In the 1990s Oxford University Press invited Ross McKibbin to write the volume in the Oxford History of England for the period 1918–51. McKibbin eventually decided that he needed two volumes to cover the period, but Oxford refused to change the series. It did, however, publish what would have been the first volume as Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 2000), which examined the social and cultural history of the period. Parties and People, which is based on the Ford Lectures in British History that McKibbin delivered at Oxford in 2008, tackles the political history that he omitted in the earlier volume. It is not, however, the belated second volume in the Oxford history, a detailed narrative history of the period but, rather, an interpretative essay that synthesizes much recent research while building on some of the arguments he made in Classes and Cultures.

McKibbin famously argued in his early work that the decline of Liberalism had been inevitable given the expansion of the franchise and the growth of Labour. But he now abandons that view, arguing instead that the Edwardian political system was a viable if delicate equipoise, based on the “progressive alliance” between Liberalism and Labour and their shared commitment to free trade, free collective bargaining, constitutional reform, and an active social policy. What ended Liberal dominance was not the growth of the trade union movement or the expanded franchise but the war, which, among other things, undermined the progressive alliance and the ideological agreement that had held it together.

The war, McKibbin argues, should have created a new political system divided more clearly on grounds of class. Instead, the Edwardian system limped along. The Liberal Party did not simply disappear, with the majority of its supporters moving over to Conservatism as the party of property, while Labour grew but could not expand beyond its narrow base. It was not until 1931 that the Edwardian system was decisively killed and a new political regime created. The financial crisis of that year became a turning point because the MacDonald government allowed itself “to be driven from office in politically the worst possible way” (84). The Conservatives then used the crisis to secure their own political hegemony by solidifying the antisocialist coalition that had been in the making since the war. But it was an antisocialism based on the less confrontational stance of Stanley Baldwin that appealed to a now more technically educated middle class and particularly to women, who voted overwhelmingly Conservative. Most important, it won the votes of a majority of the working class, who largely accepted the Tories as natural rulers. The Tories were lucky not to be in power in 1931, but, as McKibbin notes, they had “a good hand which they played well,” while Labour “was dealt a bad hand which it played badly” (105).

There were no indications by the end of the decade that Conservative hegemony was in any danger. What destroyed it, McKibbin argues, was the crisis of 1940 and the fall of Chamberlain, which exposed the failure of appeasement and the “political system which gave it birth” (120). The Tories had to “call upon Labour to save the nation. This was to undo at a stroke the work of twenty years,” and in consequence much of the electorate was “radicalized very fast” (123), particularly workers who had previously supported the Conservative Party. That radicalization—and McKibbin rejects recent revisionist views that see the war as having little political impact—was then reinforced by wartime developments that created a broad-based desire for change. The war made Labour. As a party of government, it gained a new legitimacy, while benefiting from its identification with the state, from its support for Beveridge and social reform, and from its opposition to the prewar order. For the first time, Labour, not the Conservatives, could stand for England.

In McKibbin’s view, the Labour government that came to power in 1945 under Clement Attlee did what it had promised, particularly by creating a national health service and a system of social security and by nationalizing key industries, but it did not know how to proceed once it had realized its program. It was unable to abandon the identification of socialism and nationalization, even though most of the electorate were indifferent to it and nationalization failed to redistribute wealth or create a more democratic workplace. Labour reached an “almost inescapable impasse” (164) because it failed to tackle entrenched class and social hierarchies or the political/constitutional system. It left in place the public schools, the House of Lords, the ancient universities, and all the other supports of traditional English hierarchy. In consequence, the Tories were able to adapt to the changes wrought by the 1945 Labour government without themselves having to change. What emerged in the 1950s “was an awkward compromise based upon a tacit agreement between the Conservative and Labour Parties: a semi-democratic quasi-constitutionalism” (201) that was increasingly unable to accommodate change as English society became more democratic and traditional social hierarchies decayed. “Such was the legacy of the 1940s to the later twentieth century: a society with powerful democratic impulses but political structures and habits of mind which could not adequately contain them. It was an unresolved tension which was to dog England for the rest of the century” (262).

It is impossible to do justice in a brief review to the sophistication and complexity of McKibbin’s analysis of the period, particularly his careful attention to the importance of political culture in determining electoral behavior. By balancing the contingent against long-term structural change, McKibbin convincingly argues that “England could easily have developed different constitutional forms and a different kind of democracy” (vii). Indeed, McKibbin rues the failure of the 1940s to “produce a functioning social democracy” (201), and while not everyone will agree with that sentiment, anyone concerned with the history of twentieth-century Britain will want to read this book.