When Margaret Thatcher died in April 2013, a central question asked of her career as prime minister was whether she had really reversed Britain's decline. The prevalence of this question was testimony to how far the declinist narrative of Britain's postwar history continues to dominate public understanding, despite the best efforts of some historians (including this reviewer) to displace it. Glen O'Hara begins this stimulating book with a determinedly antideclinist sentence: “Post-war Britain was a remarkable economic success story by historical standards,” (1), but, he argues, this success was paralleled by a persistent sense of political failure. His central aim is to explain this paradox for the decades of the 1950s and the 1960s.
The central concept used to approach this paradox is unintended consequences, where reformist public policies generate effects that complicate or deflect the original purpose of the reform. Notions of unintended consequences have historically often been used by conservative thinkers, from Edmund Burke to Karl Popper, to criticize ambitious attempts to improve the human condition and to attack the hubris of radical reformers. In the conclusion, O'Hara notes this possibility, but he stresses it is not his view. He does not argue that postwar reforms were generally damaging, rather that “[t]hey usually caused problems to emerge in other arenas, evoked unheralded opposition, or produced unexpected second-order problems of management and administration” (199).
The book is divided into four sections. The first deals with the deployment of ideas from outside the United Kingdom to frame reform in Britain. The second focuses on the destabilizing of the international monetary system in the 1960s. The third looks at governance issues through the diverse topics of the development of the Ombudsman, the career of Alec Cairncross, and the politics of land. The final part analyses educational reform by looking at not only policy in general but also the specific case of Educational Priority Areas (EPAs). As this summary suggests, the book is characterized by the treatment of a wide-ranging set of issues, intended to exemplify problems, rather than seeking to offer a comprehensive history of postwar British policy.
The detailed examination of such topics as the Ombudsman and EPAs brings to bear an impressive range of primary and secondary sources and illuminates matters that are not usually much dealt with in histories of postwar Britain. The first case may be characterized as an unlikely success, where a reform initiated by an eccentric member of the libertarian Right was legislated on by the 1960s Labour government and has gone from strength to strength. The second was very different, because EPAs were only briefly experimented with and were never extended to a national program to tackle educational advantage as their advocates intended.
Other examples are perhaps less innovative, notably the discussion of Anglo-American debates over the international monetary system and the challenges of reforming Bretton Woods in the 1960s. But while aspects of this story are quite well known, O'Hara usefully draws out not only the extent to which Britain's bargaining power was enhanced by American concerns about their own balance of payments weakness but also how in the end Britain was able to assert its independence in foreign policy—a case of turning perceived weakness into strength.
The book offers the most systematic and detailed account available of the Britain's well-known taste for looking abroad for models on which to base domestic reform programs. This taste was evident in a range of policy areas, and O'Hara deals especially with economic planning, collective bargaining, and education, emphasizing the especial attraction of Scandinavian models to British policymakers. Looking abroad might be seen as a sign of open-mindedness, but in selecting which model to focus upon, the British, as is rightly emphasized here, necessarily revealed a particular understanding of their own society. A contrast is made here between the “imagining” of these foreign cases and a true “understanding,” but perhaps this dichotomy is overdrawn (12). What the detailed analysis here shows is how far serious understanding of foreign cases was known in Britain, for example, with comprehensive education, where the arguments against selectivity drew upon the extraordinary richness of empirical work done on Sweden. The failure to move to a properly comprehensive system in the United Kingdom surely cannot be ascribed to any failure of understanding but to a domestic politics that foreclosed on any such option.
This is an empirically rich, innovative contribution to our understanding of postwar Britain. It does not offer a comprehensive alternative narrative to existing, predominantly declinist, accounts. Instead, by unpicking both the complexity of the origins and the consequences of particular reform efforts, it illuminates key issues in managing the expectations created by the affluent society.
