Britain's party system had a good war. That, in a nutshell, is the contention of this major new study by Andrew Thorpe, one of the historical profession's leading authorities on British party politics in the twentieth century. Forget Labour's postwar landslide, Thorpe instructs us: it was the survival of “party” that represents the key problematic of the 1940s. How, at a moment of supreme national crisis, when polls registered mounting disillusionment with the traditional parties, when Communists and independents surged ahead at by-elections, when a “nonparty” figure like Sir Stafford Cripps could become a national treasure, and when a Coalition government and electoral truce suspended the usual cut and thrust of partisan struggle—how, despite all these vicissitudes, did the party system not only emerge from the war more or less intact but, within the space of a few years, generate soaring party memberships and election turnouts unseen at any point before or since?
The answer, Thorpe suggests, lies in the decidedly unglamorous realm of political organization, a terrain neglected by earlier historians preoccupied with retracing the high and low political roads to 1945. It is only by establishing a clear picture of membership, finances, constituency organization, and relations between leaders, MPs, agents, and activists, Thorpe argues, that claims about the ailing health of Britain's party system can be assessed satisfactorily. To meet this criterion, the author has undertaken a quest of near-Odyssean proportions, touring the depositories of England, Scotland, and Wales in search of national and local party records, personal papers, diaries, memoirs, and anything else that promises to illuminate how far and in what ways the experiences of Britain's three main parties varied “in organizational terms” (8) during the war. The reward for this time spent with rusty paperclips, molding minute books, and indecipherable handwriting is an empirical base that enables, Thorpe contends, “serious historical conclusions to be drawn” (9).
The range and depth of the evidence produced to sustain its central thesis is certainly one of the great strengths of the book. A mass of detail is expertly marshaled into crisp, lucid prose, through which a persuasive account of resilient party structures and cultures unfolds over the course of eight chapters. Striking an agreeable balance between analysis and illustration and striving to generalize where possible, these chapters deal with national-level management, MPs and candidates, agents and organizers, party membership, constituency activities, and party finances. Every one of them offers up some penetrating insights, but for reasons of space, just three of the more important themes to emerge will be mentioned here.
The first concerns Thorpe's desire to test retrospective “myths” about party fortunes during the war, particularly the notion peddled by the Central Office that the Conservative defeat in 1945 was a result of the party's selfless abandonment of partisanship under the wartime electoral truce. This, Thorpe discovers, was only partially true. Organization did not collapse through any collective impulse to put country before party; insofar as the truce was observed, it was hoped and expected that such ostensibly patriotic behavior would pay electoral dividends later on. This thinking proved wholly mistaken, yet in the longer term, electoral defeat helped to lay the foundations of Tory recovery, alerting party managers to the importance of injecting new blood into the parliamentary party and courting young voters through such vehicles as the Young Conservatives (YCs).
This relates to a second major theme of the book: the role of institutional structures in sustaining partisanship in the absence of normal electoral competition. Labour was advantaged, Thorpe finds, not so much by the docility of its opponents but by the institutional logic of its own organization. The Parliamentary Labour Party, National Executive Committee, and affiliated union membership reinforced the party's organizational integrity, while the annual ritual of membership returns incentivized activists to keep their local associations intact. Meanwhile, staffing, campaigning, and regional infrastructures were boosted by considerable sums from the prewar By-Election Insurance Fund, temporarily freed up by the electoral truce. Yet paradoxically, this left Labour complacent after 1945, not least in relation to its youth organization, which lagged noticeably behind the impressive strides of the YCs.
The third and final theme worth flagging here is the fascinating part played by women in ensuring the survival of all three parties, a subject arguably deserving of a chapter to itself. Again and again, Thorpe discovers wives standing in for MPs, agents, and officers spirited away by war service and finds constituency associations more or less kept afloat by the dogged labors of female activists. In many areas, women's sections sustained the grassroots organization through whist drives, Christmas parties, and dances, while positioning themselves at the heart of the war effort by establishing advice bureaus and knitting garments for the troops. In the longer term, however, this newfound prominence did not transform women's position within the party system. The masculine face of party politics, Thorpe argues, was restored after 1945, with women struggling as before to overcome “institutionalized sexism” in Parliament and at the constituency level. By privileging organization over ideology, Thorpe's account is likely to rankle with historians of a more intellectual bent, and it may also disappoint those searching for the “lived experience” of the home front. The author is careful to explain that his analysis provides not the whole story but only a—hitherto missing—part of the story; for political ideas or individual subjectivities, readers should look elsewhere. Yet Thorpe might have offered stronger clues as to how organization intermeshed with these other components of wartime political culture. The stability of the system might, in the final analysis, have rested on the passive member who renewed his or her subscription when asked and let it lapse if left alone, yet partisan identification, as Thorpe himself observes, was strongest when parties disagreed, as they did over postwar reconstruction from 1942. So, ideas clearly mattered to activists, but the question is, how?
The interconnections with the social and cultural history of the period might also have been usefully explored through a more sustained engagement with James Hinton's suggestive claim that Conservative women's social leadership during the war was as much about preserving class boundaries as it was about shoring up partisan identities (Women, Social Leadership, and the Second World War: Continuities of Class [Oxford, 2002]). Combined with Thorpe's own observations on gender, this proposition points to the possibility that the resilience of “party” was wrapped up in the survival of certain kinds of social relations and also in the durability of associational habits acquired between the wars and perhaps even earlier.
These, it should be stressed, are not so much criticisms as speculations about where Thorpe's pioneering work might lead future historians who seek to make sense of the politics of the 1940s. For such scholars, this splendid book will prove an indispensable guide.
