I

It is well known that the term “the Establishment,” in something like the sense in which it is still used in political and colloquial speech, was coined by the journalist Henry Fairlie in September 1955, in an article discussing the unmasking of the British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.Footnote ¹ It is almost equally well known that, as Fairlie later acknowledged, this attribution is mistaken.Footnote ² Fairlie himself had used the term repeatedly before his oft-cited article, and the historian A. J. P. Taylor had also already done so in 1953 in a sense broadly cognate with radical polemic against “the classes” and “the Thing,” William Cobbett's term for the fiscal-military apparatus constructed during the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote ³ Even then, “the Establishment” was by no means a neologism: the biographer Hesketh Pearson and the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge had each independently used the term in 1936, and in 1928 the New Statesman referred to a group of writers including Kipling, Shaw, and Wells as “Bishops . . . of the literary Establishment,” a transitional sense of the term in which a dependence upon its traditional ecclesiastical usage was still evident.Footnote ⁴ These earlier usages also appear as modulations of the sense in which John Stuart Mill, for example, had spoken of “establishments no longer considered sacred because they are establishments” due to the “assault on ancient institutions” inspired by Bentham; and of an older way of referring to Estates, or to quasi-permanent institutions of the state, that is familiar from Edmund Burke's defense of “establishments” against the French Revolution, which included not only the church but also “an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy.”Footnote ⁵

If the term was not entirely new in September 1955, however, the fact that it seemed so at that time is of considerable historical interest. “The Establishment” is now such a familiar part of everyday speech that its historical specificity—the fact that it fell into common use at a particular time and place, in which its novelty was widely remarked upon—is easily overlooked. This tendency has been compounded by its assimilation into the vocabulary of history and the social sciences, which was already underway in E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and continued in sociological studies of elites in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁶ Partly as a result, “the Establishment” is now commonly used, by historians of modern Britain and by scholars in a wide range of subfields, in a dehistoricized and more or less colloquial sense to denote various kinds of entrenched power.Footnote ⁷ Even when the concept is recognized as an artifact of mid-1950s Britain, it is easily assumed to refer to something that actually existed, or to be indicative of contemporary attitudes toward such a thing (often in the context of a somewhat indistinct “decline of deference”).Footnote ⁸ As well as adopting the philosophically questionable assumption that concepts used by historical subjects had fixed referents to which they self-evidently pointed or with which they were somehow identical, this customary understanding of “the Establishment” drains it of the meanings with which it was invested from the mid-1950s, constraining the historian's ability to “play the stranger,” which, as has been suggested elsewhere, is crucial to the study of recent and contemporary history.Footnote ⁹

In this article I offer a partial historicization of the concept of the Establishment by tracing its formation and use in British political argument. Fairlie's supposed recoining of the term in 1955 took place amid a vigorous contestation of political and social authority that had been underway in Britain since at least the late 1930s, when the Daily Mirror began to construct an opposition between “the people” and a network centering on “The Church, the West End of London and the aristocracy” in discussion of Edward VIII's prospective marriage to Wallis Simpson, and the idea of the “Cliveden Set” was formulated to denote an aristocratic cabal that had manipulated Britain's foreign policy toward Nazi Germany.Footnote ¹⁰ This contestation of authority was sustained into the following decade by influential denunciations of the “Guilty Men” supposedly responsible for the failed policy of appeasement, and by the emergence of a climate of opinion in which criticisms of “vested interests” became a common feature of political and popular speech.Footnote ¹¹ It therefore formed a central part of the context within which the emergence of what came to be called a welfare state in Britain took place during the 1940s; and as the extent and significance of the reforms of that decade arose as a defining issue in political argument from the early 1950s, discussion of the nature and location of political authority in Britain was conducted with renewed intensity and exercised a powerful influence upon the coherence and credibility of political argument.

These fundamental issues were formulated and discussed in a new political vocabulary in which “the Establishment” was a central component alongside other, no less familiar terms such as “the welfare state” and “affluence”—both of which are also commonly assumed to have had empirical referents but the recovery of which as concepts is crucial to understanding British politics after 1945. The operation of this new vocabulary and the larger transformations that it helped to effect are obscured by the dominant tendency to treat its constituent terms not as concepts but as determinate entities: as an actually existing power formation (in the case of “the Establishment”), a configuration of policies and institutions (“the welfare state”), or a socioeconomic condition (“affluence”).Footnote ¹² On the contrary, the idea that something called the Establishment or, for example, the welfare state actually existed independently of the usage of those terms is an effect of the usage of the terms themselves in political argument, which is impossible to understand historically when the effect is superimposed upon the processes that produced it. The account of political history I offer here therefore differs from existing histories of British politics during the second half of the twentieth century that have been organized around clearly defined structural transitions such as the supposed demise of social democracy and rise of neoliberalism.Footnote ¹³ Instead, I suggest that British politics after 1945 was defined by an extended dispute over the nature of the polity that had emerged from the 1940s, and over the location and constitution of power within it; and that the conceptual vocabulary within which those disputes were conducted helped to set the horizons of social-democratic and conservative politics in Britain. In particular, from the mid-1950s, the extension of the limited social democracy that had been constructed during the previous decade was promised in a language that ultimately constrained it; and the ideals of conservative government that, in its original recoinage, “the Establishment” had served to promote were marginalized within the Conservative Party, in part through the changing usage of that term itself.

The approach I adopt in this article is therefore congruent with recent tendencies in scholarship on modern Britain to assign greater autonomy to language in processes of political, social, and economic change, and with a growing interest in the “intellectual setting” of political debate that has been produced by a convergence of the so-called new political history with histories of what is conventionally referred to as high politics.Footnote ¹⁴ This latter development has produced a more sensitive and flexible reading of political language than that offered by much of the new political history, which frequently relied upon more conventional conceptions (and counterpositions) of representation and reality than its exponents claimed.Footnote ¹⁵ The present essay also contributes to recent work on histories of political and social concepts, in which the question of the relationship between concepts and words has assumed renewed importance from the use of digital humanities methodologies, the efficacy of which in tracing histories of word usage is not necessarily transferable to the production of histories of concepts.Footnote ¹⁶ The pioneering exponent of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history), Reinhart Koselleck, once suggested, “A word becomes a concept if [the] context of meaning in which—and for which—the word is used, is entirely incorporated into the word itself.”Footnote ¹⁷ In such cases, “The concept is fixed to the word, but at the same time it is more than the word,” and it is accordingly “always ambiguous.”Footnote ¹⁸ The implication—at least for the period of modernity (Neuzeit) that Koselleck claimed was marked by this distinctive mode of concept formation and contestation—could be said to be that whereas words signify syntactically, political and social concepts signify in historical time: they assimilate and thus reshape the entire framework of meaning that defines a particular historical situation, and it is by their doing so that they can be identified as concepts. It follows that, as several historians have pointed out, the history of a concept will not be the history merely of a single corresponding term but of an ensemble of concepts and terms and of the larger linguistic frameworks and material circumstances within which such an ensemble operates (and which it helps to shape).Footnote ¹⁹ In the case of “the Establishment,” the point at which the word—which, with the definite article, appears to have become available by the mid-1930s—became a concept in Koselleck's sense arrived amid the response to Fairlie's celebrated usage of September 1955, and amid the disputes over political authority and the nature and extent of recent political and social change that the concept of the welfare state was also used to conduct. Over the following decades, “the Establishment” was indeed “always ambiguous” in that it had neither a fixed referent nor even a consistent, clearly defined meaning. Indeed, almost all of its usages appear as no more than possible usages, which did not seek to assign to it a single, determinate meaning or referent that excluded all others. It is the history of these possible usages, and of the conditions for their possibility, in political argument in Britain after 1945 that I attempt to trace in this article.

II

“The Establishment” was recoined amid an intellectual revival of conservatism in postwar Britain, the leading exponents of which included the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the journalist T. E. Utley, whose work registered the prominence of questions of power and authority in political argument during the mid-1950s.Footnote ²⁰ A major forum for this intellectual culture was provided by the Spectator, reinvigorated under Ian Gilmour's ownership from 1954, when Henry Fairlie also began writing its “Political Commentary” column. The strongest emphases in Fairlie's writing fell upon an organic conception of society and the state, and upon what he claimed was a conventionally conservative understanding of politics as the play and resolution of contending interests and opinions.Footnote ²¹ This play of interest and opinion, he argued in September 1953, had been restricted in modern Britain by the stability of “the political and religious Establishments” of 1688.Footnote ²² Fairlie went on to develop a distinctive sense of “the Establishment” to connote this constraint of politics, usually as a result of collusion between party leaderships in a manner that he may have intended to echo eighteenth-century “country” opposition to the court. At the end of 1954, anticipating the next general election, he complained, “the Butskells on both sides will be fighting a mock battle with each other,” the outcome of which was unimportant because “the two parties have become equal partners in the Establishment. The evidence is there in the debates of 1954. On none of the major issues . . . did the front benches, and their faithful retainers on the benches behind them, differ.”Footnote ²³ In this formulation, “the Establishment” was a long-standing political settlement whose effects were intensified by “Butskellism,” the term recently popularized by the Economist to indicate the political constraints on economic policy that operated on government and opposition parties alike.Footnote ²⁴ Fairlie developed this sense of the term in an article criticizing the impotence of contemporary political journalism, which he related to the fact that “the Establishment has now extended itself far beyond Crown, Church and Parliament” and “includes—amongst other institutions—the press,” which he claimed was “largely owned by people who are high-ranking members of the Establishment. Whatever the differences between individual papers, there is one resemblance between them which is far more important. They all wish to preserve the ‘moderate’ Conservatives and the ‘moderate’ Socialists. They are all cast in the ‘front-bench’ frame of mind.”Footnote ²⁵

These bodies of moderate opinion, Fairlie continued, “are both primarily interested in maintaining the status quo, in shoring up the Establishment”—obstructing the free play of “interests and ideas” that he conceived as the proper activity of politics.Footnote ²⁶ He had previously argued that such an obstruction could lead to a weakening of political order, in an article criticizing what he claimed was a growing separation between British society and its “governing élite” such that the latter “have no common bond but their professional interest and are without social cohesion, without social continuity.”Footnote ²⁷ In response to criticism of this earlier article, Fairlie claimed to have been concerned specifically with the working class, which had recently gained power in Britain—in what he repeatedly called a “revolution” wrought by the Attlee governments—but which could not recognize its own leaders, who adopted “a status, a manner of living, which is not that of the working classes.”Footnote ²⁸ These claims did, however, suggest greater cohesion among the “governing élite” than Fairlie had previously allowed, and that suggestion was developed in his analysis of the Burgess-Maclean affair the following year, in which he was (and has since been) widely believed to have coined “the Establishment.”

In September 1955, the Foreign Office confirmed that the diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who had disappeared in 1951, had been Soviet agents and were now living in the USSR. Amid the ensuing opprobrium, Fairlie argued that the episode, and particularly the mobilization of elite opinion in defense of the men after their disappearance, was indicative of how power was exercised in postwar Britain. “I have several times suggested that what I call the ‘Establishment’ in this country is today more powerful than ever before,” he declared, and the Burgess-Maclean affair was a case study of its modus operandi: “By the ‘Establishment’ I do not mean only the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it is exercised socially.”Footnote ²⁹ Fairlie's article prompted a spirited correspondence in the Spectator, much of it occupied by people he had identified as members of “the Establishment” indignantly contesting his analysis and what they took to be the implication of wrongdoing on their part. In reply, Fairlie protested: “I believe that it is desirable that something like the ‘Establishment’ should exist, because it prevents even worse influences from operating.”Footnote ³⁰ In this latest sense, he appears to have meant by “the Establishment” something like “the pleasing illusions” that Burke believed harmonized the social organism with the institutions of government, in contrast with the “mechanic philosophy” of revolutionary France under which the force of law was merely coercive.Footnote ³¹ The term conveyed a sense of the unification of power and authority in postwar Britain, but also of the instability of that union, insofar as Fairlie had previously argued that the incorporation of labor leaders into this “matrix of official and social relations” jeopardized their legitimacy in the eyes of the working class.

Fairlie's claim that “the Establishment” was “more powerful than ever before” implied that the term denoted a configuration of power relations whose composition may have been altered by the accession to it of organized labor but whose fundamental character remained unchanged. The circumstances of the term's recoining amid the Burgess and Maclean affair evoked the accusations of ruling-class treachery that terms like “the Cliveden Set” and “Guilty Men” had been used to formulate during the 1930s and 1940s, and in the ensuing correspondence in the Spectator, “the Establishment” was retrospectively applied to the networks of political and intellectual opinion that promoted appeasement during the 1930s, and to earlier episodes in British political history.Footnote ³² At this point, therefore, “the Establishment” was not obviously part of a novel dispensation in political argument but rather appears to have occupied the conceptual coordinates within which the legitimacy of political authority in Britain had been questioned over the previous two decades. The same was true of its usage amid the denouement of Princess Margaret's relationship with the courtier Peter Townsend a month after Fairlie's article on the Burgess-Maclean affair, in which the alleged involvement of the archbishop of Canterbury in dissuading Margaret from marriage prompted calls for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church.Footnote ³³ In this context, criticism of the ecclesiastical Establishment was readily extended to wider criticisms of the structure and exercise of power in Britain and to claims that they were at variance with the wishes of “the people”—a usage consistent with the class-based populism formulated by the Daily Mirror during the abdication crisis of 1936.Footnote ³⁴ Hereafter, the term appears to have been rapidly assimilated into ordinary, if not yet popular, speech, so that the New Statesman, for example, could refer to Harold Macmillan's views during the 1930s as having brought upon him “the bitter hatred of the Establishment” within the Conservative Party.Footnote ³⁵ It was sufficiently recognizable for the Spectator to include a spoof “Establishment Game” in its Christmas 1955 issue; and in January 1956 the magazine's columnist “Pharos” remarked, “I see that the new sense of the word ‘Establishment’ is now becoming quite respectable,” after the radical clergyman John Collins used it in St. Paul's to denote a network of institutions from which the church ought to extract itself, in order to safeguard its integrity.Footnote ³⁶

III

Within twelve months of Fairlie's first recoining of the term, therefore, “the Establishment” had acquired two different senses in his usage and another set of pejorative meanings that renewed the discursive template within which a latent antagonism between “the people” and a loosely defined sociopolitical elite had been constructed since the late 1930s. From early 1956, the term also began to be adopted in debates within the Labour Party over the course of recent political and economic change, in which widespread discussion of a global transition from capitalism to “managerialism” was joined by divergent accounts of the nature and extent of the welfare reforms of the 1940s in Britain.Footnote ³⁷ Since the later 1940s, it had become a commonplace to refer to those reforms as having created a “welfare state,” a term whose usage could imply that Labour (as the principal reforming agent) had been incorporated into the political nation, in contrast to the dominant representation of it in interwar political culture.Footnote ³⁸ After the party's return to opposition in 1951, this supposed change in Labour's relationship to the polity was associated with descriptions of it as an “alternative government”—a long-used phrase that acquired new meanings within and outside the party, validating calls for discipline or “responsibility” by reference to a supposedly new political dispensation.Footnote ³⁹ In the extension of these discussions beyond 1955, it became increasingly common to refer to the changed position of the Labour Party within a transformed polity by describing it as part of “the Establishment.”Footnote ⁴⁰

However, the nature of the political dispensation that had emerged from the 1940s continued to be contested, and “the Establishment” could therefore be used in more than one sense. In particular, among those for whom “the welfare state” connoted only a limited and incomplete set of reforms, the identification of Labour with “the Establishment” could suggest that the party's proper objectives had been compromised or frustrated in its encounter with traditional centers and practices of power in Britain.Footnote ⁴¹ This latter usage was facilitated by Robert McKenzie's celebrated study British Political Parties (1955), which claimed that the distribution of power within the Conservative and Labour parties was “overwhelmingly similar” and that in both cases it effectively maintained the predominance of the leadership over the parliamentary party and wider party membership.Footnote ⁴² Thus when Aneurin Bevan, for example, gave a speech in February 1956 criticizing the management of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he evoked a rich set of associations in contemporary political culture that the New Statesman recognized as a challenge to “the Labour Party establishment.”Footnote ⁴³ Bevan himself followed the speech with an article complaining of “the blurring of the demarcation lines between the parties” and warning, “if the progressive party is to succeed it must challenge the assumptions . . . on which the existing pattern of society is based.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Bevan's statement aligned the leaderships of the Labour and Conservative Parties in a sense consistent with Fairlie's first recoining of “the Establishment,” but was based on a radically different understanding of what Bevan called “the existing pattern of society.” (While Fairlie had characterized the reforms of the 1940s as a “revolution,” Bevan—one of their principal architects—regarded them as incomplete and liable to reversal).Footnote ⁴⁵ In another speech later in the year, Bevan could therefore counterpose “the party establishment” to the “socialism” for which Labour supposedly stood.Footnote ⁴⁶

This claim that a vaguely defined “socialism” was frustrated or obstructed by the operation of power in Britain also extended to criticisms, by some Labour politicians, of what they took to be trade union leaderships’ incorporation into “the existing pattern of society.” In December 1955 the journalist Paul Johnson, in a major article in the New Statesman, bemoaned “the political vacuum created by the welfare state,” in which a “handful of trade union leaders and Old Etonians settle major issues of policy behind closed doors.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This was one element of an antidemocratic power nexus that Johnson called “the Hydra”; its composition was markedly similar to what Fairlie had recently termed “the Establishment” but with a stronger emphasis upon the presence, “lurking in the background,” of “those ultimate horrors, the dark Tudor figure of Lord Salisbury and the composite T.U.C. [Trades Union Congress] monster.”Footnote ⁴⁸ (Fairlie himself responded to the article by identifying “the Hydra” with “the Establishment” but denying the suggestion that it was at odds with public opinion.Footnote ⁴⁹) In 1956, the Labour politician and journalist Richard Crossman claimed that in postwar Britain the “State bureaucracy” and the trade unions were major components of a new managerialist economy: the unions, he claimed, “have now become established institutions, with deep roots in the existing social order, and display for this reason a quite natural reluctance to accept any radical change which seems inimical to their own interests.”Footnote ⁵⁰ His call for a renewed commitment to democracy in Labour politics was echoed in Tribune, which was routinely critical of union leaders’ accommodation with what its editor, Michael Foot (writing under the pseudonym John Marullus), called “the British ruling class,” and proclaimed itself a champion of “militant, democratic trade unionism” centered on the shop floor.Footnote ⁵¹

This identification of socialism with democracy—and the counterposition of those terms to a network of power that supposedly pursued its own interests without any democratic sanction—became a more marked feature of Labour rhetoric during the Suez affair, when Hugh Gaitskell's opposition to the government provided his internal critics with an opportunity to situate Labour outside the predominant structures and practices of power in Britain, and thus to stake out the ground of party unity away from revisionism. On 28 September 1956, for example, as British threats of military action intensified, Bevan declared that the incipient conflict manifested a “transition” in Britain that was accomplishing “a break with the past,” and that the “trouble with the Tories is that they refuse to admit this. In domestic as in foreign affairs they have conformed to all the assumptions, policies and conventions of the Establishment.”Footnote ⁵² Similarly, the manner in which Anthony Eden was eventually succeeded as prime minister by Harold Macmillan in January 1957—the penultimate occasion on which a British premier emerged from private soundings among senior Conservative politicians—was presented as an affront to democracy in Tribune and the New Statesman, with Bevan, again, taking particular exception to the covert influence supposedly exercised by the Marquess of Salisbury as a representative of “the Establishment.”Footnote ⁵³ Macmillan's accession to the premiership was therefore used to help secure the populist usage of this term that had emerged over 1956–57 among Labour critics of revisionism, who used it to refer to an antiquated ruling class that obstructed the proper working of democracy (and assumed that the unhampered operation of democracy would yield wide popular support for their own desire to move beyond the institutions and policies denoted by “the welfare state” to a broader—but often vaguely defined—program of socialist reform). The argument that such a program of reform was still necessary was seemingly validated in a speech given by Macmillan in March 1957, contrasting “the opportunity state” to the welfare state and promising to free the economy from the constraints of nationalization.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although the pattern of Conservative welfare policy over the following seven years generally involved what Rodney Lowe characterizes as “initial . . . hostile scrutiny” followed by effective extension of provision in many areas, Macmillan's counterposition of “the opportunity state” to the “welfare state” was seized upon by Bevan and others in the party as an indication that even the limited reforms denoted by the latter term were under threat.Footnote ⁵⁵

This new usage of “the Establishment” to denote a network of power centering on the Conservative Party that had successfully constrained or frustrated the Attlee governments, and to signify the Labour leadership's complicity in a cross-party formation of opinion that obstructed properly socialist reform, became particularly distinctive among the grouping that Ben Pimlott identified as the Labour “Centre Left,” critical of Gaitskell's leadership but distant from Bevan, whose leading figures were Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman and whose positions broadly aligned with the editorial tendencies of the New Statesman.Footnote ⁵⁶ “The Establishment” featured prominently in Wilson's critiques of British economic performance, as a pattern of conventional economic opinion to which the government was supposedly in thrall; and the economist Thomas Balogh adopted the term to link Britain's postwar economic performance with what he claimed was a gentlemanly amateurism in the ethos and personnel of the British state.Footnote ⁵⁷ (Wilson and Balogh's criticisms were also facilitated by the availability of new methods of economic measurement that helped to construct narratives of “decline” from the late 1950s.Footnote ⁵⁸) A similar argument was also advanced by J. B. Priestley under the rubric of “Topside,” his near-synonym for “the Establishment,” which he defined as “the reaction against a revolution that never happened”—that is, the successful resistance of traditional centers of power to the incomplete reforms of the Attlee governments.Footnote ⁵⁹ The implication of the Labour leadership in these critical usages of “the Establishment” was facilitated by the launch in 1958 of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was customarily presented as an anti-“Establishment” movement, and by Gaitskell's resistance to its demand for unilateral disarmament.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, after Bevan affirmed his support for British nuclear weapons at the Labour Party conference in 1957, he himself could be brought within this sense of “the Establishment,” although he continued to use it as a term of abuse.Footnote ⁶¹

IV

These uses of “the Establishment,” particularly in Wilson and Balogh's criticisms of Britain's postwar economic performance, prefigured the pattern of argument in which outmoded cultural values and assumptions were held to be constraining Britain's political and economic institutions, which became a prominent feature of public discourse during the early 1960s.Footnote ⁶² They did not, however, originate as a response to the actual emergence or renewed predominance of any identifiable group, or set of beliefs and practices, to which “the Establishment” self-evidently referred. Attempts by, for example, the incipient New Left to assemble empirical evidence that the power of business, political, and social elites had become more integrated and extensive after the war was met by empirical evidence, assembled by the Labour revisionist Anthony Crosland, that it had not.Footnote ⁶³ Nor were they demonstrably indicative of shifts in wider political or cultural opinion, or in public opinion at large. For example, public discussion of the “angry young man” supposedly portrayed in John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, which premiered in May 1956, has been presented as emerging from “a wave of anti-establishment writing” during the mid- and late 1950s.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet constructions of the “angry young man” did not straightforwardly reinforce the pejorative uses of “the Establishment” that some in the Labour Party were developing at the time. Blake Morrison has observed of the “Movement” writers, several of whom (including Kingsley Amis and John Wain) were also commonly identified as “angry young men,” that they occupied “an ambivalent position” toward structural inequality and the institutions of traditional authority in postwar Britain: “on the one hand opposed to the ‘old order’; on the other hand, indebted to, and respectful toward its institutions,” to the “values” of which they continued to subscribe.Footnote ⁶⁵ This ambivalence was exemplified by Wain, who wrote in March 1957 (in an article disclaiming his identity as an “angry young man”) that, amid the cultural disinheritance visited upon the working class by industrialism and mass culture, “the Establishment” (which he defined as “a network of men from the right schools and colleges, belonging to the right clubs and married to the right sort of wives . . . within which all effective decisions are made”) represented a locus of continuity in national culture, which should be reformed only “slowly and cautiously.”Footnote ⁶⁶

This use of “the Establishment” with a positive evaluative force was not unusual in the late 1950s. Indeed, A. J. P. Taylor, who had used the term in a pejorative sense shortly before Fairlie was believed to have recoined it, actually argued in October 1957 that it should be abandoned in favor of Cobbett's “The Thing,” because “The very word . . . tempts us to acknowledge the moral superiority of ‘the Establishment.’”Footnote ⁶⁷ That pejorative senses of the term were not its only, nor even perhaps predominant, usages is also evident from its employment in conservative commentary. Fairlie, for example, claimed in a review of C. Wright Mills's much-discussed The Power Elite in 1956 that “The Establishment” was a desirable ethical safeguard against the commercial “power elite” and public opinion.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the first issue of Crossbow, the journal of the Conservative Party's newly formed Bow Group, T. E. Utley presented an account of postwar political history almost directly opposed to that which was propounded by the Labour “centre-left,” in which (like Fairlie) he claimed that the Attlee governments had produced a radically altered political dispensation centered upon full employment and universal social services, which required a kind of stabilization through which they would become “established institutions.”Footnote ⁶⁹ That stabilization Utley conceived as the proper task of conservative government: in the same year, he published a vindication of Anthony Eden in terms of “what is roughly called Burkian [sic] Conservatism,” crediting him with moderating the reforms of the Attlee governments while avoiding the opposite extreme of laissez-faire economics.Footnote ⁷⁰ Utley's call for the creation of “established institutions” was particularly directed at “the trade union movement,” which he suggested had been pursuing the interests of its members and not those of the “nation” as a whole.Footnote ⁷¹ Elsewhere at this time, Utley also claimed that the unions were now part of what he called “an establishment,” but that this larger formation faced the urgent task of conciliating middle-class workers “whose interests have been disproportionately sacrificed as the price of a compromise with organized labour.”Footnote ⁷² In other words, the unions were part of an “Establishment” that they were preventing from acting as Utley believed establishments properly should.

Utley's claim that the unions had yet to become proper “establishments” in this sense was widely echoed among conservative commentators in the late 1950s.Footnote ⁷³ (“What we have to do,” one Bow Group member mused in 1960, “is to make them even more a part of the establishment than they are already.”Footnote ⁷⁴) This view may have registered a tension, to which Robert Taylor has called attention, within the unions themselves between leaderships’ belief that they had assumed a permanent role in national economic management and the attitudes of local officials such as the one who told the sociologist Ferdynand Zweig in 1952, “Our movement is basically a sectionalist movement for the benefit of small sectionalist interests . . . It is all right having the national interest in mind but we are not the right people to have it.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Nonetheless, collaboration between government and the unions was maintained during the early 1950s, primarily through close personal contacts between union leaders and the minister of labor, Sir Walter Monckton—which, as was seen above, alarmed some Labour figures who viewed the unions as part of a politically constraining postwar “Establishment.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The election of Frank Cousins as general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1956 made it more difficult for the unions to be identified en bloc with “the Establishment” in this sense, as he challenged not only the mutual restraint of government-union relations but also the Labour leadership in a series of confrontations over party democracy.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, this alteration in the temper of trade union politics also tended to vindicate criticisms of the inherently sectional activities of the unions, which in conservative usages remained un- (or incompletely) “established,” exacerbating Labour's difficulties in demonstrating its capacity to reconcile national and sectional interests.

Those difficulties may partly explain why a call by the New Statesman for Labour to present itself as “the party of outrage and challenge and change” in the 1959 election went unheeded.Footnote ⁷⁸ Despite the rhetoric of Wilson, Balogh, and other members of the Labour “centre-left,” the party also remained deeply implicated in usages of “the Establishment” that referred to the polity and political economy established during the 1940s, and it was therefore not the only plausible exponent of “radical” politics.Footnote ⁷⁹ In other words, at this stage the term could signify the entrenchment of social-democratic policies and institutions in Britain as much as it supported demands for their extension. Furthermore, the critical force of the term beyond the somewhat rarefied sphere of national political commentary remained highly questionable. “Do you assume that young people dislike the Establishment?” the journalist Norman MacKenzie inquired in the light of a Gallup poll in June 1959. “Then consider how many have a ‘good’ or ‘fairly good’ opinion of such of its branches as the royal family, the Church of England, the armed forces and the big corporations: all score well over 50 per cent.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Recent reexamination of sociological surveys from the early 1960s has identified a perception among working-class respondents of a natural distinction between a majority of “ordinary” individuals and a distant elite whose position was thus likewise naturalized and which could therefore appear as a legitimate object of deference.Footnote ⁸¹ A study of working-class Conservative voters in Stevenage published in New Left Review immediately after the 1959 election also identified a pattern of “deference” to traditional and business elites associated with the Conservative Party.Footnote ⁸²

“The Establishment” had therefore acquired no single, clearly defined and exclusive usage at the time of the 1959 general election. In August that year, the Spectator issued its own critique of “the Establishment,” in the sense of what it called “an oligarchy of opinion, both pervasive and influential,” which supposedly produced a stifling conformism in political culture.Footnote ⁸³ The term's fluidity was also evident in Hugh Thomas's symposium The Establishment (1959), which is often cited as though it was straightforwardly critical of something to which the term “the Establishment” referred.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet alongside essays by Balogh, Fairlie, and the Spectator's literary critic Simon Raven, each elaborating different pejorative definitions of the term (in Fairlie's case, contra his previous insistence that it held no such force), the book included another by the former Conservative MP Christopher Hollis, who regretted that “the Establishment” in the sense of “some mysterious, social influence . . . which really controls our destinies” did not have a more palpable existence.Footnote ⁸⁵ The relative novelty, and instability, of the term was also apparent in its outright rejection by some commentators.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the 1959 election, it was the Liberal Party, rejuvenated since 1956 under Jo Grimond's leadership, that came closest to articulating an anti-“Establishment” appeal. Its manifesto derided “Tory bigwigs” and “Labour bosses” in the same register and claimed that Labour's financing by “the vested interests of the Trade Union establishment” precluded it from becoming a properly “progressive party.”Footnote ⁸⁷ After the poll, in which the Conservative majority was increased to one hundred, the New Statesman acknowledged that it had been criticism of the apparatus and institutions of the state created by Labour that had been most telling in the campaign.Footnote ⁸⁸

V

The ambiguity of the concept of the Establishment was initially maintained in the debates that followed the election, which extended those of the previous decade over Labour's relation to the postwar polity. However, over the course of those debates, “the Establishment” was situated more firmly within a distinctively contemporary conceptual vocabulary in which it acquired the meanings that enabled it to be deployed in the political appeal that Harold Wilson articulated before the 1964 election, amid wider discursive constructions of a crisis of traditional authority in Britain. First, the post-1959 debates received a new emphasis from the adoption of the concept of affluence from J. K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958), which Richard Crossman used to suggest that postwar capitalism, and thus the requirement for Labour to present itself as an “anti-Establishment party” rather than “a staid Alternative Government,” remained unchanged.Footnote ⁸⁹ Gaitskell's critics accordingly continued to use “the Establishment” to characterize his leadership as oligarchic and antidemocratic and to indicate his failure to articulate a distinctive, radical policy (the precise content of which was, as before, often somewhat vague).Footnote ⁹⁰ Meanwhile, Anthony Crosland, the leading theorist of Labour revisionism, strenuously rebutted New Left analyses of power in postwar Britain and used “affluence” to denote a transformation of capitalism that necessitated a fundamental revision of Labour's priorities—in particular, a reduction of its emphasis on public ownership and of its identification with the working class—to enable it to win support among a technical and managerial “salariat” whose electoral influence was now widely discussed.Footnote ⁹¹

From 1959, “affluence” was also adopted in conservative commentary to denote Britain's transition to an era of high mass consumption, a stage of capitalist development that was identified with economic modernity in the analyses of Galbraith and other American writers.Footnote ⁹² This usage of “affluence” also supported the turn away from universal state welfare that Macmillan's vague concept of “the opportunity state” had seemingly heralded. After the 1959 election, the Bow Group began to advance the idea of “the post-Welfare State,” and in 1961 R. A. Butler publicly advocated “welfare through growth,” holding out the prospect that state welfare provision would be supplanted by expanding personal prosperity.Footnote ⁹³ The sense of widening disagreement over welfare policy was reinforced by Enoch Powell's appointment as minister of health—which was actually welcomed in the New Statesman on the grounds that it might dispel the myth of the two parties’ convergence under the sign of “the Establishment.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Before long, Labour could also point to empirical evidence countering the idea of the “welfare state” as a transformative political and social settlement: the social worker Audrey Harvey's study of poverty for the Fabian Society in 1960 culminated with the observation “We have been deluded into thinking . . . that we have already achieved a Welfare State,” a formulation in which “welfare state” signified a degree or standard of provision of which contemporary Britain fell short.Footnote ⁹⁵ Harvey's study was reinforced by the “rediscovery of poverty” promoted by the sociologists Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith, and at the end of 1962 by the social scientist Richard Titmuss's study of inequality in Britain.Footnote ⁹⁶ “The present generation has been mesmerized by the language of ‘the Welfare State,’” Titmuss claimed; the popular assumption that “after 1948 . . . all the answers had been found to the problems of health, education, social welfare and housing” was erroneous.Footnote ⁹⁷

Shortly after the 1959 election, Titmuss had also developed a new analysis of power in Britain that distinguished between the “responsible,” or democratically accountable, power of the nationalized industries and trade unions, and the “irresponsible” power of private business interests.Footnote ⁹⁸ This analysis was partly a riposte to the idea of “the responsible society” that the Conservative “One Nation” group had promoted before the election, ostensibly as a via media between the “extremes” of laissez-faire and socialism that would foster voluntaristic social action in civil society.Footnote ⁹⁹ More importantly, however, Titmuss's widely adopted dichotomy tacitly defended the institutions of state created by Labour, and the unions, from the criticisms to which they had been subjected in 1959, while grounding the critical uses of “affluence” that were proliferating within the Labour Party upon a systematic account of economic power.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Meanwhile, the consumerist prosperity that the government had appeared to celebrate in the 1959 election was already causing disquiet among some conservative commentators. The Spectator warned that it would undermine the principle of cohesion that rooted leadership and institutions within a healthy social organism and secured the proper functioning of what Fairlie and other conservative thinkers had previously referred to (in a positive sense) as “establishments.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This argument had been applied to Galbraith's account of “affluence” in Crossbow just before the 1959 election, in an extended article by David Fairbairn warning that this new economic dispensation would create “a large genus of people whose roots go deep into no established pattern of living, who are uncommitted to any firmly held beliefs.”Footnote ¹⁰² Fairbairn suggested that “affluence” in this sense would place excessive power in the hands of advertising and marketing interests, creating “an establishment whose aims . . . run counter to those of society at large.”Footnote ¹⁰³ In other words, rather than harmonizing the interests of society in the way that quasi-Burkean usages of “the establishment” presupposed, this new “establishment” would enable a single section of the community to impose its interests on the whole, which Fairbairn therefore urged conservatives to forestall.

By early 1961, the problems posed by expanding consumption had also brought another balance of payments crisis into prospect. The Spectator began to advocate British entry into the European Economic Community as a way of averting “gradual political and economic decline”—a conceptualization of British economic performance that new forms of economic measurement and influential books by the financial journalists Andrew Shonfield and Michael Shanks were helping to construct, in a sense broadly consistent with the analyses of economic performance that Wilson and Balogh had been developing since the late 1950s.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In July 1961, Selwyn Lloyd announced a package of deflationary measures, the most notable of which was a “pay pause” for public sector workers that, insofar as it constituted an attempt to impose pay restraint without union support, ran counter to the claim that Utley and other conservative commentators had made since the late 1950s, that conservative government was uniquely capable of transforming the unions into “establishments.” The “pay pause” marked the point at which it was soon widely agreed that the government's reputation for economic competence had been lost,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ but it was also the point at which the criticisms of economic policy and performance that Wilson and Balogh had been issuing since the mid-1950s gained wide credibility. This was partly because the pay pause constituted tacit recognition by the government that some form of wage control was the prerequisite for continuously rising consumption, while its attempt to impose such an arrangement without union support meant that the Conservative Party was no longer quite so obviously the most plausible agent of Britain's transition into that economic future. A Spectator editorial criticized “Mr. Lloyd's failure even to try to carry the trade unions with him,” and the paper's City correspondent Nicholas Davenport lamented that Lloyd “chose to have an industrial war” in accordance with the preferred policy of “the Treasury establishment”—an adoption of the polemical usage that Balogh and Wilson had been deploying since the mid-1950s.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ That war was enthusiastically joined by Cousins, who scornfully rejected pay restraint at the 1961 Labour Party Conference. Meanwhile, the New Statesman gleefully pointed out that by antagonizing “white-collar” unions, “the government is . . . making itself enemies in precisely the social stratum where ‘modern’ Conservatism won votes for Tory MPs.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

This sense of weakening support for the government among the “new” middle class was also shared within a Conservative Party that was becoming the target of new pejorative usages of “the Establishment” outside formal political commentary and debate. One of its newly elected MPs, Charles Curran, warned Crossbow readers that the limitations upon its appeal to the “new” middle class included the fact that “the party sometimes conveys an impression that it is, in essence, a non-stop Old Boys reunion, conducted against a background of nannies, dorms, housemasters, pheasants, swords, and grandfathers who got themselves shot on the North-West Frontier as a prelude to immortality on the walls of Clifton Chapel.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This faintly comical admonition echoed the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, which had opened in London in May 1961 shortly before the pay pause was announced and whose most remarked-upon features included Peter Cook's impersonation of Harold Macmillan. The assimilation of this revue within political culture became apparent within a month, when the Spectator reported that Macmillan's “bumbling speech of welcome” on President Kennedy's arrival in the United Kingdom was given “from notes, as if he were trying to parody Beyond the Fringe.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In October, Cook opened a nightclub for satirical comedy in Soho called The Establishment, which Jonathan Miller, another cast member of Beyond the Fringe, presented in the Observer as part of an assault on the overlapping networks of official and social power in which the norms of Victorian public-school culture prevailed.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ loss of support among the “new” middle class was a central motif in discussions of a “Liberal revival,” which were already current when The Establishment opened in Soho and were seemingly corroborated in a run of by-elections the following year, in which the Liberals’ appeal as an anti-“Establishment” or protest party was widely perceived to have worked against the Conservatives.Footnote ¹¹¹

The pay pause also heralded a shift in the government's approach to the role of the state in the economy that was difficult to accommodate within the parameters of a political appeal that had long been framed by the slogan “Conservative freedom works.”Footnote ¹¹² Shortly before the pay pause was announced, the Conservative writer and politician Peter Goldman had claimed in a restatement of Conservative ideals, “Conservatives are the traditional foes of centralization, the traditional champions of the diffusion of power,” and characterized “Socialism” as seeking “to expand the areas within which the gentleman in Whitehall is deemed to know best.”Footnote ¹¹³ Shortly after the pay pause was announced, Crossbow, edited at the time by Geoffrey Howe, warned, “Tories can no longer laugh off the need for economic planning by deriding Mr Douglas Jay's observation that ‘The gentleman in Whitehall knows best.’”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The government accordingly set up new institutional machinery for planning economic output and wages, and initiated many of the “modernizing” reforms later pursued by Wilson's Labour governments.Footnote ¹¹⁵ But the weakness of those mechanisms, and particularly the Trades Union Congress's refusal to join the National Incomes Council, enabled Labour to claim that it alone was capable of securing the unions’ cooperation in national economic management—that is, to identify itself with the political nation without appearing to sacrifice its radicalism. In October 1962, Wilson declared that the unions would refuse to support an incomes policy without (in effect) the adoption of Labour's current fiscal policy and claimed that the government's attempts at planning were insufficiently “dirigiste”—a term whose positive connotations at this stage mark a major shift from the political culture of the 1950s.Footnote ¹¹⁶

However, Labour did not automatically benefit from the government's confrontation with the unions and what was believed to be its weakening appeal to the “new” middle class, partly because it was not itself altogether immune to the much-discussed Liberal revival.Footnote ¹¹⁷ When Gaitskell sought to consolidate the internal unity of the Labour Party by announcing his opposition to the government's application to join the European Economic Community in October 1962, the Conservative Party chairman Iain Macleod confidently predicted that it would cost Labour the next election by alienating middle-class voters who were presumed to support entry.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Even when this prediction was confounded by Charles de Gaulle's veto of the application the following January, Harold Wilson—who became Labour leader in February 1963, after Gaitskell's sudden death from lupus—faced what was thought to be the delicate strategic imperative of maintaining the fragile unity of the Labour movement while securing support among the “new” middle class. The distinctive public doctrine that he articulated before the 1964 election addressed this apparent dilemma by drawing together the conceptual resources that “the Establishment,” “affluence,” the rediscovery of poverty, and Titmuss's critique of “irresponsible” power had made available. Wilson identified the Conservative Party with the vulgarized sense of “the Establishment” that was increasingly prevalent in popular culture, which he associated with privilege, amateurism, backwardness, and, not infrequently, effeteness; and he contrasted it to the modernized polity he proposed to create through the incorporation of both the unions and the “new” technical and scientific middle class, which would free industry from the constraints supposedly imposed by traditional social elites.

Wilson began developing this pattern of rhetorical contrasts shortly after his election as Labour leader, claiming amid the exposure of the Admiralty official John Vassall as a Soviet spy, for example, that “the gentlemanly posture of the Establishment” was no match for the “ruthless, highly professionalized” Soviet security services.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The scandal that was created over the Conservative minister John Profumo's brief affair with Christine Keeler, with its origins at Cliveden and its suggestion of ruling-class social mores running counter to the national interest, evoked both the circumstances in which Fairlie was believed to have recoined “the Establishment” in 1955 and the specter of “the Cliveden set” to which the new concept had been related in its earliest uses. But the main elements of Wilson's political appeal and his use of “the Establishment” no longer relied upon their continuity with the vocabulary in which power and authority had been contested since the late 1930s, as the first pejorative uses of “the Establishment” in the mid-1950s had done. Instead, his celebrated speeches at the Labour Party conference of 1963 invested “the Establishment” with distinctively contemporary meanings. His speech on foreign policy, for example, ridiculed the Earl of Home (then the foreign secretary) as the representative of an “effete Establishment,” and declared, “This country cannot put forth its true strength until it cuts out the dead wood at the top . . . till it frees itself from the dead hands of the Establishment and the mesmerism of the old school tie, the nepotism and dynasticism which are as out of place in modern industry as they are in modern government.”Footnote ¹²⁰

The same themes were struck in Wilson's frequently cited speech on “the scientific revolution” the following day, in which he derided “the old-boy network approach to life” and the continuing influence in industry of “men whose only claim is their aristocratic connections or the power of inherited wealth or speculative finance.”Footnote ¹²¹ On this latter point, Wilson adopted a view of the integration of social elites and industrial leadership that was broadly consistent with the analyses of power undertaken by the New Left and contrary both to Crosland's opposing account and to that of the journalist Anthony Sampson in his influential book Anatomy of Britain (1962).Footnote ¹²² However, the plausibility of Wilson's usage of “the Establishment” as Labour leader relied not upon its empirical accuracy but upon its synthesis of the conceptual vocabulary that had emerged in Labour politics after the 1959 election, and upon its congruence with the new discursive template within which other forms of traditional authority—particularly that of the religious “Establishment”—were being called into question in 1963.Footnote ¹²³ It was undoubtedly reinforced by the accession of Home to the premiership in October that year, which Wilson greeted by demanding, “How can a scion of an effete establishment appreciate and understand, above all read [sic] the scientific revolution, the mobilization of the skill and talents of all our people in the struggle to restore Britain's position in the world?”Footnote ¹²⁴ But this pattern of rhetorical associations and contrasts had already been formulated before Home became prime minister and was largely unaffected by it.

Although Wilson's politics was therefore directed against “the Establishment” in the particular sense of that term that he had developed, it did not employ the populist, pejorative usage that had emerged in Labour commentary after Suez. Wilson proposed to change the personnel and ethos of the British state, not to formally democratize it by preventing networks of power and influence from controlling its center (except insofar as the unions constituted a locus of “responsible,” or democratically accountable, power in the terms that Titmuss had influentially established). His proposal to integrate the trade unions more fully into national economic management was implicitly endorsed at the Trades Union Congress in September 1963, where a motion by the boilermakers’ union rejecting any form of wage restraint was accompanied by the observations of the union's general secretary as to the implacable opposition of Conservative governments to trade unions. By contrast, he declared, “If we have a Labour Government in power, and it wants assistance from our movement to achieve a planned economy, I shall be one of the first in this room to pledge my support.”Footnote ¹²⁵ At the Labour Party conference the following month, union leaders restated their opposition to wage restraint under a future Labour government, but the amity between the party and the unions was repeatedly emphasized.Footnote ¹²⁶ Just under a year later, Wilson launched Labour's general election campaign with a speech at the Trades Union Congress at Brighton, which included a passing reference to “the complacent mythology of the Establishment” concerning the possibility of increasing exports without planning.Footnote ¹²⁷ By now, this aspect of Wilson's rhetoric had become characteristic, and its effectiveness was ruefully acknowledged by conservative commentators.Footnote ¹²⁸ A review of anthologies of speeches by Wilson and Home (now Sir Alec Douglas-Home) in the final pre-election issue of Crossbow complained that Wilson “repeatedly attacks the Tories as upholding a quite fictional ‘Edwardian establishment mentality.’”Footnote ¹²⁹ But the fictionality of Wilson's usage of this term did not diminish its political force, and there may have been some recognition of this in the same reviewer's only partially disparaging statement that Wilson “is equally persuasive at first glance and specious at second.”Footnote ¹³⁰

VI

Wilson continued to pursue his distinctive rhetorical strategy after Labour's narrow victory in 1964, in order to maintain his government's radical credentials. At the Labour Party conference the following year, he declared that the election had been, among other things, “a decision that . . . every aspect of our national life that has been corrupted by the doctrine of a self-perpetuating establishment, should give way to a more open society where knowing your job would mean more than knowing the right people.”Footnote ¹³¹ Meanwhile, he attempted to make good on his implicit promise to incorporate organized labor into the polity by giving ministerial office to Frank Cousins, and by restoring the legal immunities that had been taken from the unions in the Rookes v. Barnard judgment of 1964. (Introducing the latter measure in the House of Commons, the minister of labor reflected, “There were few half a century ago who believed that the trade union movement would become almost a part of the Establishment,” a development that he claimed would produce “greater efficiency and greater order”—in marked contrast to the sense in which, as was seen above, the unions were accused of complicity with “the Establishment” in Labour commentary during the mid-1950s.Footnote ¹³²) Wilson's self-presentation was sufficiently credible for the Observer's political correspondent to describe him, in a favorable comparison with the newly elected Conservative leader Edward Heath, as having “refused either to adapt his way of life or personal standards to fit into the establishment pattern.”Footnote ¹³³ Even the Times, whose political correspondent by contrast implied that Heath's election to the leadership had invalidated the association of the Conservative Party with “the Establishment” that Wilson had successfully employed, described the preparation of the National Plan as having been “surrounded by a hostile Whitehall establishment.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Yet before the 1966 election, the idea of “the Establishment” began to be directed against Wilson by critics who claimed that, in office, his radicalism had fallen short of his rhetoric. Just before polling day, the Guardian's financial editor accused the Labour Party of “behaving like the Establishment” insofar as Wilson and other party leaders appeared to “feel compelled to stick to relatively meaningless phrases” in the election campaign.Footnote ¹³⁵ This usage was adopted in 1966–67 by the self-identifying “Left” of the party and, perhaps more damagingly, by proponents of the modernizing socialism with which Wilson had aligned himself before the 1964 election.Footnote ¹³⁶ (The concept of affluence was likewise turned against Wilson by his avowedly socialist critics at around the same time.Footnote ¹³⁷) Wilson himself may have helped to validate this criticism by his presentation of the seamen's strike of 1966 as a confrontation between the unions and the state, which prompted Cousins to resign.Footnote ¹³⁸ Amid the tacit abandonment of the National Plan that ensued, the credibility of Wilson's promise to create a new polity was severely diminished.

Meanwhile the idea of “the Establishment” acquired other meanings that reflected, and helped to accomplish, a larger shifting of political alignments. The term was adopted by Heath's conservative critics to suggest that his policies conformed too closely to those of the Labour government—particularly after Enoch Powell's infamous speech on immigration in 1968 created an issue around which an ostensibly popular conservatism could be defined.Footnote ¹³⁹ Powell, the Times's economics editor Peter Jay wrote in May 1968, “is now a major political phenomenon. He is seen by many as making a bid for power over the heads of the political establishment direct to the people,” in opposition to “the illusion-ridden, bi-partisan consensus of the past few years.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ By then, the idea of a “new” or “progressive establishment” was also gaining currency among critics of the social and cultural processes of the 1960s, which in its adoption by conservative commentators could imply a kind of usurpation of the authority exercised by “establishments” in the proper sense, threatening the integrity of the nation as a moral community.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Amid these discussions of a “new Establishment” loosely associated with the Labour governments, the idea that Labour was becoming the “natural party of government” also entered political discourse.Footnote ¹⁴² Pimlott claims that Wilson himself adopted this phrase in 1969, in which context it supported his claim to the political “center” and underpinned his attempts to reform trade union law through the white paper In Place of Strife by identifying the government's proposals with the national interest.Footnote ¹⁴³ After the proposals were effectively rejected by the unions, the phrase could also tacitly rebut suggestions that the incident demonstrated the government's inability to govern while buttressing Wilson's demands for party discipline—much as descriptions of Labour as an “alternative government” had done in the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

The phrase could also still evoke a sense that Labour was uniquely competent to manage a quasi-corporatist polity with the unions, for as long as the “social contract” under which the miners’ strike was ended in 1974 continued to function.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ However, the risks of this rhetorical strategy became evident at the Conservative Party conference of 1975, where, as more conventional politicians contested Wilson's claim that Labour was “the natural party of government,” the new Conservative leader actually endorsed it.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ “If we are to be told that a Conservative Government could not govern because certain extreme leaders would not let it,” Margaret Thatcher declared, “then General Elections are a mockery and we've arrived at the one party state, and parliamentary democracy in this country will have perished.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This response opened the way to Thatcher's usage of “the Establishment” in the sense of a “left-socialist oligarchy restraining the natural acquisitiveness of ‘free-born’ Britons,” as it has been described.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ (In a kind of historical irony, the conditions for the credibility of Thatcher's new anti-“Establishment” politics had been created by the emergence, in the form of the shop stewards’ movement, of the “militant, democratic trade unionism” that Tribune had supported against what it presented as the trade union “establishment” during the 1950s.) Of course, the actual arrangements whereby Wilson could claim to be making Labour the “natural party of government” were more precarious than Thatcher made them sound, but the significance of her repositioning was instantly recognized by contemporaries. “No part of her speech,” the political editor of The Times stated immediately afterward, “had deeper political significance than her challenge to Mr Wilson's claim . . . that Labour, underpinned by trade union power, is now the natural party of government.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

It has been argued that a transition took place in British politics during or after the 1970s, in which the traditional opposition of “conservatism” and “socialism” was supplanted by more complex clusters of ideas loosely bound together within “New Rights and Lefts”—a development that can also be related to larger transitions effected by identity politics and new social movements, and by the contradictory impulses of neoliberal political economy.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The history traced here suggests that an important political transition did become evident in Britain during that period but that it had begun during the 1950s and that it was associated with a new conceptual vocabulary of which “the Establishment” was a central component. Close analysis of that vocabulary suggests that the political economy and institutions that emerged from the 1940s did not appear as a stable or finished settlement to more than a few political actors and commentators; contestations of the scope and implications of the reforms of that decade accomplished what might advisedly be called a reconstruction of political argument in Britain, the effects of which became evident from the late 1950s. In 1959, demands for more radical social-democratic (and, still more, socialist) measures were checked by the credibility of suggestions that the reforms of the 1940s had created new centers of power that were constraining Britain's political and economic development. The reorientation of political argument that took place around the “pay pause” of 1961 produced Wilson's political appeal of 1963–64, in which “the Establishment” was the antithesis of a modernizing, quasi-corporatist social democracy that his administration would inaugurate. But this usage of “the Establishment” validated only a limited program of reform aimed at escaping the supposed constraints of an aristocratic amateurism in industry and the state, the actual existence of which might have been questionable but the construction of which was nonetheless congruent with the larger cultural context of the early 1960s.

At this point, political argument in Britain had been partially realigned around an opposition between what could be termed “modern-minded” and “old-fashioned” political appeals, which the Economist recognized after Wilson's victory in the general election of 1966 (and which thus preceded the class and partisan “dealignment” of the electorate during the 1970s).Footnote ¹⁵¹ But Wilson's mastery of this change in the terms of political debate proved unsustainable in office, where his distinctive political appeal ultimately foreshortened the horizons of social-democratic reform by making the Labour Party appear as a new “Establishment” that could be held responsible for the economic and social problems of the 1970s. Thatcher's adoption, as Conservative leader, of an anti-“Establishment” appeal in this sense also marked a significant transformation within conservatism. One ideal of conservative politics that “the Establishment” had been used to promote in postwar Britain envisaged political contention giving way to the restoration of what Utley called “a balance of interests in society.”Footnote ¹⁵² Thatcher's adoption of an anti-“Establishment” appeal explicitly opposed to what she portrayed as the prevailing political settlement, and her disavowal of “consensus” politics and of the “middle way” that Utley had claimed to seek, heralded the marginalization of this form of conservatism (as Utley himself appears to have recognized).Footnote ¹⁵³ The economic and social policies that were eventually pursued by the Thatcher administrations also stood in an uneasy relationship to a conservatism that rooted political institutions within a densely structured ethical order, and that had been discussed in terms of “establishments” during the early 1960s.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

The formation and development of the concept of the Establishment is therefore a central part of the history of political argument in Britain since 1945. From its initial recoining in conservative commentary during the 1950s, the diverse usages of the term were part of a vigorous contestation of power and authority in postwar Britain, the scope and purposes of which are brought into focus when the concept is properly historicized. Most of those usages were developed in answer to the vexed questions of what kind of polity had emerged from the 1940s and of the extent of the transformation that had been wrought over the decade when it became conventional to refer to Britain as a “welfare state.” The transition of this term from an actor's to an historian's category, I suggest, also requires greater critical scrutiny than it has hitherto received. As other historians have pointed out, conceptions of postwar Britain as a welfare state conceal the actual configuration of interests and resources within the state apparatus; and the developments in political argument that have been examined here indicate that the “welfare state” in Britain was not a stable political settlement but a term that was applied to a set of policies and institutions that were less complete and coherent than it made them appear.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Distinguishing between the development of those policies and institutions and the vocabulary in which their scope and significance was contested therefore appears as a fundamental requirement for understanding British politics during the twentieth century.