A number of authoritative texts have been published charting the development of the British welfare state. Some of these books cover developments as far back as the Elizabethan age, while others have focused on narrower time frames. Texts devoted to the ideology and policies of a specific political party have been far fewer in number.

The idea of a pervasive welfare consensus or settlement is one of the factors that helps to explain the preponderance of cross-party accounts of welfare developments since the Second World War. From this perspective it is argued that, during the period between 1945 and 1979, both Conservative and Labour governments came to accept the case for a mixed economy, for the need for economic interventionism to secure growth and full employment, and for a protective welfare state. Although there has been a lively debate as to whether such accords were more akin to a pragmatic accommodation (settlement) than some form of deep ‘ideological’ fusion (consensus), the most common viewpoint is that there were more points of agreement than difference between the major parties. The dominance of what can be termed the ‘social administration’ approach to social policy also helps to explain why there have been relatively few party political accounts of social policy developments since the war. From a social administration perspective, social policy has come to be seen as more of a technical endeavour that is best left in the hands of independent, empirically sophisticated, ‘boffins’, who will devise solutions for those social problems deemed to require ameliorative action.

One of the other factors that helps explain the paucity of Conservative accounts of the post-war welfare state is the party's lukewarm or even hostile disposition to this type of collective arrangement. For many traditional Conservatives, Labour's post-war construction of the welfare state was a further example of the kind of ‘enterprising’ endeavour that politicians and governments should studiously avoid on the grounds that it will disturb the organic equilibrium that has evolved gradually and peacefully over time.

There are, however, some compelling interrelated reasons as to why the Conservative approach to the welfare state is worthy of study in its own right.