George C Peden

The First World War required the mobilisation of entire societies, regardless of age or gender. The phrase 'home front' was itself a product of the war with parts of Britain literally a war front, coming under enemy attack from the sea and increasingly the air. However, the home front also conveyed the war's impact on almost every aspect of British life, economic, social and domestic. In the fullest account to-date, leading historians show how the war blurred the division between what was military and not, and how it made many conscious of their national identities for the first time. They reveal how its impact changed Britain for ever, transforming the monarchy, promoting systematic cabinet government, and prompting state intervention in a country which prided itself on its liberalism and its support for free trade. In many respects we still live with the consequences.

The First World War required the mobilisation of entire societies, regardless of age or gender. The phrase 'home front' was itself a product of the war with parts of Britain literally a war front, coming under enemy attack from the sea and increasingly the air. However, the home front also conveyed the war's impact on almost every aspect of British life, economic, social and domestic. In the fullest account to-date, leading historians show how the war blurred the division between what was military and not, and how it made many conscious of their national identities for the first time. They reveal how its impact changed Britain for ever, transforming the monarchy, promoting systematic cabinet government, and prompting state intervention in a country which prided itself on its liberalism and its support for free trade. In many respects we still live with the consequences.

Cabinet government was transformed by the pressures of war.  Asquith’s Cabinet of over 20 ministers was too big to decide strategy or deal with economic and social change.  When Lloyd George became prime minister he replaced the full Cabinet with a War Cabinet of between five and seven members.  For the first time there was a Cabinet secretary who circulated printed records of decisions instead of the previous practice of handwritten reports from the prime minister to the king which no other minister saw.  Cabinet government affected more and more of the population as controls were extended by new ministries over industry, shipping and food supplies.  The public’s expectations of what government could achieve increased, and the Ministry of Reconstruction sought to maintain morale by promising better social conditions after the war.  On the other hand, unrestricted government borrowing and the lapse of Treasury control of expenditure made it difficult for the War Cabinet to prevent interdepartmental competition for resources.  In 1919 Treasury control was restored and the full Cabinet resumed collective responsibility for all aspects of policy.  However, the creation of a Cabinet Secretariat and an extension of the scope of government proved to be permanent changes.

Field-Marshal Montgomery had no doubt that the British army was totally unfit to fight a first-class war on the continent of Europe in September 1939, and that successive governments in the inter-war period were to blame. He pointed to their belief in the 1930s that Britain’s contribution to a future war with Germany should be made mainly through air and sea power, and remarked: ‘how any politician could imagine that, in a world war, Britain could avoid sending her army to fight alongside the French passes all understanding.r1 No politician did more to delay the commitment to send a British expeditionary force to the continent than Neville Chamberlain, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937 and Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940.2 There was no Ministry of Defence in the 1930s, and policy was laid down by the Cabinet after discussions by ministers in Cabinet committees or in the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), which brought together ministers and the professional heads of the armed forces (the Chiefs of Staff) and senior civil servants. It was Chamberlain who persuaded the Cabinet in 1934 to give a lower priority to the army than to the Royal Air Force (RAF). It was he who initiated a review of the defence departments’ programmes that resulted in a Cabinet decision at the end of 1937 that the army’s first priority should be the air defence of Great Britain, and that the expeditionary force, or field force, as it was then known, should be equipped on a scale sufficient only for operations in defence of British territories and interests outside Europe.

Liberal economists’ attitudes towards the welfare state are examined to see how clearly neoliberalism can be distinguished from other forms of liberalism. Three questions are asked. First, how could Friedrich Hayek believe he could accommodate elements of the welfare state agenda set by William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes into his thinking? Second, why did Hayek become increasingly critical of the welfare state? Third, how far did Lionel Robbins, John Jewkes, and Alan Peacock agree with him? All three might be regarded as neoliberals according to the litmus test set by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe: that is, membership of the Mont Pèlerin Society or a think tank associated with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Yet, Robbins, Jewkes, and Peacock are on a spectrum between Mirowski’s definition of neoliberalism as a belief that freedom is to be found in the unfettered market, and classical and democratic liberals’ belief that people have to be nurtured to become effecti...

Field-Marshal Montgomery had no doubt that the British army was totally unfit to fight a first-class war on the continent of Europe in September 1939, and that successive governments in the inter-war period were to blame. He pointed to their belief in the 1930s that Britain’s contribution to a future war with Germany should be made mainly through air and sea power, and remarked: ‘how any politician could imagine that, in a world war, Britain could avoid sending her army to fight alongside the French passes all understanding.r1 No politician did more to delay the commitment to send a British expeditionary force to the continent than Neville Chamberlain, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937 and Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940.2 There was no Ministry of Defence in the 1930s, and policy was laid down by the Cabinet after discussions by ministers in Cabinet committees or in the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), which brought together ministers and the professional heads of the armed forces (the Chiefs of Staff) and senior civil servants. It was Chamberlain who persuaded the Cabinet in 1934 to give a lower priority to the army than to the Royal Air Force (RAF). It was he who initiated a review of the defence departments’ programmes that resulted in a Cabinet decision at the end of 1937 that the army’s first priority should be the air defence of Great Britain, and that the expeditionary force, or field force, as it was then known, should be equipped on a scale sufficient only for operations in defence of British territories and interests outside Europe.

Liberal economists’ attitudes towards the welfare state are examined to see how clearly neoliberalism can be distinguished from other forms of liberalism. Three questions are asked. First, how could Friedrich Hayek believe he could accommodate elements of the welfare state agenda set by William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes into his thinking? Second, why did Hayek become increasingly critical of the welfare state? Third, how far did Lionel Robbins, John Jewkes, and Alan Peacock agree with him? All three might be regarded as neoliberals according to the litmus test set by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe: that is, membership of the Mont Pèlerin Society or a think tank associated with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Yet, Robbins, Jewkes, and Peacock are on a spectrum between Mirowski’s definition of neoliberalism as a belief that freedom is to be found in the unfettered market, and classical and democratic liberals’ belief that people have to be nurtured to become effecti...

Liberal economists’ attitudes towards the welfare state are examined to see how clearly neoliberalism can be distinguished from other forms of liberalism. Three questions are asked. First, how could Friedrich Hayek believe he could accommodate elements of the welfare state agenda set by William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes into his thinking? Second, why did Hayek become increasingly critical of the welfare state? Third, how far did Lionel Robbins, John Jewkes, and Alan Peacock agree with him? All three might be regarded as neoliberals according to the litmus test set by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe: that is, membership of the Mont Pèlerin Society or a think tank associated with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Yet, Robbins, Jewkes, and Peacock are on a spectrum between Mirowski’s definition of neoliberalism as a belief that freedom is to be found in the unfettered market, and classical and democratic liberals’ belief that people have to be nurtured to become effecti...

ABSTRACTThe Suez crisis is widely believed to have contributed significantly to Britain's decline as a world power. Eden's miscalculation of American reaction to the attack on Egypt was damaging to Britain's reputation and fatal to his career. However, his actions were contrary to received wisdom in Whitehall. The crisis merely confirmed Britain's dependence on the United States and had no lasting impact on Anglo-American relations. Britain's relationship with its informal and formal empire was already changing before 1956, and the turn from the commonwealth to Europe owed little to Suez. Examination of policy reviews in Whitehall before and after the Suez crisis shows that the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, and Colonial Office were slow to accept the need for change in Britain's world role. Insofar as they did from 1959 it was because of Treasury arguments about the effect of high defence expenditure on the economy, and slow growth of the Uni...

Most British studies of foreign policy since 1945 mention public opinion, but few attempt to assess the importance of public opinion. Studies of public opinion and the media tend to concentrate on domestic politics. Moreover, the lack of access to government records for most of the period makes research difficult. There are in any case problems in understanding what policy-makers mean by public opinion. Even so, there is some useful information on public opinion and foreign policy to be had in the literature surveyed.

... 9 A list of influential non-Treasury economic advisers would include Lord Stamp, a director of the Bank of England in close touch with Neville Chamberlain-see J. Harry Jones, Josiah Stamp, Public Servant (London, 1964), esp. pp. 302, 327, 336f.; Lord Weir, an industrialist who ...

ABSTRACT Sir Warren Fisher, Permanent Secretary of the Treasury from 1919 to 1939, tried to make the Treasury a ‘general staff’, for all of Whitehall. He was official head of the civil service, and his Department co-ordinated policy by persuading ministers to decide priorities within a balanced budget. Treasury advice on what policy should be was influential, partly because of the absence of a fully developed Cabinet Office or Prime Minister's Office. Treasury control of expenditure was also necessary to ensure that spending departments conformed to Cabinet decisions on priorities. The Treasury exercised a powerful influence, however, only so long as the Cabinet accepted the financial orthodoxy of balanced budgets.

Over ten years have passed since Michael Howard offered what he himself called a controversial thesis about British defence policy before the Second World War. This was that ‘the Empire brought Britain no strength in her dealings with Germany. Yet British strength had nevertheless to be dissipated in the Empire's defence.’ By 1937 the needs of home defence against air attack and of imperial defence seemed so overwhelming toBritish policy-makers that the cabinet decided that no expeditionary force could be spared to help maintain the European balance of power. Howard stressed that he was offering only a ‘very rough preliminary sketch’, which was ‘probably distorted and certainly incomplete’, in view of the limited range of documents which he had had time to consult. In particular, what was missing from his thesis was any attempt to give weights to the relative importance of home and imperial defence problems as explanations for lack of preparation to commit land forces to help al...

Between I929 and the end of the Second World War official attitudes to employment policy changed to a degree which Keynes regarded as revolutionary. In I929 it was possible for a Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill, to resist proposals supported by Keynes for expenditure on public works to cure unemployment by referring to the "orthodox Treasury doctrine" which held that "very little additional employment and no permanent employment can in fact and as a general rule be created by State borrowing and State expenditure".' In I944, on the other hand, the government issued a White Paper accepting responsibility for "the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war", and stated its belief that "in the past the power of public expenditure, skilfully applied, to check the onset of a depression has been underestimated". Moreover, whereas down to I940 the Chancellor's budget had been concerned only with cash accounting for central government revenue and expenditure, the I94i budget, with its accompanying White Paper on national income and expenditure,3 introduced a national accounting analytical framework which Keynes described as "a revolution in public finance".4 Aggregate demand management was first adopted to deal with wartime inflation, but the I944 White Paper on employment policy also used a Keynesian analysis of the forms of total expenditure on goods and services, and said that total expenditure must be prevented from falling to a level where general unemployment appeared.5 It is true that the I944 White Paper did not include deliberate planning for budget deficits on current expenditure; but it did not preclude such deficits appearing in some years, provided budgets were balanced over a longer period. Keynes himself had no doubt that the White Paper was a major landmark. It was based largely on an unpublished report, the Report of the Steering Committee on Post-War Employment,

The Suez crisis is widely believed to have contributed significantly to Britain's decline as a world power. Eden's miscalculation of American reaction to the attack on Egypt was damaging to Britain's reputation and fatal to his career. However, his actions were contrary to received wisdom in Whitehall. The crisis merely confirmed Britain's dependence on the United States and had no lasting impact on Anglo-American relations. Britain's relationship with its informal and formal empire was already changing before 1956, and the turn from the Commonwealth to Europe owed little to Suez. Examination of policy reviews in Whitehall before and after the Suez crisis shows that the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, and Colonial Office were slow to accept the need for change in Britain's world role. Insofar as they did from 1959 it was because of Treasury arguments about the effect of high defence expenditure on the economy, and slow growth of the United Kingdom's population compared with the United States, the European Economic Community, and the Soviet Union.

Historical evidence shows the Treasury and the City have shared interests.  What is less certain is the direction of influence between them.  The Treasury has had to take account of the national interest as well as the City's particular interests, and there have been times when these have been subordinated to the national interest.  However, the Treasury has had to maintain the confidence of financial markets.  Since that confidence rested on sound public finance, it was a constraint that was not unwelcome in the Treasury.

Liberal economists' attitudes towards the welfare state are examined to see how clearly neoliberalism can be distinguished from other forms of liberalism. Three questions are asked. First, how could Friedrich Hayek believe he could accommodate elements of the welfare state agenda set by William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes into his thinking? Second, why did Hayek become increasingly critical of the welfare state? Third, how far did Lionel Robbins, John Jewkes and Alan Peacock agree with him? All three might be regarded as neoliberals according to the litmus test set by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehve, that is membership of the Mont Pèlerin Society or a think tank associated with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Yet Robbins, Jewkes and Peacock are on a spectrum between Mirowski's definition of neoliberalism as a belief that freedom is to be found in the unfettered market, and classical and democratic liberals' belief that people have to be nurtured to become effective citizens and have to be protected from the market's disruptive effects. It is suggested that a nuanced approach is required in explaining why liberal economists came to believe the welfare state should make more use of markets and pricing systems for registering preferences and apportioning resources.

The chapter explores the relationship between liberal economists and the welfare state in three ways. First I look at the liberals whom Hayek associated with collectivism in the 1940s, Beveridge and Keynes, and ask how different their conceptions of the welfare state were from his.  The I look at liberal critiques of different aspects of the welfare state: income support, the National Health Service, education, housing and employment policy.  Finally I offer brief observations on the impact of the New Right on the welfare state in the 1980s.

The paper develops the thesis of my book, Arms, Economics and British Strategy (2007), that there is a long-term trend for the cost of weapons systems to increase more rapidly than national income, and that, If armed forces are to keep up with science and technology, they must, other things being equal, either become smaller or the proportion of national income spent on defence must rise.  The development of the army's tactical doctrine, organisation and weapons systems after 1918 and 1945 lends little support to the stereotypical view that generals prepare for the last war.  Retrenchment was severe in the 1920s and early 1930s because of problems with the national economy and because there was no foreign power presenting a clear and present danger.  Economic circumstances were better after 1945, but even in the Cold War defence expenditure had to be sustainable over a long period of deterrence and conscription was discontinues because  it diverted scarce labour from industry.  By 1963 the army was once more an all-regular force.  Its strength then of 181,000 men was less than three-quarters of what it had been 50 years earlier, but its cost represented 2.1 per cent of the national income, compared with 1.29 in 1913.  As regards tactical doctrine, neither post-war period could be described as one of stagnation.  The methods of trench warfare were rejected in the 1920s in favour of greater mobility through mechanization.  Greater mobility was once more the goal in the 1950s, particularly in view of the dispersal of forces required in nuclear warfare.  Changes in the structure and size of both armoured and infantry divisions were slower in the interwar period than in the 1950s, reflecting uncertainty about the army’s role.  Regarding weapons systems, the existence of wartime stocks discouraged innovation after 1918 and 1945, but in both post-war periods the development of tanks was given priority over the traditional arms of the artillery and infantry.  Victory may have removed the urgency for reform, but the march of science and technology required at least an evolutionary response, and in the case of nuclear weapons, a revolutionary one.

It became increasingly apparent in the 1950s that Britain was in long-term relative economic decline. However, during far-reaching reviews in 1959-63 of future policy, the Foreign Office and the Treasury could not agree that timely strategic retrenchment would be an appropriate response. Ministers believed that Britain would remain a world power; the British economy continued to be handicapped by higher levels of defence expenditure than those of other western European powers; and it took an economic crisis to force a decision to withdraw from east of Suez.

No politician did more to delay the commitment to send a British expeditionary force to the Continent than Neville Chamberlain, who was chancellor of the exchequer from 1931 to 1937 and prime minister from 1937 to 1940. It was Chamberlain who persuaded the Cabinet in 1934 to give a lower priority to the army than to the air force. It was he who initiated a review of defence that resulted in a Cabinet decision at the end of 1937 that the army's first priority should be the air defence of Great Britain, and that the expeditionary force, or field force, as it was then known, should be equipped on a scale sufficient only for operations in defence of British territories and interests outside Europe. It was not until February 1939 that he reluctantly agreed that the army must be prepared to fight alongside the French. Sir Michael Howard, in his seminal book, The Continental Commitment, describes Chamberlain as 'implacably hostile', prior to that date, to any idea of involvement in Europe. On the other hand, Chamberlain's most recent biographer, Robert Self, believes that Chamberlain consistently regarded the army as 'an insurance' if the primary deterrent provided by the RAF bombers should fail. This chapter looks first at the evidence for Chamberlain having ever thought it would be possible to avoid fighting on land alongside the French in a world war, and then considers briefly the extent of his responsibility for the shortcomings of the British army in France and Belgium in 1939-40.

This paper builds on John Hattendorf's observation that British sea power was undermined in the 1930s by the strategic need to prioritise first the air force and then the army.  In 1937 expenditure on the navy exceeded expenditure on either the air force or the army, and the Admiralty was successful in a defence review that year in having protection of trade routes given joint first priority along with the air defence of the United Kingdom,  and the defence of Britain's overseas territories and interests was given a higher priority than support on land for any European allies Britain might have in war. However, contrary to the Admiralty's hopes, the Air Ministry continued to place large orders for bombers as well as fighters, and expenditure on the air force overtook expenditure ion the navy in 1938, while the need to support France resulted  in expenditure on the army overtaking expenditure on the navy in 1939.  The Admiralty's plans to build a fleet large enough to defend the Empire were frustrated by lack of industrial capacity.  It is argued that scarce resources would have been better employed building ships than bombers, and that air power would have been better used in supporting the navy and the army than in strategic bombing of Germany.

Sir Horace Wilson was Neville Chamberlain’s confidential adviser while the latter was prime minister.  The article addresses three questions.  First, what was Wilson’s role in Whitehall in connection with rearmament and foreign policy?  Second, did he diminish the influence of the Foreign Office?  Third, what contribution does his defence of appeasement make to understanding of a subject that continues to divide historians?  The article concludes that Wilson played an important role in enabling Chamberlain to pursue his foreign policy goals.  However, when there was outright disagreement between Wilson and the Foreign Office, it was the Foreign Office view that prevailed.  Finally, the evidence of Wilson’s words and actions, both in 1937-9 and later, broadly supports R. A. C. Parker’s post-revisionist interpretation of appeasement, particularly as regards Munich, but Wilson was a good deal firmer in 1939 about Britain’s will to fight, if necessary, than his critics then or later allowed.

In his history of the Lloyd George coalition government of 1918-22, Kenneth Morgan notes that there was a point in the autumn of 1921 when 'unemployment. .. transcended every issue save Ireland amongst the government's priorities' and when the Financial Secretary to the ...

The paper looks at how de-industrialization transformed Scotland between the 1960s and the early 21st century.  Industry's share of total of total employment fell from 39.3 per cent in 1965 to 11.1 per cent in 2007; in contrast employment in services increased from 48.7 per cent to 81.5 per cent between these years.  On the other hand, the value of industrial output  rose.  Changes in government policy, and in the composition of industry and services, are examined to explain these trends,  Attention is drawn to the varying fortunes of different regions and cities, with growth in population and new businesses focused on Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

ABSTRACT This paper is a response to the British Chancellor of the Exchequer's consultation on closer integration of the operation of National Insurance contributions and income tax. Our historical research on proposals for a complete merger of the two systems enables people interested in tax reform to draw on experience and ideas of officials who grappled with issues similar to those facing us today. We show that officials identified the problem of maintaining increasing numbers of elderly people as long ago as 1950, and identify when and why the British government adopted a pay-as-you-go basis for the National Insurance Fund. We conclude that the advantages of National Insurance contributions separate from income tax are not negligible, but that a merger would be fairer than the present system. Our principal concern is that the contributory principle may raise unrealistic expectations regarding state pensions as it encourages a mistaken belief that these are paid from contributions made by pensioners in the past. We therefore recommend that the government should produce an annual statement showing how state pension liabilities are to be met.