An empire of influence

As the economic crisis unleashed by the Korean War and the strain of rearmament began to intensify, a new government came to power in London. It was headed by the indomitable Churchill, now seeking to crown his career by a summit conference with Stalin to end the Cold War – a plan regarded coldly in Washington and by his own Foreign Office. The Conservative party had won the election under a populist banner – ‘Set the people free!’ – that decried the bureaucratic austerity of the Labour regime. Rationing was indeed abandoned in 1954, and Labour's late nationalisation of the steel industry reversed. But there was no major departure from the domestic priorities of the previous government. Full employment remained at the centre of economic policy. The welfare state, its social corollary, was politically sacrosanct: indeed, one of its main Conservative architects, R. A. Butler, was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1951 to 1955. The tax system was left much as it was. No great ideological shift separated the two phases of British post-war politics between 1945 and 1963, even if over particular issues (like the Suez crisis or entry into the Common Market) there was sometimes a wide gap between the two major parties.

In their approach to the management of British world power and what remained of Britain's world-system, Churchill and his colleagues displayed what might be called a limited pragmatism.