Britain in the 20th Century: The Conservative Reaction, 1951-1965

The Conservatives recovered remarkably rapidly from the debacle of 1945. Their narrow election victory in 1951 led to 13 years of Conservative rule. How was the party able to reassert itself so quickly and what did it do with its period in power? Winston Churchill hoped to roll back the tide of socialism. Did he succeed, or did the Conservatives, by contrast, help to confirm a new consensus which, while not socialist, could also not be described as capitalist in the classical sense of the term?
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
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Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website.
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[@PNETriffid]

Good balanced account of the period.

[@charlotteharrison500]

incredible

[@joewilson3575]

Pfft, bet wor lad bevan could have beat covid 19

[@markcoupe845]

the tories always DIVIDE ANSD CONQEUR

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

I love his erudition but please: SOOpranational, not SUPpranational. You hear the latter pronunciation all the time in his series about Britain and the EU, and I just can't stand it any more.

[@johnbull9195]

The only vulgar society was the society Roy Jenkins introduced as Labour Home Secretary

[@th8257]

The people that moaned about those social changes loudest, i.e. the right wing of the Tory Party, had nearly two decades of government from 1979 to reverse them. They did not. Society is much more humane now that it was before Rot Jenkins' changes, and nobody apart from an increasingly small bunch of eccentric and angry oddballs would want to go backwards.

[@elgee6202]

@@th8257, just as Labour, the loudest screechers against Thatcherism, didn't reverse any of it during its subsequent 13 years in power; indeed, it placed Thatcherism on stilts and roller blades. In truth, subsequent governments don't spend their time undoing the acts of the previous government in an endless game of ping-pong. The Conservative Party is not morally, culturally, or socially conservative anyway; they're laissez-faire liberals. If they were proper conservatives - in other words reactionaries in the English High Tory tradition - they would have made turning back the clock an immediate priority upon taking office.