The context

The second advanced industrial war, that of 1939–45, would see a collectivisation even more complete than that of 1914–18, from which the state would emerge explicitly committed by all political parties to two great sets of programmes, namely the generating of conditions of growth and stability in the economy, and the provision of integrated and comprehensive welfare care. The seeds of these involvements were present by 1939; so too were the attitudes towards the state, in all their complexity and inconsistency, which would condition the ability of governments to honour these undertakings.

Two great sets of practices and their associated institutions were in 1939 still central to everything else in the British economy and society. The first was the market mechanism, together with its concomitant, namely private property. Though the state in its efforts to rationalise British industry, agriculture and transport had in significant respects impaired competition, the market was still the great regulator of the economy. Secondly, there was free collective bargaining, with the state having assumed no direct authority in such matters, except to regulate the conditions of the contest; the state had thus no explicit role in the most important aspect of the distributive process. These twin pillars, namely the market plus private property, together with state-free wage bargaining between highly organised employers and unions, stood at the centre of things. Related to them was the general class configuration of British society, providing the basic conditions from which political institutions, as embodied in a democratic state, were derived.