Despite a much-improved performance, the Conservatives failed to win the 1950 General Election, securing 43.5% of the popular vote and 298 of the 620 available seats. Given the narrowness of their defeat, many within the party believed that ‘one more heave’ (Thorpe, 2004, p 353) would prove sufficient to overturn Labour's slender overall majority of six seats at the next General Election.

The emergence of the One Nation Group

In an effort to ensure that a distinctive, ‘modern’ Conservative message would be firmly in place by the time of the next General Election, a group of nine newly elected MPs (including Edward Heath, Iain Macleod, Angus Maude and Enoch Powell) established the One Nation Group shortly after the party's 1950 defeat. At the first meeting, Macleod informed the group that he had been commissioned to write a pamphlet on the social services by the Conservative Political Centre and suggested that the new group be involved in its preparation. According to Walsha (2000), the pamphlet was intended to ‘provide a powerful case for a distinctly Conservative welfare policy’ that would be able to trump ‘socialist social welfare provision in both philosophy and practice’ (p 191). While the contributors to the pamphlet One Nation. A Tory approach to social problems (Macleod and Maude, 1950) were fulsome in their praise for social reformers such as Owen, Nightingale, Dickens and Shaftesbury and fully accepted the case for increased state welfare provision, they were keen to ensure that such activity did not undermine ‘competitive free enterprise’, which they believed represented the best means of achieving the ‘efficiency and flexibility’ required to maximise the ‘country's wealth’ (Macleod and Maude, 1950, pp 72-3). They expressed particular concern about the adverse impact of Labour's redistributionist welfare strategy, which they believed posed a threat to ‘the future well-being of even the poorest’ (p 18).

As Walsha (2000) points out, the One Nation Group (ONG) had no wish to ‘engineer or consolidate the case for a compromised form of Conservatism intent on meeting socialism part-way’ (p 190). This was made clear in the opening paragraph of One Nation: