, much of it permanently. The theory of the market
was tested to the brink of destruction.
The attack on corporatism, however, was very selective. It was
the public sector professions which found themselves pushed out in
491
the cold and their services, particularly health, education and local
government, subjected to new directions and financial cuts without
consultation. The Clegg Commission on public sector pay, with its
principle of comparability which had committed the government
during the election campaign to heavy pay increases, was abolished
in 1980. Nationalized industries were privatized with little
consultation with their workers, and major plant closings took
place in the railways, steel and the coal mines with no consultation
at all. The trade unions in both sectors ceased to be ‘governing
institutions’, if they ever were. Employment Acts in 1980 and 1982
restricted lawful picketing to the strikers’ place of work (thus
banning ‘flying pickets’ and secondary picketing of other
employers), removed the unions’ immunity from civil action in the
courts (thus making them liable for damages to employers arising
from unlawful disputes), required that new closed chops should be
approved by four-fifths of the workers and existing ones by a clear
majority, and provided compensation for workers excluded or
expelled from a union in a closed shop. A further Act in 1984
required the re-election of union officials within five years and
ballots on the political levy, provided government funds for postal
votes, and made a pre-strike ballot compulsory if the union was to
be free from civil suits arising out of the strike. Unlike its
predecessors, the government refused to intervene in major strikes,
even those in the public sector like the miners’ strike against pit
closures in 1984–85, preferring to leave negotiations to the
management. The days of ‘beer and sandwiches at no. 10’ for union
leaders were over. To a surprising extent the ‘taming of the unions’
succeeded, union membership fell from over 12 million in 1980 to
under 10 million in 1985—although due more to unemployment
and the decline of manufacturing than to defections—and the
number of strike days lost (apart from the coal industry) declined.
Far from undermining corporatism, however, these measures
proved how tenacious it was. The government’s efforts to ‘roll back
the state’ and to ‘bring the trade unions under the law’ were avidly
supported by the institutions representing business and the
employers. The Confederation of British Industry with some
caution, the Institute of Directors with much less, Aims of Industry,
the Adam Smith Institute, and a long tail of employers’
associations, local chambers of commerce and ratepayers’
associations with enthusiasm, continued to press for a restoration
492
of what they saw as the natural scheme of things. Under the latter,
private enterprise would carry on business under a benevolent,
minimalist state, management would be ‘free to manage’ without
too much interference by the state or the trade unions, and the
burden of taxation would be reduced and shifted away from the
corporations and the managers, and towards the individual
consumer. All this was advocated in the name of freedom of the
individual and the free market, but as the patron saint of the
market, Adam Smith, had cynically remarked:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for

merriment or diversion, but the conversation ends in a
conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise
prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any
law which could either be executed, or would be consistent
with liberty and justice.45
Formal corporatism was hardly necessary for the views of

management to reach and influence a sympathetic government. The
multiple channels through which business men and politicians
normally communicate were reinforced by publicity and
educational campaigns by the Institute of Economic Affairs and its
Social Affairs Unit, Aims of Industry, the National Association of
Freedom, and various ratepayers’ groups, and the national press
was heavily weighted on their side. Such dissident voices as Lord
Weinstock, Lord Kearton, the Sainsbury family, or Robert Maxwell
of the Mirror group were ‘filtered out’. Corporatism was not dead
but reverted to its natural, informal mode in which, under a right-
wing government, business interests were automatically more
influential than those of the public sector professions, the manual
workers or the consumers.
Perhaps the best example of this influence, apart from the
industrial relations legislation already noted, was taxation policy.
The business interests pressed long and hard for the reduction of
taxation, especially of the higher levels of income tax, on the grounds
that these were disincentives which discouraged managers and
entrepreneurs from working harder. They asserted that Britain was
heavily taxed compared with other countries, and British business
men penalized in comparison with their competitors. In fact,
international surveys showed that Britain was about halfway down
493
the tax league table of OECD countries, with the Netherlands,

Scandinavia, France and West Germany well above and Italy, Japan
and the United States slightly below. In 1987 ‘marginal tax rates on
average wages’ were 43.9 per cent in the UK, compared with 40.9
per cent in the United States, 51.2 per cent in France and 62.7 per
cent in West Germany. Britain’s top rate of 60 per cent, compared
with West Germany’s 56 per cent, Italy’s 65 per cent and Japan’s
76.5 per cent; the US figure, then 37.5 per cent, embraced federal tax
only and left out state and local taxes and the near-compulsory
private medical insurance covered by taxation in Western Europe,
which together would lift the top rate nearer to 50 per cent.46
Responding to this well cultivated myth of overtaxation, the
Thatcher government in 1979 immediately reduced the standard
rate of income tax from 33 to 30 per cent and the top marginal rate
from 75 to 60 per cent, and shifted the burden to indirect taxation
by raising the Value Added Tax from 8 to 15 per cent. Since then
standard income tax has been steadily reduced to 27 per cent and
compensating increases made in national insurance premiums and
the like. The result of this redistribution of the (increasing) tax
burden, was that, taking all direct and indirect taxes together over
the first six years of the Thatcher tax changes, only the highest 6
per cent of income earners had gained while 87 per cent were worse
off, the hardest hit being the poorest households with gross
earnings below £35 a week, which included most families on
unemployment or supplementary benefit.47 As John Kenneth
Galbraith commented in another context, such ‘incentive’ taxation
policies assume that the rich work harder if they are paid more,
while the poor work harder if they are paid less.
The most recent success of the private sector lobby is the
proposed replacement of local government rates on property by the
‘community charge’, a poll tax on residents. Although business
properties will still pay 25 per cent of the costs in property-based
rates, the main burden will shift from the 18 million ratepayers to
35 million adult residents.48 The unintended consequence will
probably be massive evasion, which will take the form of non-
registration leading indirectly, as in the old poll-taxed American
South, to the disfranchisement of the poor and underprivileged.
This will be a victory for those who, with Friedrich von Hayek,
believe that public spending should not be voted by those ‘without
a stake in the community’.
494
Thus the attempt to roll back the state was at best a stand-off, at
worst a take-over by one set of professionals of the powers of the
state for their own purposes. The attack on corporatism, like those
on the public sector professions, the welfare state and ‘big govern-
ment’, was paradoxically a further example of professional society
turning upon itself. The backlash was primarily an assault by the
private sector professions upon their public sector counterparts,
whom they held responsible for the excessive expansion of welfare
services, the uncontrollable growth of government, the accelerating
inflation and, ultimately, for Britain’s uncompetitive economy and
incipient economic decline. The unifying theme running through all
three waves of the backlash was an appeal to the libertarian
doctrine of the free market, which enjoyed a remarkable revival
from the 1970s onwards. It is now time to analyse that Victorian
doctrine and account for its extraordinary revival in an age which,
in economic structure and social values, would appear to have long
outgrown it.
3 THE RESURGENCE OF THE FREE MARKET

IDEOLOGY
All three aspects of the backlash against professional society came
together in the resurgence of the ideology of the free market. That
ideology had never been completely abandoned either by the
Conservative Party at its most Butskellite or even by the Labour
Party, which continued to accept the mixed economy. But in its
extreme nineteenth-century form, unmitigated by the professional
ideal, the welfare state and corporatism, it had increasingly since
the First World War become an isolated cult with a dwindling set of
devotees. Their guru from the 1930s was that most un-English of
economic philosophers Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian ‘white
immigrant’ who had been through the hyperinflation of the 1920s
and the rise of Nazism and, understandably, had never lost his
horror of both. His obsession with inflation as the cause of all
economic woes and opener of the floodgates of totalitarianism
informed all of his voluminous writings, including his influential
and powerfully argued The Road to Serfdom published at the
height of the Nazi menace in 1944.49 They all exuded the Austrian
school of economics’s gospel of the free market not only as the
fairest and most perfect allocator of society’s resources but also as
495
the sole guarantor of individual liberty against the ever-encroaching

state. This equation of the market with political freedom was one
of those naive strokes of genius out of which proselytizing religions
are made. Its powerful seduction attracted a tiny band of devoted
disciples amongst his students and colleagues at the London School
of Economics in the 1930s, some of whom, including Lionel
Robbins, T.W.Hutchison, Arthur Seldon and Lord Croham, were to
achieve great influence in a later generation and help to overwhelm
the by then established economic gospel of his rival guru and bête
noire, John Maynard Keynes.
Hayek’s rivalry with Keynes, a clash of two powerful, egotistical
personalities who met in Cambridge when the LSE was evacuated
there during the war, is a clue to his compulsive crusading. Keynes’s
glamorous, cultured, effortless superiority, so much at ease in the
great world of international statesmen, literary lions, and stars of
the performing arts, must have sorely tried the obscure continental
scholar’s patience, coming as he did from an intellectual
background where only deep scholarship and the power of esoteric
ideas gave any just claim to fame. Keynes, although a charming
host and brilliant conversationalist, seemed to Hayek to possess a
deeply flawed intellect which seized upon stop-gap solutions to
immediate problems without thinking through the consequences.50
His most famous ‘discovery’, that the market could not achieve
equilibrium at full employment without the active intervention of
the state to manage aggregate demand, damping it down when the
economy overheated and stimulating it by deficit spending when
depression threatened, appeared to Hayek an irresponsible
interference with the self-correcting mechanisms of the market
which could only end in disaster. Demand management at the
macro-level, given the power of special interests, especially the
trade unions, to influence government policy, could only work in
one direction, to stimulate inflation. It set up a ratchet effect by
which inflation accelerated with every crisis but refused to go down
again afterwards, and became more and more difficult to cure. It
ignored the relative price effect at the micro-level, by which new
industries and services attracted capital and labour away from the
old and declining ones so as to encourage innovation and general
growth. Central planning of any kind merely distorted the
workings of the market and, since no bureaucrat could anticipate
people’s needs as well as they did themselves through market
496
choice, served mainly to perpetuate the stagnating status quo.

Keynes, ‘the illustrious man, whose name I believe will go down in
history as the grave digger of the British economy’,51 was therefore
the main cause of the slow economic growth and gradually
accelerating inflation which were to bring the long post-war boom
to a foreboding close in the ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s.
Keynes’s influence was all the more galling because he, like
Hayek and his disciples, believed in the power of ideas. They never
tired of quoting the famous passage from The General Theory in
which Keynes attributed the origins of government policy to
thinkers like himself:
the ideas of economists and philosophers, both when they are

right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is
commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt
from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some
defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in
the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler
of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested
interests is greatly exaggerated compared with the gradual
encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a
certain interval; for in the field of economic and political
philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new
theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so
that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even
agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the
newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests,
which are dangerous for good or evil.52
Hayek and his followers saw Keynes as the ‘defunct economist’

whose ideas, for evil rather than good, dominated not only British
government policy but, through the adoption by the Americans at
the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 of the fixed exchange rates
which bedevilled the free market until 1971, the whole world
economy for the next three decades.
It is not surprising, therefore, that they set about out-Keynesing
the Keynesians and, surprisingly late, in the mid-1950s established
their own institution to educate the public in what they considered
to be the only true, original principles of classical economics. The
497
idea of a research organization to influence intellectual economic

opinion came from Hayek himself, who laid in the mind of Antony
Fisher, founder of Buxted Chickens, the egg which hatched a decade
later in the Institute of Economic Affairs. With Ralph Harris as
General Director from 1957, Arthur Seldon as Editorial Director
from 1959, and an Advisory Council including the ex-Fabians
Colin Clark and Graham Hutton, the Liberals Sir Oscar Hobson
and Lord Grantchester and the Conservative George Schwartz, it
began a programme of publications which stretched to over 200
books and pamphlets over the next twenty years.53 They covered a
vast range of topics, from economic policy, taxation and the right
to property, to pensions, house rents, education and the welfare
state, but the thrust of the programme, to quote two American
admirers, was ‘the market alternative works…. Try the market or,
even more concisely, …privatise.’54 Competition, Adam Smith’s
benevolent ‘invisible hand’, was the panacea which would allocate
income and wealth more equitably, encourage more enterprise and
stimulate greater economic growth than any possible alternative to
the capitalist system. It was above all the cure for inflation, the evil
of evils, which was caused by the government printing money, and
could only be ended by the state restricting the money supply to the
amount warranted by the available goods and services. Employers
could then no longer meet the inflationary wage claims of the trade
unions by raising prices. Monetarism, a wonderful all-purpose tool
of economic policy, might cause short-term unemployment but in
the end competition would force both prices and wages down to
their natural level at which both capital and labour would enjoy
full employment. Inflation gone, the self-correcting mechanisms of
the market would restore and maintain equilibrium and continuing
healthy economic growth.
The free marketeers did not, of course, reject all state
intervention. Hayek recognized that the market required for its
operation a framework of rules enforced by the state, to prevent
theft and fraud and keep the peace, and that there were ‘public
goods’, such as defence, law and order, and free use of the roads,
which were indivisible and must be collectively provided and
enjoyed. Beyond that minimal role, however, all state provision was
likely to do more harm than good. Sacred cows like state education,
medical treatment and pensions were cheerfully slaughtered, to be
replaced by education vouchers, private medical insurance and
498
insurance-based pensions. There might be a transitional need for

humanitarian relief for society’s casualties, but these would become
fewer and even disappear as the market worked its magic of
providing for all. Meanwhile, welfare should be concentrated on
selective provision for the truly needy rather than squandered on
universal schemes covering those who could provide for
themselves. Even unemployment was seldom if ever involuntary: at
some level of wages all labour markets would clear and all willing
workers would find jobs. Only the few unfortunates, the mentally
and physically handicapped, the widows and orphans whose
deceased breadwinners had failed to make provision for them, and
the elderly who had failed to provide for themselves, would require
the aid of the state. All the rest would be able, with foresight and
private saving and insurance, to stand on their own feet.
This heroic attempt to put the clock back to the Victorian values
of the Manchester School and the Charity Organization Society,
however attractive to the rich and fortunate, did not in fact
commend itself to a wide public opinion until Britain’s relative
economic decline threatened in the 1970s to become absolute. The
power of ideas is not, after all, totally independent of
circumstances, and circumstances were not yet ripe for this
particular bundle of ideas. It was not a question of their being right
or wrong; it was simply one of waiting for the inevitable disillusion
with a set of opposing ideas which had either been wrong all the
time, as they thought, or, as their opponents thought, had been so
right in the circumstances of post-war Britain that they had
succeeded only too well and had achieved so much that some
beneficiaries felt they could now do without them.
It was, indeed, now so long since the ideas of classical economics
had reigned supreme that the reasons for abandoning them in their
extreme form were now forgotten. Extreme laissez-faire is an
oxymoron: to let things completely alone is to abandon not only state
intervention but civil society altogether and to embrace Hobbes’s
state of nature, the war of all against all. Once allow that the state is
necessary to the free market, as Hayek does, then there is no
predetermined line between what the state may and what it may not
do for the benefit of its citizens. It is a matter of judgment and
compromise. Hayek’s distinction between ‘law’ defined as the
minimal rules necessary to allow competition to operate and
legislative ‘directions’ which go beyond that minimum is logically
499
untenable.55 It is predicated on the naive assumption of negative

freedom, that only the state, controlled by the tyranny of the
majority, is a threat to individual liberty. Yet, as any 5-year-old in an
unsupervised kindergarten playground knows, one person’s freedom
is another’s coercion, and universal liberty is freedom for the bully,
the cunning and the criminal. It is the distribution of freedom that
matters, and the state is necessary not only to protect the weak from
the strong but also, paradoxically, to protect the citizens from itself.
There is indeed a law of the conservation of freedom which states
that there is always the same amount of freedom in a society; in a
tyranny or an oligarchy it is exercised by one man or a few; in an
ideal democracy (not Aristotle’s tyrannous ‘ochlocracy’) it is
distributed as broadly as possible. The state can create positive
freedom, and may be just as necessary to protect its citizens from the
economically powerful as from the physical bully. The same law that
guards the possessions of the rich from the predatory strong must
guard the poor from the predatory rich. Hayek’s false distinction is
merely special pleading for the ‘haves’ against the ‘have nots’: by
means of it those with the greater bargaining power in the market are
free to exploit it while being protected by the state they deride from
the depredations of the poor. It is the classic demand of the privileged
in all societies. The aristocracy in that pre-industrial society which
the original classical economists attacked in the early nineteenth
century demanded power without responsibility, protection without
paying for it, to have their lovely cake and eat it. The free marketeers
demanded the same for the managers of great corporations. Small
wonder that Hayek derided the concept of ‘social justice’ as meaning
anything more than what the market allots, since by this device he
cleverly denied the right of the victim to question the system and,
once his premise was accepted, it would provide an impregnable
defence of the status quo.
Unfortunately for Hayek and his followers, it is a self-defeating
system. Like Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinian survival of the
fittest to which it harks back, it contains the seeds of its own
destruction. Not only is the free market a near-sighted giant that
consumes whatever is cheapest and within immediate reach with no
thought for the morrow and no concern for the unforeseen
consequences, either of future shock from oil crises, wars or other
disasters or of the social costs imposed on the innocent by acid rain,
holes in the ozone layer, the export of jobs, deindustrialization and
500
the like. It is also a cannibal that devours its own children.

Competition by definition leads to the elimination of competitors,
as the increasing concentration of British industry in the last
hundred years demonstrates. By 1978, as we have seen, the leading
100 firms produced 41 per cent of manufacturing output and
employed about two-fifths of the workforce.56 This meant that in
most industries three to five companies dominated output and
employment and were in a position, even without collusion, to
administer prices, and to a lesser extent, wages. The chief enemy of
the free market is neither the state nor even the trade unions but the
corporations themselves. The free marketeers paid little attention to
this flaw in their theory, except to brush it aside with remarks about
the substitutability of commodities (such as plastic for metals or
porcelain, or nuclear power for gas, oil or coal) and the
competitiveness of international free trade, neither of which holds
up in a world of increasingly diversified conglomerate and
multinational corporations.
The essential truth is that the theory of the free market is a
throwback to the Victorian world of many small producers, none
of whom was capable (though some did try) of rigging the market
in his own favour. This is not to deny that free competition, other
things being equal, is desirable and should be allowed to operate
wherever there are not overriding arguments of national security,
environmental damage, or social equity against it, and there is
endless scope for argument about what the proper limits of public
and private enterprise should be. But it is to affirm that in a great
many cases the much vaunted freedom to choose is only a choice
between public monopoly, which is amenable to some measure of
democratic control, and private monopoly, which is not.
No doubt all this is patently clear to the talented and perceptive
authors of the free enterprise lobby, some of whom are experts in
the evolution of industrial structure, but who fear the state more
than they fear their friends in the corporations. What, then, is the
real explanation for the acceptance of a theory more appropriate to
the economic circumstances of the early nineteenth century than
those of the late twentieth? It would appear that its appeal in an age
of rising public expenditure, decelerating economic growth, and
shrinking company profits is to the private sector professionals who
run the corporations and to the taxpayers who fund the public
sector. Both are victims of the false economic distinction
501
perpetrated by both Ricardo and Marx and now revived in a

modern context: the distinction between productive industry and
unproductive services. In a heroic oversimplification this is equated
with the distinction between the service-producing public sector
and goods-producing private industry—ignoring some of the most
basic nationalized industries (e.g. coal and steel) and the flourishing
private financial and commercial services of the City. The original
distinction was always untenable, not only because any service
which people want (health, education, transport) is as productive as
manufacturing (lollipops, doll’s eyes, juke boxes) but because, as
both Marx and Ricardo agreed, goods themselves consist almost
entirely of service (labour) embodied in concrete form. The notion
expressed by so many corporate executives, that the private sector
produces the wealth which the public sector squanders, is
manifestly false. It is just as valid to claim that the public sector
produces and maintains, through the education and health services,
most of the skills on which the private sector depends. In a complex
interdependent society such claims and counter-claims are as naive
and unhelpful as the pot calling the kettle black.
The freedom that the private sector demands is in practice
freedom for the managers of the great corporations. The latter
would be less than human if they did not welcome and applaud this
vote of confidence in their benevolent despotism. Even the
managers of nationalized industries such as British Telecom and
British Airways eagerly anticipated emancipation from the scrutiny
of Cabinet and Parliament and the transfer of responsibility to a
small, feeble and unrepresentative annual general meeting of
shareholders. Who would not welcome the opportunity to operate
where one’s salary and fringe benefits are no longer a charge
resented by the taxpayer but a symbol of the company’s success,
where the real competition is not in price and quality but in the
battle to take over one’s rivals, and where the highest reward is to
sit at the head of the largest corporation in one’s industry? If in the
process high-quality goods are sometimes produced, first-class
services rendered, and promising innovations introduced, these are
bonuses which have little to do with the power game played at the
top. The most predictable outcome of that game, played since the
Ernest T.Hooleys and Harry J.Lawsons of the Victorian age, are the
Ivan Boeskys and Ernest Saunderses, lords of the high financial
world of ‘paper entrepreneurialism’ in which the main products are
502
not goods and services but paper securities and paper profits, to be
used for acquiring still larger paper empires. As Alan Fox said in
1974, the modern corporation is self-defeating: it is ‘hoist with its
own petard’.57
According to a leading professor of business and public policy at
Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Robert
B.Reich, ‘paper entrepreneurialism is the bastard child of scientific
management.’ It has replaced technological innovation with paper
transactions designed to produce short-term profits by imposing
losses on others—other firms, other taxpayers, other
shareholders—often for the sake of making or fighting off takeover
bids for other firms. Competition reaches its apotheosis in the
gigantic conglomerate, appearing at breakneck pace in America,
Britain and all over the Western world.
Conglomerate enterprises rarely, if ever, bring any relevant

managerial, technical or marketing skills to the new
enterprises they acquire. Their competence lies in law and
finance. Their relationship to their far-flung subsidiaries is that
of an investor. Indeed, many conglomerates function almost
exactly like mutual funds…. Like the mutual fund, the
conglomerate organization does not create new wealth or
render production more efficient. It merely allocates capital,
duplicating—though awkwardly—the function of the financial
markets.
Thus, he goes on:
modern conglomerates are economically sterile. Their only

effects are to facilitate paper entrepreneurialism and to spare
managers the need to stake their careers on anything so risky
as a single firm trying to make products. The growth of
conglomerates illustrates managers’ discretionary power to
serve their own goals, and reveals how far economic change
since the end of the [mass production manufacturing]
management era has separated managers’ incentives from
socially productive results.58
Far from lagging behind the American ‘symbolic economy’, Britain

is out in front:
503
The fate of the British industry over the past twenty-five years
illustrates this new reality. Britain has consistently led the
world in major technological breakthroughs, such as
continuous casting of steel, monoclonal anti-bodies, and CAT-
scan devices. But because British businesses lacked the skills
necessary to incorporate these inventions into production
process quickly enough, the British have reaped no real
competitive advantage from them. These inventions were
commercialized in Japan and the United States.
While British manufacturing has been declining, British ‘paper

entrepreneurialism’ has been expanding, most rapidly of all in the
financial sector with its international ramifications and in the
multinational conglomerates which pursue their paper profits
throughout the world at the expense of domestic industry. As Reich
sees it in the American context, the biggest barrier to active
adjustment to the new flexible systems of ‘high tech’ production in
a highly competitive international economy
is not technical but ideological. For fifty years Americans have

been embroiled in an endless debate over the merits of two
artificial concepts: the ‘free market’ and ‘national planning’.
The real choice facing Americans is rather between evading
the new global context and engaging it—between protecting
the American economy from the international market while
generating paper profits, and adapting it to meet international
competition. Either way, government will be actively involved.
And though the form of government involvement may be
different, the fact of it will be nothing new.59
Substitute ‘Britons’ for ‘Americans’ and that analysis equally

describes Britain in the last few decades.
Like Keynes and Hayek, Reich lays the blame at the door of
defunct economists: ‘The enduring myth of the unmanaged market
illustrates the power of ideology over political reality.’60 The market,
in fact, has always been managed, consciously or unconsciously, by
the state, which has set the terms, controlled access, defined the
property to be exchanged, enforced contracts, and protected the
rights of those involved. Civil society, in which the market is
embedded, is only possible in partnership with the political authority,
504
which alone can prevent it from collapsing into a Hobbesian state of

nature. To deny that partnership, to restrict the role of the state to the
enforcement of neutral ‘rules of the game’, is by a sleight of hand to
‘freeze the frame’ and perpetuate the advantages of the currently
privileged players. It is a dangerous ploy, since it may incite the less
privileged players to repudiate what they perceive to be an unfair
game, to kick over the board and repudiate the privileged. Only if the
rules are democratically negotiable can the game continue, to the
mutual benefit of all the players. To inscribe the rules in stone when
they happen to favour one’s own side, far from guaranteeing
freedom, is an invitation to resistance and revolution on the other
side. It certainly does not liberate human energies and enterprise.
Reich’s conclusion, that ‘this false choice—the free market versus
central planning, business culture versus civic culture—has prevented
us from understanding the importance of human capital to America’s
future’, applies equally to Britain.61 In a complex, interdependent
society in which we all look to one another’s human capital for
prosperity and survival, it is foolish to set one set of professions at
war with the other. Conflict is inherent in human society but in the
last resort co-operation must prevail if society is to continue. Just as
in Victorian society the classes, however locked in combat, were
forced to live together like unhappy spouses, so in professional
society the career hierarchies, however fierce their competition for
resources, must learn to accommodate to one another’s needs. The
only alternative is mutually assured destruction.
The resurgence of the free market ideology, paradoxically, was not
so much a reaction against professional society as a perverse by-
product of it. It was an integral part of that struggle for power and
resources between the professional hierarchies which, by a gross
oversimplification, had bifurcated into two rival groups attached
respectively to the public sector and the private sector. The brilliant
siren-song of Hayek and his followers seduced the professional
corporate managers and their political admirers into believing that
freedom for giant corporations was the precise equivalent of freedom
for individual citizens, consumers and workers, and that the
corporate managers, though as great a threat to the free market as
the state itself, were the best defenders of individual liberty. It was a
superb example of double-think worthy of Orwell’s 1984. By
holding aloft the icon of Big Brother they distracted attention from
the more insidious embrace of Big Sister, the giant corporation.
505
This may not of course have been the intention of the free
marketeers, many of whom believed their own propaganda. But it
was certainly the effect, particularly via the small group of right-
wing politicians who in the mid-1970s, according to one Tory ex-
minister, hijacked the Conservative party.62 Their use of the state to
increase the monopolistic size and power of the private
corporations in the name of competition was one of the choicest
ironies of modern history.
Both Keynes and Hayek believed that ideas, especially of defunct
economists, were more powerful than vested interests. What
neither of them addressed was the question of why some ideas were
powerful at certain times rather than others, and what induced
politicians and the public to listen to one defunct economist rather
than his rival. Keynes was listened to when things went wrong
between the wars and many people saw their vital interests
threatened by a failed and self-defeating market. Hayek and the
free marketeers were largely ignored as long as professional society
‘delivered the goods’ of prosperity and welfare, and were only
listened to when things began to go wrong in the 1970s and many
people saw their vital interests threatened by accelerating inflation
and the elephantiasis of the state. Their opportunity arose out of
Britain’s economic decline which, with the onset of world recession,
threatened to change from the merely relative to the absolute mode.
To the rival explanations of that decline and its connection with the
dilemma of British politics we must finally turn.
4 BRITAIN’S ECONOMIC DECLINE AND THE

POLITICAL DILEMMA
In October 1973 in the course of the short, disastrous war against
Israel, the Arab states discovered a weapon to pressurize Israel’s
Western friends which dramatically changed the balance of the
world economy. The oil embargo and the subsequent ten- to
fifteenfold rise in oil prices by OPEC, the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries, abruptly shifted the terms of trade
against the industrial countries and in favour of the primary
producers. Not all the primary producers: the non-oil producing
Third World suffered more than the First and some of the poorer
countries were close to bankruptcy. But the cheap energy on which
the West, unthinkingly, had come to rely for the continuing
506
economic boom was suddenly cut off. This was not the beginning
of the West’s troubles. The economic Pax Americana by which the
free world economy had been managed ever since the Bretton
Woods Conference of 1944 had been showing signs of strain for
some time and had in effect been abandoned in 1971 when the
Nixon Administration abandoned the fixed gold-dollar exchange
rate and left the world’s currencies to float against the dollar. For
the British government Anthony Barber at the Exchequer floated
the pound sterling in 1972. These were symptoms that the
victorious Western allies of the Second World War could no longer
maintain the economic and financial framework which had
sustained the long secular boom, and its main beneficiaries, the
rapidly growing economies of Western Europe and Japan, were not
yet ready to take up the burden. The oil crisis dramatized the
changing balance of world trade. It put great strain on the weakest
of the major industrial economies, namely Britain.
Britain’s economy, as we have seen, had been in relative decline
throughout the twentieth century. Some economic historians dated
it from the First World War, some from the ‘climacteric of the
1890s’, some from the ‘Great Depression’ of 1874–96, some even
from the Great Exhibition of 1851 which marked the end of the
Industrial Revolution. Most regarded a relative decline in Britain’s
monopolistic position as workshop, merchant, banker and insurer
to the world as inevitable, but few, even when the European
Economic Community overtook the British living standard during
the 1960s, thought that it would ever become absolute. The oil
crisis changed that optimism. It precipitated a massive inflation
which not only wiped out all the gains of the wage explosion of the
mid-1970s but almost priced British exports out of world markets
and instigated a balance of payments crisis in 1976 requiring a
gigantic loan from the International Monetary Fund. Britain was
saved from bankruptcy only by the fortuitous discovery of North
Sea oil, which came on stream in the later 1970s. This, however,
had the unfortunate side-effect of enabling Britain to restore the
balance of payments and pay its way in the world without any
fundamental reform of the underlying economic structure. The oil
revenues were squandered in a spending spree on consumer imports
which did nothing to arrest the further decline of the domestic
industrial base, and on the consequent bill for a trebling of
unemployment.
507
The result was that Britain’s economic growth in terms of Gross

Domestic Product was negative in 1974 and 1975 for the first time
since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and again in 1980 and
1981. Overall, GDP per head did manage to grow between 1975
and 1985 by an average of 1.5 per cent per annum, but this was less
than any other country in the EEC except the Netherlands and
Spain, and much less than Japan and the United States.63 Inflation
averaged 14.2 per cent in the 1970s and 7.2 per cent in 1980–85,
reaching the alarming heights of 24 per cent in 1975 and 22 per
cent in 1980. The pound of 1971 was worth 32 pence by 1979 and
21 pence by 1985. Unemployment, never more than 3 per cent
(660,000) before 1971, rose in the late 1970s to 7 per cent (1.5
million) and doubled to 13 per cent (3.5 million) in the early 1980s
(despite reductive changes in the mode of calculation).64 Worse still
was the decline of employment in manufacturing, which fell by 18
per cent in the 1970s and by a further 22 per cent between 1979
and 1984. By then manufacturing industry employed only 22 per
cent of the British workforce.65 Commentators began to talk about
‘deindustrialization’ and the destruction of the industrial base.
Aubrey Jones, a Conservative ex-minister much involved with
planning and incomes policy in the 1960s, wrote in 1985 that ‘the
relative decline may now be turning into an absolute one, so great
has been the destruction of equipment and the demoralization of
the workforce’.66 Britain’s share of world exports of manufactures,
which had shrunk from 25.3 per cent in 1950 to 9.3 per cent in
1975, declined further in the 1980s.67 To some extent this loss has
been compensated by gains in employment in services, but most of
these jobs were in low-paid non-manual work such as retailing and
routine clerical work. The expanding financial sector was more
related to the world economy and overseas investments, diverting
jobs away from Britain, than to investment in domestic industry,
and may have cost more in export earnings than it gained.
According to a leading American economist, William J.Baumol of
Princeton University, Britain with its low productivity has
‘preserved its jobs and competitiveness by becoming an exporter of
cheap labour.’68 The ‘economic miracle’ of the mid-1980s, a 2.5 per
cent growth in GDP in 1984 and 3.5 per cent in 1985, was simply
recovery from the abnormally low output levels of 1982.69
The explanations for this sorry performance were as manifold as
the vested interests trying to escape blame and transfer it to others.
508
Devotees of economic planning blamed the lack of foresight which

left Britain at the mercy of sudden shifts in world economic winds,
and the failure to use the consequent windfall from North Sea oil to
rebuild the industrial base by selective investment in high
technology and the transport and other infrastructures. The free
market lobby derided such planning and blamed Britain’s lack of
competitiveness on the inflation caused by the growth of public
expenditure on welfare and subsidies to nationalized and ‘lame
duck’ private industries and by the open-ended growth of the
money supply to meet inflationary pay increases. Public
expenditure in its widest sense did indeed grow from about 50 per
cent of GDP in 1970 to about 60 per cent in 1975; but these, as Sir
Alec Cairncross has pointed out, are very misleading figures,
including transfer payments such as social security which go
straight back into personal expenditure, and capital investment in
commercial assets, such as public housing and the nationalized
industries, in addition to the provision of public services like
defence, health and education. Arguing that only the last are what
people mean by public expenditure, Cairncross estimated that
‘there was no increase in the relative size of the public sector in the
twenty-five years after the Korean War’ and that the rise from 1970
to 1975 was only from 21 to 25 per cent at current prices. At
constant (1970) prices, allowing for the fact that ‘the productivity
of doctors, teachers, soldiers and others in the public sector is
constant’ while it rises with investment in the private sector, ‘real’
public expenditure actually fell, from 29 per cent in 1952 to 21 per
cent in 1970, and rose only to 23 per cent in 1975.70 The free
market lobby, concerned not only with the net cost of government
but with the extent of personal dependence on the state, naturally
rejected so narrow a definition. In terms of the Treasury
compromise definition of 1976, which deducted fixed capital
investment but included both spending on goods and services and
transfer payments, public expenditure rose after the oil crisis from
41 per cent in 1973–74 to 43 per cent in 1978–79, 46.5 per cent in
1982–83 and (ignoring the capital receipts from privatization) to
about 48 per cent in 1985–86.71 The last two figures are an ironical
comment on the anti-public spending policies of the Thatcher
government.
It was not surprising therefore that the free market lobby should
have urged the merits of their single weapon of economic policy,
509
control of the money supply and especially of the ‘Public Sector

Borrowing Requirement’ which enabled governments to spend
beyond their means. A monetarist policy was first adopted by
Chancellor Dennis Healey and the Labour government in 1976,
confronted by a balance of payments crisis and a demand from the
International Monetary Fund, as the condition of a £4 billion loan,
for a cutback in public spending. But the real turning point came
with the take-over of the Conservative Party by Sir Keith Joseph
and his friends and their replacement of Edward Heath as leader by
Margaret Thatcher in 1975.72 This enabled the radical right when
they came to power in 1979 to try the experiment of pure
monetarism as a cure for inflation and slow economic growth upon
the British people. In an article in the Observer on 31 August 1980
the Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith asked, if there
had to be an experiment in monetarism, what better people to
inflict it on than the tolerant, phlegmatic British?
After a disastrous start, in which inflation rose to 22 per cent in
1980, largely due to the government’s own policies of raising
indirect taxes, meeting promised public sector pay increases, and
accepting the cost of monetarist-induced unemployment, the
revolution in policy did succeed in bringing down inflation to 4.6
per cent in 1983, though it rose again to 6.1 per cent in 1985.73 But
monetarism itself completely failed to fulfil its promises. This was
because, as the Bank of England itself had warned, the quantity of
money in the economy was almost impossible to define much less
control, and the ‘intermediate’ definition (Sterling M3) used by the
Treasury failed to take full account of all the other tributaries to the
money supply, especially private credit in all its forms from bank
loans to credit cards. It was bank credit, not the Public Sector
Borrowing Requirement, which was the most significant factor in
the growth of the money supply, and bank credit was increasingly
beyond the control of the Treasury and the central bank. Ironically,
this was because the very market policies pursued by government
gave free reign to the financial institutions providing the credit.
Monetarism as a concept was gradually abandoned by the Treasury
and was in effect pronounced dead by the Governor of the Bank of
England on 24 October 1986.74 The partial conquest of inflation
was entirely due to the government’s severe deflationary policies, to
high interest rates (forced up by the need to prop up the pound),
cash limits on public spending, real expenditure cuts in higher
510
education, the Health Service and local government and,

paradoxically, the privatization of nationalized industries which
soaked up private funds that might otherwise have found their way
into private industrial investment. The cost of this massive
deflation, as we have seen, was the reduction by a fifth of the
manufacturing base of the economy and a more than doubling of
unemployment. Ironically, it did not even reduce public
expenditure, which went on rising, principally to support the direct
and indirect costs of the unemployed and, from 1982 onwards, the
Falklands war and its aftermath of maintaining an expensive and
useless base in the south Atlantic.
The real causes of inflation and of economic decline were much
more fundamental than the superficial analysis of the monetarists
allowed. The components of the inflation of the 1970s were not
money supply but rising costs, primarily import prices, especially of
oil and energy-related supplies, and also wages, which rose in
response to accelerating inflation but rarely managed to get far
ahead of it. All other causes, including taxation and public
expenditure, played a minor and sometimes negative role. In the
first year of the oil crisis, 1973–74, seven-tenths of the 16.1 per cent
inflation was due to import prices and another six-tenths to wage
increases, moderated by a decrease of three-tenths in the
contribution of taxes and other causes. The following year’s record
inflation (23.1 per cent) saw the same contribution, six-tenths, by
wages, a reduction to three-tenths in the contribution of import
prices, and a now positive contribution of one-tenth by taxes and
other causes.75 The monetarist argument failed before the costpush
of imports, and it would have required a draconian control over
both company prices and every avenue of credit to hold down
wages, not to mention some foolproof and necessarily
authoritarian method of preventing strikes.
So much for inflation, which was only the symptom of a deeper
malaise. It would have been no problem if British productivity had
kept pace with that of competitors in Western Europe and Japan. If
rising prices, in part at least, resulted from ‘paying ourselves too
much’, the remedy applied by Britain’s more successful rivals, who
suffered much less from the oil-generated inflation, was not to pay
themselves less but to produce more goods and services at lower
prices. The real cause of Britain’s economic sluggishness was the
abysmally slow growth of British productivity. Production per head,
511
contrary to popular opinion, is not increased by working harder

(though it may be increased by working longer while at work) but by
working more efficiently, which requires better equipment and
organization. The most obvious reason for Britain’s poor
performance on this front was lack of capital investment. According
to Sidney Pollard, the ‘one failure in the Western European success
story since the war’ was due firstly to lagging investment, caused by
‘concentrating first and foremost on symbolic figures and quantities,
like prices, exchange rates and balances of payments, to the neglect
of real quantities of goods and services traded’, and secondly to the
Treasury’s ‘wastrel, spendthrift and unregenerate’ policies of cutting
long-term public investment to solve short-term crises. His remedy,
anathema to the free marketeers, was ‘a mixed system in which much
of the steering and the initiative is taken on by the state, on the
French or Japanese model’.76
Investment in Britain was lower than elsewhere, except perhaps
in the United States, but not sufficiently lower to account for all the
difference in growth rates. According to Cairncross, ‘What was
different in Britain was what happened to output per unit of new
investment.’ It was the low incremental capital-output ratio which
was the heart of the problem: Britain in 1963–73 required nearly
three times as much investment in manufacturing as West Germany
to achieve a given increase in output (with a British ICOR of 2.5
compared with the Germans’ 7.2).77 Both management and trade
unions were blamed for restricting the benefits of innovation. Trade
unions, fearful of redundancy, insisted on old levels of manning on
new machinery and spun out the work over tea breaks and
overtime to maintain as much employment as before. Managers,
discouraged from investment by these practices, winked at them for
the sake of a quiet life, and allowed overmanning not only on the
shop floor but amongst the ‘overhead’ staff in the offices. Because
of this, Cliff Pratten of Cambridge University found in 1976 that
output per employee was 50 per cent higher in Swedish than in
comparable British firms. In a second survey of multinational
companies operating in Britain, the United States, France and West
Germany Pratten found that in eighty-five out of 109 cases
productivity was lower in Britain than abroad. This was partly due
to shorter hours of actual work on the job—according to Sir
Michael Edwardes of Chloride, their Dagenham battery factory
managed only twenty-eight hours out of a forty-hour week as
512
against thirty-four in a similar American factory. It was partly due

to demarcation disputes and different maintenance practices: in the
British car industry it took six maintenance men to restart the
assembly line after a breakdown, compared with two on the
continent. (It was commonly said that when a British assembly line
broke down, the maintenance men had to be fetched from the back
room; in West Germany the maintenance men circulated round the
line, looking for trouble; in Japan all the workers co-operated to get
the line moving again.) Finally, it was partly due to the higher ratio
of indirect to direct workers: one French components firm achieved
80 per cent of the output of its British subsidiary with only half the
workforce. The British plant had six time as many overhead staff in
the personnel department and four times as many in production
engineering.78 Despite the closing of so many inefficient plants,
productivity rose by only 9.4 per cent between 1979 and 1983,
while the more important measure, labour cost per unit of output,
actually rose in 1980–84 by 20 per cent.79
Only good management and better industrial relations could
solve that problem. British management, with some honourable
and exceptional examples like Courtaulds and Jaguar, was
notoriously bad. We have already noted what Martin Wiener has
called the decline of the industrial spirit in Britain since 1850, and
attributed it not to the survival of aristocratic values but to the rise
of the professional ideal of public service in the public schools and
older universities.80 What British managers suffered from still more,
pace the free marketeers, was a decline in the competitive spirit.
First noted by Alfred Marshall in the 1890s, it was still in evidence,
according to Sir Arthur (now Lord) Cockfield, chairman of Boots
the Chemists, in 1978:
We suffer in this country from market domination, price

leadership, parallel pricing, the lack of effective competition,
unwillingness to compete on price, which in many trades is
regarded as disreputable or undesirable, and a ‘cost plus’
mentality under which the instinctive reaction to cost increases
is to pass them on in price, rather than absorb them in greater
efficiency, with the resulting erosion of resistance to cost
increases, particularly unjustified increases in labour costs….
[I]t is not so much the active and deliberate abuse which is the
problem as a general attitude of uncompetitiveness.81
513
That is why Britain continued to rely on old and declining

industries much longer than other countries, to find privileged
markets for them in the old empire and the emerging Third World,
and to trade low-value, high-labour-cost manufactures in exchange
for raw materials rather than compete in the ‘high tech’ world of
the expanding economies.82
Beneath all the other problems lay the state of British industrial
relations. It was not that there were more strikes and more days lost
by industrial disputes in Britain—there were far more than in
Germany, Holland, Scandinavia or Japan, but far fewer than in
Italy, Canada, Australia, or the United States—but there was too
often between strikes a sullen lack of co-operation between
managers and workers. It showed itself in a questioning of
managerial prerogatives, in a clinging to work routines and spheres
of influence, an insistence on watertight demarcations between
different jobs, a deep suspicion of any innovation which might
increase profits at the supposed expense of wages, and a mutual
suspicion that any change suggested by the other side was a ploy to
‘get something for nothing’. As Ralf Dahrendorf has observed,
British workers and managers perceived their relationship as a zero-
sum game in which there was only a limited kitty to be played for
and one side’s gain was the other side’s loss.83 The result was Alan
Fox’s ‘low-trust’ industrial relations in which confrontation is the
natural posture and co-operation is at a premium.84 This was in
stark contrast to the high-trust industrial relations of the Japanese,
who regard both managers and workers as members of the same
family, sharing the benefits of innovation and productivity and
seeing high profits as the main guarantee of rising wages. It is
significant that in Japanese companies in Britain, such as the Sony
works at Bridgend, the management was able to win cooperation
by treating both workers and managers alike.
This would seem to suggest that the main cause of the bloody-
mindedness which besets British industry, and therefore of the
inability of the economy to break out of the vicious circle of slow
growth, low expectations, and fear of redundancy, is the persistence
of class. Managers and workers come from opposite sides of the
tracks, from different social backgrounds and educational
experiences, speak with different accents, have different
expectations of lifetime incomes and careers, and feel themselves
locked into different slots in the social framework. Managers, like
514
other middle-class professionals, have stable careers, some security

of tenure, automatic pensions, and regularly rising incomes—
though some of these advantages are now being jeopardized by the
absolute decline of manufacturing industry. Workers are paid ‘the
rate for the job’, expect little or no promotion, have smaller
pensions or none, and after reaching their peak earnings early in life
can thereafter only ‘rise with their class, not out of it’.The secret of
the Japanese industrial success may not lie in better education,
superior management skills, quality control groups, or any of the
other devices extolled in the West, but in two professional
conditions of service for manual workers which the West has never
tried, lifetime employment and rising pay scales.85 British workers
and managers still inhabit two different social worlds between
which conflict is the norm and co-operation the exception.
Industrial confrontation in the workplace has been exacerbated
at the national level by the politics of confrontation. Like
monetarism, the attempt by government to ‘tame the unions’
began, as we have seen, with the Labour Party, with In Place of
Strife and the unsuccessful industrial legislation of the late 1960s. A
second attempt was passed into law by the Heath government in
1972 but was immediately repealed by the second Wilson
government in 1974. The real ‘politics of confrontation’—her own
term—began with Margaret Thatcher’s government after 1979
which, after a ‘softly-softly’ start under James Prior when rising
unemployment was expected to discipline the unions, erupted into
violent confrontation with the miners’ strike of 1984–85. Renewed
legislation was passed to enforce ballots before strikes, individual
members’ rights against unions, and the democratic election of
officials. Confrontation works both ways and, with class warriors
like Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers on the
battle lines, it looked as if industrial relations would lead Britain to
become once more as ‘ungovernable’ as in the early 1970s.
However, deflation, recession and unemployment did their work,
trade union numbers fell from 55 to 43 per cent of the employed
workforce, and trade union voters continued to desert Labour for
other parties. At the 1987 election as many as 58 per cent of trade
unionists voted for other parties, 30 per cent for the
Conservatives.86 In other words, for all the confrontation and the
class rhetoric on either side, class, though still important in the
workplace, was no longer the master spring of politics.
515
The underlying malaise of Britain’s economy is rooted in the

transitional state of British society. We have the worst of both
worlds: all the bitterness and mutual hostility of an old and
obsolescent class society which refuses to die and all the greedy
scramble for resources between the professional interest groups,
but few of the benefits of a more fully developed professional
society as in West Germany or Japan. In industry
professionalization has not reached down far enough to persuade
the manual workers that they fully belong to the new society or to
the same order of human beings as the managers. The
professionalization of the workers, their merger into a single status
along with the non-manual staff, with the same conditions of
employment, paid sick leave and holidays, pension rights and the
like, is far from complete and has not been pursued with enough
sincerity to convince them that corporations distribute rewards
fairly and without special privileges to the few. The vaunted
principle of equality of opportunity operates increasingly outside
industry, through the educational system, so that inside the firm
upward mobility is increasingly blocked off for the majority, and
the career hierarchies are effectively open only to the managerial
trainees with the right educational qualifications. The old class
feeling of ‘Us versus Them’ still prevails and perpetuates the zero-
sum game in which neither side will willingly yield an inch. To
prevent the other side’s gain rather than to co-operate for mutual
benefit becomes the aim of the game. Mutual frustration and
resistance to innovation are the result.
The transition is reflected in the division of Britain into two
nations, north and south, or rather into the north and west and the
south-east. In the north and west, including Scotland and Wales,
the old class society persists, clinging to old industries and old
grievances. Pockets of the new society exist in the suburbs around
the major northern cities but they include fewer of the bright,
young, upwardly mobile corporate managers and more of the
public sector professionals—teachers, college lecturers, local civil
servants, local government officers, Health Service employees, and
so on. The latter now form the backbone of the opposition parties,
both Labour and Alliance. At the 1978 Labour Party Conference
70 per cent of the delegates were white-collar workers, and 60 per
cent were in public sector occupations.87 This helps to account for
the strength of Labour, and also of the Liberals in Scotland, the
516
north, the west and Wales. The public sector professionals are torn
between their old loyalty to class-based politics, with its demand
for equality for the underprivileged, and the pull of their
professional interests, which seek equality of opportunity. The
tension shows itself partly in the split between Alliance and Labour,
much more in the division in the Labour Party between an
egalitarian left and a more pragmatic, opportunist right wing.
The split between north and south is, in part at least, a split
within the professional middle class, between the public sector
professionals who, with the decline of private industry, dominate
the politics of the north and west, and the private sector
professionals, the upwardly mobile managers of the new service
and ‘high tech’ industries, who dominate the politics of the Home
Counties. The south-east is the kingdom of the young urban
professionals, riding high on the resurgence of the free market
ideology which promises them their heart’s desire, power without
responsibility, wealth without compassion, status without a second
thought for the underprivileged (although the stock market plunge
of 19 October 1987, with its echoes of 1929, may have disturbed
their complacency). In short, they want to have their cake and eat
it, all the benefits of professional society without its costs.
The transition is reflected too in the division, in the south as well
as in the north, between the decaying inner cities and the
prosperous suburbs. Not all coloured immigrants have gravitated
to the slums, and some, especially the Asians, have become
spectacularly successful entrepreneurs and upwardly mobile
professionals. But race as well as class has aggravated the tensions
of the inner-city slums where both coloured immigrants and white
residents inhabit a nether world little touched by the new society.
Unemployment, material deprivation, poor health, low-grade
schools, and a wretched physical environment all conspire to fuel
social conflict. The periodic riots, in Brixton (London), St Paul’s
(Bristol), Toxteth (Liverpool), Handsworth (Birmingham), and
many other inner-city areas both north and south, are a protest
against exclusion from the good life promised by professional
society. A hundred years ago Joseph Chamberlain asked what
ransom property was prepared to pay for the security which it
enjoyed.88 The Bourbon critics of modern welfare, most of them
owners of vulnerable human capital, seem to have learned nothing
and forgotten nothing since his time. It is only the other face of
517
professional society, the caring concept of social citizenship, that

prevents the total alienation of the inner cities and their complete
degeneration into crime, violence, riots and chaos.
The structure of British politics and the decline of democracy
have conspired to sharpen these tensions. At first sight the hijacking
of the Conservative Party by the free marketeers and the near
hijacking of the Labour Party by the extreme left in the 1970s look
like a classic backlash against professional society, a return to the
old class politics of former times, with class warriors as vehement
as Arthur Scargill and Norman Tebbit fighting the old battles all
over again. On closer analysis, however, the more significant
division appears to be between the public sector professionals who,
with the decline of private industry there, dominate the politics of
the north and west, and the private sector professionals who have
taken over the Tory Party, especially in the south-east. On either
side they have nearly driven out the manual workers and the
individual capitalists in whose name they so confidently speak. The
main issue in politics is which version of the professional social
ideal is to be applied to British society, the public sector ideal of an
egalitarian, caring and compassionate state run by well-paid
professionals or the private sector ideal of equal opportunity for
those able to climb the corporate ladder of success and compete in
the struggle for survival of the fittest corporations.
Both extremes have their dangers, which might drag down the
rest of us. The first could lead, if not to 1984, then to an
authoritarian regime in which individual differences are
discouraged and individual enterprise frustrated. The second could
lead to a more decentralized authoritarianism, paradoxically
backed by a powerful centralized government, in which the new
‘overmighty subjects’, the feudal lords of the giant corporations,
manipulate their multinational estates with scant regard to national
governments or the interests of the local inhabitants, whose
prosperity and survival they decide without consultation or
compunction.89 Both sets of idealists would hotly deny any such
objective, but it is the logic of their positions, not their well-
meaning intentions, that will determine the unintended
consequences. We are on the horns of a political dilemma created
by the logic of professional society.
Is there no escape from that dilemma? Only if we reject the false
antithesis proffered by the two extremes. It is rarely ‘madmen in
518
authority’ but true believers convinced of the Tightness of their

own ideals who lead nations to perdition. The true believers on
each side have been able to force a choice between two equally
repellent alternatives only because the structural flaws of the British
political system have enabled two extreme minorities to capture the
vehicles of power. As Edmund Burke so admirably said 200 years
ago, ‘Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for
human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be
provided for by this wisdom.’90 It is not beyond the wisdom of men
and women, in a society as potentially well-fitted for the provision
of human wants as the new professional society of late twentieth-
century Britain, so to contrive its government that we may enjoy its
benefits without falling into the rival pits, of corporate neo-
feudalism and the authoritarian state, which the extremists are so
busily digging for us.
519
NOTES
CHAPTER 1 THE MEANING OF PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Ode inscribed to W.H.Channing’, in Mark
Van Doren (ed.), The Portable Emerson (Viking Press, 1956), p.
323.
2 Cf. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–
1880 (Routledge 8c Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 29.
3 This model was first adumbrated in my Stenton Lecture, 1980:
Professionalism, Property and English Society since 1880
(University of Reading, 1981), pp. 10–12.
4 Cf. Larkin, Property in the 18th Century, with Special Reference to
England and Locke (Cork, 1930); C.B.Macpherson, The Political
Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford
University Press, 1962); Perkin, Origins of Modem English Society,
pp. 51–5.
5 Peter H.Lindert, ‘Unequal English wealth since 1670’, Journal of
Political Economy, vol. 94, 1986, p. 1131.
6 Gary S.Becker, Human Capital (Columbia University Press, 1964);
Pierre Bourdieu, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture
(Sage, 1977); Alvin Gouldner, The Future of the Intellectuals and the
Rise of the New Class (Macmillan, 1979); Anthony Giddens, The
Class Structure of the Advanced Industrial Countries (Hutchinson,
1973).
7 Sir Alex Cairncross, ‘The post-war years, 1945–77’, in Roderick
Floud and Donald McCloskey, The Economic History of Britain
since 1700, vol. 2, 1860 to the 1970s (Cambridge University Press,
1981), pp. 409–11.
8 Leslie Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy (Methuen,
1976), p. 216; Economic Trends Supplement, no. 12, 1987, p. 201.
9 Cf. Friedrich A. von Hayek’s works, esp. The Road to Serfdom
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1944), The Constitution of Liberty
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), and Law, Legislation and Liberty
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982); and the many publications of the
Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies.
10 Cf. Henry Pelling, ‘The working class and the origins of the welfare
state’, in Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain
520
NOTES
(Macmillan, 1968); Bentley B.Gilbert, The Evolution of National

Insurance in Great Britain (Michael Joseph, 1966), p. 450; Perkin,
Origins of Modem English Society, pp. 319–39.
11 Richard M.Titmuss, The Irresponsible Society (Fabian Society,
1960), pp. 10–12, 13–14, 20.
12 The Independent, 24 September 1987.
13 Richard M.Titmuss, Essays on ‘The Welfare State’ (Allen & Unwin,
1976), pp. 23–8; Paul Wilding, Socialism and Professionalism
(Fabian Society, 1981) and Professional Power and Social Welfare
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
14 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (ed. T.H.Green
and T.H.Grose; London, 1875), vol. 1, p. 125.
15 Cf. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 257–9, 389.
16 Ibid., pp. 3–4.
17 Cf. V.Gordon Childe, ‘The birth of civilization’, Past and Present,
no. 2, 1952 and Man Makes Himself (Watts, 1965).
18 Phyllis Deane and W.A.Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959
(Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 282.
19 Social Trends, 1986, table 1.3; A.H.Halsey (ed.), Trends in British
Society Since 1900 (Macmillan, 1972), p. 87.
20 Parliamentary Papers, 1872, XVI. 37 [c. 602], Reports of Inspectors
of Factories and Workshops, pp. 82–4; Annual Abstract of
Statistics, 1985, p. 123.
21 Hannah, op. cit., p. 216; Brian Murphy, A History of the British
Economy (Longmans, 1973), p. 806.
22 Joseph Sykes, The Amalgamation Movement of British Banking, 1825–
1924 (King, 1926), p. 113; Murphy, op. cit., p. 703; Scotland has a
further ‘Big Two’, the Bank of Scotland and the Clydesdale Bank.
23 P.E.Harris and R.Clarke, Concentration in British Industry, 1935–
75 (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 27.
24 David E.Butler and Jennifer Freeman, British Political Facts, 1900–
67 (Macmillan, 1968), pp. 211–19; Annual Abstract of Statistics,
1981, table 6.28.
25 David C.Marsh, The Changing Social Structure of England and
Wales, 1871–1951 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 172; Hugh
A. Clegg, The System of Industrial Relations in Britain (Blackwell,
1972), p. 143.
26 Geoffrey Millerson, The Qualifying Associations (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 246–54; Monopolies Commission,
Professional Services: A Report on the General Effect on the Public
Interest of Certain Restrictive Practices…(Cmnd. 4463, 1970), part
II, pp. 83–5.
27 Clive Jenkins and Barrie Sherman, White Collar Unionism: The
Rebellious Salariat (Routledge 8c Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 31–2.
28 G.R.Porter, The Progress of the Nation (ed. F.W.Hirst; Methuen,
1912), p. 141; Annual Abstract of Statistics, 1987, table 14.1.
29 Parliamentary Papers, 1914–16, XIX, Reports from University
Colleges, pp. 28–9, table 4; Commonwealth Universities Yearbook,
521
NOTES
1979 (Association of Commonwealth Universities); Annual Abstract

of Statistics, 1981, loc.cit.; Social Trends, 1983, table 3.12.
30 Census of England and Wales, 1881; Annual Abstract of Statistics,
1981, table 6.1.
31 Emmeline W.Cohen, The Growth of the British Civil Service, 1780–
1939 (Allen & Unwin, 1941), p. 164; Annual Abstract of Statistics,
1981, table 6.5; M.Abramowitz and V.F.Eliasberg, The Growth of
Public Employment in Great Britain (Princeton University Press,
1957).
32 Calculated from Annual Abstract of Statistics, 1981, tables 14.1 and
14.5.
33 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Penguin, 1976),
pp. 129–42: the population in service-producing occupations in the
USA is there given as rising from 49 per cent in 1947 to 64 per cent
in 1968, but if transport, distribution, utilities and private domestic
workers are excluded the latter figure drops to 35 per cent.
34 Colin Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress (Macmillan,
1940), pp. 176–7, and (1951 edn), pp. 395–6. The 1960 edn drops
the term ‘Petty’s Law’ and substitutes ‘a wide, simple and far-
reaching generalization’, p. 492.
35 R.Campbell, The London Tradesman (Gardner, 1747).
36 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776; ed. E.B.Bax; Bohn,
1905), vol. 1, pp. 49–50.
37 Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management (Penguin,
1965), p. 159.
38 Cf. Frederick W.Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management
(1911; Harper & Row, 1947); John Child, British Management
Thought (Allen & Unwin, 1969), ch. 2.
CHAPTER 2 THE ZENITH OF CLASS SOCIETY

1880 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 428–37.
2 Cf. Harold Perkin, The Age of the Railway (Panther, 1970; David &
Charles, 1972), ch. 9.
3 Cf. H.J.Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images
and Realities (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 339–42;
Kathleen Chorley, Manchester Made Them (Faber, 1950);
H.B.Rodgers, ‘The suburban growth of Victorian Manchester’,
Journal of Manchester Geographical Society, vol. 58, 1962.
4 L.G.Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty (Methuen, 1905), pp. 41–
3; figures derived from Inland Revenue, including information about
the division of taxpayers (over £160 p.a.), multiplied by 5 to include
families of taxpayers; the 38 million ‘in poverty’ were simply the
residual, non-taxpaying population.
5 A.L.Bowley, The Change in the Distribution of the National
Income, 1880–1913 (Clarendon Press, 1920); cf. H.J.Perkin,
‘Middle-class education and employment in the 19th century’,
Economic History Review, vol. 14, 1961.
522
NOTES
6 For references, see Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, pp.

85, 122, 180, 257, 263–4, 399, 446–8.
7 Cf. T.S. and B.Simey, Charles Booth, Social Scientist (Oxford
University Press, 1960); Cf. Perkin, Origins of Modern English
Society, pp. 326–8.
8 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London
(Macmillan, 1889–1903, esp. vols 1 and 2 published 1892).
9 B.Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (Longmans,
1901), pp. 111, 117–18.
10 Booth, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 165; Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on
Indigence (Hatchard, 1806).
11 Booth, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 131–2.
12 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 35, 62; vol. 2, p. 21.
13 Rowntree, op. cit., pp. 115–18.
14 Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (Chairman:
Almeric W.FitzRoy), Report (Cd. 2175, 1904).
15 A.L.Bowley and A.R.Burnett-Hurst, Livelihood and Poverty
(London School of Economics, 1915); a fifth town, Bol ton, was
surveyed in 1913, and the results published in 1915.
16 Rowntree, op. cit., pp. 120–1; Bowley and Burnett-Hurst, op. cit., p.
40.
17 B.S.Rowntree and May Kendall, How the Labourer Lives (Nelson,
1913), pp. 31–2.
18 Bowley and Burnett-Hurst, op. cit., pp. 42–3.
19 B.J.Oddy, ‘The health of the people’, in Theo Barker and Michael
Drake (eds), Population and Society in Britain, 1850–1980
(Batsford, 1982), p. 123 (derived from British Medical Journal,
1953).
20 Registrar General’s Second Report on Infant Mortality, supplement
to 42nd Annual Report of Local Government Board (Cd.
6909,1913), p. 73.
21 Report upon the Physical Examination of Men of Military Age by
National Service Medical Boards, (Cmd. 504, 1917), p. 22.
22 S.B.Saul, The Myth of the Great Depression, 1873–96 (Macmillan,
1969), p. 37.
23 Harold Perkin, The Economic Worth of Elites in British Society,
1880–1970 (Report to SSRC, 1977, deposited in British Library
Lending Division, Boston Spa), Appendix 5.3.
24 Saul, op. cit., pp. 28–30, who is ‘careful not to give too much
emphasis to this topic’ but allows ‘the sagging price of wheat’ and
(presumably) of other foods and raw materials.
25 Perkin, Elites, Appendix 5.1.
26 E.H.Phelps Brown and S.J.Handfield Jones, ‘The climacteric of the
1890s’, Oxford Economic Papers, 1952.
27 H.L.Beales, ‘The Great Depression in industry and trade’, Economic
History Review, vol. 5, 1934; and Saul, op. cit.
28 T.W.Fletcher, ‘The Great Depression of British agriculture, 1873–
96’, Economic History Review, vol. 13, p. 421; Saul, op. cit., p. 35.
523
NOTES
29 Cf. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 343–5; steep

inflation without corresponding rises in real wages, however, as in
1910–14 and the 1970s, tends to exacerbate industrial conflict.
30 Cf. Harold Perkin, ‘Land reform and class conflict in Victorian
Britain’, in The Structured Crowd: Essays in English Social History
(Harvester and Barnes & Noble, 1981).
31 J.A.Thomas, The House of Commons, 1832–1901 (University of
Wales Press, 1939), pp. 14–17, tables 1–6, and 1906–11 (idem,
1958), pp. 28–31, 44–5. Thomas counts ‘interests’ rather than MPs
but it is possible to distinguish landowners from business men,
though of course they overlapped.
32 The 1892 Liberal Cabinet contained six landowners, one rentier and
two business men, as against eight lawyers and professional men;
that of 1906 eight landowners and business men as against nine
lawyers and professional men and one trade union official; cf. H.J.
Laski, Studies in Law and Politics (Allen & Unwin, 1932), ch. 8;
W.L.Guttsman, The British Political Elite (MacGibbon & Kee,
1963), ch. 4.
33 Cf. Robert McKenzie and Alan Silver, Angels in Marble: Working
Class Conservatives in Urban England (Heinemann, 1968).
34 Paul Smith (ed.), Lord Salisbury on Politics (Cambridge University
Press, 1972), pp. 343–5.
35 R.C.K.Ensor, ‘Some political and economic interactions in later
Victorian England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th
series, vol.31, 1949.
36 Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for
London, 1885–1914 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 294–8.
37 R.E.Pumphrey, ‘The introduction of industrialists into the British
peerage’, American Historical Review, vol. 65, 1959; F.M.L.
Thompson, English Landed Society in the 19th Century (Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 292–9.
38 Cf. W.D.Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain
Since the Industrial Revolution (Groom Helm, 1987), pp. 166–8.
39 Statistics and tables calculated from J.A.Thomas, opera cit. (see note
31 above), as explained in Perkin, ‘Land reform’, Appendix, in
Structured Crowd, pp. 128–31.
40 Cf. Henry Pelling, Political Geography of British Elections, 1885–
1910 (Macmillan, 1967), pp. 41, 278, 388; J.M.Lee, Social Leaders
and Public Persons: A Study of County Government in Cheshire
since 1888 (Clarendon Press, 1963), passim.
41 C.F.G.Masterman, The Condition of England (Methuen, 1909), p. 66.
42 Perkin, ‘Land reform’, loc. cit.
43 John Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–68
(Constable, 1966).
44 Speech at Dorchester, 16 January 1884, in J.L.Garvin, Life of Joseph
Chamberlain (Macmillan, 1932), vol. 1, p. 462.
45 Cf. Perkin, ‘Land reform’, loc. cit. pp. 100, 111.
46 Garvin, Chamberlain, vol. 1, p. 169; Jesse Collings and J.L.Green,
Life of Jesse Collings (Longmans, 1920).
524
NOTES
47 Cf. Perkin, ‘Land reform’, loc. cit. p. 117.

48 S.D.Headlam, The Socialist’s Church (George Allen, 1907), p. 60;
idem, ‘Guild of St Matthew’, in New Encyclopedia of Social Reform
(Funk & Wagnall, 1909); Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The First
Fabians (Quartet, 1977), pp. 91–2, 108–9.
49 Chushichi Tsuzuki, H.M.Hyndman and British Socialism (Oxford
University Press, 1961); Yvonne Cloud, Eleanor Marx (Lawrence &
Wishart, 1972); N. and J.MacKenzie, op. cit., pp. 43, 49.
50 N. and J.MacKenzie, op. cit., ch. 13.
51 Cf. Alan M.McBriar, Fabian Socialism and British Politics, 1884–
1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1966), ch. 12, esp. p. 349; ‘No
major political development can be attributed with certainty to
Fabian influence; but few similar groups, so small and so much
outside the established centres of power, can have exercised as great
or as varied an influence in minor but not unimportant ways.’
52 Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party (Macmillan, 1954),
pp.112, 120, 210, 218.
53 H.M.Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (Macmillan,
1911); Tom Mann, Memoirs (Labour Publishing Co., 1923), esp.
pp. 58–62; MacKenzie, op. cit., pp. 85–9, 90–2, 104–7.
54 H.A.Clegg, A.Fox and A.F.Thompson, A History of British Trade
Unions Since 1889 (Clarendon Press, 1964), vol. 1, ch. 2; Richard
Price, ‘Rethinking labour history: the importance of work’, in James
E.Cronin and Jonathan Schneer (eds), Social Conflict and the
Political Order in Modern Britain (Groom Helm, 1982), pp. 186–8.
A.E.Musson, British Trade Unions, 1800–75 (Macmillan, 1972), p.
58; B.A.Mitchell and P.Deane, Abstract of British Historical
Statistics (Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 66.
55 Clegg, Fox and Thompson, op. cit., pp. 249–68.
56 William Stewart, J.Keir Hardie (Independent Labour Press, 1925);
Pelling, Origins of Labour Party, pp. 121–9.
57 Clegg, Fox and Thompson, op. cit., ch. 8; John Saville, ‘Trade
unions and free labour: the background to the Taff Vale decision’, in
M.W.Flinn and T.C.Smout (eds), Essays in Social History
(Clarendon Press, 1974).
58 Clegg, Fox and Thompson, op. cit., pp. 302–3; Pelling, Origins of
Labour Party, pp. 218–19, 225–8, 230–3.
59 For Herbert Spencer and his version of Social Darwinism, see below,
ch. 4, section 3.
60 C.F.G.Masterman, The Heart of the Empire (Fisher Unwin, 1901),
p. 8, and The Condition of England (Methuen, 1909), p. 9.
61 Karl Pearson, ‘Reproductive selection’, pp. 78–80, and The
Groundwork of Eugenics (Eugenics Laboratory Series, 1912), pp.
27–30; in Richard A.Soloway, Birth Control and the Population
Question, 1877–1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 1982),
pp. 25, 37.
62 Karl Pearson, Socialism and Natural Selection (1904), in Bernard
Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, 1895–914 (Alien &
Unwin, 1960), p. 13.
525
NOTES
63 Soloway, op. cit., p. 4; M.Crackanthorpe, ‘Population and progress’,

Fortnightly Review, December 1906.
64 ‘Miles’ [Sir John Frederick Maurice], ‘Where to get men’,
Contemporary Review, vol. 81, January 1902; Sir John Frederick
Maurice, ‘National health: a soldier’s study’, idem, vol. 83, January
1903.
65 Samuel A.Barnett, ‘A scheme for the unemployed’, Nineteenth
Century, 1888, pp. 753–4; William Booth, In Darkest England and
the Way Out (Salvation Army International Headquarters, 1890), p.
93; Booth, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 154, 66–8; A.Marshall, ‘The housing
of the London poor, I’, Contemporary Review, February 1884; cf.
Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Clarendon Press, 1971),
esp. chs 15 and 16.
66 Booth, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 39, 154; vol. 5, p. 73.
67 H.M.Hyndman, ‘English workers as they are’, Contemporary
Review, July 1887.
68 Sidney Ball, The Moral Aspects of Socialism (Fabian Society, 1896),
p. 5; Shaw and Wells quoted in B.B.Gilbert, The Evolution of
National Insurance in Great Britain (Joseph, 1966), p. 92.
69 S.Smith, ‘The industrial training of destitute children’,
Contemporary Review, January 1885.
70 Committee on Physical Deterioration, Report, p. 8.
71 Ibid., pp. 13–14, 15.
72 Ibid., pp. 38–9.
73 Ibid., p. 39.
74 Ibid., p. 85.
75 Sidney Webb, The Decline in the Birth-Rate (Fabian Society, 1907),
pp. 6–7.
76 F.W.Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development
(Macmillan, 1907), pp. 24–5; Soloway, op. cit., pp. 35–6; Semmel,
op. cit., pp. 44–7.
77 David Heron, On the Relation of Fertility in Man to Social Status
(Drapers’ Company Research Memoirs, 1906), pp. 11–16; A.F.
Tredgold in Eugenics Review, vol. 3, 1911, pp. 109–11; Ethel
Elderton, Report on the English Birth Rate, part I (Eugenics
Laboratory Memoirs 19 and 20, 1914), p. 232; The Times, 14
February 1912; Daily Telegraph, 28 October 1913; Soloway, op.
cit., chs 2 and 3, and Bibliography, pp. 365–84.
CHAPTER 3 A SEGREGATED SOCIETY

1 Frank Harris, My Life and Loves (1925; Grove, 1963), 730.
2 K.Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (Lawrence & Wishart, 1969),
part 2, p. 573; Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles (Groom Helm,
1973), p. 62 (The Queen magazine ran a regular column called ‘The
upper 10,000 at home and abroad’); W.D.Rubinstein, ‘Education
and social origins of British elites, 1880–1970’, Past and Present,
no. 112, 1986; John Scott, The Upper Classes: Property and
Privilege in Britain (Macmillan, 1982).
526
NOTES
3 Cf. Davidoff, op. cit., ch. 2.

4 Cf. F.M.L.Thompson, English Landed Society in the 19th Century
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), ch. 10; G.D.Phillips, The
Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England
(Harvard University Press, 1979), chs 2 and 3.
5 Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 431.
6 Cf. F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., pp. 303–18.
7 W.D.Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain
Since the Industrial Revolution (Groom Helm, 1981), pp. 59–69,
esp. tables 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4.
8 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (Longmans, 1926), pp. 48–9.
9 Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership (Cambridge University Press,
1948), p. 347.
10 G.W.E.Russell, Seeing and Hearing (Grant Richards, 1907), p. 355.
11 Ralph Nevill (ed.), The Reminiscences of Lady Dorothy Nevill
(Arnold, 1906), p. 100.
12 Cf. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 85–9. My view
has not been changed by Lawrence and Jeanne C.F.Stone, An Open
Elite? England 1540–1880 (Clarendon Press, 1984)—see my review
in Journal of British Studies, vol. 24, October 1985, pp. 496–501.
13 Act I; Jack Worthing, whose income and source of wealth Lady
Bracknell finds ‘satisfactory’ in a suitor for her daughter’s hand, is a
rentier with between £7,000 and £8,000 a year chiefly in
investments: ‘I have a country house with some land, of course,
attached to it, about fifteen hundred acres, I believe; but I don’t
depend on that for my real income. In fact, as far as I can make out,
the poachers are the only people who make anything out of it.’ Lady
Bracknell had in mind not only the decline in rents but the
graduated death duties instituted by Sir William Harcourt the
previous year.
14 F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., pp. 310, 317–18.
15 W.T.Beastall, ‘Landlords and tenants’, in G.E.Mingay, The Victorian
Countryside (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), vol. 2, p. 435;
Thompson, op. cit., p. 315.
16 F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., pp. 303–6.
17 Phillips, op. cit., pp. 30, 44–5.
18 Ibid., p. 39.
19 F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., p. 303.
20 Phillips, op. cit., p. 39.
21 Ibid., pp. 31–2.
22 Ibid., p. 40.
23 F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., 306–7; Phillips, op. cit., p. 39.
25 Ibid., p. 299.
26 Nevill, op. cit., pp. 102–3.
28 G.W.E.Russell, ‘Land and lodging houses (a colloquy with the Duke
of Bedford),’ Nineteenth Century, vol. 42, 1897, p. 384.
527
NOTES
29 H.J.Perkin, The Economic Worth of Elites in British Society Since

1880 (Report for SSRC, 1977, deposited in British Library Lending
Division, Boston Spa).
30 Ibid.; Rubinstein, op. cit., pp. 59–69. Cf. also F.M.L.Thompson,
‘English landed society in the 19th century’, in Pat Thane, G.
Crossick and R.Floud (eds), The Power of the Past Cambridge
University Press, 1984), who agrees with Rubinstein but cites as
many rich industrialists as city men.
31 Who was Who? Dictionary of National Biography, GEC, The
Complete Peerage, etc.
32 Rubinstein, op. cit., pp. 102–10, 166–7.
33 Ibid., p. 45; when Morrison’s descendant ‘played the game’ he
received a peerage in 1965, ibid., p. 170.
34 Ibid., p. 44; B.Webb, Our Partnership, pp. 412–13.
35 J.M.Bullock, ‘Peers who have married Players’, Notes and Queries,
vol. 169, 1935; GEC, The Complete Peerage, under Rosslyn.
36 Lady Tweedsmuir, The Lilac and the Rose (Gerald Duckworth,
1952).
37 Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (eds), The Diary of Beatrice Webb
(Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1982–85), 8 July 1903; N.
and J.MacKenzie, The First Fabians (Quartet Books, 1979), ch. 20,
esp. pp. 303–4; F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., p. 301.
38 The Lady, February 1893; Davidoff, op. cit., pp. 66–7.
39 Phillips, op. cit., pp. 20–1.
40 Advertisement quoted in The Realm, 8 March 1895; Davidoff, op.
cit., p. 63.
41 T.H.S.Escott, Social Transformations of the Victorian Age (Seeley,
1897), p. 90.
42 Cf. Lee, op. cit., pp. 38–43.
43 Ibid., p. 79.
44 Ibid., ch. 2, esp. pp. 18–23 and 29–38.
45 Ibid., chs 2 and 3.
46 Phillips, op. cit., ch. 2, ‘The lordliest life on earth’ (all quotations in
this paragraph are on p. 13, and references on p. 177, n. 1).
47 C.F.G.Masterman, The Condition of England (Methuen, 1909), p.
161.
48 Harold Perkin, The Age of the Automobile (Quartet, 1976), p. 53.
49 D.Lloyd George, Speech at Limehouse 30 July 1909, in Ely Halevy,
The Rule of Democracy, 1905–14 (Benn, 1952), part 1, p. 298.
51 Ibid., p. 326.
52 L.G.Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty (Methuen, 1905), pp. 41–2.
53 B.G.Orchard, The Clerks of Liverpool (J.Collinson, 1871), pp. 63–
4; Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London, 2nd series, vol.
2, p. 189 and vol. 3, pp. 272–3, 449; Hugh McLeod, ‘White collar
values and the role of religion’, in Geoffrey Crossick (ed.), The
Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914 (Macmillan, 1977), p.
63, n. 7.
528
NOTES
(Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 142; W.H.Fraser, The

Coming of the Mass Market (Macmillan, 1981), p. 21.
55 A.L.Bowley, The Change in the Distribution of the National
Income, 1880–1913 (Clarendon Press, 1920), p. 16; G.D.H.Cole,
Studies in Class Structure (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), pp. 55–
7; see also T.W.Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in
Victorian England (St Martin’s Press, 1982), p. 28.
56 A.H.Halsey (ed.), Trends in British Society Since 1900 (Macmillan,
1972), p. 113 (peak at 6.8 per cent in 1921); Deane and Cole, op.
cit., p. 248, give only 4.6 per cent as employers in 1911, plus 8.2 per
cent as workers on own account.
57 From H.J.Perkin, ‘Middle-class education and employment in the
19th century: a critical note’, Economic History Review, vol. 14,
1961.
58 Halsey, op. cit., pp. 114–17.
59 Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them (Faber, 1950), pp. 155–7.
60 Ibid., p. 157.
61 C.Stella Davies, North-Country Bred: A Working-Class Family
Chronicle (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 63–4.
62 K.Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (Lawrence & Wishart, 1969),
part 2, p. 573.
63 Schools Inquiry Commission (Chairman: Lord Taunton), 1868,
Minutes of Evidence, vol. 6, pp. 626–7. In Culture and Anarchy
(Smith, Elder, 1869), however, Arnold still omitted the professional
class in his tripartite division of society into ‘barbarians, philistines
and populace’.
64 Cf. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 273–5.
65 Henry B.Thompson, The Choice of Profession (London, 1857), p.
5.
66 Anthony Trollope, The Bartrams (1859).
67 Paul Thompson and Thea Vigne’s oral history of Edwardian
childhood interviews, nos 63 and 83, cited by McLeod, in Crossick,
op. cit., p. 73.
68 Ibid., interview no. 450, in Thea Vigne and Alun Howkins, ‘The
small shopkeeper and market towns’, in Crossick, op. cit., p. 203.
69 Rubinstein, op. cit., pp. 71–2; and ‘The end of “Old Corruption” in
Britain, 1780–1860’, Past and Present, no. 101, 1983, p. 19.
70 Rubinstein, Men of Property, p. 45; Phillips, op. cit., p. 40.
72 Halsey, op. cit., p. 113, table 4.1; Deane and Cole, op. cit., p. 248,
table 66.
73 Geoffrey Millerson, The Qualifying Associations (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 246–58.
74 Cf. Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America: The
Intellectual as a Social Type(London: Chatto & Windus, 1966); p.
xi; Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers (University of
Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 3–22; and ‘Intellectuals’, in International
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 7 (Free Press, 1968), pp.
399–415; Heyck, op. cit., pp. 14–17.
529
NOTES
75 Cf. Heyck, op. cit., pp. 24, 33.

76 O.J.R.Howarth, The British Association for the Advancement of
Science: A Retrospect, 1831–1921 (British Association for the
Advancement of Science, 1922), chs. 1–7; L.P.Williams, ‘The Royal
Society and the founding of the BAAS’, Notes and Records of the
Royal Society, November, 1961; A.D.Orage, ‘The origins of the
BAAS’, British Journal for History of Science, December 1972;
Heyck, op. cit., pp. 60–2, 113.
77 Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and
Society in Victorian England (Faber, 1968). Arthur Engel, From
Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in 19th-
century Oxford (Clarendon Press, 1983).
78 Mark Pattison, ‘A chapter of university history’, Macmillan’s
Magazine, August 1875, p. 308.
79 Perkin, Economic Worth of Elites.
80 Rubinstein, op. cit., p. 95.
81 Booth, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 10–25, 72–4, 80–3, 150–6, 191–4.
82 Cornhill Magazine, May, June, July and August 1901, articles by
G.S.Layard, G.Colmore, Mrs Earle and Lady Agnew.
83 Cf. Geoffrey Crossick, ‘The emergence of the lower middle class in
Britain’, and Thea Vigne and Alun Howkins, ‘The small
shopkeeper’, in Crossick, op. cit.; J.B.Jeffreys, Retail Trading in
Britain, 1850–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 1954), pp. 18–24.
84 Jeffreys, op. cit., p. 18.
85 Cf. J.A.Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family
Planning Among the Victorian Middle Classes (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1954); J.A. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in
Victorian England (Liverpool University Press, 1964); though the
Banks tend to take the supposed decline in money incomes at face
value. For clear signs that the trend towards smaller families began
in the higher classes as early as the 1850s, see Census of England
and Wales, 1911 Fertility of Marriage, Part 1 (Cd. 8678, 1917) and
Part 2, Report (Cd. 8491, 1923).
86 See Cornhill Magazine articles, above n. 82.
87 Vigne and Howkins, in Crossick, op. cit., pp. 187–8.
88 Vigne and Thompson, interview nos 135 and 183, quoted by
McLeod in Crossick, op. cit., pp. 70–1, and local tradition.
89 Cf. McLeod, in ibid., pp. 68–79.
90 Quoted from Booth Collection, B267, by McLeod, ibid., p. 69.
91 Halsey, op. cit., p. 113, table 4.1.
92 Ibid.
93 P.H.J.H.Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession: A Study of the
Contribution of Teachers Associations…(Blackwell, 1972), p. 2.
94 Cf. R.M.Hartwell, ‘The service revolution’, in C.M.Cipolla (ed.),
The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 3 (Fontana, 1973).
95 R.Church, Over the Bridge (Heinemann, 1955), pp. 134–5, 206–18.
96 Gregory Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester University Press,
1976), and ‘The social economy of Victorian clerks’, in Crossick, op.
cit.
530
NOTES
97 F.Klingender, The Condition of Clerical Labour in Britain (Martin

Lawrence, 1935), p. 20.
98 Anderson, Victorian Clerks, esp. pp. 74, 84, 108, 109–10, 115–16, 119.
99 Cf. Richard Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), ch. 4.
100 Anderson, Victorian Clerks, chs 5 and 6.
101 This is not to say that opportunities for mobility out of, as well as
into, the clerical class were increasing. Anderson, Victorian Clerks,
pp. 20–7, demonstrates that the chances of becoming a partner in
the firm were decreasing, except for the well-connected or extremely
able and lucky.
102 Anderson, Victorian Clerks, pp. 65–71; Crossick, ‘The emergence of
the lower middle class’, in Crossick, op. cit., pp. 51–2.
103 Frederick Willis, Peace and Dripping Toast (Phoenix House, 1950),
pp. 14–15.
104 Booth, op. cit., 3rd series, vol. 1, pp. 150–1.
105 C.F.G.Masterman, The Condition of England (Methuen, 1909), p. 66.
106 G.Stedman Jones, ‘Working-class culture and working-class politics
in London, 1870–1900: notes on the remaking of a working class’,
Journal of Social History, vol. 7, 1974, p. 498.
107 Booth, op. cit., 3rd series, vol. 7, p. 425.
108 Jones, op. cit., p. 499.
109 Ibid., p. 499.
110 Ibid., p. 500.
111 Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Enquiry into
the Condition of the Abject Poor (London Congregational Union,
1883); William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (Salvation
Army International Headquarters, 1890); Charles Booth, op. cit.;
B.Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (Macmillan,
1908); A.L.Bowley and A.R.Burnett Hurst, Livelihood and Poverty
(London School of Economics, 1915); Royal Commission on the
Housing of the Working Classes, Report (C. 4402, 1884–85);
Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Report (Cd.
2175, 1904); Royal Commission on the Poor Law and the Relief of
Distress, Report (Cd. 4499, 4603 and 4922, 1909–13); Census of
England and Wales, 1911, Fertility of Marriage, Part 1 (Cd. 8678,
1917) and Part 2, Report (Cd.8491, 1923).
112 Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975) and his journal Oral History;
Raphael Samuel (ed.), Village Life and Labour (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1975), and the journal History Workshop; Elizabeth Roberts,
A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Wor king-Class Women,
1890–1930 (Blackwell, 1984) and ‘Working wives and their
families’, in Theo Barker and Michael Drake (eds), Population and
Society in Britain, 1850–1980 (Batsford, 1982); Flora Thompson,
Lark Rise to Candleford (Oxford University Press, 1945); C.Stella
Davies, North Country-Bred: A Working-Class Family Chronicle
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum:
Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Manchester
531
NOTES
University Press, 1971); M.K.Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe

(Cambridge University Press, 1961).
113 Standish Meacham, A Life Apart: The English Working Class,
1890–1914 (Thames & Hudson, 1977).
114 R.Roberts, op. cit., p. 1.
115 Ibid., p. 3.
116 Willis, op. cit., pp. 14–15.
117 R.A.Bray, ‘The boy and the family’, E.J.Urwick (ed.), Studies of Boy
Life in Our Cities (Dent, 1904), pp. 19–20; J.C.Thresh, Enquiry
into the Causes of the Excessive Mortality in No. 1 District Ancoats
(Manchester, 1899), p. 31; Thompson and Vigne’s interview no.
417, quoted in Meacham, op. cit., pp. 34, 35, 53.
118 Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Monthly
Review, 1955 edn), p. 79.
119 B.S.Rowntree and May Kendall, How the Labourer Lives: A Study
of the Rural Labour Problem (Nelson, 1913), pp. 315, 318, 320.
120 Thompson and Vigne’s interview no. 185, quoted in Meacham, op.
cit., p. 26.
121 Raymond Postgate, The Builders’ History (National Federation of
Building Trades Operatives, 1923), p. 243.
122 A.Morrison, in Cornhill Magazine, April 1901.
123 M.S.Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (Bell, 1913), ch.
6, ‘Budgets’, and ch. 16, ‘The state as a guardian’.
124 Rowntree and Kendall, op. cit., ch. 3, ‘Budgets’, esp. table opp. p.
36, and pp. 303–4.
125 Thompson and Vigne’s interview no. 206, in Meacham, op. cit., p. 26.
126 Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place, ch. 4.
127 Thompson and Vigne interviews no. 312 and 253, in Meacham, op.
cit., pp. 26–7.
128 Cf. Stephen Humphries, Hooligans and Rebels: An Oral History of
Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Blackwell, 1981).
129 E.Roberts, ‘Working wives’, in Barker and Drake, op. cit., p. 162.
130 P.H.J.H.Gosden, Friendly Societies in England, 1815–75
(Manchester University Press, 1961), pp. 13–16.
131 G.D.H.Cole, A History of Cooperation (Cooperative Union, 1944),
p. 371.
132 Price, An Imperial War, pp. 47–9. Solly broke with the Club and
Institute Union in 1878 over his disputed criticism of the clubs’ tied
links with the brewers, ibid., pp. 49–54.
133 Ibid., pp. 66–80; quotations on pp. 72–3.
134 Ibid., pp. 82–9.
135 H.A.Clegg, A.Fox and A.F.Thompson, A History of British Trade
Unions Since 1889, vol. 1 (Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 1; B.R.
Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics
136 Edward H.Hunt, British Labour History, 1815–1914 (Humanities
Press, 1981), pp. 304–6; Clegg, Fox and Thompson, op. cit., pp.
57–60; Hubert Llewellyn Smith and V.Nash, The Story of the
Dockers’ Strike (Fisher Unwin, n.d. [c. 1890]), pp. 32–3.
532
NOTES
137 Clegg, Fox and Thompson, pp. 66–87; Hunt, op. cit., pp. 307–8.
138 Cf. Richard Price, ‘Rethinking labour history: the importance of
work’, in J.E.Cronin and J.Schneer (ed.), Social Conflict and
Political Order in Modern Britain (Rutgers University Press, 1982),
pp. 185–90, 197–9. Cf. also Richard Price, Labour in British Society
(Croom Helm, 1986), ch. 5.
139 Cf. Richard Price, ‘The labour process and labour history’,
(unpublished paper presented at the Social History Society
Conference at Chester, December 1980). I am grateful to Dr Price
for a copy of this illuminating paper and its many useful references,
including: James Samuelson, Labour-Saving Machinery (Kegan Paul,
1893), Carter Goodrich, The Frontier of Control (Bell, 1920), and
W.F. Watson, Machines and Men (Allen & Unwin, 1935). See also
Will Thorne, My Life’s Battles (Newnes, 1925), pp. 47–8, Eric
Hobsbawm, ‘The British gas workers, 1873–1914’, in Labouring
Men (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964); F.W.Taylor, The Principles of
Scientific Management (Harper & Bros, 1911) and Richard Price,
Masters, Unions and Men: The Struggle for Work Control in
Building and the Rise of Labour, 1830–1914 (Cambridge University
Press, 1980).
140 Cf. John Saville, ‘Trade unions and free labour: the background to
the Taff Vale decision’, in M.W.Flinn and T.C.Smout (eds), Essays in
Social History (Clarendon Press, 1974).
141 Price, ‘The labour process’, cites The Engineer, 21 March 1902,
condemning Taylorism as ‘soulless’, and Edward Cadbury,
Experiments in Industrial Organization (Longmans, 1912),
condemning the reduction of the worker to a living tool.
142 Cf. Charles More, Skill and the English Working Class, 1870–1914
(St Martin’s Press, 1980).
143 Saville, loc.cit.
144 Cf. Paul Adelman, The Rise of the Labour Party, 1880–1945
(Longmans, 1972), ch. 2, and references there cited.
145 R.Roberts, op. cit., p. 109.
146 Jones, ‘Working class culture’, loc. cit., p. 500.
CHAPTER 4 CLASS SOCIETY AND THE PROFESSIONAL

IDEAL
1 Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 252–70.
2 Ibid., pp. 257–60; Anton Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce
of Labour (Macmillan, 1899).
3 For sources see Perkin, op. cit., pp. 257–60, nn.
4 Schools Enquiry Commission (Chairman: Lord Taunton), Minutes
of Evidence, 1868, vol. 6, pp. 626–7.
5 Martin J.Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial
Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
6 Quoted in ibid., p. 20.
7 Ibid., p. 18.
533
NOTES
8 Ibid., p. 17.
9 Cf. Perkin, op. cit., p. 278.
10 A.C.Pigou (ed.), Memorials of Alfred Marshall (Macmillan, 1925),
p. 103.
11 Edwin Chadwick, On Unity (1959), p. 99, quoted in S.E.Finer, Life
and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (Methuen, 1952), p. 475; J.S.
Mill, The Principles of Political Economy (Longmans, 1904 edn),
pp. 573, 590, and Autobiography (1873; Oxford University Press,
1924 edn), p. 196.
12 Cf. inter alia Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (Chapman & Hall,
1843), book 3, ch. 2, ‘The Gospel of Mammon’; F.D.Maurice, On
the Reformation of Society (Southampton, 1851); John Ruskin,
Unto This Last (1862) and Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on Political
Economy (1862–63) in E.T.Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds),
Works of John Ruskin (George Allen, 1905), vol. 17, pp. 12–114
and 129–293.
13 Ruskin, loc. cit., vol. 17, p. 40.
14 Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership (Longmans, 1948), p. 210; F.G.
Bettany, Stewart Headlam (John Murray, 1926); E.P.Thompson,
William Morris (Lawrence & Wishart, 1955).
15 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (Longmans, 1926), pp. 190,
194, 199.
16 Madeline Rooff, A Hundred Years of Family Welfare (Michael
Joseph, 1972), pp. 13, 268.
17 Cf. Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T.H.Green and his
Age (University Press of America, 1983); Craig Jenks, ‘T.H.Green,
the Oxford philosophy of duty and the English middle class’, British
Journal of Sociology, vol. 28, 1977.
18 Ibid., pp. 277–8; Cf. Alan Ryan, Property and Political Theory
(Blackwell, 1984), chs 3 and 5.
19 S.T.Coleridge, ‘Remarks on Sir Robert Peel’s Bill’, 18 April 1818, in
Kathleen Cockburn, Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of
Coleridge (University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 351–9.
20 R.L.Nettleship (ed.), Works of T.H.Green (Longmans, 1885–88),
vol. 3, p. 372.
21 Ibid., p. 374.
22 Arnold Toynbee, Progress and Poverty (Kegan Paul, 1883), pp.
233–4.
23 Richter, op. cit., pp. 118–21.
24 Charles Gore in Stephen Paget (ed.), Henry Scott Holland, Memoirs
and Letters (John Murray, 1921), p. 241.
25 Herbert Samuel, Liberalism (Grant Richards, 1902), quoted by Reba
Soffer, Ethics and Society in England: The Revolution in the Social
Sciences, 1870–1914 (University of California Press, 1978), p. 188.
26 Mrs Humphry Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (Collins, 1918), p.
252 and passim.
27 Stefan Collini ‘Political theory and the “science of society”’,
Historical Journal, vol. 23, 1980.
28 Jeremy Bentham, Supply without Burthen, or Escheat vice Taxation
534
NOTES
(1775), in Werner Stark (ed.), Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings

(Allen & Unwin, 1952), vol. 1, esp. pp. 283–8; James Mill, The
Elements of Political Economy (Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1821),
pp. 201–3; John S.Mill, Explanatory Statement of the Land Tenure
Association (July 1870), in Dissertations and Discussions (Parker,
1859–75), vol. 4, p. 239.
29 Pigou, op. cit., pp. 333–4.
30 Ibid., p. 174.
31 Ibid., p. 102.
32 Ibid., pp. 282–3, 352.
33 Edward David, ‘The New Liberalism of C.F.G.Masterman’, in K.
D.Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History (Macmillan, 1974),
pp. 17–41.
34 B.S.Rowntree and A.C.Pigou, Lectures on Housing (Manchester
University Press, 1914), p. 36.
35 Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Industrial Democracy (Longmans,
1902), pp. 766–84.
36 Peter F.Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge
University Press, 1978), pp. 34–8; Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Fabians
reconsidered’, in Labouring Men (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974),
ch. 14.
37 Cf. Clarke, op. cit., p. 4 on ‘bourgeois socialism’ and the ‘radical
bourgeoisie’, meaning the academics Graham Wallas, L.T.
Hobhouse, J.A. Hobson, J.L. and Barbara Hammond, and Gilbert
Murray.
38 Cf. George Bernard Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays on Socialism (Fabian
Society, 1889) and Fabianism and the Empire (Fabian Society,
1900); and the voluminous writings of the Webbs.
39 B.Webb, My Apprenticeship, Appendix E, pp. 431–6, ‘Why the self-
governing workshop has failed’.
40 George Lansbury, My Life (Constable, 1928), p. 105.
41 Sidney Webb, ‘The rate of interest and the laws of distribution’,
Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 2, 1887–88.
42 Graham Wallas, MS review of E.R.Pease, History of the Fabian
Society (1916), quoted in Clarke, op. cit., p. 32.
43 Graham Wallas, in The Practical Socialist (Fabian Society journal),
vol. 1, p. 119, in Clarke, op. cit., p. 38.
44 H.G.Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography (Gollancz, 1934), p.
598.
45 Except of course for the property professions—cf. Avner Offer,
Property and Politics, 1870–1914 (Cambridge University Press,
1981), p. 82.
46 J.A.Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism: New Issues of Democracy
(King, 1909; ed. P.F.Clarke, Macmillan, 1974), p. 81.
47 Cf. Harold Perkin, ‘Land reform and class conflict in Victorian
England’, in The Structured Crowd: Essays in English Social History
48 Parliamentary Debates, 30 August 1880, 4th series, vol. 256, col.
619.
535
NOTES
49 Ibid., 14 August 1894, 5th series, vol. 28, col. 962.

50 Stewart D.Headlam, The Socialist’s Church (George Allen, 1907), p.
60.
51 Cf. MacKenzie, op. cit., pp. 37–41.
52 Offer, op. cit., pp. 223–4.
53 J.L.Garvin, Life of Joseph Chamberlain (Macmillan, 1932), vol. 1,
p. 462.
54 Cf. Perkin, ‘Land reform’, loc. cit., pp. 117–18; Offer, op. cit., pp.
76–84.
55 Offer, op. cit., pp. 82–7.
56 The Solicitors Act, 1974 confirmed the lawyers’ monopoly of
conveyancing, though this has since been ended by the Thatcher
government, but the replacement of title deeds by simple registration
(outside London and Yorkshire, where registration of title is
required) has still not been achieved.
57 The Economist, 10 January 1885.
58 Parliamentary Debates, 14 August 1894, 4th series, vol. 28, col.
962.
59 Edward Bristow, ‘The Liberty and Property Defence League and
industrialism’, Historical Journal, vol. 18, 1975, pp. 765–7.
60 Cf. Perkin, ‘Land reform’, loc. cit., pp. 123–8.
61 Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Odhams, 1963), p. 48.
62 London (magazine), 16 July 1896, quoted in Offer, op. cit., p. 222.
63 Ibid., pp. 223–4.
64 Bristow, loc. cit., p. 783; Sidney Webb, Socialism in England (Swan
Sonnenschein, 1890), p. 190.
65 Offer, op. cit., p. 301.
66 Bristow, loc. cit., p. 769; Offer, op. cit., pp. 235–6, 254, 301–8.
67 Property Owners’ Journal, January 1909, in ibid., pp. 309–10.
68 George J.Head, ‘The property market—retrospect and outlook’,
Auctioneers’ Institute, 12 January 1910, in ibid., p. 310.
69 Offer, op. cit., p. 301.
70 Cf. Eli Halevy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (Faber &
Gwyer, 1928), pp. 15–18 for the distinction between ‘natural’ and
‘artificial’ individualism.
71 Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State (Williams & Norgate,
1884), pp. 88–92.
72 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (Williams & Norgate, 1851), pp.
322–3.
73 Spencer, Man versus State, p. 19.
74 Ibid., p. 18.
75 Ibid., pp. 17, 34, 68.
76 Ibid., p. 39.
77 Ibid., p. 34.
78 Ibid., pp. 73–4.
79 N.Soldon, ‘Laissez-faire as dogma: the Liberty and Property Defence
League, 1882–1914’, in Brown, op. cit., p. 210.
80 Bristow, loc. cit., pp. 763–7.
81 Ibid., p. 767.
536
NOTES
82 Ibid., p. 776.
83 Ibid., pp. 776–8; Soldon, loc. cit., p. 218.
84 Soldon, loc. cit., pp. 210–12, 219–21; J.W.Mason, ‘Thomas
Mackay: the anti-socialist philosophy of the Charity Organisation
Society’, and D.J.Ford, ‘W.H.Mallock and Socialism in England,
1880–1918’, in Brown, op. cit., pp. 290f. and 317f.
85 Thomas Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty (John Murray, 1891).
86 Soldon, loc. cit., pp. 222–7; Edward Bristow, ‘Profit-sharing,
socialism and labour unrest’, in Brown, op. cit., pp. 276–9.
87 Spencer, Man versus State, pp. 327, 324n.; Liberty and Property
Defence League, Dangers of Municipal Trading (LDPL, 1899), p.
27, in Offer, op. cit., pp. 234–5.
88 Bristow, ‘The LDPL’, Historical Journal, 1975, p. 785; Offer, op.
cit., pp. 236–8.
89 Soldon, loc. cit., pp. 219, 231.
90 The Times, 3 April 1911.
91 W.H.Mallock, ‘Conservatism and the diffusion of property’,
National Review, 1888, p. 402; Ford, loc. cit., pp. 326–7.
92 Bristow, in Brown, op. cit., pp. 262, 274–5.
93 Soldon, loc. cit., p. 233.
94 Bristow, in Brown, op. cit., p. 289.
95 Parliamentary Debates, 15 February 1912, 5h series, vol. 34, col.
53.
96 Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of
the British System since 1911 (Deutsch, 1980), pp. 58, 61–2.
97 Cf. Colin Crouch, The Politics of Industrial Relations (Fontana,
1982), pp. 212–22.
98 Mason, loc. cit., pp. 300, 307.
99 Lord Salisbury, Speech at Exeter, The Times, 3 February 1892; Offer,
op. cit., p. 354.
100 Parliamentary Debates, 26 January 1886, 3rd series, vol. 302, col.
457; Offer, op. cit., p. 353.
101 Arthur Balfour, Speech at Birmingham, The Times, 23 September
1909; Offer, op. cit., p. 357.
102 Viscount Milner’s Memo, 1913, in ibid., p. 380.
103 F.M.L.Thompson, English Landed Society in the 19th Century
104 Offer, op. cit., p. 361.
106 Ibid., p. 332.
107 Karl Marx, German Ideology (1845–46), in T.B.Bottomore and M.
Rubel (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings on Sociology and Social
Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 94.
109 Sydney Checkland, British Public Policy, 1776–1939 (Cambridge
110 Edwin Chadwick, On the Different Principles of Legislation and
Administration in Europe (1859), in Finer, op. cit., p. 476.
111 Pigou, op.cit., p.229.
537
NOTES
112 D.P.Crook, Benjamin Kidd: Portrait of a Social Darwinist

(Cambridge University Press, 1984); Bernard Semmel, Imperialism
and Social Reform, 1895–1914 (Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp. 31–5;
C.R.Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (Oxford University
Press, 1971).
113 Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (Macmillan, 1894), pp. 163–4,
227–8, 233–7.
114 Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (Black, 1900), pp. 367–8,
and The Ethic of Free Thought (Black, 1901), pp. 325–8, 345–50.
115 Benjamin Kidd, The Science of Power (Methuen, 1918), pp. 73–4.
116 Cf. Semmel, op. cit., p. 58.
117 Sidney Webb, ‘Lord Rosebery’s escape from Houndsditch’,
Nineteenth Century, September 1901.
118 Lord Rosebery, Speech at Chesterfield, 16 December 1901;
MacKenzie, op. cit., p. 287.
119 Ibid., pp. 287–8.
120 Ibid., pp. 290–1.
121 Bentley B.Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great
Britain (Michael Joseph, 1966), p. 450.
122 Henry Pelling, ‘The working class and origins of the welfare state’,
in Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (Macmillan,
1968), p. 18.
123 For splits in the Labour party and TUC over National Insurance see
K.D.Brown, Labour and Unemployment, 1900–14 (David &
Charles, 1971),ch.7.
124 W.L.Blackley, ‘National Insurance: a cheap, practical and popular
means of abolishing poor rates’, Nineteenth Century, vol.4, 1878.
125 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London
(Macmillan, 17 vols, 1889–1903, vol. 1, p. 167.
126 Cf. Brian Simon, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920
(Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), pp. 133–7, 278–85; John Hurt,
Elementary Schooling and the Working Class, 1860–1918
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), ch. 5.
127 Margaret McMillan, The Child and the State (Socialist Library,
1911).
128 Lord Londonderry’s Memo to Cabinet, 10 February 1905; Gilbert,
op. cit., p. 96.
129 Simon, op. cit., pp. 283, 285.
130 Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 72, 88.
131 Simon, op. cit., pp. 136–7, 278–85.
132 Evidence of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons to the
Committee on Physical Deterioration (Chairman: Sir Almeric
FitzRoy), Minutes of Evidence (Cd. 2210, 1904).
133 B.M.Allen, Sir Robert Morant (Macmillan, 1934), pp. 231–4;
Simon, op. cit., pp. 286–7.
134 Violet Markham, Friendship’s Harvest (Max Reinhardt, 1956), pp.
200–1.
135 Gilbert, op. cit., p. 154.
136 Ibid., p. 156.
538
NOTES
137 B.Webb, Our Partnership, pp. 79–81; Simon, op. cit., chs 6 and 7.
138 Allen, op. cit., pp. 145–81.
139 Hartmut Kaelble, Social Mobility in the 19th and 20th Centuries:
Europe and America in Comparative Perspective (Berg, 1985), p.
72.
140 Allen, op. cit., pp. 211–12.
141 Ibid., pp. 255–63.
142 Ibid., pp. 268–86; Sir Henry Bunbury (ed.), Lloyd George’s
Ambulance Wagon: Being the Memoirs of W.J.Braithwaite, 1911–
12 (Methuen, 1957).
143 B.S.Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (Nelson, [1903]), p.
154.
144 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and the Relief of Distress
(Chairman: Lord George Hamilton), Report (Cd. 4499, 1909), vol.
1, pp. 560–5; Minority Report, idem, vol. 3, pp. 686–9.
145 Allen, op. cit., pp. 275–82, 288; Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 297–303, 317,
380–3, 401–13; David Cox, ‘Seven years of National Health
Insurance in England’, Journal of American Medical Association,
vol.76, 1921.
146 Allen, op. cit., p. 284.
147 Cf. Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Clarendon Press,
1977), pp. 136–8, and Unemployment and Politics, 1886–1914
(Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 75–7, 180–2, 260, 263.
148 W.H.Beveridge, Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (Longmans,
1909).
149 W.H.Beveridge, ‘The problem of the unemployed’, paper read to
London School of Economics Sociological Society, April 1906, in
Harris, Beveridge, p. 119.
150 Ibid., pp. 147, 150–5, 169–73, 178–9, 180–5.
151 Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 61–86.
152 W.H.Beveridge, ‘The economics of socialism’, paper read to Oxford
University Social Sciences Club, February 1906, in Harris,
Beveridge, pp. 87–8.
153 B.R.Mitchell and P.Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics
154 Letter from W.S.Churchill to H.G.Wells, 17 November 1902, in
Wells Collection, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
CHAPTER 5 THE CRISIS OF CLASS SOCIETY

1 Cf. Edward H.Hunt, British Labour History, 1815–1914
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), pp. 329–34; Henry Pelling, ‘The
labour unrest, 1911–14’, in Popular Politics and Society in Late
Victorian Britain (Macmillan, 1968).
2 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England
(Constable, 1936).
3 Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of
the British System since 1911 (Deutsch, 1979), pp. 30, 140–1, 178–
9, 209–13.
539
NOTES
4 Cf. Claus Offe, ‘Political authority and class structures’,

International Journal of Sociology, vol. 2, 1972.
5 A.H.Halsey, Trends in British Society Since 1900 (Macmillan,
1972), p. 127.
6 Hunt, op. cit., p. 319.
7 Standish Meacham, ‘“The sense of an impending clash”: English
working-class unrest before the First World War’, American
Historical Review, vol. 77, 1972; E.H.Phelps Brown, The Growth of
Industrial Relations (Macmillan, 1959), pp. 330–1. G.A.Phillips,
‘The triple industrial alliance of 1914’, Economic History Review,
vol. 24, 1971, disagrees.
8 Dangerfield, op. cit., p. 400.
9 Meacham, loc. cit.
10 David Lloyd George, War Memoirs (Odhams, 1938), pp. 1141–2.
11 W.S.Hilton, Foes to Tyranny: A History of the Amalgamated Union of
Building Trade Workers (AUBTW, 1963), pp. 200–9; Frank
Matthews, ‘The building guilds’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds),
Essays in Labour History (Macmillan, 1971), vol.2, pp. 288–90.
12 National Transport Workers’ Federation, Annual General
Conference Report, 1914, p. 32, in Phillips, loc. cit., p. 65.
13 Halsey, op. cit., p. 121–2.
14 Cf. Phelps Brown, op. cit., pp. 332–8; Hunt, op. cit., pp. 329–34.
15 Cf. Joe White, ‘1910–14 reconsidered’, in James E.Cronin and
J.Schneer (eds), Social Conflict and the Political Order in Modern
Britain (Groom Helm, 1982); Richard Price, Masters, Unions and
Men: Work Control in the Building Industry and the Rise of Class
(Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. chs 5–7; Bob Hol ton,
British Syndicalism, 1900–1914: Myths and Realities (Pluto Press,
1976), pp. 20, 198–200.
16 G.R.Askwith, Industrial Problems and Disputes (John Murray,
1920), p. 177.
17 White, loc. cit., pp. 80–1, 92; Phelps Brown, op. cit., p. 321.
18 Phelps Brown, op. cit., pp. 322–3; Askwith, op. cit., p. 150.
19 Phelps Brown, op. cit., p. 323.
20 Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900–21:
The Origins of British Communism (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969),
chs 1 and 2.
21 Phelps Brown, op. cit., p. xxxiv; Hunt, op. cit., p. 285.
22 H.A.Turner, Trade Union Growth and Structure: A Comparative
Study of the Cotton Unions (Allen & Unwin, 1962), pp. 357, 374–
5; G.D.H.Cole, Labour in the Coal-Mining Industry 1914–21
(Clarendon Press, 1923), pp. 13–14.
23 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy (Longmans,
1902), p. 842.
24 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (Longmans, 1926), p. 376.
25 Webb, Industrial Democracy, p. 846.
26 Ibid., pp. 843–4.
27 Beatrice Webb, Diaries, 1912–24 (ed. Margaret Cole; Longmans,
1952), p. 146.
540
NOTES
28 Sir Arthur Clay, Syndicalism and Labour (John Murray, 1911), pp.
vi, 172–3.
29 Independent Labour Party, Conference Report, 1914, pp. 114–16,
in Briggs and Saville, op. cit., p. 7.
30 Robert Williams, The New Labour Outlook (Leonard Parsons,
1921), pp. 139, 192; Phillip S.Bagwell, ‘The triple industrial
alliance, 1913–22’, in Briggs and Saville, op. cit., p. 103.
31 Middlemas, op. cit., pp. 57–60, 66.
32 Phelps Brown, op. cit., pp. 341–2.
33 Middlemas, op. cit., p. 61.
34 Master of Elibank (Liberal Chief Whip) to the King, 18 August
1911, in ibid., p. 61.
35 Phelps Brown, op. cit., p. 328.
36 William Ashley, ‘Profit-sharing’, Quarterly Review, 1913, in
Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, 1895–1914 (Allen
& Unwin, 1960), p. 214.
37 William Ashley, The Economic Organization of England
(Longmans, 1914; 1949 edn), pp. 190–1.
38 Askwith, op. cit., p. 356 (my emphasis).
39 William Stewart, J.Keir Hardie (Independent Labour Party, 1925),
pp. 359–60.
40 Christopher Addison, Four and a Half Years: A Personal Diary,
1914–19 (Hutchinson, 1934), vol. 1, p. 85.
41 Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World
War (Bodley Head, 1965), pp. 157–63, 169–79, 248–50.
42 Ibid., pp. 57, 84, 205.
43 War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, The Workers and
the War [August 1914], and Labour Party, Annual Reports.
44 Federation of British Industries, The Elements of Reconstruction
(FBI, 1916), p. 38.
45 Parliamentary Debates, 16 November 1916, 5th series, vol. 87, col.
1107.
46 Official History of the Ministry of Munitions (HMSO, 1918–22),
vol. 1, part 1, pp. 58–9.
47 Marwick, op. cit., p. 252.
48 Ibid., pp. 201–2; Middlemas, op. cit., pp. 113–14; P.K.Cline, ‘Eric
Geddes and “the experiment” with business men in government,
1915–22’, in K.D.Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History
(Macmillan, 1974).
49 Lord Salter, Memoirs of a Public Servant (Oxford University Press,
1921; 1960 edn), p. 87.
50 According to the MacDonnell Commission on the Civil Service (4th
Report, pp 1914, XVI, p. 44) there were only 450 administrative
class civil servants in 1914 out of a total non-industrial staff of
282,420. If they had increased in proportion to the rest there would
have been about 600 out of 380,963 in 1920.
51 Bulletin of Federation of British Industries, 12 October 1918.
52 Report of War Cabinet for 1918 (Cmd. 325, 1919), pp. 214–15.
53 Conservatives, alone or in Conservative-dominated coalitions, were
541
NOTES
in power for fifty of the next seventy years (71 per cent of the time),
Labour for only twenty-five years, ten of which were in minority or
coalition governments.
54 Stanislaw Andrzejewski, Military Organization and Society
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954).
55 A.J.P.Taylor, English History, 1914–45 (Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 120.
56 Richard M.Titmuss, Essays on ‘The Welfare State’ (Allen & Unwin,
1958), p. 86.
57 Philip Abrams, ‘The failure of social reform, 1918–20’, Past and
Present, no. 24, April 1963.
58 The standard rate of income tax before the First World War was 1s.
2d. in the £; between the wars it ranged between 4s. and 6s., usually
around 4s. 6d.—B.R.Mitchell and P.Deane, Abstract of British
Historical Statistics (Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 429.
59 Parliamentary Debates, 11 February 1919, 5th series, vol. 112, col.
49–50.
60 Lloyd George to Ben Tillett, 25 August 1914, in J.Schneer, ‘The war,
the state and the workplace: British dockers during 1914–18’, in
Cronin and Schneer, op. cit., p. 101.
61 Royden Harrison, ‘The War Emergency Workers’ National
Committee, 1914–18’, in Briggs and Saville, op. cit., p. 219.
62 Keith Middlemas, The Clydesiders: A Left-Wing Struggle for
Parliamentary Power (Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 73–4; James Hinton,
‘The Clyde Workers’ Committee and the dilution struggle’, in Briggs
and Saville, op. cit.; Kendall, op. cit., ch. 7.
63 Hinton, loc.cit., pp. 155–6, 165–6.
64 Ibid., p. 167.
65 The Worker, 29 January 1916, in Marwick, op. cit., p. 73.
66 Kendall, op. cit., p. 116.
67 Hinton, loc. cit., pp. 173–8; Kendall, op. cit., pp. 122–5; Marwick,
op. cit., pp. 173–6.
68 Hinton, loc.cit., pp. 181–3; Kendall, op.cit., 125–8, 136–8;
Christopher Addison, Politics from Within, 1911–18 (Jenkins,
1924), pp. 191–2.
69 Hinton, loc. cit., p. 163 (‘one of the hoariest legends about the CWC
is that it led the Rent Strike of the autumn of 1915’, based on the
false claim of William Gallacher, Revolt on the Clyde (Lawrence &
Wishart, 1936), pp. 54–5); Joseph Melling, Rent Strikes: People’s
Struggle for Housing in West Scotland, 1890–1916 (Polygon Books,
1983), ch. 7.
70 Matthew B.Hammond, British Labour Conditions and Legislation
During the War (Oxford University Press, 1919), pp. 321–4.
71 Askwith, op. cit., p. 395.
72 Thomas Bell, Pioneering Days (Lawrence & Wishart, 1941), pp.
119–28; Kendall, op. cit., ch. 8.
73 Cf. Marwick, op. cit., p. 84; Middlemas, op. cit., p. 87.
74 Kendall, op. cit., pp. 152–6.
75 John T.Murphy, Preparing for Power: A Critical History of the
British Working-Class Movement (Cape, 1934), pp. 145–6.
542
NOTES

77 John T.Murphy, New Horizons (John Lane, 1941), p. 61.
78 Murphy, Preparing for Power, pp. 152–4; T.Bell, op. cit, pp. 149–
51, 302–3; Kendall, op. cit., pp. 164–5.
79 Solidarity (organ of London Shop Stewards’ Committee), February
1918, in Kendall, op. cit., p. 168.
80 Sir Basil Thomson, The Scene Changes (Collins, 1939), p. 410.
81 Manchester District Armaments Committee, December 1918, in
Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society, p. 112.
82 FBI, op. cit., pp. 47–8; Engineering Employers’ Confederation,
Workshop Committees (EEF, 1917), in Middlemas, op. cit., pp. 112,
225.
83 War Workers’ Emergency National Committee [August 1914];
Harrison, loc. cit., pp. 212–25, 227–8.
84 WWENC, Why Pay More Rent? (leaflet, 1915); ibid., pp. 233, 250–
1, 253–9.
85 Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society, pp. 123, 134.
86 Master of Elibank to George V, 18 August 1918, in ibid., p. 61.
87 Ibid., p. 82.
88 Industrial Unrest Commission, Report, and G.N.Barnes’s Summary
(Cd. 8662, 8663, 1913).
89 Middlemas, op. cit., pp. 137–8, 143–4.
90 Report of War Cabinet for 1917 (Cd. 9005, 1918), p. xix.
91 Taylor, op. cit., pp. 128–9.
92 A.Gleason, What the Workers Want: A Study of British Labour
(Allen & Unwin, 1920); Middlemas, op. cit., pp. 118, 128.
93 Halsey, op. cit., p. 123; David E.Butler and Jennie Freeman, British
Political Facts (Macmillan, 1968), p. 141.
94 Labour Party Constitution (1918); Labour and the New Social
Order (1918).
95 David Lloyd George, final campaign speech, The Times, 14
December 1918.
96 Kendall, op. cit., ch. 10.
97 Cf. notes 7, 11, 15, 20 and 30, above.
98 Bulletin of the FBI, 12 October 1918, 16 January 1919; Marwick,
op. cit., pp. 254, 279.
99 Engineering Employers’ Confederation, Brief; Middlemas, op. cit.,
p. 147.
100 Cabinet papers, 2 January 1918, in ibid., p. 119.
101 Hinton, ‘Clyde Workers’ Committee’, loc. cit., Kendall, op. cit., chs
7, 8 and 14.
103 Middlemas, op, cit., p. 132.
104 Ibid., chs 5 and 6.
105 Gallacher, op. cit., pp. 217–42; David Kirkwood, My Life of Revolt
(Harrap, 1935), pp. 171–4; Annual Register, 1919, pp. 9–10.
106 The Worker, 28 December 1918, in Kendall, op. cit., p. 364, n. 205.
107 Royal Commission on the Coal industry (Chairman: Sir John
543
NOTES
Sankey), Reports I–III (Cmd. 359–61, 1919); Cole, Labour in the

Coal Mining Industry, chs 5 and 6; Mowat, op. cit., pp. 30–6.
108 W.S.Churchill, The Aftermath (Scribner, 1929), pp. 40–5; S.R.
Graubard, ‘Military demobilization in Great Britain following the
First World War’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 19, 1947; Annual
Register, 1919, pp. 5–6, 11.
109 G.D.H.Cole, History of the Labour Party from 1914 (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. 103–7; G.A.Hutt, Post-War History of the
British Working Class (Gollancz, 1937), pp. 33–40; Mowat, op. cit.,
pp. 41–2.
110 Bagwell, loc. cit., pp. 106–8.
111 Ibid., pp. 109–10.
112 J.C.C.Davidson, Memoirs of a Conservative, 1910–37 (ed. Robert
Rhodes James; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), pp. 178, 228–34.
113 Bagwell, loc. cit., pp. 114, 117.
114 Ibid., pp. 117–25; Mowat, op. cit., pp. 119–24.
115 G.A.Phillips, The General Strike (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976),
chs 6–11; Alastair Reid and Steven Tolliday, ‘The General Strike,
1926’, Historical Journal, vol. 20, 1977, and works there critically
reviewed.
116 Rodney Lowe, ‘The erosion of state intervention in Britain, 1917–
24’, Economic History Review, vol. 31, 1978.
117 Middlemas, op. cit., pp. 137–41; Mowat, op. cit., pp. 37–8.
118 Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society
119 Parliamentary Debates, 13 May 1926, 5th series, vol. 195, col.
1048.
120 Middlemas, op. cit., p. 191; Mowat, op. cit., p. 336; Phillips,
General Strike, pp. 277–9.
121 W.Milne-Bailey, The Industrial Parliament Project (TUC, 1926), p.
8.
122 G.W.MacDonald and H.F.Gospel, ‘The Mond-Turner Talks, 1927–
32’, Historical Journal, vol. 16, 1973; Phillips, General Strike, pp.
289–93.
CHAPTER 6 A HALFWAY HOUSE: SOCIETY IN WAR AND

PEACE
1 Derek H.Aldcroft, The Inter-War Economy, 1919–39 (Batsford,
1970), p. 246.
2 Ibid., p. 80.
3 Ibid., pp. 20, 26–7, 364.
War (Bodley Head, 1965), p. 290.
5 A.J.P.Taylor, England, 1914–45 (Oxford University Press, 1965), p.
124.
6 Alan T.Peacock and John Wiseman, The Growth of Public
Expenditure in the United Kingdom (Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. 166.
544
NOTES
7 A.H.Imlah, ‘British balance of payments and export of capital’,

8 Taylor, op. cit., p. 123.
10 Sidney Pollard, The Development of the British Economy, 1914–50
(Arnold, 1962), p. 44.
11 Joel Hurstfield, ‘The control of British raw material supplies, 1919–
39’, Economic History Review, vol. 14, 1944, p. 2.
12 Marwick, op. cit., pp. 167–9, 178, 192–3, 250.
13 Royal Commission on Coal Industry, Report No. 1 (Cmd. 359,
1919), pp. vii–xxiii.
14 J.M.Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (Hogarth Press, 1926), p. 35.
15 C.L.Mowat, Britain Between the Wars (Methuen, 1955), p. 7.
16 R.H.Tawney, ‘The abolition of economic controls, 1918–21’,
Economic History Review, vol. 13, 1943; Rodney Lowe, ‘The
erosion of state intervention in Britain, 1917–24’, Economic History
Review, vol. 31, 1978.
17 Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum (Manchester University Press,
1971), p. 149.
18 Ibid., p. 160.
19 Aldcroft, op. cit., p.363.
20 Quoted in John Stevenson, British Society, 1914–45 (Penguin,
1984), p. 82.
21 A.L.Bowley and Margaret Hogg, Has Poverty Diminished? (King,
1925), p. 20.
22 Hubert Llewellyn Smith, The New Survey of London Life and
Labour (London School of Economics, 1930–35); B.S.Rowntree,
Poverty and Progress: A Second Social Survey of York (Longmans,
1941); H.Tout, The Standard of Living in Bristol (Bristol University
Press, 1938).
23 A.L.Bowley and J.Stamp, The National Income, 1924 (Oxford
24 Stevenson, op. cit., p. 92.
25 Philip Abrams, ‘The failure of social reform, 1918–20’, Past and
Present, no. 24, 1963, p. 61.
26 Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s
Movement in Britain (Bell, 1928), pp. 337–43.
27 Abrams, loc. cit., p. 60.
28 R.Roberts, op.cit., pp. 161–2.
29 Marwick, op. cit., pp. 91–2.
30 New Statesman, 23 June 1917; Marwick, op. cit., p. 94.
31 Anthony J.Coles, ‘The moral economy of the crowd: some 20th
century food riots’ (unpublished paper, University of Lancaster,
1974); Joseph Melling, Rent Strikes: The People’s Struggle for
Housing in West Scotland, 1890–1916 (Polygon Books, 1983).
32 A.M.Carr-Saunders and D.C.Jones, A Survey of Social Conditions in
England and Wales (Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 25; the average
number of children of (presumably skilled or semi-skilled) manual
545
NOTES
workers went down from 4 to 2.7, of agricultural workers from 3.9

to 2.7, and of labourers from 4.5 to 3.4, representing a rise in living
standards (counting two parents per family) of 22, 20 and 20 per
cent respectively.
33 Ibid., p. 25.
34 Royal Commission on Population, Report (Cmd. 7695, 1949); Richard
A.Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Problem in England
1877–1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 212.
35 Diana Gittins, ‘Women’s work and family size between the wars’,
Oral History, vol. 5, 1977, and Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure,
1900–39 (Hutchinson, 1982), esp. ch. 6.
36 Doris M.Stenton, The English Woman in History (Allen & Unwin,
1957), ch. 1.
37 Marwick, op. cit., p. 107; A.H.Halsey, Trends in British Society
Since 1900 (Macmillan, 1972), p. 51.
38 Strachey, op. cit., p. 392.
39 Parliamentary Debates, 13 March 1918, 5th series, vol. 97, cols
795–6; Marwick, op. cit., p. 244.
41 Parliamentary Debates, 26 February 1919, 5th series, vol. 112, col.
1829–30.
42 Marwick, op. cit., p. 244.
43 B.A.Waites, ‘The effect of the First World War on class and status in
England, 1910–20’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 11,
1976, p. 30.
44 Ibid., p. 30.
45 Alan D.Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain (Longmans,
1980), pp. 76–7.
46 Rowntree, op. cit., pp. 417–20.
47 E.T[ownshend]., ed., Keeling’s Letters and Reminiscences (Allen &
Unwin, 1918), p. 238; Marwick, op. cit., p. 218.
49 Robert Currie, Alan D.Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and
Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since
1700 (Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 1.
50 Halsey, op. cit., p. 528; F.H.McClintock and N.H.Avison, Crime in
England and Wales (Heinemann, 1968), p. 23.
51 Peter H.Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, ‘Revising England’s social
tables, 1688–1867’, Dept of Economics, Working Paper Series no.
176, University of California, Davis, 1981 (kindly supplied by the
authors), pp. 33–4.
52 Lee Soltow, ‘Long-run changes in British economic inequality’,
53 Peter H.Lindert, forthcoming book on the distribution of private
wealth in England since 1760, quoted in W.D.Rubinstein, Wealth
and Inequality in Britain (Faber, 1986), p. 95.
54 Royal Commission on Distribution of Income and Wealth
(Chairman: Lord Diamond), Report No. 1 (Cmnd. 6171, 1975), p.
97.
546
NOTES
55 Ibid., p. 92.
56 A.B.Atkinson, Wealth, Income and Inequality (Penguin, 1973), p. 23.
57 George Polanyi and John B.Wood, How Much Inequality? (Institute
of Economic Affairs, 1974), pp. 76–7.
58 Rubinstein, Wealth and Inequality, pp. 145–6.
59 Bowley and Stamp, op. cit., p. 160.
60 Peacock and Wiseman, op. cit., pp. 82, 86, 92.
61 John Hilton, Rich Man, Poor Man (Allen & Unwin, 1944), pp. 39–
41.
62 Sidney Pollard and D.W.Crossley, The Wealth of Britain (Batsford,
1968), p. 263.
63 T.H.Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge University
Press, 1950), reprinted in Class, Citizenship and Social Development
(ed. S.M.Lipset; Doubleday, 1964), p. 116.
64 Hartmut Kaelble, Social Mobility in the 19th and 20th Centuries:
Europe and America in Comparative Perspective (Berg, 1985), pp.
72, 76.
65 David V.Glass (ed.), Social Mobility in Britain (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1954); A.H.Halsey et al., Origins and Destinations: Family,
Class and Education in Modem Britain (Clarendon Press, 1980);
John H.Goldthorpe et al., Social Mobility and Class Structure in
Modern Britain (Clarendon Press, 1980).
66 Glass, op. cit., pp. 98, 106, 107.
67 Ibid., pp.114, 120–1.
68 Ibid., pp. 114, 120–1, 122–3.
69 R.K.Kelsall, in ibid., p. 317.
70 Ibid., pp. 183, 186–7.
71 Harold Perkin, Economic Worth of Elites (SSRC report, 1977),
tables 3.1–6, 5.1–6, 7.1–6, 7.2.1–6, 7.8.1–6.
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 329–32; The Times, 19 May
1920; C.F.G.Masterman, England After the War (Hodder &
Stoughton, 1922), p. 32; W.L.Guttsman, The English Ruling Class
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), pp. 121–6.
73 F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., pp. 333, 337.
74 6th Duke of Portland, Men, Women and Things (Faber, 1937), pp.
1–3.
76 Scott Committee on Land Utilisation in Rural Areas, Report
(HMSO, Ministry of Works, 1942).
77 David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the
Towns, 1774–1967 (Leicester University Press, 1980), pp. 420–2.
78 Perkin, Economic Worth of Elites, tables 5.7–15, 10.7–15; W.D.
Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the
Industrial Revolution (Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 60, 62–3, 228.
79 W.L.Guttsman, The British Political Elite (MacGibbon & Kee,
1963), pp.95, 77n.
80 Ibid., pp. 105, 107.
81 Charles H.Wilson, History of Unilever (Cassell, 1968), vol. 1, p. 297;
547
NOTES
P.W.S.Andrews and Elizabeth Brunner, Life of Lord Nuffield

(Blackwell, 1953), pp. 182–3; W.J.Reader, Imperial Chemical
Industries: A History (Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. 2, p. 133.
82 Rubinstein, Men of Property, p. 185; Leslie Hannah, The Rise of the
Corporate Economy (Methuen, 1976), p. 121.
83 W.D.Rubinstein, ‘Wealth, elites and the class structure of modern
Britain’, Past and Present, no. 76, 1977 and Men of Property.
84 Deane and Cole, op. cit., pp. 142, 147.
85 Contrast Peter Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England, 1700–
1830 (Cambridge University Press, 1959).
86 Recalculated from Rubinstein, Men of Property, tables 3.3 and 3.6.
87 T.H.J.Bishop and R.Wilkinson, Winchester and the Public School
Elite (Faber, 1967), pp. 98–101.
88 W.D.Rubinstein, ‘Education and the social origins of British elites,
1880–1970’, Past and Present, no. 112, 1986, pp. 168–9.
89 Cf. Perkin, Economic Worth of Elites, (SSRC report, 1977), ‘The
recruitment of elites in British society since 1880’, Journal of Social
History, vol. 12, 1978, and Essays in English Social History
(Harvester and Barnes & Noble, 1981), ch. 9; and Rubinstein,
‘Wealth, elites and class structure’, loc. cit., Men of Property, ‘The end
of “Old Corruption” in Britain, 1760–1850’, Past and Present, no.
101, 1983, Wealth and Inequality, and ‘Education and social origins’,
loc. cit. See also Hartmut Kaelble, Historical Research on Social
Mobility (Columbia University Press, 1981) and Social Mobility in the
19th and 20th Centuries (Berg, 1985) where the British data were
privately supplied by Perkin from the 1977 SSRC report.
90 Rubinstein, ‘Education and social origins’, loc. cit., pp. 175–7.
91 Harold E.Dale, The Higher Civil Service of Great Britain (Oxford
University Press, 1944), p. 69; Rubinstein, ‘Education and social
origins’, loc. cit., p. 185.
92 Ibid., p. 182.
93 Contrary to popular opinion that death duties are easily and
frequently avoided and therefore tend to reduce the wealth
measured by the probate returns, the amounts left by the really rich
elites (landowners and millionaires) have not declined as much as
expected if large-scale evasion were in operation; and the probate
returns of most members of the other elites were not sufficiently
large to attract high enough rates to be worth evading; cf. Perkin,
Economic Worth of Elites, esp. tables 4.10.15, 10.10.15.
94 William Watson, ‘Spiralism’, in Max Gluckman (ed.), Closed
Systems and Open Minds (Oliver & Boyd, 1962); cf. A.H.Birch,
Small Town Politics (Oxford University Press, 1959), esp. ch. 2,
‘The development of modern Glossop’.
95 J.B.Priestley, English Journey (Heinemann, 1934), pp. 300–1.
96 Royal Commission on Distribution of Income and Wealth (Chairman:
Lord Diamond), Report No. 7 (Cmnd. 7595, 1979), p. 150; Marian
Bowley, Housing and the State (Allen & Unwin, 1945), p. 271.
97 Goldthorpe et al., op. cit., pp. 60, 251: the reference is to the 1940s-
70s, but the same principle applies to earlier decades.
548
NOTES
98 Goldthorpe et al., op. cit., p. 60, table 2.3; Guy Routh, Occupation
and Pay in Great Britain, 1906–60 (Cambridge University Press,
1965), p. 4.
99 Aldcroft, op. cit., pp. 352, 357; Routh, op. cit., pp. 4, 64–5, 70–1,
78, 104, 107.
100 Ibid., pp. 65, 70.
101 Ibid., pp. 147–54; cf. Elliott Jacques, ‘An objective approach to pay
differentials’, New Scientist, 3 July 1958; Michael Fogarty, The Just
Wage (Geoffrey Chapman, 1961), pp. 11–20.
102 Goldthorpe et al., op. cit., p. 60; Routh, op. cit., p. 5.
103 Industrial Society, Status and Benefits in Industry (IS 1966), p. c.
104 Alan Fox, Beyond Contract: Work, Power and Trust Relations
(Faber & Faber, 1974).
105 F.D.Klingender, The Condition of Clerical Labour in Britain (Martin
Lawrence, 1935), p. 61.
106 Clive Jenkins and Barrie Sherman, White-Collar Unionism: The
Rebellious Salariat (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 29.
107 George Tomlinson, Coal Miner (Hutchinson, 1937), p. 10; George
Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Gollancz, 1937); Arthur Marwick,
Class: Image and Reality in Britain, France and the USA Since 1930
(Fontana, 1981), pp. 91–2.
108 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Penguin, 1958), pp. 72–3.
109 Tomlinson, op. cit., Marwick, Class, p. 85.
110 H.L.Beales and R.S.Lambert, Memoirs of the Unemployed
(Gollancz, 1934); Marwick, Class, p. 81.
111 Aldcroft, op. cit., p. 80.
112 David Lockwood, ‘The new working class in Europe’, European
Journal of Sociology, vol. 1, 1960.
113 C.Chisholm (ed.), Marketing Survey of the UK (Business
Publications, 1937); James E.Cronin, Labour and Society in Britain,
1918–79 (Batsford, 1984), p. 89.
114 Aldcroft, op. cit., pp. 359, 364.
115 Assuming 3.7 persons per household; Aldcroft, op. cit., p. 371.
116 Ibid., pp. 357, 372–3; Pollard and Crossley, op. cit., p. 263.
117 Aldcroft, op. cit., p. 367; the Ministry of Labour’s family budget
inquiries suggested a 60–70 per cent increase in average real income
in cash and kind, 1913–38.
118 Bowley and Hogg, op. cit., pp. 16–17.
119 Llewellyn Smith, op. cit.; Tout, op. cit.; Rowntree, Poverty and
Progress.
120 B.S.Rowntree, The Human Needs of Labour (Longmans, 1937),
and Poverty and Progress, pp. 456–7.
121 Brian Abel Smith and Peter Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest
(Bell, 1965); Peter Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom
(Penguin, 1979).
122 Sir John Boyd Orr, Food, Health and Income (Macmillan, 1936),
and Sir John Boyd Orr and David Lubbock, Feeding the People in
Wartime (Macmillan, 1940), p. 1.
123 Ministry of Health, Report on Overcrowding in England and Wales
549
NOTES
(HMSO, 1936); Political & Economic Planning, British Health

Services (PEP, 1937), pp. 35–6.
124 G.C.M.M’Gonigle and J.Kirby, Poverty and Public Health
(Gollancz, 1937).
125 Mary Spring Rice, Working Class Wives (Penguin, 1939), pp. 28,
37–40, 155, 188.
126 Richard M.Titmuss, Birth, Poverty and Wealth (Hamilton, 1943), p.
31.
127 Halsey, op. cit., p. 339.
129 Compare, for example, two photographs of boys at the same school
in East London in 1894 and 1924 in E.H.Phelps Brown, The Growth
of British Industrial Relations (Macmillan, 1959), facing p. 42.
130 Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, p. 363–4.
132 Mass Observation, The Pub and the People (MO, 1943), p. 334.
133 Richard Stone and D.A.Rowe, The Measurement of Consumers’
Expenditure and Behaviour in the United Kingdom, 1920–38
(Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 80–1, 91; James Walvin,
The People’s Game (Allen Lane, 1975), p. 119.
134 Halsey, op. cit., pp. 120, 564–5; Harold Perkin, The Age of the
Automobile (Quartet, 1976), pp. 136–7.
135 J.A.R.Pimlott, The Englishman’s Holiday (Faber, 1947; Harvester,
1976), pp. 214–22.
136 Halsey, op. cit., p. 299; Stone and Rowe, op. cit., pp. 17, 21, 25.
137 Hoggart, op. cit.; Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and
Kinship in East London (Penguin, 1957).
138 Cronin, op. cit., p. 71.
139 Rice, op. cit., p. 17.
140 Terence Young, Becontree and Dagenham (Becontree Social Survey
Committee, 1934).
141 Ruth Durant, Watling: A Survey of Social Life on a New Housing
Estate (King, 1939), p. 253.
142 Mass Observation, People’s Homes (MO, 1943).
CHAPTER 7 TOWARDS A CORPORATE SOCIETY

1 Ray Pahl and John Winkler, ‘The coming corporatism’, New Society,
9 October 1974; Colin Crouch, The Politics of Industrial Relations
(Penguin, 1979), pp. 188–96. Cf. also Benito Mussolini, Speeches
on the Corporate State (Vallecchi, 1936).
2 Philippe Schmitter, ‘Still the century of corporatism?’, Review of
Politics, vol. 36, 1974, reprinted in P.Schmitter and G.Lembroke
(eds), Trends Towards Corporatist Intermediation (Sage, 1979).
3 Colin Crouch, ‘Research on corporatism in Britain: an interim
report’, Discussion Paper at the Conference on Organizational
Participation and Public Policy, Princeton University, September
1981.
4 Pahl and Winkler, loc. cit.
550
NOTES
5 Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society: The British

Experience Since 1911 (Deutsch, 1979), ch. 13.
1880 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 29.
7 Evan Davis and Andrew Dilnot, The Institute of Fiscal Studies Tax
and Benefit Mode (IFS Working Paper no. 58, 1985), reported in the
Guardian, 18 July 1985: between fiscal years 1978/9 and 1985/6
personal taxation, including both direct and indirect taxes, increased
such that only the richest 6 per cent of taxpayers paid less while the
lowest 87 per cent suffered an up to 5 per cent loss of real income.
8 Cf. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 107–24.
9 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist
Party (1848; reprinted in Marx and Engels: Collected Works,
Lawrence & Wishart, 1975– ), vol. 6, p. 489.
10 Alfred Marshall, Industry and Trade: A Study of Industrial
Technique and Business Organization (Macmillan, 1920), pp. 315–
16; he added: ‘except in so far as it was closed by tarif [sic] barriers’.
So far ‘no firm ever had a sufficiently long life of unabated energy
and power of initiative for the purpose,’ but ‘a large joint stock
company has special advantages, which do not materially dwindle
with age.’
1976), p. 13.
12 Ibid., table A2, p. 216.
13 Ibid., tables 8.1, 8.2 and A5, pp. 118–21 and 225.
14 Leslie Hannah and J.A.Kay, Concentration in British Industry
(Macmillan, 1977), pp. 85, 96 and table 6.2, pp. 89–91.
15 Observer, 20 July 1985.
16 S.J.Prais, The Evolution of Giant Firms: A Study of the Growth of
Concentration in Manufacturing Industry in Britain, 1909–70
(Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 10, 13.
17 Derek F.Channon, ‘Corporate evolution in the service industries’, in
Leslie Hannah (ed.), Management Strategy and Business
Development (Macmillan, 1976).
18 Charles Wilson, The History of Unilever (Cassell, 1954), vol. 1, pp.
73–88; W.J.Reader, Imperial Chemical Industries: A History
(Oxford University Press, 1970), vol. 1, ch. 19 and cartoon facing p.
449.
19 Reader, op. cit., vol. 1, esp. pp. 208–11 and ch. 19.
20 Liberal Industrial Inquiry, Britain’s Industrial Future (Liberal Party,
1928), p. 100; Adolf A.Berle, Jr and Gardner C.Means, The Modern
Corporation and Private Property (Macmillan, 1932), p. 4;
A.A.Berle, Jr, The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (Harcourt,
Brace, 1954), p. 39.
21 Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth
(Chairman: Lord Diamond), Report No. 1 (Cmnd. 6171, 1975), p.
97; Balfour Committee on Industry and Trade, Factors in Industrial
and Commercial Efficiency (HMSO, 1927), p. 128.
22 Graham Bannock, The Juggernauts (Penguin, 1973), p. 5.
551
NOTES
23 The Sunday Times, 10 January 1982.

War (Bodley Head, 1965), pp. 192–93, 201; W.J.Reader, Architect
of Air Power: The Life of Viscount Weir (Collins, 1968), ch. 2.
25 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace
(Macmillan, 1919), and Collected Writings (Macmillan, 1971),
vol.2, p. 150.
26 Hannah, Corporate Economy, p. 33.
27 Ibid., p. 36.
28 Lyndall Urwick, ‘The pure theory of organization with special
reference to business enterprise’ (British Association typescript,
1930), p. 10, quoted in John Child, British Management Thought
(Allen & Unwin, 1969).
29 The Economist, 9 February 1924, quoted in Hannah, Corporate
Economy, p. 45.
30 Arthur E.Cutforth, Methods of Amalgamation and the Valuation of
Businesses for Amalgamation and Other Purposes (Bell, 1926), p.
17.
31 P.Sargant Florence, ‘Problems of Rationalization’, Economic
Journal, vol. 40, 1930, p. 365.
32 Derek F.Channon, The Strategy and Structure of British Enterprise
(Macmillan, 1973), ch. 9.
33 Ibid., p. 239.
34 Ibid., pp. 64, 67.
35 John H.Dunning, The Role of American Investment in the British
Economy (Political & Economic Planning, 1969), pp. 135–6.
36 Robert Heller, ‘Britain’s top directors’ and ‘Britain’s boardroom
anatomy’, Management Today, March 1967, pp. 62–5, and
September 1970, pp. 82–5.
37 Martin J.Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial
1880–1970, Report to the Social Science Research Council, 1977
(deposited in the British Library Lending Division, Boston Spa),
tables 5.13, 5.14, 7.13, 7.14.
39 Child, op. cit., p. 40.
40 Edward Cadbury, Experiment in Industrial Organization
(Longmans, 1912), p. xvii.
41 John Lee, Management: A Study of Industrial Organization
(Pitman, 1921), in Child, op. cit., pp. 59–63.
42 John Lee, The Social Implications of Christianity (Student Christian
Movement, 1922), pp. 114–15.
43 Child, op. cit., pp. 72–3, 80–3.
44 Ibid., pp. 88–97.
45 Note also the many other management professional bodies emerging
at this time: the Sales Managers’ Association, the Office Managers’
Association, the Institute of Cost Accountants, etc.; cf. Geoffrey
Millerson, The Qualifying Professions (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1964), pp. 246–54.
552
NOTES
46 Child, op. cit., pp. 113–14.

47 Tom Lupton, Management and the Social Sciences (Penguin, 1972), p. 9.
48 C.A.R.Crosland, ‘The transition to socialism’, in R.H.S. Crossman
(ed.), New Fabian Essays (Turnstile Press, 1953), p. 42; Labour
Party, Industry and Society (Labour Party, 1957), p. 16.
49 Quoted by David Lockwood, The Black Coated Worker (Allen &
Unwin, 1958), p. 40.
50 Alice Russell, ‘The quest for security: the changing working
conditions and status of the British working class in the twentieth
century’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Lancaster, 1982)—
to which much of this section is indebted—p. 52. For holidays with
pay generally, see ch. 2; also J.A.R.Pimlott, The Englishman’s
Holiday (Faber, 1947; Harvester, 1976), chs 8 and 13; Departmental
Committee on Holidays with Pay (Chairman: Lord Amulree),
Report (Cmd. 5724, 1938) and G.C.Cameron, The growth of
holidays with pay in Britain’, in Graham L.Reid and Donald J.
Robertson (eds), Fringe Benefits, Labour Costs and Social Security
(Allen & Unwin, 1965).
51 Russell, op. cit., pp. 71, 84, 96; Pimlott, op. cit., p. 221.
52 Social Trends, 1986, p. 71.
53 Russell, op. cit., pp. 155, 184, 210–11, 235. For occupational
pensions generally, see ch. 3, and Committee of Inquiry into the
Economic and Financial Problems of the Provision for Old Age
(Chairman: Sir Thomas Phillips), Report (Cmd. 9333, 1954); A
Group of Trade Unionists, Plan for Industrial Pensions (Fabian
Society, 1956); Government Actuary, Occupational Pension
Schemes: A Survey (HMSO, 1958) and his Second to Fifth Surveys
(HMSO, 1966, 1968, 1972 and 1975); Jack Wiseman,
‘Occupational pension schemes’, in Reid and Robertson, op. cit.;
British Institute of Management, Pensions Today: A Survey of
Current Practice (BIM, 1972); The Industrial Society, Employee
Involvement in Occupational Pension Schemes: Survey and Report
(Industrial Society, 1975); K.Kekelm, A.E.G.Round and T.G.Arthur,
Hoskings’ Pension Schemes and Retirement Benefits (Sweet &
Maxwell, 4th edn, 1977); and H.Lucas, Pensions and Industrial
Relations: A Practical Guide (Pergamon, 1977).
54 Cf. inter alia Trades Union Congress, Conference Report, 1975 and
Occupational Pension Schemes: A TUC Guide (TUC, 1971).
55 Stanley D.Chapman, The Early Factory Masters (David & Charles,
1967), p. 161; Eric Roll, An Early Experiment in Industrial
Organization: Boulton and Watt, 1775–1805 (Longmans, 1930), p.
225; Parliamentary Debates, 28 May 1816. For sick pay schemes
generally, see Russell, op. cit., ch. 4; The Industrial Welfare Society,
Works Sickness and Benevolent Schemes (IWS, 1934), Employee
Benefit Schemes (IWS, 1949), and Sick Pay Schemes and Benevolent
Schemes Among Hourly Paid Employees (IWS, 1957); Institute of
Personnel Management, Company Sick Pay Schemes (IPM, 1959)
and Sick Pay Schemes (IPM, 1971); Ministry of Labour, Sick Pay
Schemes (HMSO, 1964).
553
NOTES
56 Ministry of Labour, Sick Pay Schemes, p. 7; Russell, op. cit., pp.305,

319.
57 Russell, op. cit., pp. 355–73; Geoffrey Goodman, Redundancy in
the Affluent Society (Fabian Society, 1962), pp. 15–20. For security
of earnings and employment generally, see Russell, op. cit., ch. 5;
Goodman, op. cit.; Acton Society Trust, Redundancy: A Survey of
Problems and Practice (AST, 1958); Ministry of Labour, Security
and Change (HMSO, 1961); Donald J.Robertson, ‘Redundancy in
Great Britain’, in Reid and Robertson, op. cit.; Cyril Grunfield, The
Law of Redundancy (Sweet & Maxwell, 1971); S.R.Parker, et al.,
Effects of the Redundancy Payments Act (HMSO, 1971);
Department of Employment, Code of Industrial Practice (HMSO,
1972); S. Mukherjee, Through No Fault of Their Own: Systems for
Handling Redundancy in Britain, France and Germany (Macdonald,
1973); The Industrial Society, Security of Earnings and Employment
(IS, 1973); J.Henderson, Guide to the Employment Protection Act,
1975 (IS, 1975); J.Jackson, Employment Protection: The New Law
(Brehon, 1976); H.A.Clegg, The Changing System of Industrial
Relations in Great Britain (Blackwell, 1979), pp. 488–90.
58 Roy A.Church, Kenricks in Hardware (David & Charles, 1969), pp.
291–2; Ministry of Labour Gazette, 1931, p. 9; Russell, op. cit., pp.
355–6.
59 Ministry of Labour Gazette, 1963, pp. 50–5, quoted in Russell, op.
cit., pp. 385–6.
60 Parker et al., op.cit., p. 3.
61 Cf. British Institute of Management, Towards Single Status (BIM,
1975). For single status, i.e. equal treatment for manual and non-
manual workers alike, see Russell, op. cit., ch. 6; Industrial Society,
Status and Benefits in Industry (IS, 1966) and Status Differences and
Moves Towards Single Status (IS, 1970); T.Robinson, Staff Status
for Manual Workers (Kogan Page, 1972); British Institute of
Management, Employee Benefits Today (BIM, 1974) and Employee
Benefits (BIM, 1978).
62 Cf. Clive Jenkins and Barry Sherman, White-Collar Unionism: The
Rebellious Salariat (Routledge & Kegal Paul, 1979), pp. 84, 88; J.
Bugler, ‘The shopfloor struggle for status’, New Society, 25
November 1965.
63 Industrial Society, Status and Benefits; BIM, opera cit., 1974 and
1978.
64 Russell, op. cit., p. 490.
65 Code of Industrial Practice (HMSO, 1972).
66 Industrial Society, Status and Benefits, p. 30; Alan Fox, Beyond
Contract: Work, Power and Trust Relations (Faber & Faber, 1974).
67 Reid and Robertson, op. cit., p. 30.
68 Robinson, op. cit., pp. 84–5.
69 Hannah and Kay, op. cit., p. 112; Sir Alec Cairncross, ‘The postwar
years’, in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (eds), The
Economic History of Britain Since 1700 (Cambridge University
Press, 1981), vol.2, p.409.
554
NOTES
70 Economic Trends Supplement, no. 12, 1987, p. 201; Hannah and

Kay, op. cit., p. 112. In 1985 the public sector still employed 27 per
cent—Social Trends, 1987, p. 73.
71 David Butler and Anne Sloman, British Political Facts, 1900–79
(Macmillan, 1980), pp. 348–9.
72 Guardian, 18 July 1985.
73 Sir Leo G.Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty (Methuen, 1906), pp.
41–3; Social Trends, 1984, p. 78.
74 Samuel H.Beer, Modem British Politics: A Study of Parties and
Pressure Groups (Faber & Faber, 1965), p. 337.
1960), p. 20.
76 Middlemas, op. cit., pp. 207–9.
77 Walter M.Citrine, Men and Work: An Autobiography (Hutchinson,
1964), p. 250.
78 L.P.Carpenter, ‘Corporatism in Britain, 1930–45’, Journal of
Contemporary History, vol. 11, 1976, pp. 3–8. See also Sir Basil
Blackett, ‘The era of planning’, in G.R.Stirling Taylor (ed.), Great
Events in History (Cassell, 1934); Sir Arthur Salter, The Framework
of an Ordered Society (Cambridge University Press, 1933); Leo S.
Amery, The Framework of the Future (Oxford University Press,
1944); Hugh Sellon, Democracy and Dictatorship (Lovat Dickson,
1934); Lord Eustace Percy, Government in Transition (Methuen,
1934); Roy G.Glenday, The Economic Consequences of Progress
(George Routledge, 1934) and The Future of Economic Society
(Macmillan, 1944).
79 Carpenter, loc. cit., p. 13.
80 Robert Boothby, Harold Macmillan, Oliver Stanley and John Loder,
Industry and the State (Macmillan, 1927); ‘A National Plan for
Great Britain’, Weekend Review; 14 February 1931; Harold
Macmillan, Reconstruction (Macmillan, 1933), The Next Five Years
(Macmillan, 1935) and The Middle Way: A Study of the Problem of
Economic and Social Progress in a Free and Democratic Society
(Macmillan, 1938).
81 Macmillan, The Next Five Years; G.D.H.Cole, Guild Socialism: A
Plan for Economic Democracy (Fabian Society, 1920); Carpenter,
op. cit., p. 12.
82 Trades Union Congress, ‘The public control and regulation of
industry and trade’, Conference Report (TUC, 1932); Carpenter,
loc. cit., pp. 16–19.
83 Sir Robert Hacking to Colin Brooks, Colin Brooks’s Diary, quoted
in Middlemas, op. cit., p. 258.
84 TUC, Special Conference Report (TUC, 1940), p. 18.
86 H.M.D.Parker, Manpower; A Study of Wartime Policy and
Administration (HMSO, 1954), pp. 95–6.
88 Henry M.Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Macmillan,
1976 edn), p. 219; Middlemas, op. cit., p. 286.
555
NOTES
89 Middlemas, op. cit., p. 296.

90 Butler and Sloman, op. cit., pp. 208–10.
91 Ibid., pp. 42, 82.
92 W.L.Guttsman, The British Political Elite (MacGibbon & Kee,
1963), pp. 237–9; P.G.J.Pulzer, Political Representation and
Elections in Britain (Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 67–72; David
Coombes, Representative Government and Economic Power
(Heinemann, 1982), pp. 46–7.
93 Walter Milne-Bailey, The Industrial Parliament Project (TUC
Research Department, December 1926), and Trade Union Documents
(Bell, 1929), pp. 24–5; Middlemas, op. cit., pp. 176, 178.
94 For lists of Reports of Royal Commissions and Departmental
Committees, most of which entailed taking evidence from
‘corporatist’ representatives, see Butler and Sloman, op. cit., pp.
268–71 and 274–6.
95 Beer, op. cit., pp. 337–8.
96 Andrew Shonfield, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of
Public and Private Power (Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 153,
161; Middlemas, op. cit., p. 20.
97 See, inter alia, Reports of the Council on Pay, Productivity, and
Incomes (Chairman: Lords Cohen and Heyworth), 1957–61; the
National Incomes Commission (Chairman: Sir G.Lawrence), 1961–
64; the Prices and Incomes Board (Chairman: Aubrey Jones), 1965–
70; the Pay Board (Chairman: Sir F.Figgures), 1973–74; the
Commission on Pay Comparability (Chairman: Hugh A.Clegg),
1979.
99 Annual Register, 1974 (Longmans, 1975), pp.21, 41–2.
100 Pelling, op. cit., chs 13 and 14.
101 Cf. A.L.Beier, The Death of the Body Politic: English Society 1640–
1760 (Routledge, forthcoming).
102 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776; University of Chicago
Press, 1976), vol. 1, p. 487.
103 T.H.Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge University
Press, 1950), pp. 10–21.
104 Ibid., p. 34.
105 Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law (Murray, 1874), p. 170.
106 T.H.Marshall, op. cit., p. 32.
107 Ibid., p. 81.
108 Ibid., pp. 83–4; Lionel Robbins, The Economic Problem in Peace
and War (Macmillan, 1947), pp. 9, 16.
109 For ‘National Efficiency’, Liberal imperialism and the Fabians, see
ch. 4 above.
110 R.C.Birch, The Shaping of the Welfare State (Longmans, 1984), p.
3.
111 Ross Terrill, R.H.Tawney and his Times (Deutsch, 1973), ch. 1.
112 R.H.Tawney, Equality (Allen & Unwin, 1931; 1938 ed), pp. 108–
15.
556
NOTES
113 Ibid., pp. 115–16, 144, 150, 127, 164–9, 176–7, 180–1.
114 Ibid., pp. 222–46.
115 R.H.Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (Harcourt, Brace & Howe,
1920), p. 180.
116 Cf. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The First Fabians (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1977), pp. 117–18, 375–6; B.S.Rowntree and A.C. Pigou,
Lectures on Housing (Manchester University Press, 1914), p. 36.
117 N. and J.MacKenzie, op. cit., passim; W.H.Beveridge, Insurance for
All and Everything (Liberal Party, 1924), for Beveridge’s doubts
about ‘the national minimum’ beyond the insurance cover, see José
Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Clarendon Press, 1977),
pp. 322–3; J.M.Keynes, The Means to Prosperity (The Times,
1924), which begins his interest in full employment through deficit
finance—cf. Harrod, op. cit., pp. 441–2; Macmillan et al., opera cit.
118 Cf. N. and J.MacKenzie, op. cit., pp. 375–6.
119 The phrase is Churchill’s in a Cabinet minute of 14 February 1943,
Birch, op. cit., p. 114.
120 Harris, op. cit., chs 1–3.
121 Cf. ibid., pp. 87–8, 165, 314.
122 Beveridge, Insurance for All; Harris, op. cit., pp. 349–52.
123 Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (Cmd.
6404, 1942); Harris, op. cit., chs 16 and 17.
124 Ibid., p. 353.
125 W.H.Beveridge, The Causes and Cure of Unemployment
(Longmans, 1931), pp. 64–6.
126 Harris, op. cit., pp. 462–3.
127 Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, pp. 6–7.
128 Harrod, op. cit., chs 1–4.
129 Ibid., ch. 7.
130 Ibid., p. 332.
131 J.M.Keynes, article in The Nation, 7 June 1924; Harrod, op. cit., p.
348.
132 J.M.Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (Sidney Ball Lecture, Oxford
University, 1924; Hogarth Press, 1926), pp. 52–3.
133 Harrod, op. cit., p. 462.
134 J.M.Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money (Macmillan, 1936).
135 John Eatwell, Whatever Happened to Britain? The Economics of
Decline (Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. ch. 4; J.F.Wright,
Britain in an Age of Economic Management (Oxford University
Press, 1979), pp. 140–5, 170.
136 Harrod, op. cit., pp. 575–85.
137 Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change 1914–39 (Macmillan, 1966),
p. 285.
138 Friedrich A.von Hayek, Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical
Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism (George Routledge, 1935), p.
1; for the ‘white emigration’ [sic] see Perry Anderson, ‘Components of
the national culture’, in Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn,
(eds), Student Power (Penguin, 1969), pp. 229–34.
557
NOTES
139 Birch, op. cit., p. 40.

140 Clement Attlee to Harold Laski, 1 May 1944, quoted in Kingsley
Martin, Harold Laski, 1893–1950; A Biographical Memoir
(Gollancz, 1953), p. 161.
141 Harry Eckstein, The English Health Service: Its Origins, Structure
and Achievements (Harvard University Press, 1985), p. ix.
142 N. and J.MacKenzie, op. cit., pp. 290–91; H.G.Wells, A Modern
Utopia (Chapman & Hall, 1905); George Bernard Shaw, Man and
Superman (1903); Harris, op. cit., p. 87.
143 Titmuss, Welfare State, pp. 24–5.
144 Ibid., p. 27.
145 Bentley B.Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Britain:
The Origins of the Welfare State (Michael Joseph, 1966), pp. 401–
16. Gilbert thinks that the BMA were defeated, but they had gained
a larger capitation fee and the predominant share in the running of
the panel doctor system, and according to Dr Alfred Cox, a BMA
official and critic of the BMA leadership’s tactics, they had ‘won on
points’.
146 Cf. Charles Webster, ‘Designing a National Health Service, 1918–
42’ (unpublished paper presented at the SSRC conference on ‘The
Roots of welfare’, University of Lancaster, 1983). I am grateful to Dr
Webster for access to this paper, on which much of the next three
paragraphs is based.
147 Sir Bertram Dawson, ‘Medicine and the state’, The Medical Officer,
vol. 23, 5 June 1920, pp. 223–4.
148 Consultative Council on Medical and Allied Services (Chairman: Sir
Bertrand Dawson), Interim Report on the Future Provision of
Medical and Allied Services (Cmd. 693, 1920).
149 Ibid., para. 3.
150 British Medical Association, A General Medical Service for the
Nation (BMA, 1938).
151 Sir Arthur S.MacNalty, The Reform of the Public Health Services
(Nuffield College, Oxford, 1943), pp. 30–1; Nuffield Provincial
Hospitals Trust, A National Hospitals Service (NPHT, 1941);
Webster, op. cit., pp. 13–17.
152 British Medical Association, Medical Planning Commission, ‘Draft
Interim Report’, British Medical Journal, vol. 1, 1942, pp. 743–53;
Webster, op. cit., pp. 20–1.
153 Webster, op. cit., pp. 23–4.
154 Eckstein, op. cit., p. 3.
155 Ibid., pp. 155–60. Again, the leadership of the BMA did not get all
it wanted, but the outcome was a substantial victory for the rank
and file doctors.
156 Ibid., pp. 229–31.
157 Harry Eckstein, Pressure Group Politics (Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp.
101–2.
158 Brian Abel Smith, A History of Nursing (Heinemann, 1975), p. 248.
159 Paul Wilding, Professional Power and Social Welfare (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 27–8, 44–5, 50–1.
558
NOTES
160 Committee of Inquiry into the Regulation of the Medical Profession,

Report (Cmnd. 6018, 1975), para. 11.
161 A.Cartwright and R.Anderson, Patients and Their Doctors, 1977
(Institute for Social Studies in Medical Care, 1979); British Medical
Association, General Practitioner Charter Working Group Report,
British Medical Journal, 24 February 1979; Wilding, op. cit., p. 110.
162 Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (Boyars, 1975).
163 Ivan Illich et al., Disabling Professions (Boyars, 1977); Joseph K.
Lieberman, The Tyranny of the Expert (Walker, 1970).
164 Lewis Yablonsky, The Tunnel Back: Syanon (Macmillan, 1965), p.
368.
165 Charles L.Mowat, The Charity Organization Society, 1869–1913
(Methuen, 1961), esp. ch. 5; Titmuss, Welfare State, p. 15; Elizabeth
Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (Tavistock, 1977), p. 111.
166 Richard M.Titmuss, Commitment to Welfare (Allen & Unwin,
1968), p. 85.
167 Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Services
(Chairman: Lord F.Seebohm), Report (Cmnd. 3703, 1968).
168 A.Sinfield, Which Way for Social Work? (Fabian Society, 1969), p. 2.
169 Quoted in Kathleen Jones (ed.), Year Book of Social Policy in
Britain, 1971 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 46.
170 Asher Tropp, The School Teachers: The Growth of the Teaching
Profession in England and Wales from 1800 to the Present Day
(Heinemann, 1957), esp. chs 8, 9 and 14; Harold Perkin, The
teaching profession and the game of life’, in Peter Gordon (ed.), Is
Teaching a Profession? (Heinemann, 1983).
171 Cf. Harold Perkin, Key Profession: The History of the Association
of University Teachers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 222.
172 Caroline Benn and Brian Simon, Halfway There: Report on the
British Comprehensive School Reform (Penguin, 1972), ch. 10,
found that, despite a considerable swing away from streaming, more
than half the schools in their survey still taught in streams or broad
bands of ability and no less than 70 per cent by some sort of
streaming or setting.
173 Maurice Kogan and W.van der Eyken, County Hall (Penguin, 1973),
p. 54.
174 Lady Plowden, Children and their Primary Schools (HMSO, 1967),
vol. 1, p. 123.
175 Idem, and A.H.Halsey, A New Partnership for Our Schools
(HMSO, 1977); Wilding, op. cit., pp. 24–5.
176 Maurice Kogan, Educational Policy Making: A Study of Interest
Groups and Parliament (Allen & Unwin, 1975), pp. 37, 108–9.
177 Cf. Perkin, ‘Teaching profession’.
178 Cf. D.H.MacKay and A.W.Cox, The Politics of Urban Change
(Croom Helm, 1979); cf. Harold Perkin, ‘Public participation in
government decision-making’, Town and Country Planning School:
Report of Proceedings (Royal Town Planning Institute, 1973).
179 Norman Dennis, Public Participation and Planners’ Blight (Faber &
Faber, 1972).
559
NOTES
180 Wilding, op. cit., p. 18.

182 Friedrich A.von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1944) and Law: Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of
Social Justice (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); Milton and Rose
Friedman, Free to Choose (Penguin, 1980).
183 Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (ed. John Keane,
MIT Press, 1984), p. 263.
CHAPTER 8 THE TRIUMPH OF THE PROFESSIONAL

IDEAL
1 Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 218–21.
2 Ibid., pp. 252–70.
3 ‘A’ [J.S.Mill], ‘On Miss Martineau’s summary of political economy’,
Monthly Repository, vol. 8, 1834, p. 320.
4 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843; Chapman & Hall, 1893
edn), p. 56; F.D.Maurice, On the Reformation of Society (Forbes &
Knibb, 1851), pp. 10–13; Karl Marx, Capital (Chicago, 1909 edn),
vol. 3, pp. 1031–2; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Smith,
Elder, 1869), ch. 3.
5 Matthew Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868;
ed. R.H.Super, University of Michigan, 1964), pp. 308–9.
6 James Mill, Essay on Government (1820); S.T.Coleridge, On the
Constitution of Church and State (1852 edn), pp. 54–5; J.S.Mill,
Principles of Political Economy (1848; Longmans, 1904 edn), pp.
589–90; Carlyle, Past and Present, pp. 23–4; Norman and Jeanne
MacKenzie, The First Fabians (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), pp.
290–1; H.G.Wells, A Modern Utopia (Chapman & Hall, 1905);
José Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Clarendon Press,
1977), p. 87.
7 Cf. Perkin, Origins, pp. 267–9.
8 Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial
9 William Morris, The Earthly Paradise: A Poem (F.S.Ellis, 1868–70).
10 Wiener, op. cit., jacket summary.
11 Samuel Courtauld, Address to the Engineers’ Club, Manchester,
1942, and John Child, British Management Thought (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 121; quoted in Wiener, op. cit., pp. 127 and
144.
12 Cf. D.C.Coleman, ‘Gentlemen and players’, Economic History
Review, vol. 26, 1973.
13 Wiener deals with the major contributions to the controversy over
the deceleration of British economic growth in the Appendix, op.
cit., pp. 167–70, including Charles Kindleberger, Economic Growth
in Britain and France, 1851–1950 (Harvard University Press, 1964);
H.J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the 19th
Century (Cambridge University Press, 1964); Peter Mathias, The
560
NOTES
First Industrial Nation (Methuen, 1969); David Landes, The

Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial
Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
(Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 331–58; D.H.Aldcroft,
‘The entrepreneur and the British economy, 1870–1914’, Economic
History Review, vol. 17, 1964–65; A.L.Levine, Industrial
Retardation in Britain, 1880–1914 (New York, 1967);
E.J.Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: An Economic History of
Britain Since 1750 (Penguin, 1969); Donald McCloskey (ed.),
Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain Since 1840 (Methuen, 1971)
and ‘Did Victorian Britain fail?’, Economic History Review, vol. 23,
1970; N.F.R.Crafts, ‘Victorian Britain did fail’, idem, vol. 32, 1979;
Michael Fores, ‘Britain’s economic growth and the 1870 watershed’,
Lloyd’s Bank Review, no. 99, January 1971; Wilfred Beckerman
(ed.), Slow Growth in Britain: Causes and Consequences (Oxford
University Press, 1979); and John Saville, ‘The development of
British industry and foreign competition, 1875–1914’, Business
History, vol. 12, 1970. See also Donald Coleman and Christine
Macleod, ‘Attitudes to new techniques: British businessmen, 1800–
1950’, Economic History Review, vol. 39, 1986. Like the last, the
reviews of Wiener’s book by economic as distinct from political,
social and cultural historians have been almost uniformly critical of
a cultural explanation of economic phenomena.
14 See, inter alia, Michael Sanderson, The Universities and British
Industry, 1950–1970 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972),
T.J.H.Bishop and R.Wilkinson, Winchester and the Public School
Elite (Faber & Faber, 1967), and John Rae, The Public School
Revolution: Britain’s Independent Schools, 1964–79 (Faber &
Faber, 1981).
15 For references, see Perkin, Origins, pp. 73–8.
16 Cf. ibid., pp. 428–37.
18 See above, ch. 3, section 1.
19 Cf. John Chandos, Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800–64
(Hutchinson, 1984), and Lawrence Stone, ‘The size and
composition of the Oxford student body, 1580–1909’, in L.Stone
(ed.), The University in Society (Oxford University Press and
Princeton University Press, 1975), esp. vol. 1, part 3, pp. 37–58.
20 Cf. Perkin, Origins, pp. 272–8.
21 Quoted by Wiener, op. cit., p. 13.
22 J.J.Findlay (ed.), Arnold of Rugby (Cambridge University Press,
1897), p. 65. For a reassessment of Arnold’s contribution see T.W.
Bamford, Thomas Arnold on Education, with a Selection from his
Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1970), and J.A.Mangan,
Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School
(Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 15–18.
23 Bishop and Wilkinson, op. cit., pp. 104–8.
24 Ibid., pp. 64–9.
561
NOTES
25 Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and

Society in Victorian England (Faber & Faber, 1968 and Cambridge
University Press, 1981); Arthur Engel, ‘The emerging concept of the
academic profession at Oxford, 1800–54’, in Stone, op. cit., vol. 1,
and From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession
in 19th-century Oxford (Clarendon Press, 1983).
26 Rothblatt, op. cit., Appendix IIA, p. 280; Edward Milliard (ed.),
The Balliol College Register, 1832–1914 (Oxford University Press,
1914), p. vii.
27 T.W.Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian
England (Croom Helm, 1982), p. 21.
28 Margery Perham, Lugard, vol. 1, The Years of Adventure (Collins,
1956), p. 35; Wiener, op. cit., p. 130.
29 Letter to J.A.Mangan, quoted in The Games Ethic and Imperialism
(Viking Penguin, 1986), p. 86.
30 C.A.Anderson and Miriam Schnaper, School and Society: Social
Backgrounds of Oxford and Cambridge Students (Public Affairs
Press, 1952), pp. 6–7.
31 Bishop and Wilkinson, op. cit., pp. 64–9 and 104–8.
32 Sanderson, op. cit., pp. 52–4.
33 Bishop and Wilkinson, op. cit., pp. 68–9 and 107.
34 Sir Ernest Barker, Age and Youth: Memories of Three Universities
(Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 125; Sanderson, op. cit., pp.
306–8.
35 Royal Commission on Public Schools (Chairman: Sir John Newson),
First Report (HMSO, 1968), vol. 1, p. 56 (the footnote reference is
to Appendix 6, vol. 2, p. 95, which shows only 84 per cent of the
pupils from professional and managerial families, though 10 per
cent from the armed forces, presumably mainly officers’ children,
and only 5 per cent from the manual and non-manual working
classes III and IV.)
36 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 58 and vol. 2, Appendix 8, p. 236.
37 Rae, op. cit., esp, ch. 6.
38 Anthony Sampson, The New Anatomy of Britain (Hodder &
Stoughton, 1962), p. 609; Graham Turner, Business in Britain (Eyre
& Spottiswoode, 1969), p. 141; W.J.Reader, Imperial Chemical
Industries: A History (Oxford University Press, 1970, 1975), vol. 1,
pp. 218–19, vol. 2, pp. 91–2; quoted in Wiener, op. cit., pp. 148,
149, 150.
39 Acton Society Trust, Management Succession (AST, 1956), p. 91.
Another study of 646 managers in 1954–55 by R.V.Clements,
Managers: A Study of their Careers in Industry (Allen & Unwin,
1958) showed that 26.2 per cent came from public schools, and 35
per cent from universities, of whom 19.6 per cent were from Oxford
and Cambridge (p. 174). Clements comments:
…so influential and deeply felt are social origins that they have
tended to reproduce a sort of class system in the management
hierarchy. In a sense top jobs have been filled by men, usually
562
NOTES
of higher social origins, expecting and sometimes even trained

for top management, and inferior posts by men expecting and
trained for no more than lower management jobs. (p. 95)
40 Directory of National Biography under Morris; Who’s Who? under

Robinson and Wolfson.
41 Noel Annan, ‘The possessed’, New’ York Review of Books, 5
February 1976; Wiener, op. cit., p. 131; see also Noel Annan, ‘The
intellectual aristocracy of Victorian England’, in J.H.Plumb (ed.),
Studies in Social History (Longmans, 1955).
42 Much of the argument of this section is anticipated by my Stenton
Lecture, Professionalism, Property and English Society Since 1880
(University of Reading, 1981).
43 Cf. ‘Land reform and class conflict in Victorian Britain’, in Harold
Perkin, The Structured Crowd: Essays in English Social History
44 Cf. Gary S.Becker, Human Capital (Columbia University Press, 1964).
45 Joseph Melling, Rent Strikes: People’s Struggle for Housing in West
Scotland, 1890–1916 (Polygon Books, 1983); F.H.Lawson,
Introduction to the Law of Property (Clarendon Press, 1977 edn),
pp. 125–6; T.M.Aldridge, Rent Control and Leasehold
Enfranchisement (Oyez, 1977), chs 1–12; Lloyd Evans, The Law of
Landlord and Tenant (Butterworths, 1974), chs 14–17; R.Jarmain,
Housing Subsidies and Rents (Stevens, 1948), pp. 16–18; Adela A.
Nevitt, Housing Taxation and Subsidies (Nelson, 1966), ch. 8;
Christina M.E.Whitehead, The United Kingdom Housing Market
(Saxon House, 1974), pp. 44–6; and Bruce Headey, Housing Policy
in the Development Economy (St Martin’s Press, 1978), ch. 6.
46 Cf. Murray Forsyth, Property and Property Distribution Policy
(PEP, 1971), p. 38.
48 Shorthold Tenancies (Department of the Environment, Housing
Booklet no. 8, HMSO, 1985).
49 Cf. Aldridge, op. cit., chs 16–18; Evans, op. cit., ch. 18.
50 Cf. William Ashworth, The Genesis of Modern British Town
Planning (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), ch. 8; Lewis B.Keeble,
Town Planning at the Crossroads (Estates Gazette, 1961), esp. ch.
12; Gordon E.Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning
(Halstead Press, 1974).
51 Andrew Cox, Adversary Politics and Land: The Conflict over Land
and Property Policy in Post-War Britain (Cambridge University
Press, 1954), passim.
52 Cf. Perkin, ‘Land reform and class conflict’, loc. cit., pp. 122–31.
53 Cox, op. cit., esp. part C.
54 Cf. Ashworth, Keeble & Cherry, opera cit.
55 B.B.Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain
(Michael Joseph, 1966), esp. chs 5, 6 and 7, and British Social
Policy (Batsford, 1970), esp. chs 4, 5 and 6; Pat Thane, The
Foundations of the Welfare State (Longmans, 1982), chs 3, 6 and 7.
563
NOTES
56 Cf. A.B.Atkinson, Unequal Shares: Wealth in Britain (Penguin,

1974), pp. 103–5.
57 H.A.Clegg, The Changing System of Industrial Relations in Great
Britain (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 306–13; C.Saunders et
al., Winners and Losers: Pay Patterns in the 1970s (PEP, 1977).
58 Henry George, Progress and Poverty (Appleton, 1880); J.Hyder, The
Case for Land Nationalization (Simkin & Marshall, 1913).
59 Burke’s Landed Gentry (Burke’s Peerage, 1956 edn), Preface;
Harold Perkin, The Economic Worth of Elites in British Society
Since 1880 (Report to SSRC, 1977, deposited in British Library
Lending Division, Boston Spa), table 10.1 (male millionaires’ own
probate returns).
(Chairman: Lord Diamond), Report No. 1 (Cmnd. 6171, 1975), ch.
5, esp. tables 41 and 45.
61 Cyril Grunfield, The Law of Redundancy (Sweet & Maxwell,
1980), pp. 3, 5 and passim; Peter Wallington (ed.), Butterworths
Employment Law Handbook (Butterworths, 1979), pp. 140, 151,
157–264; W.W.Daniel and Elizabeth Stilgoe, The Impact of
Employment Protection Laws (Policy Studies Institute, 1978). Cf.
also Audrey Hunt, Management Attitudes and Practices Towards
Women Workers (HMSO, 1975).
62 Report of the (Bullock) Committee of Inquiry on Industrial
Democracy (Cmnd. 6706, 1977); White Paper on Industrial
Democracy (Cmnd. 6810, 1978). Cf. also Clegg, op. cit., pp. 438–
43; Stephen Bubb, The industrial democracy White Paper’,
Industrial Law Journal, vol. 7, 1978; Sir Otto Kahn-Freud,
Industrial democracy’, ibid., vol. 6, 1977; and Paul Davies and Lord
Wedderburn, ‘The law of industrial democracy’, ibid., vol. 7, 1977.
(Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 51; A.A.Berle, Jr and G.C.
Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (Macmillan,
1932); R.H.Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (Harcourt, Brace &
Howe, 1920), p. 180.
64 Graham Bannock, The Juggernauts (Penguin, 1973), p. 5.
65 The Sunday Times, 10 January 1982, citing a Stock Exchange
survey; this proportion has now been increased substantially by the
privatization of nationalized industries but is still a small minority of
the population.
66 Cf. the increase in alleged ‘insider trading’ on the London and New
York Stock Exchanges, associated with, amongst others, Ivan
Boesky, Dennis Levine, Sir Ernest Saunders, etc. in 1986.
67 Cf. Franklin L.Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and
Change in Ideas, 1660–1950 (Collier Macmillan, 1977), p. 7. Cf.
also Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 252–70; and
T.W. Heyck, op. cit., pp. 13–14.
68 Cf. Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (J.B.Lippincott,
1979); Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1972).
564
NOTES
69 Margaret Llewellyn Davies (ed.), Life As We Have Known It, By

Cooperative Working Women (Hogarth Press, 1931; Virago 1977),
Introductory Letter by Virginia Woolf, pp. xxi, xxx.
70 J.M.Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (Macmillan, 1931), p. 324.
71 Clive Bell, Civilization (1928; Penguin, 1947), p. 1.
72 T.S.Eliot, The Idea of a Christian University (Faber, 1938).
73 T.S.Eliot, ‘On thé place and function of the clerisy’, Appendix to
Roger Kojecky, T.S.Eliot’s Social Criticism (Farras, Strous &
Giroux, 1971), pp. 241–8.
74 A.Wade (ed.), Letters of W.B.Yeats (Hart-Davis, 1954), pp. 811–12;
D.H.Lawrence, Introduction to F.M.Dostoievsky, The Grand
Inquisitor, reprinted in E.D.McDonald (ed.), Phoenix: The
Posthumous Papers of D.H.Lawrence (Heinemann, 1936).
75 Percy Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (Hutchinson, 1950), p.
184, and The Art of Being Ruled (Chatto & Windus, 1926), p. 199.
76 Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order (Union Press,
1970), p. 49.
77 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Chatto & Windus, 1932).
78 Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture (Monthly Review
Press, 1972), p. 9; John Strachey, What Are We to Do? (Gollancz,
1938), p. 83; Stephen Spender, Forward from Liberalism (Gollancz,
1937), p. 70.
79 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Gollancz, 1937), and Keep
the Aspidistra Flying (Gollancz, 1936), p. 98.
80 L.Abercrombie et al., The Next Five Years: An Essay in Political
Agreement (London, 1935); Douglas Jay, The Socialist Case (Faber,
1937); Barbara Wootton, Freedom under Planning (Allen & Unwin,
1945).
81 Harold J.Laski, A Grammar of Politics (Allen & Unwin, 1925), pp.
17, 43.
82 Tawney, Acquisitive Society, p. 176.
83 Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the national culture’, in Alexander
Cockburn and Robin Blackburn (eds), Student Power (Penguin,
1969), pp. 229–34.
84 Eliot, Appendix, in Kojecky, op. cit., pp. 246–7.
85 Cf. John W.Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1967).
86 Cf. Harold Perkin, Key Profession: The History of the Association
of University Teachers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).
87 F.R.Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and the Environment
(Chatto & Windus, 1960); F.R.Leavis, Education and the University
(Chatto & Windus, 1961).
88 Q.D.Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (Chatto & Windus,
1965); Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Penguin, 1958).
89 F.R.Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword (Chatto & Windus, 1972), p. 169;
Culture and the Environment, p. 82; Education and the University,
p. 143; and ‘The responsible critic: or the function of criticism at
any time’, Scrutiny, vol. 19, 1952, p. 179.
90 Peter Scott, The Crisis of the University (Groom Helm, 1984).
565
NOTES
91 The titles of two influential books of the 1930s, Julien Benda, La

Trahison des Clercs (Paris, 1927) and José Ortega y Gasset, The
Revolt of the Masses (Norton, 1932), both concerned with the
increasing isolation of the intelligentsia or clerisy.
CHAPTER 9 THE PLATEAU OF PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY

1 Britain: A Reference Book (HMSO, 1949), p. 100.
2 Statistical Digest of the War (HMSO, 1951), p. 195; A.S.Milward,
War, Economy and Society, 1939–45 (Allen Lane, 1977), p. 211; see
also Angus Calder, The People’s War (Panther, 1971) for much of
the detail in this section.
3 John Stevenson, British Society, 1914–45 (Penguin, 1984), pp. 449–50.
4 W.K.Hancock and Margaret Gowing, The British War Economy
(HMSO, 1949); M.M.Postan, British War Production (HMSO,
1952); H.M.D.Parker, Manpower (HMSO, 1957); E.L.Hargreaves
and Margaret Gowing, Civil Industry and Trade (HMSO, 1952).
5 Sir Keith Murray, Agriculture (HMSO, 1955); Ministry of Information,
Land at War (HMSO, 1945); Victoria Sackville-West, The Women’s
Land Army (HMSO, 1944); Calder, op. cit., pp. 482–93.
6 Ministry of Food, How Britain Was Fed in Wartime (HMSO, 1946);
R.J.Hammond, Food and Agriculture in Britain, 1939–45 (Stanford
University Press, 1954); Lord Woolton, Memoirs (Cassell, 1959);
Calder, op. cit., pp. 438–47.
7 Parker, op. cit., pp. 309–10; Calder, op. cit., pp. 124, 271–2, 308–
11, 383–5, 505–6.
8 R.M.Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (HMSO, 1950), pp. 101–
95; Arthur Marwick, The Home Front: The British and the Second
World War (Thomas & Hudson, 1976), pp. 23–38; Calder, op. cit.,
pp. 40–58.
9 Marwick, Home Front, pp. 132–8; Calder, op. cit., pp. 382–6.
10 Basil Dean, The Theatre at War: A History of the Entertainments
National Service Association (Harrap, 1956); Calder, op. cit., pp.
429–37.
11 W.S.Churchill, The War Speeches (Cassell, 1963–65), vol. 2, pp.
425–37.
12 John Wheeler Bennett, King George VI (Macmillan, 1958), p. 470.
13 A.J.P.Taylor, England, 1914–45 (Oxford University Press, 1965),
pp. 437–8.
14 Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p. 506.
15 Harold J.Laski, Where Do We Go from Here? (Penguin, 1940).
16 Calder, op. cit., p. 284.
17 Picture Post, 4 January 1941 (reprinted by Morrison & Gibb,
1974).
18 Marwick, Home Front, p. 128.
19 Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services
(Cmd.6404, 1942), esp. pp. 6–11, 120–1, 137–40, 153–70; for the
report’s provenance and reception see Janet Beveridge, Beveridge
and his Plan (Hodder & Stoughton, 1954); British Institute of
566
NOTES
Public Opinion, The Beveridge Report and the Public (BIPO, 1943);
Calder, op. cit., pp. 607–14.
20 W.S.Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 603.
21 Maurice Bruce, The Coming of the Welfare State (Batsford, 1961),
p. ix, citing William Temple, Citizen and Churchman (Eyre &
Spotdswoode, 1941).
22 Quintin Hogg, One Year’s Work (Hurst 8c Blackett, 1944), p. 53.
23 Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin (Heinemann,
1967), vol. 2, pp. 224–31.
24 G.S.Bain and Richard Price, Profiles of Union Growth (Oxford
University Press, 1980), pp. 46–7.
25 Richard Croucher, Engineers at War, 1939–45 (Merlin Press, 1982),
pp. 162–7; James E.Cronin, Labour and Society in Britain, 1918–79
(Batsford, 1984), pp. 117–20.
26 Cronin, op. cit., p. 125.
27 John Eatwell, Whatever Happened to Britain? The Economics of
Decline (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 11.
28 Bernard Levin, The Pendulum Years: Britain and the Sixties (Cape,
1970), p. 210.
29 J.F.Wright, Britain in the Age of Economic Management (Oxford
30 Cf. P.N.S.Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience (Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1969); Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol.
3, The Empire Commonwealth (Cambridge University Press, 1959);
Colin Cross, The Fall of the British Empire (Hodder & Stoughton,
1968); Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of the
British Empire (Longmans, 1984), chs 9 and 10.
31 Cf., inter alia, Sheila Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations,
1960–67 (Oxford University Press, 1969); Nicolas Deakin, Colour,
Citizenship and British Society (Panther Books, 1970); Thomas J.
Cottle, Black Testimony: The Voices of British West Indians
(Wildwood House, 1978); Colin Holmes (ed.), Immigrants and
Minorities in British Society (Allen & Unwin, 1978); Charles
Husband, ‘Race’ in Britain (Hutchinson, 1982).
32 Sir Ian Fraser, letter to Miss Stanley, 11 May 1938, in BBC Archives,
quoted by Arthur Marwick, Class: Image and Reality in Britain,
France and the USA Since 1930 (Fontana, 1981), p. 159.
33 Social Trends, 1972, pp. 78, 103; ibid., 1973, p. 96.
34 Ibid., 1986, p. 168.
35 J.H.Goldthorpe et al., Social Mobility and Class Structure in
Modern Britain (Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 60–1; A.H.Halsey
(ed.), Trends in British Society Since 1900 (Macmillan, 1972), p.
118; Social Trends, 1973, p. 88.
36 Goldthorpe et al., Social Mobility, pp. 60–1.
37 Ibid., chs 2, 3 and 9.
38 A.H.Halsey et al., Origins and Destinations: Family, Class and
Education in Modern Britain (Clarendon Press, 1980), chs 10 and 11.
(Chairman: Lord Diamond), Report No. 1 (Cmnd. 6171, 1975), p. 36.
567
NOTES
40 Peter Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (Penguin, 1979),

pp. 344, 348.
41 Calculated from Social Trends, 972, p. 87.
42 Cf., inter alia, Mark Abrams and Richard Rose, Must Labour Lose?
(Penguin, 1960), and David E.Butler and Richard Rose, The British
General Election of 1959 (Macmillan, 1960).
43 J.H.Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker: 1. Industrial Attitudes
and Behaviour; 2. Political Attitudes and Behaviour; 3. The Affluent
Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge University Press, 1968–69).
44 B.S.Rowntree and G.R.Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State: A
Third Social Survey of York (Longmans, 1951), pp. 30–1.
45 Brian Abel Smith and Peter Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest
(Bell, 1965), p. 36.
46 Cf., inter alia, Peter Townsend (ed.), The Concept of Poverty
(Heinemann, 1970); W.G.Runciman, Relative Deprivation and
Social Justice (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); A.B.Atkinson,
Unequal Shares (Penguin, 1972); Dorothy Wedderburn (ed.),
Poverty, Inequality and Class Structure (Cambridge University Press,
1974); Peter Willmott (ed.), The Poverty Report 1976 (Temple
Smith, 1976); Frank Field, Michael Meacher and Clive Pond, To
Him that Hath (Penguin, 1977); Frank Field (ed.), The Wealth
Report (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); and Peter Townsend,
Poverty in UK (Penguin, 1979).
47 Townsend, Poverty in UK, pp. 88, 160–6, 207–71, 273.
48 Diamond Commission, Report No. 1, p. 102; Townsend, Poverty in
UK, p. 344.
49 Calculated from Townsend, Poverty in UK, pp. 243 and 344 by the
following method: add differences between mean non-asset income
of each of bottom four deciles and general mean (£777)=£11,322;
calculate as percentage of mean of top 1 per cent (£6,053)=187 per
cent and of top 10 per cent (£27,424)=41.3 per cent. The non-asset
income is taken because that is accessible to taxation; Townsend’s
‘final income’ of the richest 1 per cent in kind and imputed benefits
from assets (£12,331) would not be realizable but if it were it would
have required 92 per cent of it to raise those below £777 to 79 per
cent of the mean.
50 Peter H.Lindert, ‘Unequal English wealth since 1670’, Journal of
Political Economy, vol. 94, 1986, pp. 1131, 1154–6.
51 Diamond Commission, Report No. 1, pp. 92, 97, 102; Townsend,
Poverty in UK, p. 345.
52 Lindert, op. cit., p. 1150.
53 Social Trends, 1972, p. 94; 1973, p. 107; 1986, pp. 14, 17.
54 Michael Young and Peter Willmott, The Symmetrical Family
(Penguin, 1973), esp. ch. 4; the term has a longer history and can be
found in Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (Cresset,
1955), p. 301.
55 Most of the pioneers of the women’s movement in the post-war
period were, like many of their Victorian predecessors, professional
women, chiefly academics and journalists: e.g. Germaine Greer, The
568
NOTES
Female Eunuch (MacGibbon & Kee, 1970); Eva Figes, Patriarchal

Attitudes (Faber & Faber, 1970); Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate
(Penguin, 1971); Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness,
Man’s World (Penguin, 1973); Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell (eds),
The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Penguin, 1976).
56 Cf., inter alia, Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance
Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain
(Hutchinson, 1975); Mark Abrams, The Teenage Consumer
(London Press Exchange, 1959); Robin Blackburn and Alexander
Cockburn (eds), Student Power (Penguin, 1969); Timothy Raison
(ed.), Youth in the New Society (Hart-Davis, 1966); Peter Willmott,
Adolescent Boys of East London (Penguin, 1969); Kenneth Leech,
Youthquake: The Growth of a Counter-Culture Through Two
Decades (Sheldon Press, 1973).
57 Young and Willmott, Symmetrical Family, pp. 19–26.
58 Gorer, op. cit., p. 96.
59 George Mikes, How to Be an Alien (Allan Wingate, 1946).
60 Social Trends, 1973, p. 76; The Economist, 10 January 1987. Cf.
Christie Davies, Permissive Britain: Social Change in the Sixties and
Seventies (Pitman, 1975); Geoffrey Gorer, Sex and Marriage in
England Today (Nelson, 1971).
61 Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (Penguin, 1982), p.
152.
62 Britain: An Official Handbook (HMSO, 1972), pp. 23–4.
63 Alan D.Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain (Longmans,
1980), pp. 95–6; Halsey, Trends, pp. 448–9; Gorer, Exploring
English Character, ch. 14.
64 John A.T.Robinson, Honest to God (Student Christian Movement,
1963); David Jenkins, The Contradiction of Christianity (Student
Christian Movement, 1976); Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith (BBC,
1984).
1976), p. 166; M.Abramowitz and V.F.Eliasberg, The Growth of
Public Employment in Great Britain (Princeton University Press,
1957), and Economic Trends (HMSO, June 1972).
66 Perkin, Modern English Society, pp. 220–1, 252–4.
67 Geoffrey Millerson, The Qualifying Professions (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 246–54; Monopolies Commission,
Professional Services: A Report on the General Effect on the Public
Interest of Certain Restrictive Practices…(Cmnd. 4463, 1970), part
2, pp. 83–5.
68 Clive Jenkins and Barrie Sherman, White-Collar Unionism: The
Rebellious Salariat (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 31, 34;
George S.Bain and Richard Price, ‘Union growth and employment
trends in the United Kingdom, 1964–70’, British Journal of
Industrial Relations, November 1972.
69 Jenkins and Sherman, op. cit., pp. 31, 148–9.
70 Cf. John Hughes, Nationalized Industries in the Mixed Economy
(Fabian Society, 1960).
569
NOTES
71 Clive Jenkins, ‘Occupational backgrounds of principal public

corporation boards’, in John Urry and John Wakeford (eds), Power
in Britain (Heinemann, 1973), pp. 154–6.
72 Tom Lupton and C.Shirley Wilson, ‘The social background of top
decision makers’, Manchester School, January 1959.
73 Michael Barratt Brown, ‘The controllers of British industry’, in Ken
Coates, Can the Workers Run Industry? (Sphere, 1968).
74 Cf. Leslie Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy (Methuen,
1976), ch. 10.
75 David E.Butler, The British General Election of 1951 (Macmillan,
1952); and David E.Butler and D.Kavanagh, The British General
Election of 1979 (Macmillan, 1980).
76 Quintin Hogg, The Case for Conservatism (Penguin, 1947), p. 13.
77 Iain Macleod, ‘The political divide’, in The Future of the Welfare
State (Conservative Political Centre, 1958).
78 Timothy Raison, Why Conservative? (Penguin, 1964), pp. 24, 26.
79 R.H.Tawney, Equality (Allen & Unwin, 1938 edn), pp. 108–15.
80 Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (Heinemann, 1952), pp. 127–8.
81 P.H.M.Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography (Oxford
82 C.A.R.Crosland, The Future of Socialism (Cape, 1956), p. 103; R.
H.S.Crossman, Labour in the Affluent Society (Fabian Society,
1960), pp. 22–4; Jim Northcott, Why Labour? (Penguin, 1964), pp.
162–3.
83 Anthony Crosland, Social Democracy in Europe (Fabian Society,
1975), p. 2.
84 Townsend, Poverty in UK, p. 633.
85 Beveridge, Social Insurance, p. 7.
86 Townsend, Poverty in UK, pp. 828–9.
87 R.M.Titmuss, The Irresponsible Society (Fabian Society, 1960), pp.
3, 10–12, 13–14, 20.
88 Geoffrey Howe, ‘The reform of the social services’, in Bow Group
Essays (Conservative Party, 1964), quoted in Michael Shanks, The
Stagnant Society (Penguin, 1961).
89 Cf. Townsend, Poverty in UK, pp. 922–6; and inter alia, Julian
LeGrand, The Strategy of Equality (Allen & Unwin, 1982).
90 Cf. Shanks, op. cit., pp. 166–74, 184–92.
91 Robin Pedley, Comprehensive Education: A New Approach (1957;
Penguin, 1969); John Vaisey, Education in a Class Society (Fabian
Society, 1962).
92 Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033 (Penguin,
1961).
93 Shanks, op. cit., p. 167.
94 Crosland, Future of Socialism, pp. 260–1.
95 Vaisey, op. cit., pp. 15–17.
96 Royal Commission on the Public Schools (Chairmen: Sir John
Newson, David Donnison), First and Second Reports (HMSO,
1968, 1970).
97 Halsey et al., Origins and Destinations, pp. 211–12.
570
NOTES
98 Ibid., p. 180.
99 Social Trends, 1976, p. 215; E.G.Edwards, Higher Education for
Everyone (Spokesman Press, 1982), esp. ch. 12.
100 Ibid., pp. 50–65, 95–96; UNESCO, Conference of Ministers of
Education of European Member States on Access to Higher
Education, Vienna, 20–25 November 1967: Background Document
No. 3.
101 University Grants Committee, University Development, 1947–52
(HMSO, 1953), p. 11; Social Trends, 1972, p. 132.
102 University Grants Committee, University Development, 1957–62
(HMSO, 1963), pp. 96, 100–1. For the origins and development of
the 1960s expansion of higher education and the binary system see
H.J.Perkin, Innovation in Higher Education: New Universities in
the United Kingdom (OECD, 1969).
103 Committee on Higher Education (Chairman: Lord Robbins), Report
(HMSO, Cmnd. 2154, 1963), pp. 160, 277.
105 Labour Party, Labour and the Scientific Revolution (Labour Party,
1963).
106 Cf. Perkin, Innovation in Higher Education, pp. 35–45.
108 Cf. Perkin, Key Profession, pp. 223–5.
109 National Opinion Poll, Bulletin No. 109, 1972, pp. 14, 17.
110 Margaret Stacey et al., Power, Persistence and Change: A Second
Study of Banbury (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 121.
111 A.S.C.Ross, et al., Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable
Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (ed. Nancy Mitford,
Penguin, 1956); Basil Bernstein (ed.), Language, Primary
Socialization and Education (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) and
Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology
of Language (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971).
112 Jilly Cooper, Class: A View from Middle England (Eyre Methuen,
1979).
113 Crosland, Future of Socialism, pp. 178, 186, 259.
114 Ronald P.Dore, British Factory, Japanese Factory: The Origins of
Diversity in Industrial Relations (Allen & Unwin, 1973), pp. 31–41,
98–108. With the trade recession and unemployment now at 3.2 per
cent Japanese corporations are now finding ingenious ways of
shedding labour, by transfers to folding subsidiaries and the like—
Observer, 2 August 1987 (Magazine section, pp. 23–7).
115 Cf. John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler, Class in a Capitalist
Society (Penguin, 1976), pp. 80–4.
116 Central Statistical Office, ‘Social commentary; social class’, Social
Trends, 1975, pp. 10–32.
117 Cf. Townsend, Poverty in UK, pp. 285, 414–16; Committee on One-
Parent Families (Chairman: S.E.Finer), Report (Cmnd. 5629, 1974),
p. 22 and Appendix 4.
118 R.H.S.Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (Cape, 1976–77),
vol. 2, p. 190.
571
NOTES
119 W.D.Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain

Since the Industrial Revolution (Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 228–9;
industrialists outnumbered financiers by twelve to three.
120 Ibid., p. 237.
121 The Sunday Times, 7 October 1984.
1880–1970 (Reort to SSRC, 1977, deposited in British Library
Lending Division, Boston Spa), tables 4.14, 10.14.
123 Who’s Who? Who Was Who? and The Sunday Times, 28 October
1984.
124 Harold Macmillan, Pointing the Way, 1959–61 (Macmillan, 1972),
p. 18.
125 Goldthorpe et al., Social Mobility, pp. 60–1.
126 Department of Employment Gazette, December 1971.
127 J.M. and R.E.Pahl, Managers and Their Wives (Penguin, 1972), pp.
47–8.
128 Cf., inter alia, Cronin, Labour and Society, Richard Price, Labour in
British Society (Croom Helm, 1986); David Coates, The Labour Party
and the Struggle for Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 1975).
129 Ferdinand Zweig, Productivity and the Trade Unions (Oxford
University Press, 1951); Price, op. cit., pp. 215–18; Hugh A.Clegg,
The Changing System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain
(Blackwell, 1979), pp. 215–20.
130 James E.Cronin, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain (Groom
Helm, 1979), p. 141.
131 Price, op. cit., pp. 214–27.
132 H.A.Turner, Garfield Clack and Geoffrey Roberts, Labour Relations
in the Motor Industry (Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 115, 334–6.
133 Cronin, Industrial Conflict, pp. 141–4.
134 Monopolies Commission, Professional Services (Cmnd. 4463, 1970).
135 Sir Otto Kahn-Freund, Labour Relations: Heritage and Adjustment
(Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 48–52.
136 Aldington-Jones Report (Joint Special Committee of Employers and
Unions, 1972); Committee of Inquiry into…the Port Transport
Industry (Chairman: Lord Devlin), First Report (Cmnd. 2523,
1964) and Final Report (Cmnd. 2734, 1965); David Wilson,
Dockers: The Impact of Industrial Change (Fontana, 1972), pp.
215–17; Price, op. cit., pp. 224–7.
137 Clegg, op. cit., pp. 472–3; Alan Fox, History and Heritage: The
Social Origins of the British Industrial Relations System (Allen &
Unwin, 1985), p. 393.
138 An excellent example of Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action
(Harvard University Press, 1971) and the role of ‘special interest
groups’; cf. also his The Rise and Decline of Nations (Yale
University Press, 1982).
139 Cf. Colin Crouch, ‘The intensification of industrial conflict in the
United Kingdom’, in C.Crouch and A.Pizzorno, The Resurgence of
Class Conflict in Europe Since 1968 (Holmes & Meier, 1979), vol.
1, pp. 228–9.
572
NOTES
140 National Opinion Polls, Bulletin, August 1969, pp. 5–6; Goldthorpe
et al., Affluent Worker, vol. 1, pp. 112–14.
141 Ivor Crewe et al., ‘Class dealignment in Britain, 1964–74’, British
Journal of Political Science, vol. 7, 1977; Richard Rose, ‘Class does
not equal party: the decline of a model of British voting’, Studies in
Public Policy, no. 74 (University of Strathclyde, 1980).
142 Ivor Crewe, ‘The electorate: class dealignment ten years on’, West
European Politics, 1984, p. 194.
143 Clegg, op. cit., ch. 12, ‘The crisis in British industrial relations’;
Anthony King, Why Is Britain Becoming Harder to Govern? (BBC,
1976).
CHAPTER 10 THE BACKLASH AGAINST PROFESSIONAL

SOCIETY
1 Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Penguin, 1973), Medical Nemesis:
The Expropriation of Health (Calder & Boyars, 1975), Disabling
Professions (Boyars, 1975), and The Right to Useful Employment
and its Professional Enemies (Boyars, 1978). Cf. also Jethro K.
Lieberman, The Tyranny of the Experts (Walker, 1970).
2 Magali S.Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (University of
California Press, 1977), esp. pp. 51–2.
3 Cf. Margaret Thatcher’s speech to Lobby correspondents, The
Times, 19 January 1984.
1960), pp. 10–11, 13–14, 20.
5 Paul Wilding, Professional Power and Social Welfare (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1982), and Socialism and Professionalism (Fabian
Society, 1981); see also Tim Robinson, In Worlds Apart:
Professionals and Their Clients in the Welfare State (Bedford Square
Press, 1978).
6 The Times, 19 January 1984.
7 Guardian, 21 April 1979; Observer, 27 May 1979; see also John
Mortimer’s defence of the binary legal profession and Lord Good-
man’s rejoinder, Guardian, 30 July and 1 August 1979.
8 The Sunday Times, 16 October 1983.
9 Sir Leslie Scarman et al., English Law and Social Policy (A
Symposium on his Hamlyn Lectures, 1974, Centre for Studies in
Social Policy, 1976); Peter Jenkins, ‘A sorry state for justice in
Britain’, Guardian, 21 November 1984.
10 Law Commission, Codification of the Criminal Law (Law
Commission no. 143, HMSO, 1985); Robert Maclennan in The
Independent, 8 January 1987. For further criticism of the Law
Commission and the legal profession see Philip A.Thomas (ed.),
Law in the Balance: Legal Services in the Eighties (Martin
Robertson, 1982).
11 Guardian, 17 September 1984.
12 Cf. two widely publicized cases of medical negligence: (1) of a
woman who had both breasts removed on a mistaken diagnosis of
573
NOTES
cancer; (2) of ‘catastrophic brain damage’ arising from a cyst

operation on a young man—The Sunday Telegraph, 19 July 1987.
13 Guardian, 16 April 1979.
14 Katharine Whitehorn in the Observer, 6 May 1979.
15 John A.T.Robinson, Honest to God (Student Christian Movement,
1963); Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith (BBC, 1984); David Jenkins,
The Contradiction of Christianity (Student Christian Movement,
1976). Cf. Franklin L.Baumer, Modern European Thought, 1660–
1950 (Collier Macmillan, 1977), part 5, ch. 3, ‘The eclipse of God’.
16 Dennis Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics (Oxford
University Press, 1987), pp. 85, 252, 289.
17 Monopolies Commission, Professional Services: A Report on the
General Effect on the Public Interest of Certain Restrictive Practices,
Part II (Cmnd. 4463, 1970).
18 Sir Gordon Borrie, Hamptons Lecture to the Incorporated Society of
Valuers and Auctioneers, The Times, 15 November 1983.
19 Observer, 18 January 1976, 29 March 1987.
20 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford
University Press, 1979).
21 Cf., inter alia, Christopher Driver, The Disarmers: A Study in Social
Protest (Hodder & Stoughton, 1964); Frank Parkin, Middle-Class
Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament (Manchester University Press, 1968); John Minnion
and Philip Bolsover (eds), The CND Story: The First 25 Years in the
Words of the People Involved (Allison & Busby, 1983); Meredith
Veldman, ‘Romantic and religious protest in a secular society:
fantasy literature, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmanent, and eco-
activism in Britain, 1945–80’ (unpublished PhD dissertation,
Northwestern University, 1988), part 2.
22 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin,
1958); E.J.Mishan, ‘Review of The Economics of
Underdevelopment’, Economica, vol. 27, 1960; Technology and
Growth: The Price We Pay (Praeger, 1973); and ‘Whatever
happened to progress?’, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 12, 1978,
p. 412.
23 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Paul
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Ballantine, 1968); D.H.Meadows et
al, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome on the
Predicament of Mankind (Potomac Association, 1972); Edward
Goldsmith et al., A Blueprint for Survival (Penguin, 1972); E.F.
Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
(Blond & Briggs, 1973). See also Edward M.Nicholson, The
Environmental Revolution (Penguin, 1972); Richard Kimber and
J.J. Richardson, Campaigning for the Environment (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1974); Stephen Cotgrove, Catastrophe or Cornucopia:
The Environment, Politics and the Future (Wiley, 1982); Veldman,
op. cit., part 3.
24 Cf., inter alia, Robert Bacon and Walter Eltis, Britain’s Economic
Problem: Too Few Producers (Macmillan, 1978).
574
NOTES
25 Cf. Guardian, 9 August 1979.

26 Observer, 6 May 1979.
27 Cf., among other Institute of Economic Affairs publications: Arthur
Seldon, Wither the Welfare State (1981); David G.Green, The
Welfare State: For Rich or Poor? (1982); Hermione Parker, The
Moral Hazard of State Benefits (1982); David Green, Which
Doctor? A Critical Analysis of the Professional Barriers to
Competition in the Health Service (1985) and Challenge to the NHS
(1986); Arthur Seldon, The Riddle of the Voucher…Obstacles to
Choice and Competition in State Schools (1986).
28 Peter Townsend, The Concept of Poverty (Heinemann, 1970), p. 275.
29 Nick Bosanquet and Peter Townsend, Labour and Equality
(Heinemann, 1980), p. 229.
30 Julian Le Grand, The Strategy of Equality: Redistribution and the
Social Services (Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 32.
31 Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe, British Capitalism, Workers and the
Profits Squeeze (Penguin, 1972); J.O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of
the Capitalist State (St Martin’s Press, 1973); David Coates and
John Milliard (eds), The Economic Decline of Modern Britain
(Harvester, 1986), part 4, ‘Marxist views of economic decline’.
32 Ralph Harris, No, Minister! A Radical Challenge on Economic and
Social Policies (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1985), pp. 57, 63.
33 Calculated from Richard Rose, Politics in England (Faber & Faber,
1985), p. 395.
34 Government Expenditure Plans, 1986–7 and 1988–9 (Cmnd. 9702,
1986), vol. 2, pp. 6–7.
35 Kavanagh, op. cit., p. 294.
36 Margaret Thatcher, Speech at Newcastle-on-Tyne, 23 March 1985,
in ibid., p. 291.
37 Guardian, 19 July 1985.
38 Anthony Heath et al., How Britain Votes (Pergamon, 1985), p. 132.
39 Kavanagh, op. cit., p. 222.
40 Observer, 5 July 1987.
41 Economic Trends Supplement, no. 12 (HMSO, 1987), p. 201.
42 Kavanagh, op. cit., pp. 308–9.
43 Friedrich A.von Hayek, A Tiger by the Tail: The Keynesian Legacy
of Inflation (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1972), pp. 107–8, 117.
44 Harris, op. cit., p. 26.
45 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776; Bell, 1905 edn), vol. 1,
p. 134.
46 OECD Economic Outlook, no. 41, June 1987; Observer, 21 June
1987; cf. also The Sunday Times, 9 October 1983.
47 Evan Davis and Andrew Dilnot, The IFS Tax and Benefit Model
(Institute of Fiscal Studies, 1985).
48 Paying for Local Government (Cmnd. 9714, 1986).
49 See esp. Friedrich A.von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1944), The Constitution of Liberty (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1982 edn).
575
NOTES
50 Hayek, A Tiger by the Tail, pp. 99–100, 104–5.

51 Ibid., p. 111.
52 J.M.Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money (Macmillan, 1936), pp. 383–4.
53 John B.Wood, ‘How it all began’, in Arthur Seldon (ed.), The
Emerging Consensus? (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1981).
54 James B.Buchanan and Gordon Tulloch, ‘An American perspective’,
in idem, pp. 82–3.
55 Cf. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, and ‘Will the democratic
ideal prevail?’, in Arthur Seldon (ed.), Confrontation: Will the Open
Society Survive to 1989? (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1978).
56 Leslie Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy (Methuen, 2nd
edn, 1983), p. 180.
57 Alan Fox, Beyond Contract: Work, Power and Trust Relations
(Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 336.
58 Robert B.Reich, ‘The new American frontier’, in Atlantic Monthly,
March (pp. 43–58) and April (pp. 97–107, 1983), pp. 52, 55; see
also his book, The Next American Frontier (Times Books, 1984).
59 Ibid., pp. 47, 108.
60 Ibid., p. 108.
61 Ibid., p. 108.
62 William Keegan, Mrs Thatcher’s Economic Experiment (Allen Lane,
1984), p. 33.
63 Social Trends, 1987, pp. 103, 104.
64 Social Trends, 1979, p. 163; 1987, p. 80.
65 Economic Trends Supplement, no. 12 (HMSO, 1987), p. 123.
66 Aubrey Jones, Britain’s Economy: The Roots of Stagnation
67 Sir Alec Cairncross, ‘The post-war years, 1945–77’, in Roderick
Floud and Donald McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of
Britain Since 1700, vol. 2, 1860 to the 1970s (Cambridge University
Press, 1981), p. 388; M.A.Utton and A.D.Morgan, Concentration
and Foreign Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 72.
68 New York Times, 15 February 1987.
69 OECD Economic Outlook, no. 41, June 1987, p. 92.
70 Cairncross, loc. cit., pp. 409–11.
71 The Economist, 18 January 1986.
72 Keegan, op. cit., ch. 2.
74 Observer, 28 October 1986.
75 Cairncross, loc. cit., p. 394.
76 Sidney Pollard, The Wasting of the British Economy (Croom Helm,
1982), pp. 14, 73, 90, 189.
77 Cairncross, loc. cit., p. 380.
78 Cf. C.F.Pratten, A Comparison of Swedish and UK Companies (esp.
ch. 14), and Labour Productivity Differentials Within International
Companies (both Cambridge University Press, 1976); and Frances
Cairncross in the Guardian, 19 February 1977.
79 Jones, op. cit., pp. 139, 147.
576
NOTES
80 Cf. above, ch. 8, section 1.

81 Sir Arthur Cockfield, ‘The Price Commission and price control’,
Three Banks Review; March 1978.
82 M.W.Kirkby, The Decline of British Economic Power (Allen &
Unwin, 1981); cf. Sir Henry Phelps Brown, ‘What is the British
predicament?’, Three Banks Review; December 1977. See also
Coates and Milliard, op. cit., passim.
83 Ralf Dahrendorf, On Britain (BBC, 1982), pp. 84–5.
84 Fox, op. cit., passim.
85 Cf. Ronald P.Dore, British Factory, Japanese Factory (Allen &
Unwin, 1973), pp. 31–41, 98–108. Even the Japanese are finding it
difficult to maintain lifelong employment in the current recession, in
which unemployment has risen to 3.2 per cent, and are finding
‘familial’ ways of laying off some workers, by offloading them to
subsidiary companies, and so on—Observer, 2 August 1987
(Magazine section, pp. 23–7).
86 Robert Taylor in the Observer, 28 June 1987.
87 P.Whiteley and I.Gordon, in the New Statesman, 11 January 1980.
88 J.L.Garvin, Life of Joseph Chamberlain (Macmillan, 1932), vol. 1,
p. 549.
89 Cf. J.H.Hexter, ‘A new framework for social history’, Journal of
Economic History, vol. 15, 1955 on ‘overmighty subjects’.
90 Edmund Burke, Refections on the Revolution in France (1790).
577
INDEX
Note: Sub-entries are in alphabetical Alliance see Social Democratic; Triple

order except where chronological Alliance
order is more significant Allied Breweries 297
Allotment Act (1887) 152
ABCA (Army Bureau of Current Allsop, Henry (later Lord Hindlip) 43,
Affairs) 416 72
Abel Smith, Brian 279, 347, 426, 454, Amalgamated Engineering Union 417
484 Amalgamated Society of Engineers 23,
Abortion Act (1967) 347, 433 194, 197–8
Abrams, Philip 237 Amersham International 488
accents see speech Amery, Leopold 159, 320
Acland, Arthur 150 Amulree Committee on Holidays with
Acts of Parliament see legislation Pay (1938) 308
Adam Smith Institute 492 Anderson Committee on student
Addington, John (Lord Hubbard) 72 support (1956) 451
Addison, Christopher 190, 196, 239 Arms, Ronald 296
Administrative Staff College 306 Ashby, Mabel 103
Admiralty 189 Ashley, Sir William 185
Adorno, T.W. 394 Ashton, Lord (Sir James Williamson)
Adulteration Acts 121 254, 255, 266–7
Advertising Managers’ Association 439 Asia 55; see also Japan
Advisory Council 497 Askwith, Sir George (Lord) 150–1,
affluent society 419–36 178– 9, 184–5, 189, 196–7, 203,
Africa, scramble for 55 215
Agadir crisis 184 ASLEF 212
Agnew, Lady 93 Asquith, Herbert Henry 61, 74, 91,
Agricultural Holdings Acts: 1883 134; 139, 141, 151, 159, 184, 191,
1948 382 196, 318
Agricultural Land Tribunals 382 Asquith, Margot 72, 73, 74
agriculture 23; depression 38, 66–8, Assistance Board 413, 417
134;labourers 34, 46, 104, 107 Assistant Masters’ and Mistresses’
Agriculture Act (1958) 382 Associations 350
Aims of Industry 492, 493 Associated British Ports 488
Air Ministry 190 Associated Chambers of Commerce
alcohol 280 206
Alden, Percy 167 Association of Headmasters 86
Alkali Acts 121, 385 Association of Hospital and Welfare
Allen, Clifford 321 Administration 439
578
INDEX
Association of Municipal Corporations Avebury, Lord (Sir John Lubbock) 138,

135, 137 146, 148
Association of Polytechnic Lecturers 350
Association of School Masters 350 backlash against professionalism see
Association of Scientific, Technical and under professional society
Managerial Staffs 20, 440 Bacon, Francis xv
Anderson, Perry 394 Baker, Kenneth 350
Anderson, Sir John 416 Baldwin, Stanley 216
Andrzejewski, Stanislaw 191 Balfour, Arthur, 1st Earl 74, 148, 152,
Anglicans 82, 435, 478 165, 202
Annan, Noel (Lord) 376 Balfour, Gerald 148
Anti-Corn Law League 2, 48, 133 Ball, Sir James 454
Anti-imperialists 158 Ballot Act (1872) 41
appearance see dress; Physical Balogh, Thomas 394, 414
Deterioration Banbury 274, 455–6
Arab states 506 Bank of England 320, 441, 510
Archbishops of Canterbury 264, 479 Bank Rate Tribunal 441
architecture: under attack 482–3; see Barber, Anthony 507
also housing Baring family 90
Arden, Lord 85 Barker, Sir Ernest 372, 393
Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty Barnato, Barney 72
384 Barnes, G.N. 190
Argyll, Duke of 43 Barnett, Canon Samuel 31, 56, 124,
aristocracy see rich and powerful class 131, 162, 167
Aristotle 500 Barnett, Henrietta 131
Arkwright & Strutt 309 Barrow 108, 197
armed forces 44; recruits 238–9; see Bass, Michael (Lord Burton) 72
also conscription; Physical Bateman, John 70, 145
Deterioration Bath, Marquess of 459
Armstrong of Cragside, Lord 72, 88 Baumol, William J. 508
Army Contracts Department 189 Baxter, Dudley 28–9, 30, 242
Arnold, Matthew 83, 118–19, 127, BBC 267, 281
240, 362, 391 Beales, H.L. 37
Arnold, Thomas 119, 127, 335, 367, Bearsted, Lord (Marcus Samuel) 72
369 Beatles 459
Association of Teachers in Technical Beaverbrook, Lord 190, 256
Institutions 86, 350 Becker, Gary 7
Association of University Teachers 440 Beckton Gas workers see gas workers’
Association of Women Clerks in Board strike
of Trade 99 Bedford, Dukes of 65, 68, 70, 253, 458,
associations/organizations 316– 459
21;middle class 20, 85–7, 95, 439– Beecham, Sir Joseph 68
40; working class 109–10, 284; see Beer, Rachel 90
also unions and names of individual Beit, Alfred 72
associations Belfast 150, 488
Astor, Lady 235, 254 Bell, Clive 196, 198, 391–2
Attlee, Clement 131, 225, 343, 411, Bell, Daniel 22
417, 488 Bell, Lady Florence 103
Austen, Jane 366 Bell, Sir Lowthian 88
Australia 38, 419, 487, 514 Bellairs, Carlyon 159
Austria-Hungary 186 Belloc, Hilaire 77
Auxiliary Territorial Service 411 Beloff, Lord 438
Belper, Baron (Edward Strutt) 43
579
INDEX
benevolence of predators (Spencer) 142– Bonar Law see Law

3 Booth, Charles and surveys 103, 162,
Benn, Tony (Anthony Wedgwood) 327, 278; on middle class 78, 96, 100; as
469 originator of social survey 32; on
Benson, Edmund, Archbishop of poverty 27, 32–3, 35, 55, 57, 161,
Canterbury 264 167, 224, 357; on ‘residuum’ 27,
Bentham, Jeremy and Benthamites 15, 33, 55, 57; as self-made man 99; on
32, 121–3, 128, 133, 142, 155, 369 unemployment 167; on working-
Berle, A.A., Jr 388 class culture 101
Berlin, Isaiah 394 Booth, William 31, 56, 103
Bernstein, Basil 456 Boothby, Robert 320
Besant, Annie 50, 111, 235 Borrie, Sir Gordon 479
Bevan, Aneurin 346–7, 354, 441, 444 Bosanquet, Bernard 123, 126
Beveridge, William and Report on Bosanquet, Helen 103, 114, 123
Social Insurance (1942) 131, 161, Boucherett, Jesse 146
166, 324, 337, 341–2, 354, 370, Boulton & Watt 309
414, 470; character 414; on Bourdieu, Pierre 7
employment 356–7; on long-term Bow Group 447
benefits 338–9; at Ministry of Food Bowley, Sir Arthur 30, 31, 33, 34–5,
190; reception of report 416–18, 79, 103, 231, 246, 278, 357
436; on ‘rule of expert’ 344, 363; Boy Scouts 99
on ‘universalism’ 446 Boyd Orr, Sir John 279
Bevin, Ernest 214, 222, 322, 323, 411, Boys’ Brigade 99
417, 469, 480 Brabourne, Lord 145
bifurcation see divisions Bradford 52, 163
Birkenhead, Lord (F.E.Smith) 91 Bradlaugh, Charles 110, 235
Birkenhead (town) 76 ‘brain drain’ 394, 487
Birmingham 197, 264, 277; class Braithwaite, W.J. 165
conflict 420; during First World War Branson, Richard 459
253; industry 276, 297; riots 517; Bretton Woods conference 341, 497,
slum clearance 137; strikes 179; 507
suburbs 28, 268 Briggs, Asa 137
Birmingham Small Arms 297 Bright, John 47, 48, 133, 152, 342
Birrell, Augustine 141 Bristol 179, 231, 276, 278, 517
birth control 235–6 British Aerospace 488
birth rate 54–6, 59–61, 95, 102–3, 105, British Airports Authority 488
237, 278, 430, 433 British Airways 488, 489, 502
‘Black Friday’ 214 British Association for Advancement of
Blackburn, Helen 146 Science 58–9, 86
Blackburn (town) 255 British Caledonian 489
Blackett, Sir Basil 320 British Communist Party 198, 207
Blackley, Canon William 161 British Council of Churches 416
Blair, Eric see Orwell British Dental Association 439
‘Bloody Sunday’ 50 British Electric Traction Company 148
Bloomer, Mrs 237 British Employers Federation 322
Board of Education 190 British Gas 488
Board of Trade 99, 148, 150, 167, 184, British Institute of Management 305,
189–90, 196, 211, 265; Inquiry into 399
Cost of Living (1905) 103 British Labour Party 180; see also
body politic see society, corporate Labour Party
Boer War 33, 56, 57, 99, 111, 155, British Leyland 248, 441, 460, 463,
157–8, 258; see also Physical 467, 488
Deterioration British Library 259
580
INDEX
British Medical Association 164, 279, class 62–78, 254, 255–7, 365– 6,
345, 346, 347, 414, 440, 478 459–60; see also industry;
British National Oil 441, 460 management
British North Sea Oil 488 Bute, Marquess of 85, 253
British Nuclear Energy Society 439 Butler, Josephine 146
British Petroleum 442, 488 Butler, R.A. 403, 419
British Shipbuilders 488
British Socialist Party (later Communist Cable and Wireless 293, 488
Party of Great Britain) 194, 207, Cadbury, Edward 303; family and
211 business 149, 303, 311, 442
British Steel Corporation 376, 440, 441 Cadogan, Lord 253, 254
British Sugar 488 Caird, Edward 126, 335
British Telecom 293, 488, 489, 502 Cairncross, Sir Alec 509, 512
Britoil 293 Cairns, Lord 85
Broadhurst, Henry 39, 49, 51 Callaghan, James 329
Brockett, Lord (Newall-Cain) 252 Calthorpe, Lord and family 253, 254
Brooklands Agreement 180 Cambridge University see Oxford and
Brown, George 490 Cambridge
Brownlie, J.T. 198 Camden, Lord 253
Brunner Mond 307, 375 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Brunner, Sir John 76 480
Bryant and May see match girls’ strike Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry 158
Bryant, Sir Arthur 273 Canada 408, 419, 472, 514
Buchan, Mrs John (Lady Tweedsmuir) Canadian Pacific Railroad 43, 72
73–4 Cannadine, David 253
Buckingham, Dukes of 6, 69, 119 capital: human, and triumph of
Buckinghamshire 68 professionalism 377–90; ownership
Bullock Committee on Industrial of, undermined 380–90; see also rich
Democracy 387 and powerful
Burdett-Coutts, Baroness 31 capitalism, British, climacteric of 36–40;
bureaucracy 131, 183; see also Civil see also business
Service; municipal socialism Cardiff 179, 197, 252, 277
Burgess, Anthony 483 Cardwell, Edward, army reforms 371
burgesses (local middle class) 267–73 Carlile, Richard 118
Burke, Edmund 326, 519 Carlyle, Thomas 122, 362, 391
Burnett, John 231 Carron iron foundry 24
Burnett-Hurst, A.R. 33, 34–5, 103, 357 Carson, Rachel 480
Burnham, James 3 Cassel, Sir Ernest 66, 67, 73
Burnham, Lord 199 Castle, Barbara 469
Burns, John 50, 51, 106, 111, 140 Catholics 82, 133, 286, 434–5
Burrows, Herbert 50 Caudwell, Christopher 393
Burt, Cyril 448 Cavendish laboratory 86
Burt, Thomas 146 Cayzen family (Lord Rotherwick) 459
Burton, Lord (Michael Bass) 72 CEMA (Council for Education in Music
Bushill, Thomas 149 and Arts) 412
business/industry 439–41, 460, 463, census: of fertility 60, 103; of religion
467, 488, 512, 513; concentration in 240
292– 306; and corporatism 317–19, Central Landed Association 153
321–4, 327, 331; in interwar years Centre for Policy Studies 485
206, 256–7; in middle class 83, 84; Chadwick, Edwin 118, 121–1, 155,
in parliament 43–5, 46; and 161, 338, 356
professional ideal 122, 135–6, 256– Chalmers, Thomas 31
7, 374–6; and rich and powerful
581
INDEX
Chamberlain, Sir Neville 255, 267, 337, Civil Service Clerical Association 86
343 Civil Service College 25
Chamberlain, Joseph 39, 43, 47–8, Civil Service Typists’ Association 99
134– 7, 152, 159, 161–2, 167, 517 Claimants’ Union 10, 317
Chambers, Sir Paul 459 Clarendon Commission 120
Champion, H.H. 49–50 Clarendon Laboratory 86
Chaplin, Henry 152 Clarendon schools see public schools
Charity Organization Society 31, 56, Clark, Colin 22, 498
61, 123–5, 151, 167, 348, 499 Clark, Garfield 464
Charterhouse 338 Clarke, Peter 130
Chartists 2, 118 class: convergence of 421–6; divisions
Checkland, Sydney 154 within professions 399–402, 436–54;
Chester, D.N. 415 fourth, professionals as see
Chicago School 469 professional society; mobility see
Child, John 303 education in interwar years;
Child Poverty Action Group 10, 317 persistence of 455–71; versus
Children Acts: 1908 168; 1948 436 hierarchy 2–9; see also class society;
children see birth rate; education middle class; professional society;
Chiozza Money, Sir Leo 29–30, 62, 78, rich and powerful class; working
229 class
Chloride Group 441, 512 class society: from 1880–1914 see
Cholmondley, Marquess of 76 segregated classes,
Chorley, Kathleen 81–2, 105 zenith;immediately before and
Christian Socialism 48, 49, 122, 126–7, during First World War see crisis;
134, 140, 149, 343 changing see interwar years; see also
Christianity see religion corporate society; professional
Church, Richard 97 society
Church of England see Anglicans Clay, Sir Arthur vii, 182–3
Churchill, Lord Randolph 75, 167–8 Clegg Commission on public sector pay
Churchill, Viscount 68, 77 491–2
Churchill, Winston (later Sir) 255, 417; Club of Rome: Limits to Growth 481
on experts 169; and nationalization Clyde Workers’ Committee 190, 194,
229; and rationing 189; speech of 195, 196
267; and unions and strikes 179–80, ‘Clydeside, Red’ 187, 193–5
184, 202–3; and welfare 129, 166– Clynes, J.R. 180
7, 354, 414; during Second World Coal Mines Minimum Wage Act (1912)
War 411– 13, 414, 416 151, 176, 184
cities see individual cities, in particular Coalition governments 204, 213, 229,
London 230, 417, 418
citizenship, social 352–8; see also Coats J. and P. 292
corporate society Cobden, Richard 47, 133, 152, 342
Citrine, Sir Walter 217, 318, 319 Cockfield, Sir Arthur (later Lord) 513
City of London Electric Company 147 ‘Coefficients’ 159
Civil Service 87, 90–1, 99, 303, 307–8, Cole, G.D.H. 321, 414
363, 399; associations and unions Coleridge, S.T. 118, 122, 125, 362,
20, 25, 86, 99; during First World 391, 392
War 189–90; entry 250, 264–5, 369, collective bargaining 185–6, 490–1
370, 371, 373, 378; ICI compared collectivism 182; and professional ideal
with 375;plateau of professionalism 123, 139–41; see also associations;
407, 438, 439, 440; backlash unions; welfare
against professionalism 473, 487; Collings, Jesse 48, 152
pensions 308; reports on 328; Collins, Sir Godfrey 255
unions 20; women in 235 Collison, William 147
582
INDEX
Colmore, G. 93 leaders, in particular Macmillan,

Colonial Office 92 Thatcher
colonies 55, 226, 264, 369, 371, 408; Contagious Diseases Acts 146
independence of 419–20 contingent property concept 136
Colquhoun, Patrick 32 contraception 235–6
Combermere, Lord 77 Contracts Department 228
commerce see business Controllers 190, 228
Commissions/Royal Commissions/ convergence of class 421–6
Committee Reports; on education Cook, A.J. 178, 318
83, 87, 119, 120, 362, 372–3, 448, Cooper, Jilly 456
450; on health (1920) 345; on Co-operative Guild 391
housing (1884–85) 103; on income co-operative movement 94, 109, 110
see Diamond; on industry 210, 229, Co-operative Wholesale Society 94
387; on national insurance (1895) corporate society/corporatism 185–6,
162; on Poor Laws (1905–9) 103; 286–358; ‘bargained’ 151; in
on population (1949) 236; on social interwar years 208–16; enforced by
services 349; on trade unions 20; on state see War; citizenship and 352–8;
unemployment insurance see intellectuals and welfare state 334–
Beveridge; see also Bullock; 43; welfare professionals and welfare
Clarendon; Clegg; Donovan; state 343–52; and backlash against
Rothschild; Samuel; Sankey; professionalism 473, 489–93; see
Seebohm; Taunton also class society; economy,
Communist Party of Great Britain 180, corporate; state, corporate;
197, 207, 208, 418 professional society; Triple Alliance
community charge (poll tax) 494 Corrupt Practices Act (1883) 41
commuting see suburbs; transport COS see Charity Organization Society
competition, foreign 36–7, 38, 55, 177; costs: of living see standard of living; of
in interwar years 220–3, 226–7; see war 225–6, 407–8; see also
also free market; trade expenditure
concentration in industry 292–306 Cotton, George Edward Lynch
Conciliation Officers 215 (headmaster of Marlborough) 367
condescension of professionalism 390– Council for National Academic Awards
9;see also superiority 452
Confederation of British Industry 329, councils, county and parish 75–6
398, 399, 492 country houses 64–7, 73–7, 251–2
Connolly, James 195, 197, 207 County Councils Act (1888) 42
conscription 188, 198, 228–9, 238–9, County War Agricultural Committee
411;see also Physical Deterioration 188, 382, 409
Conservative Party 12, 191, 204, 232, Courtauld, Samuel and Courtaulds 30–
403; and corporatism 320, 321; and 8, 364, 372, 441, 460, 513
decline of democracy 326–7; and Cousins, Frank 325, 469
economy 222, 229–30; elites in 251, Coventry 197, 202, 276
255–6, 260–3, 265; and imperialism Cowdray, Lord 190
55, 158; and property 148, 152, Cox, Baroness 454
383; and rich and powerful class 36, Crewe, Lord 77
40–6, 52, 63, 139, 144, 373; and crime 240–1, 477
unions 174, 196, 214, 216, crisis of class society 171–217; aborted
311,312, 318; and welfare 140, 324, pre-war 174–86; First World War as
338, 341–3, 382; and plateau of supreme test of class society 188–
professionalism 416–17, 425, 443–7, 203; averted 204–17
454, 469–70; and backlash against Crofts, W.C. 138, 145, 146
professionalism 474, 485–7, 495, Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act (1886)
510, 515, 518; see also individual 134
583
INDEX
Croham, Lord 496 Devonport, Lord 190, 228, 297

Cromer, Lord 371 Devonshire, Dukes of 69, 254, 259
Cronin, James 283–4, 418 Diamond, Lord and Diamond
Crosland, Anthony 306, 445, 449–50, Commission on income and wealth
452, 456, 469 (1975) 242–4, 424, 427, 429
Crossman, Richard 445, 447, 458, 469 Dicey, A.V. 139
Crouch, Colin 286, 287 Dickens, Charles 31, 99
Crowley, Ambrose 309 diet 105
Cumberland 234, 309 Dilution Commissioners 195
Cunliffe-Lister, Sir Samuel (Lord Director General of Fair Trading 479
Masham) 72, 255 Disraeli, Benjamin 40, 42, 48, 118, 133,
Cunningham, D.J. 58–9 320
Cupitt, Don, 435, 478 Dissenters 42
Curwen, John Christian 309 District Councils Act (1894) 42
Curzon, Lord 74 divisions: geographical within country
Customs and Excise 21, 163 516–17 (see also geographical
segregation); within classes see class
Dagenham 284, 417, 512 society; within professions 399–402,
Dahrendorf, Ralf 4, 216, 329, 388, 514 436–54; see also segregated classes
Daimler company 297 Divorce Reform Act (1969) 431, 433
Dale, David 149 Docker, Sir Bernard and Lady 297
Dale, H.E. 264 dockers’ strikes (1888–89) 39, 51, 111
Dalton, Hugh 131, 336 Dockers’ Union 92
Dangerfield, George 172 doctors: and corporatism 344–8; and
D’Arcy Cooper, Francis 256 backlash against professionalism
Darlington 267 477– 8; see also National Health
Darwin, Charles 142 Service
Davidson, Randall, Archbishop of Domingo, Placido 7
Canterbury 264 Donovan Commission on Trade Unions
Davidson, Thomas 49 and Industrial Relations 20, 465,
Davies, John 325 469
Davies, Stella 82, 103 Donisthorpe, Wordsworth 145, 146
Davies Committee on health service dress: in interwar years 219, 236–7;
(1974) 477 post-World War Two 432
Davis, Steve 459 Drummond, Sir Jack 410
Dawkins, Sir Clinton 159 Dublin 175, 207
Dawson, Sir Bertrand (later Lord Dudley family 253
Dawson of Penn) 345 Durant, Ruth 284
Dawson, Sir Robert 345 Durham 87, 178, 284
De Leon, Daniel 207 duties and responsibilities of property
de Stern, Baron 72 125–7, 161; see also welfare
Deakin, Arthur 469
Defence of Realm Act 196 Earle, Mrs 93
Delamere of Vale Royal, Lord 76 earnings see income
democracy: decline of 324–31; industrial Eatwell, John 341
387–8 Eckstein, Harry 347
Denning, Lord 386 Economic Council suggested 327
depression: agriculture 38, 66–8, 134; economy: decline 506–19; mixed 403;
fear of 206; see also ‘Great see also business; competition;
Depression’ economy, corporate; free trade;
Derby 197; Earls of 38, 121, 228, 253, production; trade
254, 255, 458, 459 economy, corporate 291–315;
Deutscher, Isaac 394 concentration in industry 292–306;
584
INDEX
professionalization of working class Employment Acts (1980, 1982, 1984)

306–15; see also economy 492
Eden, Sir Anthony 255 Employment Protection Acts (1978,
Edinburgh 100, 264, 268 1980) 312, 387
education 20–1, 27; of rich and Engineering Employers’ Federation 147,
powerful class 71–2, (see also 199–200, 206, 318, 417
Oxford and Cambridge, public English Land Tenure Association 48
schools); commissions on 83, 87, ENSA (Entertainments National Service
119, 362, 372– 3, 448, 450; in Association) 412
interwar years 218, 238–9, 242, environmentalists 480–1
247–51, 259–61; meals and medical Equal Opportunities Commission 431
inspections 163–4, 247; of middle Equal Pay Act (1970) 431
class 82, 83–4, 86–91, 93; and equality: increased see plateau;
professional ideal 119–21, 124, 127– legislation for 234–5, 282, 431
8, 366–74; and corporatism 349–51; equi-valent tetrahedron, society as 4–5
post-World War Two 423–4, 439, ‘escheat’ doctrine 128
448– 54, 487; see also Oxford and Escort, T.H.S. 75
Cambridge; public schools; Essential Works Order (1941) 311
universities Essex 68, 252
Education Acts: 1870 121; 1902 165; Eton 71, 88, 90, 250, 259, 263, 368
1918 238, 239; 1944 350, 418, 436, Eugenics 54, 57, 60
448 Europe 364–5, 368, 420; armies of 55;
Education and Science, Department of in interwar years 206; during Second
21, 449, 453 World War 408, 411; industry in
Edward VII 73; as Prince of Wales 75 471, 472, 507–8, 511, 512, 514;
Edwardes, Sir Michael 376, 441, 512 strikes in 514; taxation in 493–4;
Edwards, Clement 196 see also European Economic
efficiency see national efficiency Community and individual countries
Egerton of Tatton, Lord 76 European Convention on Human Rights
Ehrlich, Paul 481 476
Eicholz, Dr 58 European Court 476, 487
Elcho, Lady 74 European Economic Community,
Elcho, Lord (later Earl of Wemyss) 141, economy of 223, 308, 387, 403,
145, 148 419, 507; see also Europe
Elderton, Ethel 60 evacuation in wartime 411–12
Eldon, Lord 6, 85 Evangelicalism 127
Electric and General Investment expectations, revolution in 407–18
Company 148 expenditure, public 10, 21–2, 226, 251,
Eliot, George 240, 435 447; in interwar years 222–3, 230;
Eliot, T.S. 392, 394 and backlash against professionalism
elites see professional; rich 483, 485–7, 509; see also costs;
Elizabeth II, Queen 459, 460 welfare
Elizabeth, Queen (consort of George VI) expertise see human capital; professional
413 Eysenck, Hans 394
Ellerman, Sir John 73, 85, 252
Elliot, Sir George 145 Fabian Society 101, 343; founded
Emergency Powers Act (1920) 213 (1884) 39; on birth rate 59–60; and
Emerson, R.W. 2 corporatism 333, 335–6;
Empire see colonies; imperialism fictionalized 127; ‘Four Pillars of the
Employers’ Parliamentary Council 147 House’ 205; and imperialism 158–9;
employers see business; economy; Triple intellectual elitism of 50; and
Alliance Labour Party 52; and lower middle
Employment, Department of 486 class 99; and Marxism 49; and
585
INDEX
municipal socialism 61, 137–8; and ‘Four Pillars of the House’ 205
professional ideal 125; on property Fox, Alan 272–3, 313, 514
132, 145; and social efficiency 164; France 400, 408, 411, 493–4, 512
on suburbs 46; on welfare 349, 354; Franco, General 286
and working class 50, 57; see also Free Labour Protection Association 147
London School of Economics and Free Land League 48, 49
individual Fabians, in particular free market and free trade ideology 12–
G.B.Shaw and Webb, B. and S. 13, 39, 230; resurgence of 495–506
Factory and Mines Acts (1830s–40s) Friedman, Milton 354, 454, 469
121, 385 friendly societies 109–10, 161
Fair Trade League 39 Fromm, Erich 394
Fairchild, E.G. 201 Fry, Maxwell 414
Falklands war 511
family: post-World War Two 425–6, Gaitskell, Hugh 306, 404, 444
430; size see birth rate Galbraith, John Kenneth 480, 494, 510
Family Expenditure Survey 426 Gallacher, William 194, 195, 198, 209–
Family Planning Act (1967) 433 10
Family Welfare Association (earlier Galsworthy, John 77
Charity Organization Society) 354 Gallon, Francis 60
Fawcett, Millicent 233 gambling 281
FBI see Federation of British Industry Garvin, J.L. 90
fear of poor 53–61 gasworkers’ strikes (1888–9) 39, 51,
Feather, Vic 330 111, 112
Federation of British Industry 188–9, Gasworkers’ Union 149
191, 199, 204, 206, 215, 217, 318– Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan 254
19, 325 GCHQ (Cheltenham) 487
Federation of Women Clerks 99 Geddes, Auckland 211
‘feedback’, administrative 164 Geddes, Sir Eric 190, 211, 297; ‘axe’
Ferrantis 442 230, 239
fertility census 60; see also birth rate General Chamber of Manufacturers 287
finance see business; costs; expenditure; General Electric Company (GEC), 376,
income; taxation 460, 467, 488
Financial Intermediaries, Managers and General Federation of Trade Unions 187
Brokers Regulatory Association 479 General Medical Council 347, 373
First Division Association 440 General Motors 300
Fisher, Antony 497 General Strikes: in 1914 175; in 1926
Fisher, H.A.L. 190, 238 171, 213–15, 286, 298, 318
Fitzwilliam, Lord 253 geographical: divisions within country
Fleck, Alexander (Lord) 459 516–17; segregation 28, 45–6, 54,
Florence, P.Sargant 299 81, 104, 274; see also suburbs
Folkestone 253 George, Henry/Georgism 39, 46–9, 128,
Follett, Mary Parker 305 134–5, 137, 139, 144–5, 385
food 121, 190, 228, 265, 409–10; George V, king 192, 198, 345
rationing 229, 410; see also Georgism see George, Henry
agriculture Germany 158, 184, 186, 212, 222;
Food Controllers 190, 228 competition from 36, 55, 220, 365;
Food and Drugs Acts (1860s) 121 in interwar years 206; industrial
Food, Ministry of 190, 265 democracy 387; Nazism in 286; see
Foot, Michael 327 also War, First and Second
Ford 296, 300, 311, 417 Giddens, Anthony 7
foreign competition see competition Gilbert, Bentley 160, 353
Foreign Office 487 Gilbreth, F.B. 298
Foreign Service 373 Girl Guides 99
586
INDEX
Gittins, Diana 236 Haldane, R.B. (Lord) 74, 136, 141, 159
Gladstone, William Ewart 43, 46–8, 69, Halifax, Lord 255
73, 110, 121, 145, 155, 169, 368 Hall, Charles 118
Glasgow 73, 264; industry in 256; Halsey, A.H. 248, 350, 423
poverty in 35; strikes in 194–6, 202, Hambledon, Lady (Mrs W.H.Smith) 72
207, 209–10, 234 ‘hands off Russia’ campaign 211
Glass, David 248 ‘happiness, greatest’, principle 122–3,
Glenday, Roy 320 128, 132
Glossop 255, 267 Harcourt, Sir William 139
Goldsmid, Sir Julius 89 Hardie, Keir 51–2, 74, 113, 130, 335
Goldsmith, Edward 481 Hargreaves, Leonard 197
Goldsmith, Sir James 459 Harlech, Lord 255, 459
Goldthorpe, John 248, 422 Harmsworth, Alfred (Lord Northcliffe)
Gore, Charles, Bishop 126–7 90, 252
Gorer, Geoffrey 432, 435 Harris, Frank 62
Gorst, Sir John 59, 165 Harris, Ralph (Lord) 484, 491, 497
Gouldner, Alvin 7 Harrison, Frederic 134
government: employment 315, 328; see Harrison, Royden 202
also politics; public; Triple Alliance Harrow 71, 88, 90, 263, 367
Grade, Lord 297 Hartington, Marquess of 43, 47, 135,
Graham, Sir James 43 259
Gramsci, A. 357 Harvey-Jones, Sir John 459
Grand Metropolitan 296 Hastings 105
‘Great Depression’: in 1874–96 36–40, Hawkins, Sir John 6
63, 66–7; in 1930s 222, 230, 280 Hawkins, W.A.S. 159
Great Exhibition (1851) 363 ‘Hawthorne experiments’ 303
Great Universal Stores 375 Hayek, Friedrich von 342, 354, 394,
Great Western Railway 43, 72 445, 447, 458, 469, 490; and free
Green, Thomas Hill 124–8, 132, 140, market ideology 494–500, 505–6;
370 and Keynes 496–7
Greenwood, Arthur 414, 417 Head, George 138–9
Greenwood, Walter 275–6 Headlam, Stewart 49, 50, 123, 134
Greg, Samuel 303 Headmasters’ Conference 450
Grey, Earl 141, 145 Healey, Denis 510
Grey, Sir Edward 74, 159 health 280; insurance 164, 165–6, 168,
Griffiths, James 417 242, 246–7; see also National
Gross Domestic Product 10, 223, 315; Health Service; Physical
post-World War Two 419, 485, Deterioration
507–8, 509 Health, Ministry of 181, 346, 447
Grossmith, George and Weedon 99 Heath, Edward 325, 329, 445, 466,
Ground Game Act (1880) 134 469, 470, 491, 510, 515
groups see associations Hedley, Thomas 311
Guardian Royal Exchange 293 Hegel, G.W.F. xii, 125
Guest, Sir John (Lord Wimborne) and Henderson, Arthur 190, 197
family 69, 72, 73, 366 Heneage, Lord 66
Guild of St Matthew 49 Heron, David 60
Guildford 84 Hesketh family 253
Hewart, Lord Chief Justice (Gordon)
Haddow, Sir Douglas 265 342
Hadow report on education (1926) 448 Heyck, T.W. 370
Haeckel, E.H. 157 Heywood, James 369
Hailsham, Lord (Quintin Hogg) 416, Hicks, George 217
444, 477 hierarchy versus class 2–9
587
INDEX
Hill, Octavia 31, 123–4 Hyndman, H.M. 49, 57, 114, 130, 134,
Hill Samuel 296 145, 201
Hindlip, Henry, Lord (Allsop) 43, 72
Hitler, Adolf 5, 222, 320, 342 IBM 300
Hoare, Sir Samuel 255 ideals: of service see professional
Hobbes, Thomas 13, 499, 504 society; see also moral
Hobhouse, L.T. 125, 130, 158 illegitimacy 237, 433
Hobsbawm, Eric 130, 394 Illich, Ivan 348, 475
Hobson, J.A. 125, 126, 130, 132–3, ILP see Independent Labour Party
158, 167, 222, 393 immigrants 420
Hobson, Sir Oscar 498 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) 76,
Hodge, John 190, 201 256–7, 296, 300, 372, 375, 459
Hodges, Frank 213 Imperial Conference (1931) 318
Hodgskin, Thomas 118 Imperial Economic Conference (1932)
Hogg, Quintin see Hailsham, Lord 318
Hoggart, Christopher 433 Imperial Tobacco Company 292
Hoggart, Richard 274, 283, 396 imperialism/Imperialists 55, 157–9; see
holidays see leisure also colonies
Holidays with Pay Act (1938) 282 income; before First World War 34–5,
Holland, Henry Scott 126 39–40, 64–71, 102, 106–8; in
Holmes, Sir Maurice 265 interwar years 218, 223, 230–2,
Home Office/Secretary 92, 179 241–7, 258–66, 270–1, 277–8; post-
Hooley, Ernest T. 502 World War Two 242–4, 424–5,
Horkheimer, M. 394 427–9, 457–9, 461; of middle class
Hornby family 255 78, 88–92, 95, 97–8, 100, 270–1; of
Horner, Lady Frances 74 rich and powerful class 64– 71,
Horniman, Annie E.F. 83 258–66; security 310–12, 457, 461;
hostility, class 36, 39 of working class 34–5, 39–40, 102,
House of Lords 171, 325; challenged 106–8, 277–8; see also Diamond;
173; and industrial reorganization National Income
320; and Taff Vale case 113 independence of colonies 419–20
housing 27, 28, 202; in interwar years Independent Labour Party 52, 99, 109,
219, 269, 284; middle class 92–4; 111, 130, 168, 183, 187, 194, 195
rented 381–2; see also suburbs India Office 92
Housing Act (1924) 337 individualism and professional ideal
Housing and Town Planning Act (1909) 123–4, 125, 151, 156–7
168 Industrial Courts Act (1919) 215
Howard de Walden, Lord 252 industrial democracy 387–8
Howe, Geoffrey 447 Industrial Freedom League 138
Howe, R. 103 Industrial Injuries Insurance (1946) 436
Howell, George 147 Industrial Parliament suggested 321, 327
Hubbard, John, Lord 72 industrial relations see strikes; unions
Hudson, George 66 Industrial Relations Acts (1971, 1974)
Hughes, Thomas 120, 149 312, 387, 470
Hull 51, 179 Industrial Relations Code (1971) 311,
human capital and triumph of 313
professionalism 377–90 Industrial Reorganization Corporation
Hume, David 15 441, 467
Hutchison, T.W. 496 Industrial Reorganization League 320
Hutton, Graham 498 Industrial Society 312, 313
Huxley, Aldous 393 industrial spirit, decline of 363–76
Huxley, Julian 414 Industrial Tribunals 386
Huxley, T.H. 435
588
INDEX
Industrial Union of Employers and Ireland 177, 207, 211; industry 488;
Employed 148 land 46, 126, 133, 135; militancy
industry see business; free market; 172, 177; revolution in 171, 172;
unions; working class strikes 150, 175, 207; universities 88
Industry Act (1975) 330 Irish Land Act (1881) 126, 133
inequality: height of 28–36; see also Irish Nationalists 41, 172
class Irving (headmaster of Uppingham) 367
inflation 39, 491, 508, 510–11 Israel 506
informal corporatism 316–21 Italy 408
Information, Ministry of 190 Iveagh, Lord 72
Inge, W.R. 61
inheritance: of father’s occupation 250; Jacques, Elliott 271
of property 128, 129 Jaguar 488, 513
Inland Revenue 91, 189 James, Henry 77
Inns of Court 20, 85 Japan 516; during Second World War
insecurity 95–6; see also security 408, 418; industry and competition
Institute of Chartered Accountants 87 from 220, 223, 227, 301, 364–5,
Institute of Chemistry 86 403, 419, 457, 472, 493, 504, 507–
Institute of Civil Engineers 87 8, 511, 513, 514–15; tax in 493–4
Institute of Directors 86, 374, 492 Jarrow 267, 276, 298
Institute of Economic Affairs 478, 483, Jay, Douglas 393
484, 493, 497 Jeffries, Richard 364
Institute of Industrial Administration 305 Jenkins, Clive 309, 462
Institute of Mechanical Engineers 87 Jenkins, David, Bishop of Durham 435,
Institute of Personnel Management 305 478
Institution of Professional Civil Servants Jenkins, Hugh 296–7, 360
440 Jenkins, Roy 433, 477
institutions see associations Joicey, Lord 69
insurance, health and unemployment Joint Consultative Council 322–3
164, 165–8, 242, 246–7; see also Joint Production Committees 417
National Health; National Insurance Jones, Aubrey 508
intellectuals 74, 86; emigrating 394, Jones, Jack 330, 469
487; welfare and 334–43; see also Jones, Thomas 268
Fabian Society Jones-Aldington Report (1972) 466
intelligence, belief in decline of 58–9, 60 Joseph, Sir Keith 327, 447, 485, 510
International Monetary Fund 507–8, Jowett, Benjamin 265, 369
510 Jowett, Fred 183
International Working Men’s justice, social 402–3; see also welfare
Associations 48, 187
interventionism: alliance of state,
industry and unions in interwar Kahn-Freund, Sir Otto 465
years 208–16; and professional ideal Kaldor, Nicholas 394
124–6, 131–3, 146–7; see also Kant, Immanuel 125
nationalization; state; War; welfare Kavanagh, Dennis 489
interwar years 173, 204–17, 241–85; Kearton, Frank (Lord) 441, 460, 493
crisis averted 204–17; class system Keighley 108
changing 251–8; middle classes, Kelmscott House circle 132
mobile and stationary 266–73; Kendall, May 34, 105, 107
money less important 258–66; ‘Road Kenrick’s hardware 311
from Wigan Pier’ 273–85; social Kent 67
change 241–51 Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesianism
investment: controlled 388–9; see also 370, 472; background 339–40; on
business; economy balanced budgets 222; on capitalists
589
INDEX
297–8, 340–2; on class 391; and 7; prices, falling 66–7; sold in

Hayek 496–7; and ideas 506; interwar years 251–4; taxed see
reactions against 469, 470, 473–4; ‘People’s Budget’; transferred to
on spending 129; on war socialism tenants 153; see also property
229; and welfare 337, 342 Land Girls 140
Khomeini, Ayatollah 6 Land Nationalization League 49
Kidd, Benjamin 156, 158 Land Nationalization Society 135
Kipling, Rudyard 77 Land Reform League 49
Kirkwood, David 194, 196 Land Reform Union (later Land
Kitchener, General Lord 85 Restoration League) 49, 135
Land Tenure Reform Association 128,
Labouchere, Henry 90 134
‘labour colonies’ suggested 56–7, 59, 60 Land Tribunals 382
Labour Department 149, 150, 184 landowners: in parliament 41–8, 53;
Labour Exchange Act (1909) 167 relationship with business 62–78; see
labour exchanges 167, 275 also rich and powerful class
Labour, Ministry of 203, 215, 308 Lane, Lord 477
Labour Party: rise of 40, 42, 48, 50, 52, Lang, Cosmo, Archbishop of
141, 232, 284; and bureaucracy Canterbury 264
183; and corporatism 15; during Langtry, Lillie 73, 74
First World War 187–8, 194, 197, Lansbury, George 131
200–3; in interwar years 204–5, large organizations 19–24, 292–306,
211, 216; and economy 222, 306; 437; and backlash against
and decline of democracy 325–7; professionalism 502–3; see also
and education 350, 373; elites in names of individual firms
260–3; and industrial relations 20, Lark Rise to Candleford 104
101–2, 147, 150, 177, 187, 194, Larson, Magali 475
216, 256, 311, 312, 321–2, 324, Laski, Harold 321, 343, 393, 414
330; and land 383–4; and plateau of Law, Andrew Bonar 140, 203, 211
professionalism 416–18, 425, 436; Law Commission 477
and backlash against professionalism Law Society 14, 87, 440, 476
449–50, 452–3, 458, 467–70, 484, Lawrence, D.H. 393
488, 491, 495, 510, 515– 18; and Lawrence, Susan 201
welfare 160–1, 163, 166, 335– 8, Laws, G.A. 141
343, 345; and working class 109, Lawson, Harry J. 502
114–15; see also Independent Layard, G.S. 92
Labour Party leaders, professional, of unions 180–2,
Labour Representation Committee (later 185, 194, 196–7, 199, 217, 467
Labour Party) 52, 113, 165 Leasehold Enfranchisement Act (1967)
Laird, John 76 382
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste 142, 143 Leasehold Enfranchisement Bill (1885)
Lancashire 32, 42, 76, 197–8, 255, 277; 49
class conflict 420; farm rents 38; Leavis, F.R. 396, 398
post-World War Two 420, 432; Lee, John 304
industry 76, 255, 275, 276, 278, Lee, Sir Frank 265
282; middle class/suburbs 28, 81–3, Leeds 197, 274
95, 100, 105, 267–8; poverty 32–4, Left 13–14, 354–5; see also Communist;
137, 280; property 253; unions/ Labour Party: socialism
strikes/ riots 179, 197, 210–11, 234; legal profession and backlash against
wages 108–9; see also Liverpool; professionalism 476, 477
Manchester Legh of Lyme, Lord 76
Lancaster 255, 267 legislation: education 121, 163, 165,
land: reform movements 39, 46–9, 133– 238, 239, 350, 418, 436, 448, 451;
590
INDEX
electoral and parliamentary systems Lipton, Sir Thomas 66, 73, 99

41–2, 46, 52, 77, 85; emergency literature, study of 396
powers 213; employment 492; Little Englanders 55, 158
health 121, 346–7, 433, 436; Liverpool 32, 197, 277; industry 76;
equality 234–5, 282, 431; housing property 253; riots and strikes 179,
196, 337, 382; industry and 210–11, 517; slum clearance 137;
industrial relations 145, 151, 176, post-World War Two 432, 517
184, 215–16, 282, 308, 312, 330, Liverpool Clerks’ Association 98
385, 387, 470; land and planning Livesey, Sir George 141, 149–50
49, 69, 126, 133–4, 144–6, 152–3, living standards see standards of living
382, 436; local government 42–3, Llangattock, Lord 119
92; morality 433–4; unemployment Llewellyn Smith, Sir Hubert 150, 167,
167, 222, 387; wartime 194–6, 202; 168, 190, 203, 278, 354
welfare 56, 115, 124, 129, 146, Lloyd, E.M.H. 189
156, 160, 167–8, 346, 436 Lloyd George, David 99, 136, 141, 158,
leisure/holidays; class differences in 82– 205; and corporatism 208–9, 215;
3, 84, 101; cult of, replaced by and land reform 136; speech of 268;
work 121; in interwar years 281–3, taxation of rich 60, 61, 77, 139;
308; during Second World War 412; and unions/strikes 150–1, 175–6,
post-World War Two 421 184, 186, 193–6, 199, 202, 204–5,
Leith of Fyvie, Lord 68, 85 208–15, 318; and War, First 91,
Lenin, V.I. 210, 343, 467 186–7, 190–6, 199, 202, 228, 318,
Lever, W.H. (Lord Leverhulme) 72, 76, 339; and welfare 61, 129, 165–6,
99, 149, 256, 257, 366 193, 309, 337, 345, 354; and
Lever Brothers 303 working class 161
Levy, Mrs 95 Local Education Authorities 163, 164
Lewis, W.T. 85 Local Government Acts (1888, 1889)
Liberal Conservatives 342 42–3
Liberal Imperialists (‘Limps’) 55, 159 Loch, Charles 114, 123, 126
Liberal League 159 Locke, John 118
Liberal Unionism 41, 43, 342 Lockie, John 149
Liberalism see New Liberalism Lockwood, David 276
Liberals 55, 147, 251, 516; during First Loder, John 320
World War 201; and education 163, London 32, 42, 43; birth rate 55; City
165; elites in 260–3; post-World of 257–8; class conflict in 420;
War Two 204, 416, 444; and land/ proposed clearance of poor from
property 126–7, 136–7, 139–41, 56– 7, 59, 60; County Council 42,
144–5, 148, 152–3, 383; and unions 46, 138, 284; department stores 94;
177, 183–4; and welfare 158–61, education 20, 21, 49, 58, 72, 86–9,
219, 246; decline of 40–8, 52, 53, 99, 107; housing estates 284;
100–1, 172, 191, 232, 337; see also industry in 73, 276; livery
New Liberalism and individual companies in 145; middle class in
leaders in particular Lloyd George 94, 97, 104–7; municipal socialism
Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance 324, in 147–9; poverty and working class
516–17 in 35, 55–8, 163, 231, 283, (see also
Liberty and Property Defence League Booth, Charles); Progressive Party in
137–8, 145–7, 148–9, 151–2 42, 138, 147; ‘Society’ in 28, 62–75
Lichfield, Lord 459 passim, 252–4, 366; strikes and riots
‘Limps’ (Liberal Imperialists) 55, 159 in 50, 111, 179, 210, 234, 517;
Lincolnshire 66 suburbs of 46, 92–3, 100;
Lindert, Peter 6, 242, 243, 428, 429 unemployment in 276; University
Lindsay, A.D. (Lord) 393, 414 20, 21; Utopian dream of 364; in
Lindsay, Earl of 73 wartime 411, 432
591
INDEX
London Association for Opposing Early McMillan, Margaret 163

Closing 146 Macmillan Committee on Trade and
London Business School 306 Industry (1930) 217, 318
London Ethical Society 126 MacNalty, Sir Arthur 346
London Government Act (1899) 92 Maine, Sir Henry 332
London Master Builders’ Association Majority Report on Poor Law
176 Commission (1909) 166–7
London Municipal Society 148 Malinowski, Bronislaw 394
London and North Western Railway 43, Mallock, W.H. 136, 147, 149
69 Malmesbury, Earl of 253
London Passenger Transport board 441 malnutrition 35; see also physique
London Ratepayers’ Defence League Malthus, T.R. 16, 31, 118, 361, 438
138 management 24–5, 131, 298–306; post-
London School of Economics 348; World War Two 441–4, 459–61,
survey 218–19 475
London Telegraph and Telephone Manchester 32, 104, 198; industry 72,
Centre 304 76, 417; middle class in 95, 100,
Londonderry, Marquess of 69, 255 105; slum clearance 137; suburbs of
Long, Walter 153 28, 81–3, 100, 105, 268; union
Longford, Lord 434 action in 179, 197, 234; University
Lovelock, James 479 21
Lowther, Claude 148 Manchester Business School 306
LPDL see Liberty and Property Defence Manchester Warehousemen and Clerks’
League Provident Association 98
Lubbock, Sir John (later Lord Avebury) Mann, Tom 50, 111, 134, 178, 180
146, 148 Mannheim, Karl 394
Lugard, Frederick 371 Mansfield House University Settlement
Luton 276, 425 167
Lyttleton, Humphrey 459 Mansion House Committee on Distress
Lyttleton, Lord 74, 89 167
Lyttleton, Revd Edward 90 Manton, Lord (Joseph Watson) 252
Marcuse, Herbert 394
McCartney, Paul 459 Marlborough, Duke of 68, 73, 251
McCulloch, J.R. 118 Marlborough House set 62, 75, 432
MacDonald, Alexander 145 Marlborough Schoool 367, 374
MacDonald, Malcolm 255 Marshall, Alfred 127, 132, 140, 340,
MacDonald, Ramsay 113, 150, 158, 337, 370; on competitive spirt 513;
187, 201, 255, 268 on depression 37; on education 128;
MacDougall (of Vanguard) 196 on property 129; on ‘residuum’ 27,
McGowan, Sir Harry 257 56; on waste 155; on work 121
McGregor, Ian 376, 441 Marshall, T.H. 218, 247, 352, 332,
machinery 112 333, 424
Maclver, David 76 Marx, Karl and Marxism 4, 11; on
Mackay, Thomas 146, 147, 151 classes 63, 83, 154, 171, 362; on
McKenna, Reginald 141, 230 free market 12, 14; on Industrial
Mackinder, H.J. 159 Revolution 291; intellectuals and
McKinsey and Company 300 123, 156–7, 302; and Keynes 340–1;
Maclay, Joseph 190 and Ricardo 83, 341; on services
Maclean, John 187, 194, 196 501– 2; and socialism 49; and
Macleod, Iain 444 syndicalism 207; on value and rents
MacManus, Arthur 194, 197–8, 207 132, 391, 482; and welfare 354–5,
Macmillan, Harold 225, 320, 321, 329, 484
337, 342, 419, 460, 467, 490 Marx, Eleanor 49, 111
592
INDEX
Mary, Queen (consort of George V) Military Service Acts 196

198, 413 Mill, James 16, 118, 128, 133, 362,
Masham, Lord (Sir Samuel Cunliffe- 438
Lister) 72, 255 Mill, John Stuart 48, 118, 121–3, 127–
Mass Observation 280, 284–5 8, 133, 242, 362, 378
Master and Servant Acts 145 Mill, Mrs J.S. (Harriet Taylor) 122, 128
Masterman, Charles 46, 54, 77, 101, Millar, Frederick 146, 148
129, 165, 251 millionaires 64–5, 69, 70, 71, 73, 85,
match girls’ strike 39, 49, 59, 111 88, 251, 253, 257–8, 458–9
Mather & Platt 303 Mills, Lord 325
Matrimonial Property Act (1970) 431 Milne-Bailey, Walter 217, 318
Maurice, F.D. 31, 362 Milner, Sir Alfred (Lord) 74, 136, 152–
Maurice, Gen. Sir Frederick 33, 56, 159 3, 159
Maxse, Leopold 159 Milner, Frederick 91
Maxwell, Robert 376, 438, 493 Miners’ Federation 178, 196, 210
Mayhew, Henry 31 Mining Federation of Great Britain 318
Mayo, Elton 303, 305 Minority Report on Poor Law
Mazzini, G. 149–50 Commission 166–7
Meacham, Standish 103 Mishan, E.J. 480
Means, G.C. 388 Mitford, Nancy 456
Mearns, Rev. Andrew 31, 103 mixed economy 403
Médical Planning Commission 346 mobility, social see convergence;
medicine see health; National Health education in interwar years; spiralists
Service Mond, Sir Alfred (Lord Melchett) 76,
Melbourne, Lord 252 256, 257, 320
Melchett, Lord (Sir Alfred Mond) 76, Mond-Turner talks 318, 320
256, 257, 320 monetarism 510–11
Mental Health Act (1959) 347 Monopolies Commission 465, 479
meritocracy see professional society Moon, Sir Richard 43
Merthyr, Lord 85 Moore, Henry 7
Methodism 49, 82, 255 moral: duties see duties; ideals of social
Metropolitan Police 208 justice 47; society 435–6; supremacy,
M’Gonigle, G.C.M. 280 belief in 115 (see also Eugenics)
middle class: and zenith of class society morals, public 220, 235–7, 432–4
27, 29–31, 46, 48, divisions within Morant, Sir Robert 161, 165, 166, 247,
78–101, fear of working class 54– 338, 354
61; divisions in 78, 101, 267–73; MORI poll 489
during First World War 225; in Morley, John 85, 134
interwar years 249–50, 258–73; Morocco 184
during Second World War 418; post- Morrell, Lady Ottoline 77
World War Two 436–54; and Morris Motors 248, 256
professional ideal 368–71; see also Morris, William 49, 123, 130, 132,
professional society 335, 364, 391
Middle Classes Defence League 148 Morrison, Arthur 103, 106
Middlemas, Keith 174, 202, 208, 291, Morrison, Charles 73
302, 337, 354, 357 Morrison, Herbert 441
Middlesborough 256 mortality rates 35
Middleton, Jim 201–2 Mosley, Sir Oswald 320
Midland Bank 255 Muir, John 194, 195
Midland Railway 43 Municipal Reform Society 138
Midlands see Birmingham municipal socialism 131, 137–9;
Midwives Act (1902) 168 attacked 146, 147–8
Mikes, George 432 munitions 409, 488
593
INDEX
Munitions, Ministry of 187, 190, 196, National Income: decline 36–7, 40;
228 increase 223, 231, 265; unequal
Munitions of War Act (1915) 194, 195, distribution 28–31, 36; see also
196 income
Murdoch, Rupert 376 National Industrial Association 149
Murphy, J.T. 197, 198, 207 National Industrial Conference 203,
Mussolini, Benito 286, 320 208, 215, 318
National Industrial Council 151, 184,
Namier, Sir Lewis 394 217, 321
Nash, Vaughan 150 National Insurance Acts: in 1911 129,
National Assistance Act (1948) 436 168; in 1946 436
National Assistance Board 339, 417 National Joint Council 322
National Association of Freedom 493 National Liberals 342
National Association of Local National Opinion Polls 455
Government Officers 20, 86, 98, National Parks 384
440 National Plan 467, 469, 490
National Board for Prices and Incomes National Planning Commission
329 suggested 321
National Bus Company 488 National Production Advisory Council
National Coal Board 296, 297, 376, on Industry 328
441 National Registration 188, 228
National Coalition 230 National Service Medical Boards 35
National Committee of Organized National Transport Workers’ Federation
Labour for Promotion of Old Age 176, 178, 183, 212
Pensions 162 National Union of Clerical Workers 307
National Confederation of Employers’ National Union of Clerks 98
Organizations 200, 206, 215, 318, National Union of Mineworkers 466,
319 515
National Confederation of Engineering National Union of Railwaymen 176,
Employers 216–17 206, 212
National Consumer Council 489 National Union of Teachers 20, 86,
National Debt 226, 315 164, 350, 351, 439
National Economic Development Nationalists, Irish 172
Council 321, 329, 467, 490 nationalization 309, 440–1; during First
National Efficiency 158–70, 334; test of World War 187–9, 227–9; in
see War, First World interwar years 205, 210, 216;
National Enterprise Board 330 privatization of 488–9, 492
National Factories 188, 206 Navigation Acts 331
National Farmers’ Union 382 Neale, E.V. 149
National Federation of Building Trades NEDC see National Economic
Employers 176 Development Council
National Federation of Old Age neo-Malthusians 59–60
Pensioners Associations 317 Nevill, Lady Dorothy 65, 69–70
National Free Labour Association 147 New Left 354–5
National Freight Haulage 488 New Liberalism 47, 54, 101, 125, 127,
National Health Service 14, 21, 328, 132, 138–40, 147, 333
401; and corporatism 344–8; and New Poor Law (1834) 56, 124
plateau of professionalism 405, 433, New Right 354–5, 485–6
438, 446, 461, 462; and backlash ‘New Social Order’ 205; see also social
against professionalism 477–8, 483, change
485–6, 516; reports on 328; see also New Unionism 48, 50–1, 101–2, 106,
health 111–12, 141, 175, 178; see also
National Health Service Act (1946) 346 unions
594
INDEX
New Zealand 159, 419 124, 126–8, 180; and rich and
Newall-Cain (Lord Brockett) 252 powerful class 71–2, 90–1, 250,
Newfield, Dr Maurice 414 258, 301–2; and science 86, 365;
Nixon, Richard 507 Oxford Social Mobility Project 248,
Norfolk 255 250, 269–70, 422–3, 450
‘North, Christopher’ (John Wilson) 118
North Sea oil 507 P. and O. -Bovis 293
Northampton, Lord 253 Pahl, Ray 286, 287
Northampton (town) 33, 34 Palmer family 267
Northcliffe, Lord (Alfred Harmsworth) Palmer’s shipyard 298
90, 252 Pankhurst, Emmeline 233
North-east 256, 267, 276, 280, 298 Panopticon 15
Northumberland, Duke of 255 Parliament Act (1911) 77
Norwich Industrial Tribunal 386 parliament see government; politics
Nottingham 275 participation, worker see industrial
nuclear weapons under attack 480 democracy
Nuffield, Lord 5, 248, 256, 257, 375 Passfield, Lord 337; see also Webb,
Nuffield College Reconstruction Survey Sidney
414 patriotism 186–7
Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust 346 Pattison, Mark, 87, 369
pay see income
O’Brien, Bronterre 16, 118 Peacock, Sir Alan 454
O’Connor, Feargus 438 Pearson, Karl 54–5, 58, 60, 156–7, 158
Odger, George 48 Pease, Edward and family 49, 255–6,
Offe, Claus 354 267
Offer, Avner 136 Pedley, Robin 449, 454
oil price rises 506–7 Peel, Dowager Countess 254, 458
old age pensions 161–3, 242, 246–7 Peel, Sir Robert 40, 66, 125, 368
Olivier, Sydney 50, 130 Peel, Viscount (later Earl) 68
Ombudsman 478 peerage creations 43, 66, 85
Open University 21 Pember Reeves see Reeves
opportunity, equal 444–5, 448 pensions 161–3, 242, 246–7, 308–9;
oral history 103 post-World War Two 429–30, 485–6
Orford, Earl of 65 ‘People’s Budget’ (1909) 77–8, 129,
Organization for Economic Cooperation 137– 9, 152, 219, 242–3
and Development (OECD) 493 PEP (Political and Economic Planning)
Organization of Petroleum Exporting 320, 414
Countries (OPEC) 506 Percival, Spencer 85
organizations see associations Percy, Lord Eustace 255, 320
Ormsby-Gore, William 207, 255 ‘permissive society’ 432–4
Orwell, George 259, 273–4, 393, 505 petty bourgeoisie 78, 81–2, 95–100; see
Osborne, John 433 also middle class
Overstone, Lord 43 Petty, Sir William 22
Owen, A.D.K. 414 Phelps Brown, E.H. 184
Owen, Robert 303 Physical Deterioration,
ownership see capital; land; property Interdepartmental Committee on
Oxford and Cambridge Universities and (1904) 33, 56, 58–9, 103, 161, 163–
graduates 361; English literature at 4, 238, 357
396; and middle class 84, 145, 367, Physical Society 86
369–70, 372–5; numbers of students physique 35, 54, 59, 238–9, 280; see
in 20–1; and professional ideal 366– also Physical Deterioration
74; and professionals 87–91, 119; Pigou, A.C. 129–30, 337, 370
and public service 370–1; reformed Pilgrim Trust 276
595
INDEX
Pilkington’s 296, 308–9, 311, 442 Powell, Baden (Professor) 369

Pit Production Committees 417 Powell, Enoch 469
Planning Council suggested 321 power see rich and powerful class
planning see town planning Pratten, Cliff 512
plateau of professionalism see under predators, benevolence of (Spencer)
professional society 142–3
Plebs League 180 pre-Raphaelites 237
Plimsoll, Samuel 146 Preston 108, 276
Plowden Committee (1967) 350 prices, falling 37–9, 67, 94, 134
plutocracy, new see business Priestley, J.B. 268, 414
Poching, H.D. 145 Primrose League 148
Poland 211 Prior, James 515
Political and Economic Planning (PEP) private and public sector professions,
320, 414 distinction between 11–16, 399– 402,
Political Evolution Society 145 438–48, 461–2, 473–4, 482, 489
politics: decline of liberal England 40– privatization 488–9, 492
8; decline of democracy 324–31; production, decline in growth rate:
political dilemma and economic before First World War 36–7, 40,
decline 506–19; see also Communist; 57– 8; during First World War 177,
Conservative; democracy; 189; in interwar years 220–2; after
government; Labour; Liberals; Second World War 363–76, 506–19
socialism Production Council 322
poll tax (community charge) 494 professional society/professional ideal:
Pollard, Sidney 227–8, 394, 512 meaning of 1–26; class versus
pollution 480–1 hierarchy 2–9; industrial revolution,
Ponting, Clive 487 culmination of 17–26; professional
Poor Laws 56, 115, 131, 166, 168, rivalries and state 9–17 class society
246; Commission, Reports on 166– 116–70; property 123–41; property
7; Guardians 42 defended 141–54; social 116–23;
poor see poverty welfare state, origins of 155–70
Popper, Karl 394 triumph of 359–404; condescension
population increase 18 of professionalism 390–404; human
Portland, Duke of 77, 252, 458 capital 377–90; industrial spirit,
Portman, Lord 253, 458 decline of 363–76 plateau of 405–
Portsmouth 277 71; Second World War and
Post Office 98, 165, 265, 273, 296, revolution in expectations 407–18;
308, 328 affluence 418–36; bifurcation of
Postal Telegraph Clerks’ Association 98 ideal 436– 54; class, persistence of
Post-war Aims Group 414 455–71; backlash against 472–519;
Potter, Richard 43, 64, 72 attacks against 475–83; state rolled
Potteries 253, 283 back? 483–95; free market ideology,
poverty: during First World War 224; in resurgence of 495–506; economic
interwar years 223, 278–80; fear of decline and political dilemma 506–
poor 53–61; post-World War Two 19 see also class society; corporate
426–7, 446, 458; and National society; professionals
Income 30–3; professionals’ attitudes professionals 18–19; as fourth class 362;
to 124, 131; relative, concept of leaders of unions as 180–2, 185,
279; ‘residuum’ in want and distress 194, 196–7, 199, 217, 467; in
27, 32–4, 55–7, 59, 60; Spencer’s interwar years 258–66, 267–72; in
attitude to 142–4; surveys of see in middle class 79–80, 83–8, 90–1; in
particular Booth, Charles, Bowley, parliament 44; in rich and powerful
Rowntree; see also welfare; working class 63, 85, 89–91; in welfare 343–
class 52; see also professional society
596
INDEX
Progressive Party in London 42, 138, Committee of Inquiry into (1975)

147 347
property 7–8; as central concept 377–8; Reich, Robert B. 503–4
human capital as 377–90; and Reith, Sir John 268
professional ideal 123–41; and religion/religious observance 220, 240;
professional ideal defended 141–54; at zenith of class society 82, 107,
see also land 115; in interwar years 220, 240,
protectionism 230 280; and professional ideal 126–7;
Provincial Postal Clerks Association post-World War Two 434–5; and
98–9 backlash against professionalism
Prudential Insurance Company 293, 478–9; Spencer’s view of 143
294, 296, 460 Renold, Hans 303
public expenditure see expenditure Rent and Mortgage Interest Restriction
public and private sector see private Act (1915) 196, 202
public schools and other private schools rents concept 132, 134
71–2, 84, 87–91, 263, 367–8; ‘respectable’ working class 107–8
commission on 372–3; in interwar resurgence of free market ideology 495–
years 259–61; post-World War Two 506
450–1; and professional ideal 119– revolution: danger of 174–86; in
21 expectations 407–18; potential in
Public Sector Borrowing Requirement interwar years 206–7
509–10 Rey, Charles 190
public sector employment 315, 328 Rhodes, Cecil 72
Ribblesdale, Lady 74
Quakers 49, 82 Ricardo, David and Ricardians 7, 11,
Quartano, Ralph 296, 297, 360 305; backlash and 289; free market
Quelch, Robert 201 ideas 12, 330, 355, 401; labour
theory of value and rent 13, 16,
118, 132, 379, 482; and Liberals
race conflict 421 342; and Marxism 83, 341; on
Radnor, Earls of 253, 458 monopolists of soil 48; on services
Rae, John 373–4 50–2
Railway Clerks’ Association 98, 211 rich and powerful class 4–5, 8; and
Railway Executive Committee 212 zenith of class society 27, 29–31,
Raison, Timothy 444 41– 8, 53, 62–78; and politics 41–8,
Ramsden family 253 53, 255–6; during First World War
rationalization in industry 298, 299 224; in interwar years 250–60, 263,
rationing 229, 410 265–6; emulated by socially mobile
Rayleigh, Lord 68 359–60; and decline of industrial
Reader, W.J. 375 spirit 363– 5; post-World War Two
Reading 33–4 427, 429, 458–9; links with business
reconstruction 204, 206, 230 365–6; and professional ideal 121,
‘Red Clydeside’ 187, 193–5 122; see also business; landowners
‘Red Friday’ 214 Right: New 354–5, 485–6; see also
Redistribution Act (1885) 41 Conservative Party
Redundancy Payments Act (1965) 312, rights and property 125, 142, 146
387 Rio Tinto Zinc 296
Reeves, Mrs Maud Pember 103, 106–7 riots 50, 179, 209
Reeves, William Pember 159 rivalries, professional and state 9–17
Reform Acts (1832, 1867, 1884) 41, Robbins, Lionel 333, 496
46, 85, 160 Robbins Committee on Higher
reforms, social see welfare Education (1963) 451–2
Regulation of Medical Profession, Roberts, Elizabeth 103, 108–9
597
INDEX
Roberts, G.H. 190 Russell, Dora 74

Roberts, General Lord 85 Russell, George 65, 70
Roberts, Geoffrey 464 Russia 186, 211, 212; revolution in
Roberts, Robert 103–4, 114, 230, 233– 193, 196, 198–9, 206–8; as Soviet
4, 274–5 Union 186, 199, 204–6, 208, 226,
Robinson, Sir David 375 408, 490
Robinson, John, Bishop of Woolwich
435, 478 Sainsbury family 296, 442, 459, 493
Rollit, Sir Albert Kaye, 135, 137, 148 St Albans 67
Rolls, Hon. Charles 119 Salford 103, 104, 230, 274
Rolls Royce 440, 463 Salisbury, Robert Arthur, 3rd Marquess
Ronson, Gerald 459 of 43, 49, 134–5, 137, 144, 148,
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 2 151–2
Rosebery, Lady (Hannah Rothschild) Salter, Sir Arthur 189, 190, 320
68, 73 Salvation Army 31, 59, 91, 99
Rosebery, Lord 68, 73, 158, 163 Samuel, Herbert, Lord 127, 438
Ross, A.S.C. 456 Samuel Commission 214
Rosslyn, Earl of 73 Samuel, Raphael 103
Rothermere, Lord 72 Sankey, Lord, and Commission on Coal
Rotherwick, Lord (Cayzen family) 459 Industry (1919) 210, 229
Rothschild, Hannah (later Lady Saul, S.B. 37
Rosebery) 68, 73 Saville, John 113
Rothschild, Lord 73 Savory, Joseph, 147
Rothschild Committee (1898) 162 Scandinavia 223, 456, 512, 514
Rothstein, Theodore 207 Scanlon, Hugh 469
Routh, Guy 270–1 Scargill, Arthur 515, 518
Rowntree, Seebohm, and surveys 103, Scarisbrick family 253
136, 149; on agricultural labour Scarman, Sir Leslie (later Lord) 476
105, 107; on improvements 280; Schedule of Protected Occupations 188,
and industry 303, 370; on middle 198
class 78, 91; on poverty 32–4, 55, Schmitter, Philippe 286–7
161, 165, 224, 279–80, 357; on Scholarships and Free Places, Report of
unemployment 167 Departmental Committee on 239–40
Royal Colleges of Medicine 20, 58, 85, School Boards 42
87, 164, 439 schools see education
Royal Institute of British Architects 87, Schumacher, E.F. 481
483 Schwartz, George 498
Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors science 157, 435; under attack 479–82
479 ‘scientific management’ see Taylor, F.W.
Royal Ordnance Factories 409, 488 Scotland 73, 100, 255, 264–5;
Royal proclamation on saving grain 229 education 72, 87, 88, 165, 264;
Royal Society 86, 373 housing 279; industry 176, 256;
royalty 73, 75, 192, 198, 345, 413, land 134; poverty 35; strikes 194–6,
459, 460 202, 207, 209–10, 234; suburbs 268
Rubinstein, W.D. 244, 260, 264 Scott, Peter 396–7
Rugby 119 Scott, Sir Walter 6, 118
Rugby School 119, 120, 145, 263, 335 SDF see Social Democratic Federation
rules: middle class 81–2; of ‘Society’ Sealink 488
74–5 Securities and Exchange Commission
ruling classes see rich and powerful 479
Runciman, Walter 196–7, 255 security of earnings and employment
Ruskin, John 122–3, 364, 391 310–12, 457, 461
Russell, Bertrand 74, 77, 159, 367, 393 Sedgwick, Adam 369
598
INDEX
Seebohm Report on Personal Social Sidebottom family 255, 267

Services (1968) 349 Sidgwick, Henry 126, 127, 128, 369
Seeley, Sir John 126 Sillitoe, Alan 433
Sefton, Earl of 458 Simon, Sir John 255, 338
segregated classes, divisions within size: of family see birth rate; of
(1880–1914) 27–8, 62–115; middle organizations see large; of unions
class 78–101; rich and powerful 62– 19–20
78; working class 101–15; see also Skegness 282
geographical segregation skilled craftsmen 105–6, 112
segregation of sexes in workhouse 56 Slater, Jim 360
Selbourne, Lord 75 Slater Walker 296
Seldon, Arthur 496, 497 SLP see Socialist Labour Party
Select Committee on health (1978) 477– slum clearance 59; see also geographical
8 segregation; ‘labour colonies’
self-identification of class 455–6 Smallholdings Act (1892) 152, 153
Sellon, Hugh 320 Smethwick 179
‘Selsdon Man’ 470, 491 Smiles, Samuel 120, 305, 363
semi-skilled workers 105, 106, 112 Smillie, Robert 213
servant-keeping (upper) middle class 78– Smith, Adam 22–4, 118, 142, 143, 331,
9, 81–2, 84–8, 91–3; see also middle 493, 498
class service: domestic 78–9, 93, 283 Smith, Allan 190, 199–200, 318
(see also servant-keeping); ideal see Smith, F.E. (Lord Birkenhead) 91
professional society; professions 85, Smith, J.C. 477
97; see also welfare Smith, Llewellyn see Llewellyn Smith
Settled Land Acts (1882, 1890) 69 Smith, Samuel 57
Sex Discrimination Act (1975) 431 Smith, W.H. 72, 366
Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act Smith, Mrs W.H. (Lady Hambledon) 72
(1919) 234–5, 282 snobbery, middle-class 81–2; see also
sexual behaviour 235–7, 432–4 rules; speech; suburbs
Sexual Offences Act (1967) 433 Snow, C.P. 398
Shaftesbury, Lord 253 Social Affairs Unit 493
Shanks, Michael 449 social change in interwar years 241–51
Shaw, George Bernard 6, 49–50, 57, 99, social citizenship 353–7; see also society,
130–1, 340–1, 398, 456, 475 corporate
Sheffield, Lady 81 ‘Social Contract’ 330, 491
Sheffield 98, 197, 207, 252, 274 Social Darwinism 55, 57, 59, 142, 155–
Shell 296, 442 6, 500
Shelley, Percy B. 118 Social Democratic Federation 39, 49–
Shelter 10, 317 52, 57, 130
Sherman, Barrie 462 Social Democratic Party-Liberal Alliance
Shinwell, Emmanuel 209 324, 516–17
Shipping Federation 141 social ideal 3–4
Shonfield, Andrew 329 Social Imperialists 59
Shop Hours regulation bills 146 social justice 402–3; see also welfare
shop stewards’ movement 173, 180; social mobility see convergence;
during First World War 197–8, 199, education in interwar years
203; in interwar years 207; see also Social Mobility Project 248, 250, 269–
unions 70, 422–3, 450
Short, Edward 351 social reforms see welfare
Shorts of Belfast 488 Social Science Research Council 259
Shrewsbury, Earl of 68, 119 Social Security 21
Shropshire 252 social services: social workers and
sick pay schemes 308–9 corporatism 348–9; see also welfare
599
INDEX
socialism: rise of 39, 48–51, 180; claims Stanley of Alderley, Lord 76

to 122, 128; and Eugenics 54–5; Stanley, Sir Albert 211–12
imperialistic 157–9; and professional Stanley, Oliver 255, 320
ideal 130–41, 144–6, 152; and Stanley (town) 33–4, 278
welfare 156–9; see also Fabian state, corporate 315–31; and
Society; Socialist Labour Party professional rivalries 9–17; decline
Socialist Democratic Party 180 of democracy 324–31; informal
Socialist Labour Party 180, 194, 195, corporatism 316–21; triple entente
207, 211 at war 321–4; rolled back 475–83;
Socialist League 39, 49 increased power of see plateau; War;
‘Society’ 63–78; see also under London rejected see resurgence of free
Society of Apothecaries 20, 85 market; see also interventionism;
Society of Authors 86 nationalization; welfare
Society of Civil Servants 440 State Resistance Society 145
Society for Promotion of Social Science Stationery Office 328
32 Statistical Societies 32
Society for Promoting Employment of Stedman Jones, Gareth 101–2, 114
Women 146 Steel-Maitland, Sir Arthur 204, 318
Society for Study of Social Ethics 127 Stenton, Lady 236
Solly, Revd Henry 110 Stephen, Leslie 126
Soltow, Lee 242 sterilization 57
Somerset, Duke of 145, 148 Stock Exchange 296, 388
Sony 514 Stock Market Crash (1929) 222
‘Souls’ 74 Stockton-on-Tees 280
South America 38, 226 Stoke-on-Trent 253, 283
South Africa 91; millionaires from 65, Stokes, Donald (Lord) 248, 460
70, 72, 73; see also Boer War Slopes, Marie 235–6
South Metropolitan Gasworks 149 Strachey, John 393
South West India Docks see dockers’ Strachey, Mrs Ray 235–8
strike Strauss, David 435
Southampton 179, 278 Street Offences Act (1959) 434
Southey, Robert 118 strikes 147; and zenith of class society
Southport 253 36, 39–40, 50–1, 101–2, 111–12;
Soviet Union see under Russia and crisis of class society 172–3,
Speaker’s Conference 253 174–86; during First World War
Special Areas Acts (1934, 1937) 222 194–6, 198– 9, 202–3; in interwar
Special Branch of Metropolitan Police years 209–16; post-World War Two
208 464, 466, 468, 469; see also General
specialists 23–4, 395–7; see also Strikes; unions
professional Strutt, Edward (Baron Belper) 43
speech and accents, class differences in suburbs: and zenith of class society 28,
27, 267–8, 456 45, 54, 81–2, 92, 100, 105; in
Spencer, Herbert 54, 133, 142–7, 155, interwar years 268–9, 284–5
157, 305, 500 Suez incident 419
Spender, Stephen 343 suffrage 191, 232
spiralists (mobile middle class) 267–73 Suffragettes 172, 177, 233
Stacey, Margaret 274, 455 Summerskill, Shirley 434
Stamp, Sir Josiah 29, 189, 231 superiority, sense of 50, 115, 390–404;
standard of living: and zenith of class see also Eugenics
society 27, 94–5, 103, 106–7; in Surrey 268
interwar years 220–1, 230, 254, Sutherland, Duke of 119, 253
279– 83; post-World War Two 419– Swansea 21
36
600
INDEX
Taff Vale case (1900) 52, 113, 147 Tomlinson, George 273, 275
Tait, Archibald, Archbishop of Tonypandy riots 179
Canterbury 264 Torquay 253
Talbot motor company 68 Town and Country Planning Acts: 1932
Tapps-Gervis-Meyrick, Sir George 253 383; 1947 351, 383, 436
Taunton Commission on Endowed Town and Country Planning Association
Schools (1869) 83, 119, 120, 362 414
Tawney, R.H. 49, 99, 131, 202, 229, town planning: and corporatism 351– 2,
335–6, 338, 343–4, 354, 388, 394, 383, 436; attacked 482–3
444 Townsend, Peter 279, 426, 438, 454,
taxation 28, 46, 49, 102, 134, 315–16, 484
385–6; in interwar years 218, 231, Toynbee, Arnold 124, 126–7, 134, 370
232, 242, 245–6; postwar 493–4; Toynbee Hall 110, 124, 127, 131, 335,
and welfare 128, 130, 139, 140, 338, 370
169; see also ‘People’s Budget’ trade: decline 220, 221–2, 226–7, 230,
Taylor, F.W. and Taylorism 24, 112–13, municipal see municipal socialism;
177, 298, 304 protectionism 230; see also
Taylor, Harriet (Mrs J.S.Mill) 122, 128 competition; free market; free trade
Taylor, Helen 48, 49, 134 Trade Boards 215
Taylor, Robert 258 Trade Disputes Acts (1906, 1927) 216
Taylor, Sir William 56 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act
teachers and corporatism 349–51; see (1974) 387
also education trade unions see unions
Teachers’ Registration Council suggested trades councils 111–12; see also unions
351 Trades Union Congress 398; early years
Tebbit, Norman 518 20, 51–2; and corporatism 309,
teenagers 431–2 318– 19, 322–4, 328–9; and
Temple, Frederick, Archbishop of education 165; post-World War Two
Canterbury 264 416, 466, 468, 470; and MPs, 113–
Temple, William, Archbishop of 14; and professionals 217, 440; and
Canterbury 264, 416 Russia 211, 212; and ‘Social
Tennant family 72, 73 Contract’ 330, 491; and strikes 187,
Terry, Ellen 6 214, 215; in wartime 187, 188, 200;
Tesco 296 and welfare 160; white-collar sector
Thames Television 297 273; see also Triple Alliance; unions
Thatcher, Margaret 327, 350, 387, 449, Trafalgar House-Cunard 293
476, 478, 482, 485–7, 491, 494, transfer payments see welfare
509– 10, 515 transport, improved 28, 77, 220, 269
Thomas, J.H. 176, 206, 212, 214, 255 Transport and General Workers’ Union
Thompson, Edward 101 466
Thompson, F.M.L. 78, 154, 251 Treasury 196, 265, 322, 341, 487, 509,
Thompson, Flora 103, 104 510, 512
Thompson, Paul 103 Tredgold, Alfred 60
Thomson, Sir Basil 208 Tressell, Robert 103, 105
Thomson, George 149 Triple Alliance (of government, unions
Thorne, Will 51, 149, 180 and employers) 175–6, 206, 208,
Tillet, Ben 51, 111, 180, 193 210– 14, 317, 321–4; see also
Tisdall, Sarah 487 corporate
Titmuss, Richard 14, 191, 317, 344, Trollope, Anthony 84
349, 352, 413–14, 444, 446–7, 454, TUC see Trades Union Congress
475, 484, Turkey, 186
tobacco 281 Turner, H.A. 464
Tollemache, Lord 76 Twain, Mark 253
601
INDEX
Tweedsmuir, Lady (Mrs John Buchan) University Grants Committee 395, 451,
73–4 453
Tynan, Kenneth 433 Unrest Commissioners 203
unskilled labourers 105, 106
Unemployed Workmen Act (1905) 167 upper classes see rich and powerful
unemployment 34, 222–3, 277, 312, Uppingham School 367
387; insurance 166–8; 242, 246–7 Urwick, Lyndall 299, 304
Unemployment Assistance Board 413, Usherwood, Kenneth 297, 460
417 utilitarianism 127–8, 132
Unilever 292, 296, 300, 372 utopianism 205, 343, 360
Unionism, New/Unionists 41, 43, 48,
50–1, 101–2, 106, 111–12, 141, Vaisey, John 449, 450, 454
152, 163, 175 Value Added Tax 316, 494
unions 23; and zenith of class society Van den Berghs 296
48, 50–1, 53, 98–9, 101–2, 109, Van Dwellers’ Protection Association
111– 13; and socialism, rise of 48, 146
50–1; and interventionism 147, 150– Vanderbilt, Consuelo (Duchess of
1, 154; and crisis of class society Marlborough) 68
172–3, 174– 86; during First World Vaughan, Charles John 367
War 187, 193– 203, 229; Versailles, Treaty of 340
professional leaders of 180– 2, 185, Verulam, Earls of 67
194, 196–7, 199, 217, 467; in Vestey family 459
interwar years 204–5, 207–16, 223, Vickers, 197, 442
273, 284; and corporatism 317–19, Vietnam war 480
321–4, 331; during Second World Vigne, Thea 103
War 323–4, 417; post-World War Villiers, George (Duke of Buckingham)
Two 309, 311, 313, 440, 464–71, 6
490– 2, 512–15; and backlash Volunteer Aid Detachments (VADs) 233
against professionalism 490–2, 512–
15; see also shop stewards; ‘Social Wadsworth, A.P. 99–100
Contract’; strikes; Trades Union wages see income
Congress; Triple Alliance Wales 21, 197, 277, 284; commission
Unipart 488 on land occupation (1896) 134;
Unitarians 82, 369 during First World War 252;
United Nations 419 education 165; housing 279;
United States 24; Americanization of strikes 179, 188, 196; Taff Vale
Britain 396; broadcasting 400; cities case 52, 113, 147; unemployment
351; companies in UK 300–1; 223, 276;
competition from 36, 55, 220, 223, Walker, Peter 360
227, 364, 403, 471; during Second Wallace, Alfred Russel 39, 49, 134,
World War 408, 412; health care 135, 378
400, 401; immigrant intellectuals Wallace, William 126
394, 487; imports from 38, 226; Wallas, Graham 126, 130, 132, 158
industry in 69, 85, 303, 305, 503–4, Walters, Sir Alan 454
508, 512; New Deal 222; New War 419, 480, 506, 511; Cabinet 91,
Right in 355; politics of 207; 190–1, 204, 322; First World 188–
poverty in 134; snobbery in 456; 203, 24–41; Second World 223,
strikes in 514; tax in 493 321–4, 407–18; see also Boer War;
universities 21; commissions on 87; and conscription; Physical Deterioration
professional ideal 87–9, 119–21, War Emergency Workers’ National
124, 127–8, 366–74; science in 86– Committee 193, 201, 202
7; specialists in 395–7; see also Ward, Mrs Humphry 127
Oxford and Cambridge
602
INDEX
Warrington 33, 34 West Bromwich 179

Warwick, Lady 74 Western Electric 303
waste, combatting 155; see also welfare Westland helicopter affair 487
Watkins, Sir Edwin 43, 145 Westminster, Dukes of 73, 76, 253, 254,
Watson, Joseph (Lord Manton) 252 458, 459
Watson, William 267 Westminster Destitute Children’s Society
wealth see rich and powerful class 163
Weavers’ Union 181 Westminster school 263, 373–4
Webb, Beatrice 74, 114, 127, 337, 338; Weston, Garfield 459
on ‘Coefficients’ 159, 343, 363; on Wheatley, John 194, 337
Charity Organization Society 124; Whigs 40, 42, 43, 47
on Fabians 123; father see Potter, White papers: on employment (1944)
Richard; Industrial Democracy 130, 418; In Place of Strife (1969) 469–
181–2; on London ‘Society’ 64–5, 70; on industrial democracy (1978)
73; on unions 181–2; and War 233; 387
on welfare 168, 337, 354; writings Whitehead, A.N. 305
with Sidney 130, 159, 181–2, 337, Whitehorn, Katharine 483
343, 354, 363 Whitehouse, Mary 434
Webb, Sidney 50, 74, 130, 337, 338, Whitley Councils 203, 215, 303, 323
363; on birth rate 60; on education Wiener, Martin 119, 303, 363, 374–5,
165; on ‘Four Pillars of the House’ 371, 374, 513
205; and Labour Party 201, 202, Wigan 274, 393
335, 337; on municipal socialism Wilde, Oscar 66
138; on national efficiency 158, 247; Wilding, Peter 477
on nationalization 229; on rents Wilkinson, Ellen 276
132; on ‘unassuming experts’ 328; Williams, Robert 176, 178, 183, 206
on unions 181–2; see also under Williamson, Ella (Viscountess Peel) 68
Webb, Beatrice Williamson, Sir James (Lord Ashton)
Weber, Max 4 68, 254, 255, 266–7
Wedgwood, Josiah 136 Williamson, Jeffrey 242
Weinstock, Arnold, Lord 376, 460, 488, Willis, Frederick, 100, 104
493 Willoughby de Broke, Lord 77, 252
Weir, Sir Williams (later Lord) 190, wills, probate evaluation of 68, 70–1
194, 256, 297, 318, 323 Wilmott, Peter 283
welfare/welfare state 21, 59, 315–16; Wilson, Harold 387, 449, 467, 469,
and professional ideal 129–30, 131, 484, 515
139–40, 155–70; during First World Wilson, Havelock 51, 201
War 192, 202; in interwar years Wilson, Horace 203
204, 242, 246–7, 277, 308–9; and Wilson, John (‘Christopher North’) 118
corporate society 332, 334–52, 356– Wimborne, Lord (Sir John Guest) and
7; and intellectuals 334–43; during family 69, 72, 73, 366
Second World War 413–18; post- Winchester School 259, 263, 368, 372
World War Two 427–8, 436, 445–7, Winkler, John 286, 287
468, and backlash against ‘winter of discontent’ 491
professionalism 473, 475, 482–7; see Wintour, U.F. 189
also Beveridge Wise, E.F. 189
Welfare Workers’ Association 305 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 394
Wellington, Duke of 6, 186 Wolfenden, Lord and Wolfenden
Wells, H.G. 57, 99, 130–2, 159, 169, Committee (1957) 433
343, 363, 393 Wolfson, Isaac 375
Wemyss, Earl of (Lord Elcho) 141, 145, Wolsey, Archbishop 6
148 women: dress 219, 236–7; in forces
Wernher, Sir Julius 65, 72, 73, 366 411; as housewives 108–9, 282;
603
INDEX
poor 458; professional 430–1; status 458; during First World War 187,
233–5, 237–8; votes for 191, 232, 191, 226, 230, 233, 234; in
234; see also working women interwar years 235, 283; middle-
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force 411 class 79–80, 97, 99; in offices 269,
Women’s Land Army 409–10 270; restrictions on 146; rights of
Women’s Royal Navy Service 411 146; in wartime 412
Wood, Sir Kingsley 255 Workmen’s Compensation Acts 385
Wood family of Glossop 255, 267 Works Managers’ Association 305
Woodstock 84 Wright, Peter 477
Woolf, Virginia 391 Wykehamists 369, 372
Wootton, Barbara 393 Wyndham, Lord 74
work: cult of 120–1; opportunities Wyndham Lewis, Percy 394
different 27, 34; status and 105–6
worker participation see industrial Yard Committees 417
democracy Yeats, W.B. 392–3
Workers’ Educational Association 99 Yeovil 276
working class: and zenith of class YMCA 98, 99
society 27–31, 45–6, 48, 53–61, 81, York 55–6, 231, 240; church attendance
88, 101–15; divisions in 81, 88, 240; poverty in 55–6, 231, 274; see
101–15; fear of 53–61; in interwar also under Rowntree
years 220– 1, 230–1, 246–7, 248– Young, Allen, 321
50, 261, 273–85; middle-class Young, Hugo 477
attitudes to 273–85; during Second Young, Michael 283, 438, 449
World War 415–17; post-World Young, Terence 284
Wart Two 463–71; physique see
Physical Deterioration; zenith of class society (1880–1914) 27–
professionalization of 306–15; see 61; British capitalism, climacteric of
also poverty; welfare 36–40; fear of poor 53–61;
working men’s clubs 109, 110 inequality 28–36; Liberal England,
working women 79–80, 97, 99, 430–1, decline of 40–53
604

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The Rise of Professional Society

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

First published in paperback 1990

This edition first published 2002

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

© 1989, 1990, 2002 Harold Perkin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN 0-203-40862-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-71686-8 (Adobe eReader Format)

Sir Arthur Clay, Syndicalism and Labour (1911)

Introduction to the 2002 edition xi

Preface to the first edition xxi

1 The meaning of professional society 1

2 The zenith of class society 27

4 Class society and the professional ideal 116

5 The crisis of class society 171

6 A halfway house: society in war and peace 218

7 Towards a corporate society 286

8 The triumph of the professional ideal 359

9 The plateau of professional society 405

10 The backlash against professional society 472

This book was first published in 1989, a year before Margaret

major societies across the developed world published in 1996, are

THE MAJOR TRENDS OF PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY

(2) The swing to services

(3) Class into hierarchy

(5) Women’s equality

(6) Higher education as the key profession

(7) The growth of government

(8) State welfare

(9) The rise of the giant corporation

Without changing the text below, in order to view professional

where democracy has declined still more and a species of elective

rise of huge incomes and capital accumulations have created a new

As such it exists, in accordance with capitalist ideology, to make

chances and treatment should desert its founding philosophy is a

operates a double standard, insisting on free trade wherever they

but is imposed by the Prime Minister, and is the leading enforcer of

paradoxically, has given them greater substance and reality. The

companies and even professionalized manual workers. The

for equality of outcome or treatment. This was because the best

I hold every man to be a debtor to his profession, from which

History is a profession of debtors, if not indeed of thieves, who

and writing at that ideal intellectual retreat in the woods of North

After the unanswerable question whether human civilization will

What has brought us to this pass? Faced with such

1 CLASS VERSUS HIERARCHY

the face of the cloth in Victorian society. In late twentieth-century

owner-manager, ideally the self-made man who rose to wealth and

property, which was the product of law and politics. Ultimately it

the benefits of capitalism. More directly, charismatic power has

Property is not, as is commonly believed, an object or a credit

landlords charged rent long before achieving a monopoly, if they

Since, too, the ideal is justified by social efficiency and the

2 PROFESSIONAL RIVALRIES AND THE STATE