"Creating a property-owning democracy"

CREATING A ‘PROPERTY-OWNING

DEMOCRACY’: THE CONSERVATIVE

PARTY AND POPULAR CAPITALISM,

1918–1951

MA Dissertation

19,266 words

Z0375723

Department of History

University of Durham

September 2007

Creating a ‘property-owning democracy’ Z0375723

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CONTENT S

Contents .................................................................................................................................... 3

Abbreviations............................................................................................................................ 4

Introduction.............................................................................................................................. 5

Chapter I: The political values of ‘property-owning democracy’ .........................................14

Chapter II: ‘For equal divison of unequal earnings’: Conservative anti-socialism............ 24

‘A community run by the state’ .............................................................................................26

‘Partisan prejudice’ ................................................................................................................28

‘Socialist muddle’ ...................................................................................................................30

Anti-socialist opportunism.................................................................................................... 31

Chapter III: ‘For occupation when you don’t want to buy; for ownership when you do’.. 35

The defence of inequality.......................................................................................................35

‘The more people who own their own home, the better’..................................................... 40

Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................48

Bibliography............................................................................................................................ 52


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ABBREV I A T I ON S

ACP Advisory Committee on Policy

ArchBCP Archives of the British Conservative Party, series 1, ‘Pamphlets and

leaflets’ (Hassocks, 1978)

HCDebs Parliamentary Debates: Official Report (Commons), 5th series

CCO Conservative Central Office

CRD Conservative Research Department

CPA Conservative Party Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford

CPC Conservative Political Centre

NUG National Union Gleanings and Continuations (Hassocks, 1973)

ONG One Nation Group

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2005)

PWPCC Post-War Problems Central Committee

TRG Tory Reform Group

USRC Unionist Social Reform Committee


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I N TRODUCT ION

Our concern to create a property-owning democracy is… a very human concern. It is a natural desire for Conservatives that every family should have a stake in society and the privilege of a family home should not be restricted to the few.

Margaret Thatcher, 17 October 19811

The association of the Conservative party with ‘property-owning democracy’ is a

longstanding one. When Thatcher used the phrase in her speech to the 1981 Conservative

party conference, she credited it to Anthony Eden, who had himself promised a

‘nationwide property-owning democracy’ in 1946. Yet the lineage of the term can be

traced back to 1923, when Noel Skelton argued that the ‘master problem’ of unequal

economic ‘status’ could only be resolved through the creation of a ‘property-owning

democracy’. The context in which Eden advocated ‘property-owning democracy’ was

different to that of the 1920s, and it was only after the 1940s that the term came to be

closely identified with home ownership. Nevertheless, despite this strategic change,

‘property-owning democracy’ consistently embodied a set of Conservative ideas and

strategies fundamental to Conservative appeal in the period 1918—1951. Eden’s language

in 1946 was not very different from that of Skelton in 1923.

The historical significance of ‘property-owning democracy’ as a political concept has

received relatively little attention. In particular, its potential to shed light on how

Conservative appeals and strategies developed in the early twentieth century has not been

explored. The study of ‘property-owning democracy’ is not only a window on twentieth-

century Conservative values, but also revealing of the complex interrelationship between

Conservative political philosophy, strategy and language, as well as a means to bring

greater coherence to the study of Conservatism as it developed both before and after

World War II.

The term ‘property-owning democracy’ was first used by Noel Skelton in a series of

articles in The Spectator in 1923, published the following year in the pamphlet

Constructive Conservatism.2 Skelton argued that the extension of the franchise meant

the creation of a ‘new era’. Conservative policy, he argued, needed to deal with economic

inequality, not only in order to create political stability, but also because he recognised

1 Times (17 October 1981), p. 4. 2 Noel Skelton, Constructive Conservatism (Edinburgh, 1924).


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legitimacy of these grievances. Skelton expounded the positive benefits of individual

ownership and therefore the importance of its wide distribution. What he proposed in

order to achieve this was not home-ownership, but industrial co-partnership, profit-

sharing and agricultural smallholding reform. Constructive Conservatism was indicative

of a developing strand of Conservative thinking that would be influential with figures

such as Macmillan and Eden. It was one of the first coherent statements by a

Conservative of the benefits not just of ownership but of wider ownership, in explicitly

democratic terms. Yet it was not entirely novel. It was consistent with Conservatives’

longstanding defence of property and ideas about the benefits and responsibilities of

ownership.

Constructive Conservatism particularly reflected the thinking of a group of young

Conservatives, the ‘YMCA’.3 Indeed, it has been suggested that Skelton was the

‘intellectual leader’ of the YMCA and that Constructive Conservatism was ‘a leit motif of

their thinking’.4 This distinctive group were not in a position, as junior backbenchers, to

directly influence party policy in the 1920s and 1930s.5 However, while the YMCA’s policy

ideas were often at odds with the rest of the party, the values of ‘property-owning

democracy’ had a wider significance, in bringing together Conservative concerns about

ownership, morality, political stability, social harmony, and individual initiative. It was

this resonance with longstanding principles, and the later influence of the members of

the YMCA, that particularly accounts for the significance of ‘property-owning democracy’

in twentieth-century Conservatism.

Skelton’s views were a product of the 1920s, with a predominant concern for

industrial harmony that was echoed by contemporaries.6 This concern for industrial

problems was also set out in Industry and the State (1927) by Boothby, Macmillan, de

Loder, and Oliver Stanley.7 This work was thematically similar to Macmillan’s The Middle

Way (1938), but has received less attention given its specific emphasis on industrial

relations.8 Industry and the State demonstrated the contemporary usage of the term

‘property-owning democracy’, which was used to justify broader industrial participation

and to emphasise the importance of social harmony and economic opportunity. It

explicitly advocated the interests of the ‘ordinary man’ and accepted Skelton’s concern for

3 William R.G. Frame, ‘The Conservative party and domestic reconstruction, 1931-1935’ (Ph.D thesis, University of London, 1999), p. 140. 4 P.G. Gatland, ‘The “Y.M.C.A.” and the search for a constructive Conservatism in Britain, 1924-1929’ (Ph.D thesis, University of London, 1989), p. 16. 5 Ibid., p. 385. 6 E.g. Walter Elliot, Toryism and the Twentieth Century (London, 1927). 7 Robert Boothby et al., Industry and the State: A Conservative View (London, 1927). 8 Harold Macmillan, The Middle Way: A Study of the Problem of Economic and Social Progress in a Free and Democratic Society (London, 1938).


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economic ‘status’. Yet, like Constructive Conservatism, it was a product of a small group

of progressive but relatively peripheral Conservatives. Its importance was that it

demonstrated the resonance of the term ‘property-owning democracy’ and the

consistency of the ideas of a group that had later significance.

The term ‘property-owning democracy’ has not always been clearly understood. In the

1920s and 1930s, it was most closely associated with Conservative advocacy of co-

partnership and opportunities for workers to become shareholders. It was only in the

1940s, in the wake of Eden’s call for ‘a nationwide property-owning democracy’, that it

was associated with wider home ownership. Nevertheless, confusion over the meaning of

the term among contemporary Conservatives was persistent. In 1950, Eden had publicly

denounced Attlee’s claim that nationalization meant a ‘property-owning democracy’,

arguing that in fact it meant a ‘property-denying state’.9 It has hardly been more clearly

understood by scholars. Few historians of interwar Conservatism have seen ‘property-

owning democracy’ as important and attention to the term has largely been confined to

the period after World War II. Harriet Jones, for instance, has claimed that ‘property-

owning democracy’ was ‘entirely a linguistic phenomenon imposed from above’ but does

not examine the origins and development of the term (which she dismisses as ‘jargon’)

before 1945.10 David Jarvis’ claim that Conservatives were ‘curiously reticent’ about

‘property-owning democracy’ in the interwar period stems from his assumption that its

‘central theme’ was home ownership, rather than ownership in a more general sense.11

Confusion about ‘property-owning democracy’ and its meaning reflects inattention to its

origins, and has been added to by the fact that the term was subsequently used in Rawls’

Theory of Justice.12 The term ‘property-owning democracy’ can only be understood if

defined within contemporary Conservative political culture. That ‘property-owning

democracy’ did not always feature explicitly in Conservative discourse has meant some

have been sceptical as to its importance. But ‘property-owning democracy’ was more than

simply rhetoric. It was a set of interrelated ideas, attitudes and strategies that informed

Conservative language and appeal. As such it is a historically important medium through

which to study the remarkable success of early twentieth-century Conservatism.

9 Times (13 February 1950), p. 4. 10 Harriet Jones, ‘The Conservative party and the welfare state, 1942-1955’ (Ph.D thesis, University of London, 1992), p. 34. 11 David Jarvis, ‘Stanley Baldwin and the ideology of the Conservative response to socialism, 1918-31’ (Ph.D thesis, Lancaster University, 1991), pp. 346-7. 12 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1999 [1971]), p. 242; Amit Ron, ‘Visions of democracy in “property-owning democracy”: Skelton to Rawls and beyond’ (paper presented at the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 1 Sept. 2005).


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Housing policy is particularly relevant to ‘property-owning democracy’ given the term’s

association with owner occupation. There are numerous sociological and economic

analyses of the twentieth-century growth of home ownership.13 For political historians,

however, these studies are often frustratingly reductive. For example, while Saunders

claims that Conservative success reflected the fact that home ownership was becoming

‘normal’, he does not consider the active role of Conservatives in developing this element

of their appeal. This literature has spawned an administrative history of housing

concerned largely with policy.14 Yet, as one commentator has noted, this ‘is apt to subside

into a soporific narrative’.15 More critically, the tendency to assume that socio-economic

shifts were at the root of change means that the ideas, intentions and strategies of

politicians have not been explored.

The study of political ideas has not always been central in the historiography of the

Conservative party. Traditionally historians have accepted at face value their claims to be

non-doctrinaire, and consequently have seen them as either Machiavellian or as arch-

pragmatists. Organisational and structural studies of the party have done little to

alleviate the impression that Conservative ideas were unimportant.16 The result has been

a preoccupation with political power and statesmanship, and a historiography dominated

by biographies. In the context of ‘property-owning democracy’, studies of individuals

such as Chamberlain, Macmillan and Eden are particularly relevant,17 but the picture of

Conservative ideas they paint is a narrow one. The restricted focus of ‘high politics’

historians such as Cowling is similarly problematic. His emphasis upon the the

‘politicians who mattered’ means that he analyses the manoeuvres of an elite at the

expense of wider public ideas. This inattention to ideas is reflected in a tendency to

concentrate on private sources. As Williamson has noted, ‘amidst the rich private

evidence it can be forgotten that politicians… are… public figures for whom speech-

making and publication is a principal function’.18 Conservative public discourse has not

received the attention that it merits. Terms like ‘property-owning democracy’ have not

13 Stephen Merrett and Fred Gray, Owner-Occupation in Britain (London, 1982); M.J. Daunton, A Property-Owning Democracy? Housing in Britain (London, 1987); Peter Saunders, A Nation of Home Owners (London, 1990). 14 E.g. Marion Bowley, Housing and the State, 1919-1944 (London, 1945). 15 M. A. Crowther, British Social Policy 1914-1939 (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 12. 16 E.g. Chris Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain, 1922-1929 (London, 1975); John Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902-1940 (London, 1978); Neal R. McCrillis, The British Conservative Party in the Age of Universal Suffrage: Popular Conservatism, 1918-1929 (Columbus, 1998). 17 David Dilks, Neville Chamberlain, vol. i (Cambridge, 1985); Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (London, 1986); John Turner, Macmillan (London, 1994); Robert C. Self, Neville Chamberlain: A Biography (Aldershot, 2006). 18 Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), p. 14.


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been adequately studied in their contemporary context and historians have often failed to

realise the diversity of Conservatism (or, rather, Conservatisms).19

The literature on Conservative popular capitalism is almost entirely focused on the

period after 1945.20 Jones has argued that attitudes to owner-occupation were critical to

differences between Labour and the Conservatives.21 However, she does not pay much

attention to developments before World War II. Similarly, while Schwarz acknowledge

that the Conservative post-1945 reconstruction was ‘essentially strategic’, he does not

explore the interwar developments that influenced it.22 The few studies of interwar

Conservative popular capitalism have tended not to make a link between ideas and

strategy. Morgan, for example, stops short of considering the electoral significance of

Conservative attitudes to ownership in the interwar period.23 Jarvis has noted that ‘the

nature of Conservative propaganda aimed at new voters has scarcely been examined’,24

and links shifts in their political culture to the extension of the franchise.25 But even he

does not connect this culture to party strategy; his analysis is self-consciously ‘ideological

rather than psephological’.26

Pre- and post-World War II Conservative political cultures are rarely studied

together. Even though the idea of ‘consensus’ has been challenged, the war is still seen as

a point of discontinuity. It is often assumed that the ‘foundation of the welfare state’ was

laid after 1940, and that post-war Conservative strategy was created by the experience of

the war and the election of 1945.27 As a result of this tendency to emphasise

Conservatives’ post-1945 ‘recovery’, useful studies from the interwar period have not

19 E. H. H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2002), p. 280. 20 Paul Addison, Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain, 1945-51 (London, 1985), p. ch. iii; Peter Weiler, ‘The rise and fall of the Conservatives' “grand design for housing”, 1951-64’, Contemporary British History 14 (2000), pp. 122-50; Peter Weiler, ‘The Conservatives' search for a middle way in housing, 1951-1964’, Twentieth Century British History 14 (2003), pp. 360-90. 21 Harriet Jones, ‘A bloodless counter-revolution: The Conservative party and the defence of inequality, 1945-51’, in Harriet Jones and Michael Kandiah (eds.), The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945-64 (Basingstoke, 1996). 22 Bill Schwarz, ‘The tide of history: The reconstruction of Conservatism, 1945-51’, in Nick Tiratsoo (ed.), The Attlee Years (London, 1991), p. 156. 23 Kevin Morgan, ‘The Conservative party and mass housing, 1918-39’, in Stuart Ball and Ian Holliday (eds.), Mass Conservatism: The Conservatives and the Public since the 1880s (London, 2002), pp. 58-77. 24 David Jarvis, ‘Mrs Maggs and Betty: The Conservative appeal to women voters in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History 5 (1994), p. 130. 25 Jarvis, ‘Conservative response to socialism’, p. 43. 26 Ibid., p. 23. 27 Rodney Lowe, ‘The Second World War, consensus, and the foundation of the welfare state’, Twentieth Century British History 1 (1990), pp. 152-82; Kevin Jefferys, The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics, 1940-1945 (Manchester, 1991).


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been linked to the post-1942 reorientation of Conservative electoral appeal.28 John

Ramsden’s 1987 Royal Historical Society lecture, is a rare exception to this rule.29 He

argues that changes in the Conservative party in the 1940s have been exaggerated, the

product of a ‘long period of incremental change’.30 He even acknowledges that ‘the phrase

“the property-owning democracy” is rooted in the interwar years, and appears to have

originated with Noel Skelton in a Spectator article of 1924 [sic]’.31 Yet for all its

undeniable merits, Ramsden’s approach focuses on Conservative policy and internal

organisational changes, rather than Conservative ideas, language and strategies. As

Yelling has noted, there was a ‘paradigm shift’ in the interwar period,32 but this has not

yet been investigated.

The focus of this dissertation is on the link between Conservative political culture and the

electoral strategies that it produced. The recent movement towards a ‘new political

history’ posits a widened view of the ‘political’ and the importance of contemporary

perceptions. If Conservatives’ strategies are to be understood, their subjective

perceptions are at least as important as any objective ‘reality’. It is less important whether

or not owner-occupiers were more likely to become ‘good citizens’ than that

Conservatives expected them to be. The emphasis on contemporary language means that

‘objective’ socio-economic concepts are less important than studies of the language which

was used to win over voters.

As a result, the main research element of this dissertation is a study of the public

language deployed by Conservatives in speeches and publications. Only a few private

sources are used here, largely because they say much less about ideas than they do about

day-to-day politics. Many of the key sources are contained in the Conservative Party

Archive (CPA) at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Conservative Central Office (CCO) and

Conservative Research Department (CRD) papers demonstrate how Conservatives

translated political ideas into electoral strategies. The vast majority of the publications

cited in this study are taken from the Archives of the British Conservative Party.33 These

are a valuable source for the different messages Conservatives communicated to the

28 E.g. J.D. Hoffman, The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1945-51 (London, 1964); Ina Zweiniger-Bergielowska, ‘Rationing, austerity and the Conservative party recovery after 1945’, Historical Journal 37 (1994), pp. 173-97; Jones, ‘Bloodless counter-revolution’. 29 John Ramsden, ‘“A party for owners or a party for earners?” How far did the British Conservative Party really change after 1945?’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th s., 37 (1987), pp. 49-63. 30 Ibid., p. 62. 31 Ibid., p. 57. 32 J.A. Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918-1945 (London, 1992), p. 3. 33 Archives of the British Conservative Party, series 1, ‘Pamphlets and leaflets’ (Hassocks, 1978) [hereafter ArchBCP].


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electorate. Further evidence is taken from speeches in The Times as well as from party

publications such as Tory Challenge. Unofficial publications by Conservatives such as

Industry and the State are also used to demonstrate how Conservative political ideas

developed outside the party.

The level of detail in documentary sources is not, however, consistent. Before c. 1942,

many of debates on policy took place outside the structure of the party and were

represented inconsistently in official publications. Moreover, many of the records for the

interwar period were destroyed during the war.34 As a result, a range of unofficial

publications from the interwar period are used in this study to illustrate the interwar

development of Conservative ideas. After c. 1942, far more of the debates related to

themes embodied in ‘property-owning democracy’ took place at an official level, within

the CRD, the Post-War Policy Planning Committee (PWPCC), the Conservative Political

Centre (CPC), and Advisory Committee on Policy (ACP). These limitations do not make it

impossible to chart the development of ‘property-owning democracy’, but they do

emphasise the importance of not over-periodising the party’s history.

Explaining Conservative popularity has been a particular problem for historians given

that their success has coincided with the advent of a democratic franchise. The difficulty

has been to explain why a largely working-class electorate supported a Conservative party

associated with privilege. Conservative were challenged by a franchise which grew from

7.7 million in 1910 to almost 35 million in 1951.35 Their success is awkward for historians

because in more democratic conditions Conservatives’ inegalitarian attitudes and

tendency to defend vested interests might suggest the opposite outcome. Understanding

‘working-class Conservatism’ is therefore key to understanding Conservative success. One

explanation offered has been that the electoral system favoured the Conservative party,

the so-called ‘franchise factor’.36 Another has been that the party’s internal organisation

was peculiarly well-adapted to the political conditions of the interwar period.37 It has

even been suggested that a Conservative vote was a ‘normal’ vote.38 But none of these

explanations consider the role of Conservatives themselves in creating this support. Ross

McKibbin has suggested that their interwar success was negative, a product of their

34 The Conservative Party Archive: A Guide [http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/party_archive.pdf, accessed 01/07/2007], p. 3. 35 F.W.S. Craig, British Electoral Facts, 1885-1975 (London, 1976), pp. 75-7. 36 H.C.G. Matthew et al., ‘The Franchise factor in the rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review 91 (1976), pp. 723-52. 37 Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, p. ch. 10. 38 Frank Parkin, ‘Working-class Conservatism: A theory of political deviance’, British Journal of Sociology 18 (1967), pp. 278-90.


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strategy of eroding working-class unity.39 Yet neither McKibbin nor those historians who

have focused upon structural explanations of ‘working-class Conservatism’ have

considered the positive, constructive role that Conservatives had in creating their own

electoral success. This study posits an explanation of Conservative dominance focused on

their ideas and strategies. Their success, it argues, was a reflection of their ability to

reconceptualise their principles upon explicitly democratic terms. It suggests that

explanations of Conservative success have often been incomplete because of their

tendency to overlook the role of Conservatives themselves in creating this. Thus, it

demonstrates that the debate about ‘working-class Conservatism’ has become largely

redundant; instead, Conservative success reflected an electoral strategy that appealed to

diverse audiences whose allegiances were not simply determined by their social class or

by economic self-interest.

‘Property-owning democracy’ embodied a set of attitudes – towards industry,

ownership, citizenship and capitalism – that expressed a distinctive political culture. This

dissertation not only investigates these attitudes but considers how, why, and through

who Conservatives sought to build a mass appeal. What this dissertation demonstrates is

that Conservative success was not in spite of but, rather, because of their

inegalitarianism. Their appeal was not just reactionary, and their success in the early

twentieth century reflected the sensitive articulation of the values of ‘property-owning

democracy’ to a heterogeneous electorate.

The Conservative appeal was multifaceted. This was particularly demonstrated by

their advocacy of widened ownership. They appealed to middle-class home owners and

those with other property interests. This appeal was also made against a negative image

of the slum dweller and the council tenant. But it also had an aspirational element,

appealing to would-be owner-occupiers, especially among working-class electors.

Conservatives emphasised the economic opportunities provided by their policies, which

was a potent theme, even if these opportunities were not as universal as they suggested.

Through this strategy they sought to create new constituencies of electoral support for the

economic status quo. ‘Property-owning democracy’ emphasises the importance of

studying Conservatism in the early twentieth century as a whole. In demonstrating the

pre-1945 development of ‘property-owning democracy’, this dissertation questions the

assumption that World War II and the 1945 general election fundamentally changed the

Conservative party. Instead, it suggests that the development of Conservative ideas and of

39 Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880-1950 (Oxford, 1990), p. 284.


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the rhetoric of ‘property-owning democracy’ substantially prefigured shifts in

Conservative language, appeal, and strategy after 1947.

This analysis avoids a conventional, chronological, analysis of Conservative ideas,

language, and strategy because such an approach is often at the root of presumptions

about historical discontinuity. The tension between ideas and strategy that this analysis

explores suggests, instead, a thematic arrangement. Nevertheless, within this structure, it

demonstrates a broad periodisation running through much of the argument. The period

1918–1939 was distinctive in form if not fundamentals from that of c. 1942–1951, given

the shifting electoral context and changing attitudes. Chapter 2 outlines the themes of

‘property-owning democracy’ and the distinctive Conservative ideas that it produced.

Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how these ideas were translated into electoral strategies

and a popular public discourse. Chapter 3 demonstrates the relevance of ‘property-

owning democracy’ to Conservative anti-socialism, and chapter 4 demonstrates how it

produced a positive, aspirational, and indisputably capitalist appeal. Through these, this

dissertation demonstrates not only the underlying consistency of the distinctly

Conservative values embodied in the term ‘property-owning democracy’ but also the

sensitive way in which they were expressed in different electoral contexts.


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CH A P T E R I : THE PO L I T I C A L V A LUE S O F ‘ P RO PERTY - OWN ING D EMOCRAC Y ’

The ideas embodied in the term ‘property-owning democracy’ were an important – and

largely consistent – element in Conservative appeal in the period 1918–1951. This chapter

examines these values at a basic level. It demonstrates that while Conservatives were

committed to many liberal values – individual initiative, anti-statism, and private

enterprise – this was complicated by their emphasis upon ownership as a moral and

democratic institution. It also demonstrates that Conservative values, as expressed

through ‘property-owning democracy’, were not only distinctive but also a consistently

important part of their thinking in the early twentieth century. The values that it explores

were at the core of the electoral strategies and appeals analysed in chapters 2 and 3.

Conservatives saw ownership as both a right and a privilege, with benefits and concurrent

duties. This wider ownership was expected to not only make democracy more secure but

also improve its character. The wide range of sources used in this chapter reflects the fact

that these ideas were widely distributed in Conservative publications and often implicit.

Few secondary sources are used because there are few historical analyses of Conservative

ideas. This chapter does what historians have, thus far, not done: to define the values of

‘property-owning democracy’ in their contemporary context.

Conservatives’ emphasis on individual initiative and private enterprise was closely linked

to their concern for ownership. They shared this concern for individualism with many

liberals. However, the importance of the individual within the context of ‘property-

owning democracy’ reflected not the values of nineteenth-century Liberalism but, rather,

the fact that industrial change and political philosophies like socialism, had challenged

nineteenth-century Tory conceptions of the state. Conservatives emphasised the

individual as a counterpoint to the collectivist emphasis upon the state. ‘Property-owning

democracy’ expressed a longstanding Conservative preoccupation with ownership. The

view that private ownership was the ‘basis of civilisation’1 was seen by many as the

defining feature of Conservatism.2 The defence of private property was one of the

‘cardinal features of historical Conservatism’, although in the nineteenth century the

emphasis was on land rather than the more broad concern for property that

1 Skelton, Constructive Conservatism, p. 9. 2 Boothby et al., Industry and the State, p. 12.


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Conservatism acquired in the twentieth.3 Conservative opposition to ‘socialism’ was

justified on the basis that it meant ‘the destruction of all private property and liberty’.4

Thus the Conservative language of the individual was much more closely tied to their

traditional concern for morality and property than it was with contemporary libertarians

such as Ernest Benn. Industry and the State summed up the origins of Conservative

individualism:

Our attitude towards the independence of the individual is distinguished from that of other parties by the important we assign to the individual ownership of property. Political liberty, the goal of the Liberal, is of course essential; the improvement of the industrial status of the worker, the chief aim of the Socialist, is another; but we believe that the ‘slave mentality’ cannot wholly be exercised without… the ownership of property.5

Conservatives distanced themselves from libertarians. ‘We have been moving steadily

away from the abstract laissez-faire individualist… outlook’, Amery noted in 1943. ‘As a

creative, positive doctrine, it has little more to say’.6 In his subsequent account of the

interwar period, Macmillan probably exaggerates the extent that ‘the Conservative Party

as a whole seemed to have absorbed the old Liberal laissez-faire concepts’.7 Nevertheless,

in 1950, Maude lamented that ‘there are still too many people who identify Conservatism

with a sort of nineteenth-century Liberalism’8 and Conservative leaders had to

continually reinforce the message that:

We are not a Party of unbridled, brutal capitalism, and never have been… we are not the political children of the laissez-faire school.9

What made Conservative individualism distinctive was that it was linked to individual

ownership as well as to the good of the community. It was this that made their advocacy

of wider ownership particularly important.

‘Property-owning democracy’ closely linked ownership with virtue, personal morality

and ‘character’. Central to Skelton’s argument for a ‘property-owning democracy’ was his

suggestion that ownership had a ‘moral and intellectual’ effect upon the owner.10 Morality

was particularly linked to homeownership. The justification for better housing was

‘public welfare and morality in their widest sense’.11 The consequence of bad housing, and

3 Leon D. Epstein, ‘Politics of British Conservatism’, American Political Science Review 48 (1954), p. 30. 4 Conference Reports 48 (1920), p. 15. 5 Boothby et al., Industry and the State, p. 12. 6 Leo Amery, ‘The forward view’, 20 February 1943, in L.S. Amery, Framework for the Future (Oxford, 1944), p. 133. 7 Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change 1914-1939 (London, 1966), p. 223; Martin Francis, ‘“Set the People Free”? Conservatives and the State, 1920-1960’, in Martin Francis and Ina Zweiniger-Bergielowska (eds.), The Conservatives and British Society, 1880-1990 (Cardiff, 1996), p. 60. 8 Angus Maude, The Conservative Way of Life (London, 1951), ArchBCP 1951/6, p. 2. 9 Anthony Eden, 02 October 1947, Conference Reports 68 (1947), p. 42. 10 Skelton, Constructive Conservatism, p. 23. 11 Francis Fremantle, A Great Housing Policy (1935), ArchBCP 1935/17, p. 4.


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particularly bad rented housing, was not just ‘political instability’ but also ‘broken

homes’, ‘delinquency’, divorce, political apathy and even child abuse.12 Ownership was

assumed to create ‘a more desirable social life’.13 In an early draft of the pamphlet

Property-owning Democracy, Eccles recalled that:

I once heard a sensible woman tell her prospective son-in-law not to worry about her daughter’s unpunctuality and untidiness. She would be a different girl, her mother said, when she had a house of her own.14

Individual independence from the state was closely linked to moral ‘character’ and to self

help. The emphasis on these moral values as a product of individual independence led to

a concern for self-help and thrift. Most Conservatives agreed with Skelton that ‘the best

kind of social legislation is that which gives the citizens a better chance of helping

themselves’.15 The Conservative focus on the individual also informed their advocacy of

unfettered economic ‘freedom’. This was particularly demonstrated by Conservatives’

adoption of consumerist language and the promise of ‘a better deal for the consumer’ and

‘freedom of choice for the housewife’.16

Conservatives’ attitudes to ownership and individualism strongly influenced their

anti-statism. The function of government was seen to have very definite bounds. A

suspicion of state power was an intrinsic part of Conservative language and thought

throughout the period 1918—1951. One reason for Conservatives’ emphasis on property

was that it was a counterpoint to political power. Private enterprise was central to

‘individual initiative and individual genius’17 and private property a counterpoint to

political power, as the ‘One Nation’ group argued in 1950:

The more men and women there are whose property gives them a security, a status and an influence independent of officialdom, the greater is the guarantee for the freedom of their fellow subjects.18

This belief that private ownership offset political power was demonstrated by

Conservatives’ association of state power with threats to individual freedom. Eccles

defended his commitment to private property on these terms:

Our party stands for the distribution of… property… because we know that personal freedom and private rights cannot exist in a state where property-power is concentrated in a few hands and least of all the hands of the government.19

12 ‘Housing: the human problem’, 1 February 1950, CPA, CCO 4/3/119, p. 7. 13 Kingsley Wood, 30 March 1925, NUG 61 (1925), p. 539. 14 David Eccles, ‘Property-owning democracy’, n.d. [c. July 1948], CPA, CRD 2/23/7, p. 7. 15 Skelton, Constructive Conservatism, p. 22. 16 10 Points of Conservative policy (1946), ArchBCP 1946/38, p. 2; ‘Onward in freedom’, 17 June 1953, CPA, ACP (53) 25, p. 10. 17 Lord Cranbourne, Our Political Future (1943), ArchBCP 1943/21, p. 4. 18 Iain Macleod and Angus Maude (eds.), One Nation: A Tory Approach to Social Problems (London, 1950), ArchBCP 1950/56, p. 20. 19 David Eccles, ‘The alternative to nationalisation’, 27 July 1948, CPA, CRD 2/6/11, p. 8.


Page 17

Wider property ownership, therefore, benefited the whole community, even those who

did not directly profit from it. The belief in the political importance of private property

was one reason for Conservative anti-statism. Another was that state ownership did not

confer the same benefits as private ownership. While the latter was associated with

‘personality’ and ‘character’, the former was assumed to create a ‘soulless State’.20 Skelton

warned that ‘what everybody owns, nobody owns; and far from expressing the wage-

earner’s ideal [of ownership], Socialism makes it unattainable, while communal

ownership neither interests nor influences a single human being’.21

The preference for individual ownership produced a distinctively Conservative vision

of the state, which promoted not material equality but rather widened economic

opportunities, particularly widened ownership. Conservatives were unequivocal that: ‘the

state has been created and exists for the convenience of the individual’.22 When Churchill

argued that ‘Britain’s greatness has been built on character and daring’ he contrasted this

to ‘docility to a State machine’.23 Conservative anti-statism was not just principled; it also

reflected concerns about the efficiency of the state and about what state intervention

could achieve. It was on the grounds of efficiency, for example, that Galbraith (a

Conservative MP on the ACP housing sub-committee) overruled Brooke (a CRD official)

in arguing that Labour’s licensing regime should be derestricted.24 While ideas about the

role of the state changed markedly after 1918, Conservatives remained sceptical about the

efficiency of state enterprise. Throughout the period the cost and speed of house building

by the state was compared unfavourably to that by private enterprise.25 This concern for

efficiency was particularly apparent after 1945 in Conservative attitudes to the welfare

state. Even where they conceded the need for state ownership, ‘value for money’ was

paramount.26 Anti-statism was often expressed through a rejection of a universal welfare

state and through advocacy of means-tested or contributory social services.

Conservatives’ anti-statism and their concern were efficiency were closely linked, as in

the ‘One Nation’ group in the 1950s.27

Conservative anti-statism was not absolute. In particular, it was qualified by changing

attitudes towards the principle of state intervention, and the recognition that private

initiative and voluntarism could not solve all social problems. Conservatives nevertheless

20 Anthony Eden, 25 November 1947, Times (25 November 1947), p. 3. 21 Skelton, Constructive Conservatism, p. 19. 22 Oliver Lyttleton, ‘What should we do with the peace?’, 26 November 1943, ArchBCP 1943/39, p. 8. 23 Mr Churchill’s Declaration of Policy to the Electors (1945), ArchBCP 1945/8, p. 3. 24 Galbraith to Brooke, 3 August 1950, CPA, CRD 2/23/8. 25 E.g. Houses and How to Get Them (1924), ArchBCP 1924/10, p. 14; The Two-way Movement of Ideas (London, 1947), ArchBCP 1947/10, p. 17; Notes on Current Politics (17 January 1949), p. 5. 26 We’re on the Right Road (1950), ArchBCP 1950/124. 27 Robert Walsha, ‘The One Nation group: A Tory approach to backbench politics and organisation, 1950-55’, Twentieth Century British History 11 (2000), p. 194.


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remained highly sceptical about state action where it threatened individual initiative and

ownership. This scepticism was demonstrated by Conservatives’ opposition to

nationalisation, which became relevant given Labour’s programme of public takeovers

after 1945. It was argued that nationalisation was fundamentally flawed because it did

not improve workers’ economic status,28 a concept which – as the following section will

show – was central to Conservative advocacy of wider ownership.

The Conservative emphasis on the individual benefits of ownership went beyond a liberal

concern for individual gains. Wider individual ownership was associated with political,

economic and social stability. In economic terms, wider ownership was seen to entrench

capitalism, and therefore economic stability, by more widely distributing its benefits.

While Conservatives rarely used the term ‘equality’, they implicitly sought equality of

economic opportunity – the equal right to unequal rewards. This approach recognised

some criticisms of capitalism made by socialists, even if it rejected the solutions they

offered. There were, Industry and the State recognised, ‘very real grievance[s]’ produced

by unfettered economic liberalism.29 That these grievances were not more explicitly

recognised in Conservatives’ public language reflected not only their confidence in

capitalism but also a realisation of the political dangers of acknowledging the validity of

such criticisms. The wider distribution of property, it was anticipated, could correct the

injustices of capitalism without fundamentally changing the status quo. Conservatives

remained in no doubt about the fundamental desirability of capitalism itself. Industry

and the State, while acknowledging the validity of some criticisms of capitalism,

categorically rejected the idea that these objections were terminal.30 ‘Property-owning

democracy’ was directly equated with the spread of capitalist values, as a letter from

Cranborne to Eden on the subject demonstrated in 1946:

You have been thinking in terms of a property-owning democracy. I have been thinking in terms of spreading capitalism. Yours is perhaps the more tactful phrase. But we mean the same thing.31

Conservatives recognised the importance of economic security, which they closely

associated with ownership. There was little doubt about the desirability of wider

ownership, especially home ownership. Speaking in 1925, Baldwin was enthusiastic:

We want people to own their homes. And we shall devise every fair means we can to extend the class of occupying owner. We want to see more and not less of private

28 Tennant, ‘Socialist attitude to property’, 5 March 1952, CPA, CRD 2/23/28, p. 2. 29 Boothby et al., Industry and the State, p. 133. 30 Ibid. 31 Quoted in John Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, 1940-1957 (London, 1995), p. 175.


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property. We want it more spread. It is impossible to exaggerate the value to the citizen, therefore to the State, of a good home.32

The 1945 PWPCC report on housing, Looking Ahead, was similarly unequivocal that ‘the

national interests are best served by as many as possible owning their own homes’.33 Not

only was wider home ownership assumed to be intrinsically positive, but it was also

assumed to be popular. Conservatives claimed that ‘home ownership is one of the

fundamental desires of the people of this country’34 and this was seen to be the case as

much in 1922 as it was in 1952.35 The growth of building societies was supposed to

demonstrate this interest, and Conservatives assumed that they satisfied ‘an essential

human ambition and social need’.36 This belief in the universalism of the desire for

economic security reflected Conservatives’ conviction as to the desirability and popularity

of an economic order with a fairer distribution of property. Conservative language

emphasised the commonality of capitalist interests and rationalised mass democracy as

‘property-owning democracy’. This was also another reason that Conservatives rejected

laissez-faire economics. ‘Such an exclusive economic system’, Eccles argued, ‘cannot exist

alongside a distributed political power’.37 The Conservative attitude to the distribution of

wealth was summed up in a conversation between ‘Mrs. Perkins’ and a neighbour in The

Onlooker in 1945:

I always wonder a bit when I hear people talking about the capitalists. As far as I can see, I’m one myself, and so’s everyone who puts a bit of money aside so as it earns a bit more. Or owns a house. Or a piece of land.38

Conservatives’ advocacy of wider ownership meant their defence of the economic order

was not merely libertarian. One reason for this emphasis was a strategy of attempting to

draw attention away from the obvious wealth inequalities within the capitalist

‘community’; but another was the belief that everyone had an interest in capitalism.

Ownership was closely linked in Conservative language with ‘responsible’ citizenship

and political stability. One reason for this was their association of ownership with

morality. That property ownership was seen to create better citizens explains the

enthusiasm with which Conservatives advocated it. Another reason was the belief that, by

making individuals more politically responsible, ownership produced political stability.

By giving individuals a greater stake in society, ownership was presumed to be a key

32 Stanley Baldwin, 4 December 1925, National Union Gleanings and Continuations (Hassocks: Harvester, 1973) [hereafter NUG] 61 (1925), p. 88. 33 Looking Ahead (London, 1945), ArchBCP 1945/53, p. 11. 34 Thomas Galbraith in Parliamentary Debates: Official Report (Commons), 5th series [hereafter HCDebs], v. 426 (29 July 1946), c. 797. 35 E.g. The Landless People (1922), ArchBCP 1922/53. 36 Times (7 June 1933), p. 13. 37 Ibid., p. 3. 38 Onlooker (July 1945), p. 7.


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qualification to citizenship. This concern for citizenship was not new.39 Few

Conservatives disputed that ‘the more of the electorate who have a stake in the country

the better’.40 Indeed, it was alleged that Labour opposed wider ownership because they

depended on the irresponsible behaviour of the propertyless.41 ‘Give a man a stake in the

country’, it was supposed, ‘and he has little use for socialism’.42 The connection between

owning property and performing ‘duties of citizenship’ such as voting was emphasised.43

A central criticism of Liberal land policy in 1925 was that it disconnected responsibility

from ownership.44 The duties associated with ownership were particularly important

when Conservatives defended large private landlords, arguing that private profits were

matched by community responsibilities.45 A motion at the 1949 party conference labelled

private ownership ‘the hallmark of sound citizenship’46 and in 1950, the One Nation

group contrasted the ‘millionaire owner of stocks and shares’ with the landowner because

of the range of automatic duties incumbent upon the latter but not the former.47 Maude

was even more blunt, arguing that ‘Conservatism has no use for the really “idle rich” who

enjoy the benefits of wealth without accepting any responsibility for its employment’.48

Conservative advocacy of wider ownership was associated with their concern, from

the 1930s onwards, to ‘educate the democracy’. Given the expansion of owner-occupation

and the advent of mass-democracy, it is perhaps unsurprising that ‘educating the

democracy’ became an important theme in Conservatism. Baldwin famously declared in

1928 that ‘we have got to make democracy safe for the world’.49 The widening of the

franchise meant that traditional Tory paternalism evolved into a concern for inculcating

in the electorate an acceptance of the political and economic status quo. Conservatives’

attitudes to slum dwellers particularly illustrated their attitudes to education, citizenship

and responsibility. Having visited ‘some of the worst slum houses I have come across’,

Chamberlain concluded that ‘the housing problem is not merely a problem of housing but

a problem of social education’.50 ‘Property-owning democracy’, by advocating wider

individual ownership, was ‘educating the democracy’ writ large. Wider ownership was

39 E.g. George Boyce, ‘‘Rights of Citizenship’: The Conservative Party and the Constitution, 1906 - 1914’, in Alan O'Day (ed.), Government and Institutions in the Post-1832 United Kingdom (Lewiston, NY, 1995), pp. 215-36. 40 ‘The ownership of property’, 1 May 1953, CPA, ACP 3/3 (53) 23, p. 1. 41 Houses and How to Get Them, p. 18. 42 Times (22 April 1925), p. 10. 43 To Women Voters (1918), ArchBCP 1918/13; Jarvis, ‘Conservative response to socialism’, p. 446. 44 Liberal Land Policy (1925), ArchBCP 1925/8, p. 9. 45 The Land and the People: Nationaliser’s Statements Answered (1920), ArchBCP 1920/39. 46 Conference Reports 70 (1949), p. 24. 47 Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, p. 19. 48 Maude, Conservative Way of Life, p. 4. 49 Baldwin, 10 March 1928, ArchBCP 1928/6, p. 4. 50 Neville Chamberlain to Hilda, 1 November 1925, Robert C. Self (ed.), The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, vol. ii (Aldershot, 2000), p. 318.


Page 21

one means by which the ‘threat’ mass democracy posed to the political order could be

neutralised.

Wider ownership was also anticipated to foster social harmony. Class tensions and

social strife were associated with economic discontent and inequalities of ‘status’. The

widening of ownership was expected to reduce these tensions by eroding differences

between social and economic classes. The main problem identified by young

Conservatives such as Boothby and Macmillan in the 1920s was ‘the elimination of the

distrust and discontent steadily growing among the wage earners’51 and, for Skelton, a

society ‘at peace with itself’ was as important as private property itself.52 The reduction of

class tension was particularly important when Conservatives spoke of ‘partnership in

industry’. The increased distribution of ownership was seen as key to this. The ACP

concluded in 1946 that:

The citizen in industry must feel that he has a clear and important status as an individual personality with prospects for advancement on merit, with a sense of collective responsibility… and with a fair reward for his efforts.53

‘Property-owning democracy’ espoused a concern for ‘status’ as an alternative to

‘equality’. In doing so, it rejected egalitarianism, and accepted inequality. Hickson has

suggested that opposition to equality was ‘a continuous unifying principle within the

Conservative party’.54 Even supposedly ‘progressive’ Conservatives such as Butler argued

that ‘quality is a necessary as equality’, echoing Hugh Cecil’s claim two decades earlier

that ‘inequality is the law of nature’.55 Given their views on ownership, economic freedom

and individual initiative, Conservatives saw the egalitarianism implicit in the term

‘equality’ as dangerous. Inequality was seen as both generating wealth and safeguarding

freedom.56 Yet inequalities of status and of opportunity remained a concern. Conservative

policymakers – as the subsequent chapters demonstrate – appreciate the risks of this

association with inequality. But the universalism that was particularly advocated by

Labour after 1942 was attacked as undesirable and utopian. Most importantly, the

fundamental unimportance of material inequality was emphasised so long as ‘status’ –

economic opportunity, typically ownership – was available to all. The argument that

‘there is no fixed division between capitalist and workers’ was more than just rhetoric.57

Yet they recognised the need to correct economic inequalities that served as a barrier to

51 Boothby et al., Industry and the State, p. 26. 52 Skelton, Constructive Conservatism, p. 21. 53 Conference Reports 67 (1946), p. 35. 54 Kevin Hickson, ‘Inequality’, in Kevin Hickson (ed.), The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945 (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 192. 55 R.A. Butler, Fundamental Issues (1946), ArchBCP 1946/23, p. 3; Cecil, Conservative Ideals, p. 10. 56 Jones, ‘Bloodless counter-revolution’, p. 8. 57 Are You a Capitalist? (1922), ArchBCP 1922/56.


Page 22

wider ownership. The idea of ‘status’ was particularly applied to industry and workers

‘investing’ their labour, Cranborne argued in 1943, were equally as ‘capitalist’ as rich

speculators.58 Co-partnership and profit-sharing were assumed to produce a happier and

more effective environment: their value, it was argued, ‘lies not so much in the cash

return as in the fact that it helps to raise the employee to the status of partner’.59 That it

was recognised that co-partnership did not tend to significantly increase industrial

output emphasises that Conservative interest of such schemes was not just fiscal. Instead,

they were advocated because they ‘confer[red] a definite status’:

There is no difference in kind but only in degree between the man who owns one share in the Company and the man who owns a million. The worker is recognised as having status in the concern of an owner.60

‘Property-owning democracy’ emphasised the need to create and foster a capitalist

community independent of class. While it was through the benefits of individual

ownership that it sought to achieve this, it was the creation of a capitalist political nation

that was its ultimate end. It is significant that John St Loe Strachey suggested that they

argued not for a ‘property-owning democracy’ but, more generally, for a new ‘democratic

Conservatism’.61 The inventor of the term ‘property-owning democracy’ was anxious that

the Conservative party be ‘a national, not a class party’.62 The term ‘property-owning

democracy’ embodied Conservative values and their commitment to capitalism, in the

context of a large, democratic, franchise.

Amit Ron distinguishes a property-owning democracy (where democracy is ‘made safe’

for owners) and a property-owning democracy (where the distribution of property

changes the character of the state).63 This distinction represented an important duality in

Conservative values in the period 1918–1951. Conservatives moved from a position where

they defended the institution of property to a position where they also advocated its wider

distribution. Jarvis is probably right to suggest that this was a distinctively Conservative

response to the extension of the franchise from 1918.64 In 1946, Salisbury called for ‘more

economic democracy, to balance political democracy’.65 Challenged by Labour’s language

of ‘rights’, Conservatives reversed the traditional relationship between property and

responsibility:

58 Cranborne, Political Future, p. 4. 59 Topic for Today: Profit-sharing and Co-Partnership (London, 1950), ArchBCP 1950/78, p. 5. 60 ‘Report… on the subject of co-partnership’, 25 August 1927, CPA, CRD 1/3/1, p. 5. 61 Quoted in Gatland, ‘Constructive Conservatism’, p. 74. 62 Times (30 October 1930), p. 15. 63 Ron, ‘Visions of democracy’, pp. 4-5. 64 Jarvis, ‘Conservative response to socialism’, ch. iv. 65 Quoted in Jones, ‘Conservative party and the welfare state’, p. 177.


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Given that in the nineteenth century Conservatives had argued that only property owners should possess political rights, it followed that in an age that when all had the vote all should be property owners.66

The idea that responsible behaviour earned the privilege of ownership was displaced by

the idea that the right of ownership created responsible behaviour. This idea was not

new, but it became gradually more influential. Intrinsic to Eden’s call for a ‘nationwide

property-owning democracy’ was the view that property was both a right and a

responsibility.67

Conservatives anticipated that ownership would produce financial security and

responsibility. This was seen to have political, social, and economic consequences and to

have wider benefits because it secured for the entire community not only stability but a

measure of freedom from the state. And many echoed Brooke’s view that ‘house-

ownership as a political asset to us, and a good thing in itself’.68 The reasons for this

resonance are discussed in more detail in the following chapters. The linking of

ownership, responsibility and economic opportunity reflected the fact that ownership was

seen as both a right and a responsibility, not only ‘making democracy safe’ but also

‘making good citizens’. It produced ‘a stake and a status’.69 The fifth Earl of Salisbury best

summed up what Conservatives meant by ‘property-owning democracy’ when, in 1948,

he characterised it as:

A society of independent, responsible citizens, working together for the public good, owning their own homes, having some share in the control of the businesses in which they work, not slaves but free men.70

66 Gatland, ‘Constructive Conservatism’, p. 77. 67 Times (4 October 1946), p. 2. 68 Brooke to Director, 7 January 1935, CPA, CRD 1/1/1, #24. 69 ‘Ownership of property’, p. 12. 70 Lord Salisbury, ‘The faith of a Conservative’, 22 May 1948, ArchBCP 1948/20, p. 8.


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CH A P T E R I I : ‘ F O R EQUAL D I V I S ON O F UNEQUAL E ARN INGS ’ : C ON SERVAT I V E

ANT I - S O C I A L I SM

What is a Communist? One who hath yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings

Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing,

To fork out his penny and pocket your shilling.1

Conservatives’ anti-socialism was an important part of their strategy, and articulated

negatively the values of ‘property-owning democracy’. It was imbued with political ideas

as well as opportunism. The consistency of Conservative anti-socialism throughout

1918—1951 suggests the enduring importance of ‘property-owning democracy’ to their

appeal.

Anti-socialism was not uniform; it embodied a whole range of different Conservative

perspectives and groups. It was a broad label that articulated many of the ideas

associated with the term ‘property-owning democracy’ against Labour. It was centred on

opposition to ‘socialist’ values, the defence of capitalism and property, and the argument

the socialism eroded ‘character’. The way it was articulated varied among different

individuals and in different contexts. In the period 1920–24, Cowling identified

numerous different anti-socialist methods2 and Jarvis is sceptical that any single anti-

socialist strategy emerged before 1931, concluding that it ‘meant different things to

different people’.3 In particular, there was a division between those who saw it as a total

electoral strategy and those who saw it as just one element of Conservative electoral

appeal. This was particularly apparent in the 1920s, between the bulk of Conservative

MPs and the YMCA. Yet the political diversity that anti-socialism encompassed was its

strength and meant that it was unifying force within Conservatism.

Historical studies of Conservatives’ anti-socialism are the exception rather than the

rule. While few would contest Green’s argument that Conservatives were ‘quintessentially

anti-socialist’,4 it has often been assumed that the strategy embodied a one-dimensional

opportunism. While Williamson has examined anti-socialism in the context of

1 Quoted in Cecil, Conservative Ideals, p. 9. 2 Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920-1924: the beginning of modern British politics (Cambridge, 1971), p. 3. 3 Jarvis, ‘Conservative response to socialism’, pp. 9, 56. 4 Green, Ideologies, p. 10.


Page 25

‘Baldwinism’, the way it was articulated in a wider context has hardly been studied.5 The

one exception to this is Jarvis’ thesis, ‘the ideology of the Conservative response to

socialism’. Yet, even in this comprehensive analysis, Jarvis’ focus on ideas means that his

treatment of Conservative anti-socialist strategy is peripheral.6 Cowling identified the

central theme of Conservative strategy after 1924 as ‘resistance to socialism’.7

Conservatives, he argued, were motivated by a desire to defend the social order and to

make Labour the main opposition. He suggested that Conservative anti-socialism was no

more than a means to achieving political dominance. The implication of his conclusion

was that Conservative ideas were unimportant and that anti-socialism was largely

reactionary. Yet, while ‘anti-socialism’ often had a reactionary tone, it was neither

Machiavellian nor devoid of political principles.

Conservatives’ response to socialism was partly self-interested. Yet, as chapter 1

demonstrates, it also reflected an underlying belief that capitalism was morally and

economically justified. That Conservatives should defend the capitalism was never

doubted, even by relatively radical members of the party.8 Anti-socialism was a widely

accepted Conservative strategy that represented a compromise between values and

opportunism. ‘Property-owning democracy’ was particularly important to this anti-

socialism because ownership and the relationship between the individual and the state

were among the most important points of difference between Labour and the

Conservatives. These differences of principle, alongside opportunistic attacks on Labour

(for instance, on housing policy, or its administrative competence), created Conservative

anti-socialism, which can be defined as having four main elements. Firstly, it emphasised

the threat arising from ‘socialism’ to the economic and political order, and to social

stability. Secondly, it attacked the incompetence of Labour politicians. Thirdly, it

portrayed Labour as doctrinaire and inflexible, contrasting them to supposedly ‘common

sense’ Conservatism. Lastly, it embodied Conservative opportunism, a willingness to

attack Labour in those areas that it was weakest.

5 Philip Williamson, ‘The doctrinal politics of Stanley Baldwin’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1993); Williamson, Baldwin. 6 Jarvis, ‘Conservative response to socialism’, p. esp. ch. ii. 7 Cowling, Impact of Labour, p. 3. 8 Gatland, ‘Constructive Conservatism’, pp. 163-4; Peter Dorey, The Conservative Party and the Trade Unions (London, 1995), p. 3.


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‘A community run by the state’

An emphasis on the threat posed by Labour was strategically central to Conservative anti-

socialism. This reflected genuine – if publicly exaggerated – fears about the consequences

of a Labour government. Indeed, Addison has suggested that the threat of Labour was a

‘master theme’ for twentieth-century Conservatism.9 While the nature of these fears

changed after 1945 given the experience of the Attlee government, this strategy of

emphasising the ‘threat’ posed by Labour was consistent. The Conservative language of

foreboding particularly demonstrated the importance of the values of ‘property-owning

democracy’ to their anti-socialist strategy. Each element of their emphasis on the threat

of Labour reflected a topic for which ‘property-owning democracy’ produced a critique of

‘socialist’ values. It was not just the threat posed by Labour itself that made Conservative

anti-socialism important. The Conservative attitude to the electorate, Jarvis has argued,

was ‘trepidation and suspicion’.10 In the aftermath of the 1918 Representation of the

People Act, there was uncertainty about the impact of the widened franchise.11

Conservatives oscillated between suspicion of a voting public of whom almost half would

support Labour in 1945, to a paternalistic assumption that Labour somehow ‘misled’

them.12 Given these fears, anti-socialism was an instinctive and natural position.

Conservatives emphasised the threat to property that Labour represented, particularly to

the assets of the working population, such as savings in building societies.13 This focus on

the threat of expropriation was apparent in the interwar period when they characterised

Labour’s redistributive policies as greedy. Are You A Capitalist? warned the reader

against the attack on ‘your nest-egg’, suggesting that the sums held by building societies

would ‘make the Socialists’ mouths water’.14 Another pamphlet suggested that:

The Socialists have got a stern and wrothful [sic] eye on [your house]. What looks to the honest, level-headed workman a sound investment for his later years is, say Socialists, ‘theft’ in its essential character.15

This was again a theme in a pamphlet of 1935 which warned homeowners of the threat

posed by Labour:

9 Paul Addison, ‘The British Conservative party from Churchill to Heath: Doctrine or men?’ Contemporary European History 8 (1999), p. 298. 10 David Jarvis, ‘The shaping of Conservative electoral hegemony, 1918-1939’, in Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor (eds.), Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), p. 140. 11 Philip Williamson, ‘“Safety First”: Baldwin, the Conservative party, and the 1929 general election’, Historical Journal 25 (1982), p. 387. 12 R.A. Butler, 30 May 1946, in The New Conservatism: An Anthology of Post-War Thought (London, 1955), ArchBCP 1955/51, p. 30. 13 Jarvis, ‘Conservative response to socialism’, p. 290. 14 Are You A Capitalist (1922), ArchBCP 1922/56. 15 Socialism and Your Home (1926), ArchBCP 1926/3.


Page 27

What a prospect! You cease to own your own house and land, any compensation you may receive will be practically worthless, you will lose control over your savings and you won’t be able to get your money back when you want it.16

Conservatives linked the threat of expropriation with curbs on freedom. Hugh Cecil

concluded in 1923 that socialism was ‘inconsistent with Personal Liberty’ as a result of its

denigration of ownership.17 In 1945, Labour was associated with ‘a community run by the

state with personal liberty permanently under restraint’.18 Conservative language also

associated Labour with social disharmony, heralding ‘class war’.19 The idea that Labour

represented sectional interests was especially articulated by Baldwin,20 and reflected the

Conservative concern for social harmony as well as their claim to represent the interests

of the entire community. Socialism was also seen to threaten ‘character’, leading not only

to ‘economic disaster’ but also ‘moral despair’.21 The Conservative perception of the

Labour ‘threat’ was more than simply rhetoric. The economic ‘distrust and discontent’

that ‘socialism’ was said to propagate was antithetical to ‘property-owning democracy’.22

The focus on the threat to ownership, morality, and harmony represented a negative

element of the Conservatives’ strategy of emphasising the interests of the entire

community in the capitalist system, a strategy investigated in more detail in chapter 3.

Conservatives were often more sanguine about the threat Labour posed than their

public language suggested. In private, many did not see the political threat it posed in the

apocalyptic terms they used publicly. After 1945, Conservative public language about the

Labour threat came much closer to this private realism. Nevertheless, they were

convinced that Labour ‘socialism’, unchecked, would pose a major threat to property and

therefore to their efforts to create a ‘property-owning democracy’. This emphasis upon

the threat of Labour was instrumental in development of an anti-socialist consensus

within the Conservative party, particularly in the 1920s. By using general Conservative

principles around which there was a broad consensus to emphasise the threat posed by

Labour, arguments about specific policies could be avoided and a critical, pragmatic

strategy was developed. Conservative anti-socialism in the interwar period demonstrated

how they created an ‘instinctive Conservative position’ that allowed different interests to

coalesce, aided by Baldwin’s ‘inclusive public doctrine’.23

16 Your House to Go! (1935), ArchBCP 1935/124. 17 Cecil, Conservative Ideals, p. 12. 18 Onlooker (July 1945), p. 8. 19 Boothby et al., Industry and the State, p. 14. 20 Williamson, ‘Safety First’, p. 389. 21 Skelton, Constructive Conservatism, p. 7; Jarvis, ‘Conservative response to socialism’, p. 245. 22 Boothby et al., Industry and the State, p. 26. 23 Philip Williamson, ‘The Conservative party, 1900-1939: From crisis to ascendancy’, in Chris Wrigley (ed.), A Companion to Early Twentieth-century Britain (Oxford, 2003), p. 18.


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‘Partisan prejudice’

The Conservatives’ characterisation of Labour as dogmatic and inflexible was another

element of their anti-socialism. The party was motivated, it was argued, by ‘unproven

theories’24 and sought to introduce ‘doctrinaire measures’.25 Labour was closely identified

not just with socialism but also Marxism and communism. ‘Socialism’ was consistently

identified with the Labour party in Conservative discourse. In political literature, and

even in private, one was equated with the other, to the extent that party publications

almost always referred to Labour as ‘the Socialists’. When literature did refer to them by

name, it usually did so in inverted commas. It was not unusual for Labour politicians to

be labelled ‘Marxists’.26 Distinctions between Labour, socialists and communists were

downplayed; socialists, like communists, were ‘jealous and distrustful men’.27 That

Conservatives identified Labour not only as socialists but with communists and Marxists

reflected both a strategy of alienating voters from Labour but also genuine fears.

Conservative strategy linked Labour’s ‘dogmatism’ to policy failure and inefficiency. Their

policies, it was suggested, were intrinsically flawed, based on ‘abstract and mechanical’

ideas.28 Conservative attacks on Labour as utopian and doctrinaire socialists were

important because they remained highly sceptical not only of the desirability but also of

the practicality of their principles, a scepticism they sought to convey to the electorate.

‘Socialism’ was, Skelton suggested, ‘a mechanical method of achieving the millennium’,

and Industry and the State concluded that:

A Socialist state might survive if the supermen of history were its cabinet ministers, if Confucius were at the Board of Trade and Napoleon were Minister of Transport.29

It was particularly important, both in terms of Conservative identity and in their

criticism of Labour as doctrinaire, that they cultivated a non-dogmatic, ‘common sense’,

self image. The illusory notion that they espoused a non-doctrinaire ‘middle way’ was

important both in public and private. It was typical that, in 1943, Cranborne defended

Conservatism as ‘an objective, common sense, practical point of view’, and yet in the

same document defined Conservatism in terms of morality, individualism and private

initiative.30 Conservatives aspired to ‘a happy mean between order and liberty’ that was

24 General Election 1945 (1945), ArchBCP 1945/8, p. 20. 25 Lord Woolton, ‘The modern Conservative’, 24 January 1948, ArchBCP 1948/19, p. 5. 26 E.g. R.A. Butler, ‘Fundamental Issues’, 13 March 1946, ArchBCP 1946/23, p. 2. 27 Eccles, What do you think?, p. 3. 28 Leo Amery, The Conservative Future: An Outline of Policy (Rochester, 1946), ArchBCP 1946/68, p. 5. 29 Boothby et al., Industry and the State, p. 17. 30 Lord Cranbourne, Our Political Future (1943), ArchBCP 1943/21, p. 3.


Page 29

‘neither the anarchy of extreme individualism nor a doctrinaire collectivism’.31 That

Conservatives were non-doctrinaire was a source of pride given their pejorative definition

of the term.32 It was nonetheless a fiction. Conservative claims that Labour was

‘dogmatic’ reflected the values of ‘property-owning democracy’, and an emphasis on their

own political values, their association the status quo, and their scepticism about

‘socialism’.

The experience of the Labour government after 1945 produced a shift in Conservative

strategy, since it gave lie to many of their former prognostications of doom, and

emphasised its other shortcomings. In particular, characterisations of Labour as

dogmatic became less plausible, though they did not cease. The tone of Conservative anti-

socialism became less alarmist. As Schwarz has noted, ‘Attlee was not a figure to chill the

blood of the most insouciant upholders of privilege’.33 Churchill’s notorious ‘Gestapo’

speech of 1945 demonstrated that characterisations of the ‘threat’ of Labour of the kind

propagated in the interwar period had become ‘farcical’.34 Conservative attacks on

Labour, therefore, shifted to capitalise on popular disillusionment. They did not cease to

attack Labour for their dogmatism, but did so on more specific terms, in the light of the

experience of the 1945 government. The association of Labour with administrative

inefficiency became particularly important. An attack on ‘doctrinaire Socialism’ in the

1951 manifesto was, for example, linked to Conservative promises to end ‘extravagance’.35

Conservative attacks on Labour housing policy were particularly prominent after

1945. While suggesting that Labour’s aversion to private enterprise arose from their

dogmatism, Conservatives portrayed their housing policy as ‘common sense’. Labour’s

‘downright failure to live up to their roseate promises’ was attributed to their ‘deliberate

obstruction of private enterprise… for purely doctrinaire reasons’.36 It was Labour’s

aversion to private enterprise building that was particularly attacked, and that was often

used to demonstrate their dogmatism. Despite representing a considerable degree of

opportunism, this was consistent with the ideas about private enterprise that had always

imbued Conservative anti-socialism. The 1951 Campaign Guide attacked Labour

‘prejudice against private enterprise’ just as Eustace Percy, speaking 27 years earlier,

accused Labour of seeking to ‘poison’ business.37

31 Herbert Williams, The Modern State (1937), ArchBCP 1937/46, p. 43; David Clarke, Conservative Faith in a Modern Age (London, 1947), ArchBCP 1947/5, p. 7. 32 W.H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, vol. ii (London and New York, 1983), pp. 188-9. 33 Schwarz, ‘Tide of history’, p. 147. 34 Ibid., pp. 147-8. 35 Manifesto of the Conservative and Unionist Party (1951), ArchBCP 1951/56, p. 2. 36 Notes (07 October 1946), pp. 10-11. 37 Campaign Guide 1951 (London, 1951), CPA, PUB 224/14, p. 255; HCDebs. (26 March 1924), v. 171, c. 1486.


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‘Socialist muddle’

Attacks on Labour’s competence became particularly prominent after 1945, given the

effect the Attlee government had on popular perceptions of Labour. While Conservative

strategy throughout the interwar period emphasised the shortcomings of Labour

administration, this was more often in terms of the threat to property and freedom they

posed. While Labour in the interwar period was attacked for ‘partisan prejudices’,

‘Socialist muddle’ became pivotal to Conservative strategy after 1947.38 By 1948 Churchill

spoke publicly and scornfully of ‘two and half years of Socialist mismanagement and rule’

and claimed that ‘socialist planners have miscalculated and mismanaged everything they

have touched’.39 After 1945, as has already been noted, characterisations of Labour as

doctrinaire radicals bent on revolution became increasingly implausible. This meant that

Conservative attacks on Labour after 1945 shifted to criticism of specific policies and to

their administration. Such a strategy was apparent in publications such as Fifty Things

The Tories Will Do For You (1947).40 The importance of ‘Socialist muddle’ was

particularly evident during the 1950 and 1951 elections. The central theme of the 1950

manifesto was ‘socialist mismanagement’ and Conservative policy promises were

matched by expositions of Labour’s failings, emphasising the contrasting competence of

Labour and the Conservatives.41

Conservative anti-bureaucratic language was linked to their attack on Labour

competence. It demonstrated how the negative strategy at the core of the Conservative

response to state expansion was instilled with the values of ‘property-owning democracy’.

Under Labour, they warned ‘land and businesses would be owned and controlled by the

State. Socialism would create a new ‘vagrant class’ of unemployed alongside a

‘government official class’.42 Nationalisation was associated with ‘a bureaucratic state in

which every worker [would] become an industrial conscript’.43 This would mean creating

‘thousands more officials, and private enterprise and individual freedom would be

destroyed’.44 While these warnings were exaggerated, they were consistent with

‘property-owning democracy’. The threat of bureaucracy was a key theme in Conservative

anti-socialist strategy, and the term was used pejoratively as a general description of the

undesirable consequences of state expansion. Thus, when Selborne warned of ‘magnified,

38 All the Facts (1949), ArchBCP 1949/132, p. 17. 39 Winston Churchill, ‘Set the people free’, 14 February 1948, ArchBCP 1948/17, pp. 1, 7. 40 Fifty Things The Tories Will Do For You (1947), ArchBCP 1947/14. 41 Times (25 January 1950), p. 6. 42 Cecil, Conservative Ideals, pp. 10-11. 43 Conference Reports 48 (1920), p. 22. 44 Do You Believe? (1929), ArchBCP 1929/94.


Page 31

glorified and impossible bureaucracy’45 he was referring not only to the expansion of

government but also to the limitation of economic freedom.

Anti-bureaucratic language became more potent after 1945. This reflected popular

frustration with austerity, controls and rationing. Exploiting this, the Conservative ‘Trust

the People’ exhibition featured a ‘Socialist Magic House constructed entirely of

Government forms’.46 Salisbury was frustrated by ‘more rules, more regulations, more

officials, more forms which are almost unintelligible and which no one wants to fill up’.47

This attack on the expansion of bureaucracy was not new. It took advantage of distrust of

the state, and in doing so exaggerated the extent of its interventionism. Thus Woolton

spoke of ‘the gigantic army of officials’ and a Conservative pamphlet suggested business

was being ‘strangled’.48 Assheton even attributed the fall of the Roman Empire to ‘top-

heavy bureaucracy’.49 Yet this indicated a genuine unease among Conservatives about the

expansion of the state, expressed through criticism of bureaucracy. Conservative anti-

bureaucratic language became a more important part of their negative anti-socialist

strategy because of the popular experience of post-war austerity and the idea that Labour

had created ‘a paradise for the spiv’, but it was neither new nor entirely reactionary.50

Anti-socialist opportunism

While anti-socialism was, by definition, a negative electoral strategy, it often represented

opportunism, a response to political circumstances reflecting the values of ‘property-

owning democracy’. Conservative attitudes to housing particularly demonstrated this

electoral opportunism. After 1947, the issue was an opportunity to attack Labour because

of its failure to fulfil popular expectations. Labour had made ambitious promises on

housing, perhaps the most important domestic issue in 1945.51 In 1946, 41% of the

electorate saw it as the most important issue facing Britain and it remained a public

priority through 1947.52 Yet progress was slow, frustrated by economic crises and

logistical problems.53 These problems, along with Bevan’s concentration on long-term

housing meant that the Labour government’s record was interpreted as a quantative

45 Conference Reports 52 (1924), p. 28. 46 Tory Challenge (August 1947), p. 13. 47 Salisbury, ‘The faith of a Conservative’, 22 May 1948, ArchBCP 1948/20, p. 3. 48 Woolton, ‘The modern Conservative’, p. 4; We’re on the Right Road (1950), ArchBCP 1950/124. 49 Ralph Assheton, Facing the Future (1945), ArchBCP 1945/12. 50 Times (03 October 1947), p. 2. 51 Harriet Jones, ‘“This is magnificent!”: 300,000 houses a year and the Tory revival after 1945’, Contemporary British History 14 (2000), p. 100. 52 Jones, ‘Conservative party and the welfare state’, p. 135; Rodney Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 238. 53 Kenneth Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945-51 (Oxford, 1986), p. 164; Jones, ‘This is magnificent!’ p. 102.


Page 32

failure.54 This issue was a unique opportunity after 1945 for Conservatives to extol the

virtues of free markets, and the failure of Labour policy gave this appeal even more

credibility.55 It was even more of an opportunity for Conservatives given the frustration

Labour policy produced among private builders. The slogan ‘let the builders build’

embodied Conservative scepticism about the expansion of the state and their advocacy of

economic freedom as well as emphasising the greater efficiency of private enterprise.56

Morgan has argued that Labour’s failures should be seen in the context of wider

contemporary problems and that their record on housing was ‘competent if not

outstanding’.57 Yet their record was undoubtedly viewed more critically by

contemporaries.

Conservatives characterised Labour’s housing programme as mismanaged. Their

policy, it was suggested, was doctrinaire and by restricting private enterprise limited its

own success. This criticism went hand-in-hand with Conservative advocacy of a

‘property-owning democracy’. The promise to build 300,000 houses a year was

engineered by a group led by Galbraith, against opposition within the CRD.58 The pledge

was calculated to embarrass Labour and to emphasise the vitality of the Conservative

alternative. Woolton best summed up this element of Conservative anti-socialist strategy

after 1945 when he asked: ‘are we better off? Better fed? Better clothed? Better housed?’59

That much of the electorate could answer ‘no’ to these questions was an electoral

opportunity for Conservatives.

Anti-socialism was important part of Conservative identity. It stressed the differences

between Conservatives and Labour on principles that were particularly important within

‘property-owning democracy’. While Conservatives continued to reject laissez-faire

economics, they by no means accepted the values of socialism, a point emphasised in

speeches and publications. Through anti-socialism, Conservatives stressed that Labour

and Conservative policy reflected ‘two utterly different conceptions of life and society’.60

The choice between the two was presented in stark terms in 1950:

There are two ways of life. One concentrates all power in the State and its Ministers. Under the other, economic and political power is spread throughout the community and millions of men and women and families can live their lives in freedom under the law.61

54 Lowe, Welfare State in Britain, p. 249. 55 Jones, ‘Conservative party and the welfare state’, p. 132. 56 Let the Builders Build (1951), ArchBCP 1951/69. 57 Morgan, Labour in Power, pp. 166, 169. 58 Jones, ‘This is magnificent!’ p. 107. 59 Lord Woolton, ‘The modern Conservative’, 24 January 1948, ArchBCP 1948/19, p. 2. 60 Winston Churchill, ‘The days ahead’, 20 May 1949, ArchBCP 1949/18, p. 5. 61 Conference Reports 71 (1950), p. 90.


Page 33

This anti-socialism affirmed Conservative identity and self-image. Their claim that they

were non-doctrinaire was implausible; but the idea that they were, and their frequent

references to Disraeli’s concern for social reform, was important to their own legitimacy.

Through anti-socialism, Conservatives not only attacked the failings and vulnerabilities of

Labour but also affirmed their own values and strengths. Conservative anti-socialism was

also important in creating consensus around agreed principles. Articulating principles of

‘property-owning democracy’ negatively, against Labour, was much more likely to

generate general agreement without producing disagreements on the details of policy.

Conservative anti-socialism was an important element of their electoral appeal. Yet it

was only ever one part of it. Conservatives increasingly recognised that their appeal

needed to go beyond simple negations if it was to be successful. This reflected an

increasing sensitivity to democratic opinion, and a fear of being associated with vested

interests. Thus, at the end of a tirade attacking Labour’s failings in 1948, Woolton

reminded his audience that ‘we are no party of privilege’.62 Eccles concluded in 1951 that

‘the typical Conservative has outgrown the old image of wealth and privilege. You find

him or her in all classes’.63 Yet such claims were more aspiration than reality. The risks of

an exclusively anti-socialist strategy were always appreciated. Rothermere’s criticism of

Conservative policy in 1925 received a stinging official response. ‘Social reform is NOT

socialism’, it was argued:

Such an attitude, while interesting as a relic of past thought, finds no support from present day public opinion… No party can hope to continue to be a force in guiding the nation if it merely opposes and lacks the vision to construct.64

Such language had similarities with Skelton’s argument that the Conservative party

should be an ‘architect’ rather than a ‘caretaker’, and also with Baldwin and

Chamberlain’s attitude to social policy in the 1920s. It was generally accepted that

Conservatives appeal needed to be more than simply reactionary. Differences over what

that appeal would be, and the continued influence of older members of the party in the

interwar period, limited the extent that such a strategy was developed at an official level

before 1942. Nevertheless, had Conservative electoral strategy been wholly negative, the

party would not have been as electorally successful as it was.65 Conservatives needed to

offer not only anti-socialism but also a ‘fair deal’ in order to win over Labour.66

62 Woolton, ‘Modern Conservative’, p. 8. 63 David Eccles, ‘The new Conservatism’, 4 August 1951, ArchBCP 1951/5, p. 4. 64 The Conservative Past and Future: A Reply to Viscount Rothermere (1925), ArchBCP 1925/69, pp. 4, 9, 15. 65 Williamson, Baldwin, p. 352. 66 David Eccles, ‘The alternative to nationalisation’, 27 July 1948, CPA, CRD 2/6/11, p. 11.


Page 34

Despite this wariness about a solely negative electoral appeal, the need to attack

socialism was a central motivation for Conservatives. ‘Property-owning democracy’ was

important in this context because it was very often the ideas and values that this

represented that were the key points of difference between Labour and the Conservatives,

demonstrating that even if anti-socialism was often opportunistic it should not be seen as

simply reactionary. Conservative anti-socialism was also largely consistent. While the

tone and content of this appeal changed after 1945, Conservative anti-socialist rhetoric

remained strategically important and consistent with that in the interwar period. It

dominated Conservative party broadcasts, sometimes criticising nationalisation ‘but

more often in terms of a general hostility to controls, bureaucracy, expansion of State

power and interference with economic liberty’.67 Anti-socialism was one reason for the

vehemence of Conservatives’ advocacy of widened ownership. Conservative policies and

strategies were justified in terms of their ability to bolster this anti-socialism. Industry

and the State, for example, argued that their policy constituted ‘the only anti-Socialist

programme that has any chance of success’.68 And when Macmillan spoke of

‘safeguard[ing] Democracy’, socialism was the threat he sought to safeguard against.69

‘We do not base our policy in opposition to Socialism’, Eden claimed in 1946.70 It would

have been more accurate to say that ‘we do not base our policy solely on opposition to

Socialism’.

67 H.G. Nicholas, The British General Election of 1950 (London, 1951), p. 129. 68 Boothby et al., Industry and the State, p. 7. 69 Macmillan, Middle Way, p. 374. 70 Anthony Eden, 7 March 1946, in New Conservatism, p. 70.


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CH A P T E R I I I : ‘ F O R O CCUPAT I ON WHEN YOU DON ’ T WANT TO B U Y ; F OR OWNER SH I P WHEN YOU DO ’

We shall be more cheerful when the Conservatives are back.1

Historians have often found Conservative success in the early twentieth century

problematic because this success was in spite of their association with inequality and

vested interests. This chapter demonstrates that their success was in fact a product of

their ideas about inequality, ownership and economic opportunity. Conservative appeal

was not simply opportunistic: in the period 1918—1951, they responded to the twin

challenges of changing public expectations and acute social problems with solutions

inspired by the values of ‘property-owning democracy’.

The defence of inequality

The Conservatives’ electoral strategy demonstrated that they recognised the obvious

electoral dangers that their acceptance of inequality posed. Wider ownership was

therefore fundamental to ‘property-owning democracy’ despite the fact that

Conservatives’ rhetoric exaggerated its accessibility. As well as anti-socialist and popular

capitalist values, the electoral strategy of ‘property-owning democracy’ also had an

aspirational element. It made a virtue of the Conservatives’ defence of inequality and

emphasised consumer interests. Conservative electoral appeal centred upon aspirations,

and was concerned with ownership, citizenship, and the values of ‘property-owning

democracy’.

The inequality that was inherent to the Conservative appeal was demonstrated by

their concern for property as a political qualification. While ‘property-owning democracy’

was an appeal to diverse social groups, it emphasised the links between ownership,

citizenship and democratic participation. The belief that ownership should be available to

all meant that Conservatives posited the existence of a capitalist community independent

of class. Nonetheless, it is easy to see why many historians have concluded that

Conservative strategy revolved around social class. McKibbin has emphasised the

importance of the ‘£500 man’2 and, in 1947, Conservatives were by their own admission

1 Home Truths (January 1950), p. 1. 2 McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 269.


Page 36

concerned for the ‘£600-a-year man’, a ‘class which is being bullied and browbeaten’.3 In

both cases, Conservative appeal has been interpreted as an appeal to middle-class

interests. Yet it would be more accurately viewed as an appeal to propertied interests,

which were not the sole preserve of those on middle incomes. Conservatives’ explicit

concern for ownership, their attacks on Labour, and the need to appeal to the working-

class electorate all suggest it was property interests which were at core of their electoral

strategy. Particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, the identification between propertied and

middle-class interests was very strong. This identification was demonstrated by the fact

that many Conservatives associated ownership with ‘that ambitious section of the

population that wishes to regard itself as middle class’.4 Yet there remained key

differences. Conservatives targeted not just the middle but also the ‘artisan class’,5

especially after 1945, when ownership came within the compass of a much larger section

of the population. Working-class owner-occupiers were consistently important in

Conservative discourse, identified as ‘thrifty workers’ and ‘better paid artisans’ who were

‘the cream of the working class’.6 Those on middle incomes had a greater interest in

Conservatives’ advocacy of broader ownership, but this was concern not for the middle

class per se but rather as a group to whom ownership was particularly relevant.

The exclusivity of the Conservatives’ appeal was reflected in their pejorative

characterisation of the most dispossessed, slum dwellers and council tenants. Political

exclusion, Schwarz has argued, was particularly important after the 1918 expansion of the

franchise, which ‘required repressions and exclusions as much as it did the virtues of

affirmation’.7 Conservative perceptions of slum dwellers in the 1920s and 1930s were a

mixture of paternalism and cynicism. According to one housing minister, the ‘slum

problem’ was that ‘slum dwellers unfortunately often love their slums!’8 This belief was

one factor in the concern in the 1930s ‘to educate tenants in good tenanthood’.9 After

1945, while avoiding targeting the working class in general, Conservatives articulated a

pejorative characterisation of council tenants consistent with their interwar attitudes to

slum dwellers. This reflected a belief that many council tenants had no aspirations

towards ownership. Conservatives were expected to echo ‘Mrs Perkins’ in Onlooker when

3 Tory Challenge (July 1947), p. 5. See also Notes (31 Janurary 1949), pp. 16-17. 4 David Gammans to Winston Churchill, 29 January 1948, CPA, CRD 2/23/7. 5 ‘Housing’ [2nd draft], manuscript, 1 Janurary 1951, CPA, CCO 4/4/121. 6 Socialism and Your Home (1926), ArchBCP 1926/3; ‘Home ownership’, n.d., p. 2; Neville Chamberlain to Hilda, 18 May 1924, Self (ed.), Diary Letters, ii, p. 223. 7 Bill Schwarz, ‘Politics and rhetoric in the age of mass culture’, History Workshop Journal 46 (1998), p. 132. 8 Arthur Griffith-Boscawen, Memories (London, 1925), p. 141. 9 Happier Homes For All (1935), ArchBCP 1935/19.


Page 37

she concluded ‘don’t see myself living in a council house’.10 Council houses themselves

were decried in Conservative publications as ‘pretty shoddy’.11 This reflected the political

values with which council houses were associated, and the political nation that

Conservatives sought to define, rather than the actual standard of building. Conservative

fears of ‘the country gradually turning into one vast council estate’ were not literal but,

rather, political.12

That Conservative appeal implied an exclusive concern for property was problematic

given the fact ownership was the domain of a minority of the electorate. It was estimated

that wider ownership was of interest to only half the population.13 The suggestion that

‘the property in this country is fairly divided among all classes’ was quite disingenuous.14

Even in 1953, Conservatives privately acknowledged that wider equity ownership

primarily benefited the middle class.15 This was one factor in the Conservatives’ emphasis

upon ownership as an aspiration, rather than as a material reality. Their strategy

demonstrated an awareness of the dangers of defending of inequality, and particularly of

being associated with vested interests. This was almost certainly the reason for the CCO’s

unwillingness to endorse to the formation of a ‘Middle Class Union’ after 1945.16 During

the 1920s and 1930s, there was still election literature that targeted specifically middle

incomes. A leaflet on Unionist housing policy in 1923, for instance, specifically promised

more ‘middle-class houses’.17 Yet by the 1940s, such appeals had become less explicit as

Conservatives had become more sensitive to the risks of defending bourgeois interests.

Notable exceptions to this rule, particularly in the 1940s, were party publications that had

a largely middle-class readership. Tory Challenge in particular was unguarded in its

argument that the government was attacking middle-class interests. A cartoon in 1947,

for instance, ‘on the beach at Margate’ portrayed a ‘middle class’ gent being attacked by a

rabid dog, ‘Shinwell’.18 Such examples were, however, an exception to a strategy that

drew attention away from the fact that the Conservatives’ concern for property was

inegalitarian and favoured middle incomes. An important part of the Conservative appeal

was to propertied interests, but in the context of a large democratic electorate they were

constrained as to the extent they could articulate this appeal to the exclusion of the

10 Onlooker (July 1945), p. 7. 11 Onlooker (March 1945), p. 7. 12 Michael Fraser, ‘The ownership of property’, 1 May 1953, CPA, ACP 3/3 (53) 23, p. 20. 13 What We Think… About Property-Owning Democracy (London, 1949), CPA, CRD 2/23/7, p. 3. 14 Kingsley Wood, quoted in NUG 58 (1923), pp. 80-1. 15 Fraser, ‘Ownership of property’, p. 12; ‘Home ownership’, n.d., CPA, ACP 3/2 (19), p. 3. 16 CPA, CCO 3/1/56. 17 Unionist Housing Act Means More Houses (1923), ArchBCP 1923/48. 18 Tory Challenge (July 1947), p. 3.


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dispossessed. The values of ‘property-owning democracy’ were thus communicated

pragmatically.

Conservatives were realistic about the risks of an unqualified public commitment to

inequality, and of an association with privilege. By imbuing their appeal with aspirations,

they sought to make their inegalitarianism into a virtue. This aspirational element of

their appeal meant that they put the emphasis in their public language upon economic

opportunities and freedom. This was central to their attacks on ‘levelling down’. The

contrast between this and Conservatives’ ‘opportunity for all’ was particularly apparent in

Conservative language during the 1950 and 1951 elections.19 Macmillan reminded the

party in 1947 that:

The betterment of all can only be achieved by endeavouring to reach a higher standard and not by attempting to secure equality by pulling all down to a lower level.20

Instead, Conservatives advocated a ‘national minimum’, and argued for a ‘more selective

and less expensive’ welfare state.21 Conservative strategy after 1945 accepted the principle

of the welfare state as a ‘safety net’ but remained critical of inefficiency and of

universalism. Their emphasis, therefore, was upon economic opportunities within a

welfare state.

The Conservative appeal to the consumer in particular demonstrated the aspirational

element of their strategy and the links between this and ideas about free markets and

individual initiative. It was a powerful critique of the 1945 Labour government given

dissatisfaction with austerity and economic controls. It demonstrated the Conservatives’

strategy of connecting with the electorate through an emphasis on economic opportunity.

This strategy was typically manifested in their claim that ‘the ordinary man… and his

wife… “know best”’.22 Consumerist language became particularly important after 1945

because such language was much more credible when in opposition, criticising an

incumbent government. The Conservative claim in 1950, for example, that ‘too many…

sacrifices are being borne by those who… should least be called upon to make them’23

would have been much more awkward had it been made in the 1930s. The importance of

‘property-owning democracy’ to the Conservative strategy was demonstrated by the fact

that the failure to meet the needs of the ‘consumer’ was often central to their attacks on

Labour. Consumerist language was particularly apparent in Home Truths, which harked

back to the economic opportunities of the interwar period and recorded Pam Peggotty’s

19 E.g. Times (14 February 1950), p. 10. 20 Conference Reports 68 (1947), p. 32. 21 Times (20 September 1951), p. 7; Weiler, ‘Middle way in housing’, p. 388. 22 Just Think! (1950), ArchBCP 1950/61. 23 Macleod and Maude (eds.), One Nation, p. 38.


Page 39

difficulties getting housing and buying food. This approach reflected an underlying belief

that ‘the consumer, and the customer alone, knows what he wants’,24 and was consistent

with Conservatives’ defence, before 1914, of the ‘pleasures of the people’.25 ‘The

Protection of the Consumer’ was also an important element of their opposition to

nationalisation.26 By adopting consumer language, they were making a claim to represent

the interests of the nation, and specifically a nation concerned with economic

opportunity. Such language had an ‘ordinariness’ about it that emphasised this

connection between Conservatives and the public. A broadcast by Eden in 1951 embodied

this approach:

Anyway, who wants statistics…? We all know too well that the pound simply melts away these days.27

The Conservatives’ claim to be ‘the party of the public’ was not novel,28 but it remained an

important part of a strategy which highlighted their democratic credentials through an

emphasis upon economic freedom.

Conservative ideals of domesticity were closely linked to their emphasis upon

aspirations. While these ideals were romanticised, they also embodied an innate

optimism. The home, according to the PWPCC, was:

A place where the younger children can be left to play while their mother is busy with the house-work; and where growing boys and girls can raise vegetables or flowers, keep chickens or rabbits, learn rough carpentry, help their father with odd jobs at the week end, and generally pursue those outdoor hobbies which are such an important factor in their education.29

This rose-tinted image of family life was apparent throughout Conservative language, and

linked to the ideal of a ‘property-owning democracy’ through the values of ownership and

responsibility. The strategy of emphasising the aspiration of owner-occupation embodied

a genuine belief that it was a virtue. Many Conservatives sincerely – if optimistically –

believed that it could be increased across society. Conservative electoral appeal was

imbued with a belief that ‘the British people will not travel far in the Socialist direction if

we show them a better way’.30

By emphasising opportunities and aspirations, Conservative strategy drew attention

away from the wealth inequalities inherent in their policies. This reflected a realisation

that the acceptance of such inequalities was politically dangerous, and a belief that they

24 Tory Reform Committee, Forward--By The Right (London, 1943), p. 13. 25 Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867-1914 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 107. 26 ‘Nationalised industries: general policy’, 29 June 1948, CPA, CRD 2/6/9(i), p. 11. 27 Anthony Eden, ‘The way to peace and prosperity’, 19 October 1951, ArchBCP 1951/60, p. 3. 28 McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 284. 29 Looking Ahead (1944), ArchBCP 1944/2, p. 9. 30 Eccles, What Do You Think? (London, 1948), ArchBCP 1948/35, p. 11.


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were unimportant within ‘property-owning democracy’. The ‘One Nation’ group of

Conservatives after 1950 reflected a longstanding Conservative belief that ‘inequality

[w]as both necessary and desirable’.31 There are strong parallels between ‘one nation’

Conservatism and the emphasis upon ‘status’ (rather than inequality) as the ‘master

problem’ in the interwar period. The Conservative strategy of ‘property-owning

democracy’ was closely linked with the creation of a broad aspirational appeal, an effort

to draw attention away from its defence of material inequality.

‘The more people who own their own home, the better’

Conservatives’ belief in the spread of ownership was rhetorically important to their

electoral strategy, despite the fact that wider ownership was constrained by economic

realities. They anticipated wider ownership, through co-partnership, savings, and house

purchase, was highly desirable even if they were constrained by material realities. While

the fervour with which these different forms were advocated changed depending on

economic circumstances, all three represented an electoral strategy that was thematically

consistent.

Co-partnership and profit-sharing were particularly important to Conservative appeal

in the 1920s and 1930s. The idea of co-partnership – of workers’ shares in the profits and

management of industry – was popularised in Britain after the 1880s.32 That it received

particular emphasis in the interwar period reflected the fact that it seemed to resolve the

challenges posed by a mass electorate, calls for ‘industrial democracy’ and renewed

industrial strife. The link between co-partnership, economic ‘status’ and the creation of a

‘wider industrial outlook’ was first made by Skelton, but was subsequently made by many

others.33 Virtually every party conference agenda paper after 1924 featured a motion on

co-partnership and profit-sharing. The compatibility of co-partnership with the values of

‘property-owning democracy’ explains the emphasis placed upon it by Skelton and his

contemporaries, and industrial disruption in the 1920s and 1930s strengthened its

political importance. However, it was recognised that the government’s role in promoting

co-partnership was a necessarily limited one. Conservatives acknowledged that its

implementation required ‘mutual good faith and good will’ rather than legislation.34 The

authors of Industry and the State were among those most keen to introduce it, but even

they did not envisage compulsion in most cases. Moreover, as the CRD recognised, co-

partnership had a limited electoral appeal. It was dismissed in 1930 as ‘singularly futile’

31 Hickson, ‘Inequality’, p. 191. 32 Jihang Park, Profit-sharing and Industrial Co-partnership in British Industry, 1880-1920 (New York, 1987), pp. 1, 40. 33 E.g. Industrial Charter (1947), ArchBCP 1947/36, p. 32. 34 Co-partnership (1924), ArchBCP 1924/14, p. 18.


Page 41

because it suggested ‘no case for Government action of any kind’.35 After 1945, Alport

sympathised with the view that ‘if Co-partnership… is the only alternative to

Nationalisation it is a very poor alternative’, and an internal report concluded that the

scope for a policy of co-partnership was limited.36 Co-partnership’s electoral appeal was

also limited by confusion over its meaning, demonstrated by an episode recounted at the

1924 conference when a prospective Conservative MP maintained that his opposition to

co-partnership stemmed from a belief that ‘one wife should be enough for anybody’.37

Nevertheless there was continued interest in co-partnership among Conservatives after

1945. This was particularly the case in 1946 and 1947.38 Both The Industrial Charter and

the CPC’s Profit-sharing and Co-partnership demonstrated the continued importance of

co-partnership.39 But this interest reflected a desire to emphasise the values of ‘property-

owning democracy’, rather than in co-partnership itself, which had limited strategic

importance. It continued to be seen as a ‘pis-aller’ of exaggerated significance.40 As a

result of its obvious lack of electoral resonance, and the limited scope for government

action in promoting it, co-partnership was never a major element of policy. It is

nevertheless historically important because Conservative advocacy of co-partnership in

the 1920s and 1930s reflected the values of ‘property-owning democracy’ just as strongly

as their later strategy of promoting homeownership.

Owner-occupation, as a political and social phenomenon, became gradually more

important from the 1930s, when credit became much cheaper. It was only then that

homeownership came within the reach of affluent workers and the majority of the middle

class. Yet while Conservatives associated themselves with owner-occupation in the 1930s,

it was only after 1945 that they developed the rhetoric of ‘property-owning democracy’ in

relation to home ownership. One reason for this is that while ownership was undeniably

expanding in the 1930s, it only had limited political importance. This reflected the

consensus around the National Government, wider economic problems, and the

importance of international challenges. While Conservatives boasted of their success in

housing in general, they said much less specifically about owner-occupation.

Conservative promises to promote home ownership after 1945 demonstrated not only the

values of ‘property-owning democracy’ but also political opportunism. The potency of this

issue, and its later centrality to Conservative electoral strategy, was not initially realised.

35 Unsigned memo, 26 March 1930, CPA, CRD 1/3/1. 36 Alport to Clarke, 2 July 1947, CPA, CRD 2/6/9(ii); G.M. Block, ‘Co-partnership and profit-sharing in industry’, November 1946, CPA, CRD 2/7/59(i). 37 Conference Reports 52 (1924), p. 30. 38 CPA, CRD 2/7/59(i). 39 Industrial Charter, p. 34; Topic for Today: Profit-sharing and Co-partnership (London, 1950), ArchBCP 1950/78. 40 Block to Clarke, 26 February 1946, CPA, CRD 2/7/59(ii).


Page 42

Looking Ahead (1944) demonstrated the assumption that ‘housing is one of the non-

controversial issues in party politics today’.41 As late as 1948, key figures in the CRD were

arguing that the best way to create a ‘property-owning democracy’ was through private

savings.42 It is significant that Conservatives’ use of the rhetoric of ‘property-owning

democracy’ preceded their realisation of the importance of housing as an issue. Through

1946, both Churchill and Eden linked this language to industry, profit-sharing and

‘partnership in industry’ rather than to owner-occupation.43 Conservatives only began to

realise the electoral potency of their historic advocacy of wider home ownership as part of

an effort after 1945 to redefine and rebuild their electoral support. Motions on housing at

conferences became increasingly partisan. In 1950, Woolton concluded that ‘the failure of

socialist housing policy is the cause of widespread hardship and misery’, and was

therefore an electoral opportunity.44

This Conservative appeal to owner-occupiers, and to the aspiration of owner-

occupation was not new, even if it had a new prominence after 1945. A Conservative

pamphlet in 1926, had argued that Labour’s attacks on the ‘idle rich’ threatened not just

owners but also aspiring owners.45 Even before Skelton’s articles were published,

Conservative literature emphasised the importance of wider home ownership in

pamphlets such as The Landless People and Are You A Capitalist?46 In 1924 Kingsley

Wood claimed that Unionists had a long history of encouraging owner-occupation47 and

in 1925 Griffith Boscawen argued it was their ‘help for house purchasers’ that

distinguished Conservative policy.48 That the nature of the Conservative appeal to the

ideal of home ownership changed over the period 1918—1951 reflected not a change in

values but in circumstances. From the 1940s, its accessibility to affluent workers as well

as those on middle incomes meant that Conservatives could much more plausibly suggest

owner-occupation was within reach of all. The reality was that it remained the preserve of

the relatively wealthy. An internal party report in 1950 noted that while there was ‘a

strong demand from the majority… for houses to buy’, ‘the economic cost makes such a

situation largely “unreal”’.49 That owner-occupation, as an expression of ‘property-

owning democracy’, came to have such importance to the Conservative appeal reflected

both the values of ‘property-owning democracy’ and also opportunism. While their

41 Looking Ahead (1944), ArchBCP 1944/2, p. 30. 42 Tory Challenge (April 1948), p. 6. 43 Times (7 October 1946), p. 2. See also, Times (28 October 1946), p. 2. 44 Woolton to constituency agents, 14 February 1950, CPA, CCO 4/3/119. 45 Socialism and Your Home (1926), ArchBCP 1926/3. 46 The Landless People (1922), ArchBCP 1922/53; Are You A Capitalist? (1922), ArchBCP 1922/56. 47 Quoted in NUG 59 (1924), p. 362. 48 Times (7 April 1925), p. x. 49 ‘Housing: the human problem’, 1 February 1950, CPA, CCO 4/3/119, p. 8.


Page 43

commitment to wider ownership was consistent throughout this period, the means by

which it was to be achieved changed to reflect the context in which it was articulated.

The pragmatism of the Conservatives’ electoral strategy was particularly demonstrated by

their attitude towards the welfare state. The ideal of a ‘property-owning democracy’ was

challenged by social ills, perceived as both morally and politically important. Good

houses, even rented ones, were expected to aid ‘social contentment’50 and state

intervention was justified by the ‘greater need of the community’.51 Conservatives

perceived changing expectations about the state. The welfare state embodied a changing

mood, something Conservatives would have been ‘extremely myopic’ to have

overlooked.52 As a result, they sought not only to expound a distinctive Conservative

vision of state welfare but also to reassure the public that they would not implement a

laissez-faire economic agenda.53 ‘Property-owning democracy’ was construed by some as

an alternative to social spending.54 That most Conservatives rejected such interpretations

demonstrated their sensitivity to public opinion and to social need. They saw their

attitude to the state after 1942 as a test of their electoral credibility. Their fears of being

seen to oppose social spending on housing were such that an uncontroversial internal

report on it in 1949 was marked ‘secret’ and its distribution strictly limited.55

Conservative attitudes to state welfare compromised the principles of ‘property-owning

democracy’. But their vision of the ‘welfare state’ was nevertheless imbued with those

values.

Housing was a particularly important social issue in the context of ‘property-owning

democracy’ because it represented a conjunction of concerns about individual initiative

and social harmony.56 The Conservatives’ acceptance of the need for social housing in the

1920s, and for slum clearance in the 1930s, particularly demonstrated the tensions

between ‘property-owning democracy’ and Conservative realpolitik. Hilton Young

justified slum clearance on the grounds that slums were ‘not so much a housing question

as a public health question’; he recognised the need for state intervention on the basis of

social need.57 Such action was justified ‘in the interests of social contentment’.58 As Frame

has pointed out, ‘the very fact that the Government was willing to take on responsibilities

50 Times (27 Janurary 1923), p. 3. 51 Conference Reports 65 (1943), p. 391. 52 Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, vol. 1, ‘Britain in Search of Balance, 1940-61’ (Basingstoke, 1986), p. 690. 53 Zweiniger-Bergielowska, ‘Conservative party recovery’, p. 188. 54 Norman St John Stevas, quoted in Conference Reports 70 (1949), p. 23. 55 ‘Housing policy’, 08 March 1949, CPA, CRD 2/23/9. 56 Frame, ‘Domestic reconstruction’, p. 317. 57 Hilton Young, A Great Housing Policy (1933), ArchBCP 1933/8, p. 4. 58 Times (27 January 1923), p. 7.


Page 44

at all showed a growing recognition that the failure of the market mechanism made it

necessary for some interference to take place’.59 Chamberlain, speaking in 1926, summed

up this approach: ‘I am all for private enterprise, except where I think that private

enterprise cannot function so well as communal enterprise’. His advocacy of state

intervention in order to deal with slums reflected his belief that they could not be

improved so long as they remained privately owned.60 That Conservatives went much

further in their acceptance of the need for state housing in the 1940s reflected the impact

of the war not just on public opinion but in creating a housing shortage of unprecedented

magnitude.61 Conservative interference in the housing market after 1951 was entirely

consistent with interwar practice; the principles of ‘property-owning democracy’ were

never immutable. And if the criterion for interference was ‘extreme and urgent need’, this

was met after 1945.62

The Conservative attitude to council housing, as to the post-1942 ‘welfare state’, was

one of qualified acceptance. Their stance was a compromise between ‘property-owning

democracy’, social need, and public opinion. The principles of ‘property-owning

democracy’ had particular importance in housing, where government intervention was

limited in terms of quality (to the smallest house, to let) and in terms of quantity (until a

free market could be restored). While associating local-authority housing with

‘propertyless proletarians’, Conservatives accepted that private enterprise did not meet

the needs of the poorest.63 ‘The smallest type of house’ was the basis for Conservative

social housing, and private enterprise was expected to meet demand for other types.64

Therefore, while social need qualified ‘property-owning democracy’, it did not vitiate it.

Instead it reflected a willingness to respond to social ills, linked to Conservative concern

for harmony, legitimacy and public expectations.

Despite Conservative acceptance of the ‘welfare state’, they were not shy of advocating

non-state solutions. As late as 1946, the PWPCC anticipated a situation where

intervention in housing could return to solely slum clearance.65 The preference for

individual initiative was one of the most distinctive elements of Conservative appeal. This

did not necessarily mean an abandonment of social housing but rather emphasised a

59 Frame, ‘Domestic reconstruction’, p. 311. 60 Times (20 February 1926), p. 7. 61 Bentley Gilbert, British Social Policy, 1914-1939 (London, 1970), p. 203; Jones, ‘This is magnificent!’ p. 100. 62 Jones, ‘Conservative party and the welfare state’, p. 129. 63 David Gammans to Winston Churchill, 29 January 1948, CPA, CRD 2/23/7. 64 Kingsley Wood, Our Social Services (1936), ArchBCP 1936/20; Kingsley Wood, speech, 26 Janurary 1923, Times (27 January 1923), p. 3. 65 Jones, ‘Conservative party and the welfare state’, p. 127.


Page 45

commitment to administrative efficiency. The Conservative position was thus

summarised:

Insofar as housing is a social service many houses [not provided by] private enterprise must be provided by local authorities; but it [is] mere exaggeration to argue that because some house must be built by local authorities, the great bulk of the housing programme should be entrusted to them.66

It was accepted that ‘the houses have to be provided; and so large a job cannot be left to

private enterprise’.67 The expansion of the housing stock, rather than the preferment of

private enterprise, was the Conservatives’ primary objective in the early 1920s.68 The

Tory Reform Committee’s commitment in 1943 to ‘vigorous’ private enterprise alongside

‘social justice’ as a government priority was therefore not new.69

Conservative housing policy demonstrated their willingness to compromise the

principles of ‘property-owning democracy’, at least in the short term, in order to retain

electoral credibility. This was particularly important in housing given the conflict

between the Conservatives’ objective of fulfilling the housing shortfall and their

commitment to a free market. This was demonstrated by their reluctance to adopt a

policy of council house sales, and by their commitment in 1947 to 300,000 houses a

year.70 The gulf between this and the creation of a ‘property-owning democracy’ caused

tensions between Macmillan and Butler after 1951, reflecting the fact that state-assisted

building was central to meeting this target.71 Underlying this was a realisation among

Conservatives that ‘it does not matter two scraps who builds the houses so long as they

are’.72 It also demonstrated realism about public priorities:

The British people are more concerned with building the maximum number of houses than with any question whether they are for sale or to let, or privately or publicly built.73

This conflict between a commitment to ‘property-owning democracy’ and the need to

build large numbers of houses to let at affordable rents demonstrated that while

implemented with a great deal of pragmatism, the Conservative vision of a ‘property-

owning democracy’ was an important feature of their housing policy.

Nevertheless, ‘property-owning democracy’ was of enduring importance in

determining Conservative strategy. While they largely accepted the idea of a ‘welfare

state’, concerns about economy, efficiency and initiative meant that they articulated a

66 Notes (17 January 1949), p. 10. 67 Room to Live (1919), ArchBCP 1919/37, p. 2. 68 Crowther, Social Policy, p. 56. 69 Tory Reform Committee, Forward, pp. 10, 16. 70 Weiler, ‘“Grand design for housing”’. 71 Harriet Jones, ‘New tricks for old dogs? The Conservatives and social policy, 1951-5’, in Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman, and W. Scott Lucas (eds.), Contemporary British History, 1931-1961: Politics and the limits of policy (London, 1991), p. 39; Jones, ‘This is magnificent!’ p. 117. 72 Conference Reports 71 (1950), p. 58. 73 Conference Reports 67 (1946), p. 3.


Page 46

particular kind of welfare, a ‘national minimum’ rather than a universalistic standard.

Private enterprise remained, where feasible, central to welfare provision and

Conservatives had an enduring preference for non-state solutions. Conservative

opposition to egalitarianism in particular that distinguished their attitude to social

policy.74 The ‘One Nation’ group typified this perspective, articulating a ‘qualified

acceptance of much of the new welfare state, whilst insisting that freer competition was

essential in order to shore this up’.75

That Conservatives’ public language placed an emphasis upon the universal attainability

of ownership demonstrated the importance of ‘property-owning democracy’ but also their

sensitivity to context. Despite their advocacy of owner-occupation as a mass institution, it

remained only affordable to limited numbers. This was reflected in the duality of

Conservative strategy in housing. Housing as a ‘social service’ was consistently defended

as a necessary element of government intervention, providing a ‘national minimum’ for

the good of the community. But this did not contradict their belief in the spread of

ownership, as part of the creation of a ‘property-owning democracy’. The differentiation

between smaller houses to let for those on low incomes and other housing to buy for

those who could afford them was striking. The interwar spread of owner-occupation,

Conservatives realised, disproportionately benefited the middle class.76 Even in 1945,

many believed that ‘a working-class house [is] built to rent’.77 Conservative confidence in

public about mass ownership was belied by private assessments that ‘any movement

towards home ownership would not be a mass movement’.78 The Conservative

commitment to expanding homeownership was qualified by a realisation that ‘if… the

provision of houses for owner-occupation prejudices the chance of those who need rented

houses it is likely to be socially undesirable and politically unrewarding’.79 In spite of this

realism, Conservatives in the 1930s, and particularly the 1940s, publicly argued owner-

occupation was within the means of all. The claim in 1934 that ‘houses for sale are now

available on such low terms that the old distinction between those for sale and those to let

is rapidly losing its economic significance’ contradicted the belief among policymakers

that there remained a significant gap between those who could afford to own their own

houses and those who could not.80

74 Jones, ‘Conservative party and the welfare state’. 75 Walsha, ‘One Nation group’, p. 214. 76 ‘Home ownership’, n.d., CPA, ACP 3/2 (52) 19, p. 2. 77 HCDebs. (17 October 1945), v. 414, c. 1262. 78 ‘Home ownership’, n.d., p. 12, emphasis added. 79 Ibid., p. 2. 80 Brooke to Director, 24 May 1934, CPA, CRD 1/1/1, #21.


Page 47

One reason for this was that Conservative electoral strategy, by placing an emphasis

on aspirations, drew attention away from their defence of inequality and sought to make

it a virtue. Another was the sense of optimism about economic opportunities that imbued

Conservative public language. Widened ownership was assumed by Conservatives to be

both popular and desirable. They perceived a ‘national preference for ownership’ as a

‘fundamental [desire] of the people’.81 Housing was seen as expressing larger socio-

economic aspirations in the context of a ‘property-owning democracy’. The Landless

People in 1922 claimed that:

Many hundred thousand Englishmen own the house they live in, the ground upon which it stands, and the garden that goes with the house. Many hundreds and thousand more are becoming owners, buying the house and the land by instalments through building societies. Others are looking forward to a time when they will begin to be owners.82

This commitment to wider ownership was central to Conservative public language. While

historians have rightly questioned the extent to which interwar Conservative policy

actually created a ‘new class of owner occupier’83, an emphasis on the accessibility of

owner-occupation was central to Conservative appeal.

Conservative electoral strategy demonstrated an unwillingness to acknowledge that

their policies disproportionately benefited particular social groups. Conservative appeal,

therefore, should not be seen in terms of social class. Chamberlain’s claim that ‘we are

building up a whole new class of good citizens’84 was misleading, because it is unlikely he

actually believed owner-occupation was creating a new social class rather than creating

‘good citizens’ among different social groups. The multi-faceted appeal of Conservatives

to owners, prospective owners and aspiring owners demonstrates the importance of

viewing their appeal, and the electoral support that it won, in terms of property and

citizenship rather than any particular social group.85 Macmillan warned in 1946 of the

risks of becoming preoccupation with ‘privilege and ownership’.86 The success of

Conservative strategy, particularly after 1945, was that it defended ownership while

avoiding an association with privilege.

81 Leo Amery, The Conservative Future (1946), ArchBCP 1946/68, p. 18; Galbraith, HCDebs. (29 July 1946), v. 426, c. 797. 82 Landless People (1922), ArchBCP 1922/53. 83 Houses and How to Get Them (1924), ArchBCP 1924/10, p. 18. 84 Neville Chamberlain to Hilda, 17 October 1925, in Self (ed.), Diary Letters, ii, p. 316. 85 Andrew Taylor, ‘“The Record of the 1950s is Irrelevant”: The Conservative party, electoral strategy and opinion research, 1945–64’, Contemporary British History 17 (2003), pp. 85, 104. 86 Harold Macmillan, ‘The Conservative approach to modern politics’, 7 May 1946, ArchBCP 1946/39, p. 11.


Page 48

CONCLU S ION

‘Property-owning democracy’ continued to be an important theme in the Conservative

party’s appeal after 1951. What this study demonstrates is that the values it embodied

were not created after 1945, but were an important part of interwar Conservative

strategy. Given this, the extent to which the Conservative party after 1945 underwent a

process of fundamental realignment can be overstated. ‘Property-owning democracy’ was

a unifying theme in Conservatism, either explicitly or implicitly, throughout the period

1918—1951.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume that Noel Skelton was the sole, or even

principal, architect of Conservative strategy in this period. When he first used the term

‘property-owning democracy’ in 1923, the values he associated with it were consistent

with those expressed by other Conservatives before him. The Conservative emphasis on

the link between ownership and electoral participation reflected an established principle.

There were also more contemporary examples, in the aftermath of World War I, of the

Conservative advocacy of wider ownership. In 1922, a pamphlet claimed that the

promoting of smallholdings was ‘only one of the ways the government is helping ex-

service men to make homes for themselves’.1 Conservative publications during 1922 also

emphasised the universalism of capitalism and the threat of expropriation posed by

Labour.2 These were all strategies at the core of ‘property-owning democracy’ throughout

the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. These examples serve to demonstrate that much of what

Skelton wrote was not new in 1923. His significance, however, was fourfold. Firstly, he

articulated these ideas in an explicitly democratic manner, and recognised the need to

widen the opportunities for ownership where possible. Secondly, the phrase ‘property-

owning democracy’ became inextricably associated with the values of ownership,

citizenship and individualism for which he was concerned. Thirdly, he influenced key

individuals such as Macmillan and Eden, and his vision was central to their attitude to

state welfare and nationalisation in the 1940s. Most fundamentally, however, Skelton was

among the first to recognise the need for Conservatives to move beyond their traditional

association with privilege and wealth. The idea that ownership was a ‘right’ was a

Conservative response to democracy that maintained their traditional concern for

1 A “Holding” Of My Own (1922), ArchBCP 1922/18, original emphasis. 2 The Landless People (1922), ArchBCP 1922/53; Are You A Capitalist? (1922), ArchBCP 1922/56.


Page 49

individual ownership. Conservatives’ enthusiasm for ownership has thus been explained

by Gatland:

Given that in the nineteenth century Conservatives had argued that only property owners should possess political rights, it followed that in an age when all had the vote, all should be property owners.3

Conservatives remained a party of property within the context of the democratic

franchise by redefining ownership along broader lines: the three decades after 1918 saw

Conservatives responding to democratisation by seeking to widen ownership and thus

their electoral support.

‘Property-owning democracy’ was not simply rhetoric. It was a set of values and

strategies that explain Conservative appeal in the early twentieth century. It is also a

useful historical label. The term was not widely used by Conservatives until after 1946.

Nevertheless, it is useful because even when the term itself was not explicitly used, the

ideas that it represented were often important. To some extent, therefore, Conservatives’

advocacy of ‘property-owning democracy’ was instinctive. It was closely associated with

values that were central to Conservative appeal, and underscores the underlying

consistency of these values.

Given the diversity of Conservative ideas, their appeal should not be seen in terms of

social class. Instead, it is much more useful to view it in terms of its emphasis upon

ownership as an attribute of ‘good citizenship’. They appealed not just to those on middle

incomes (who particularly benefited from Conservative policies) but also to those on

lower incomes (especially skilled workers) who sought economic security and social

status, and who were often suspicion of government intervention. This strategy had its

shortcomings, but even so, it was undoubtedly one of the defining elements of twentieth-

century Conservatism. Despite the prominence of ‘property-owning democracy’ during

the 1950 and 1951 general election campaigns, Conservatives failed to secure a decisive

victory in either. Nevertheless, ‘property-owning democracy’ was important because it

justified longstanding Conservative values to an electorate that often did not materially

benefit from them.

By focusing on the consistencies in Conservative strategy before and after World War II,

this study challenges the idea that the period 1939—1945 was a point of discontinuity.

The importance of this is that it emphasises the need to see post-war Conservatism as

part of a longstanding political tradition. Conservative language and strategies may have

been markedly dissimilar to those in the interwar period, but the ideas and appeals that

3 Gatland, ‘Constructive Conservatism’, p. 77.


Page 50

underpinned them were consistent. What did change after 1945 was the context in which

these ideas were articulated. The events of 1939—1945 had a twofold significance. They

marked a growing public acceptance of state intervention. Government was increasingly

expected to act to solve social problems. One reason for this was the experience of World

War II. Yet attitudes to social spending were shifting through the 1920s and 1930s, and

Conservatives were responsible for a range of measures, particularly in housing and

unemployment insurance. After 1945, Conservatives found themselves presented with a

fait accompli in the form of the welfare state after 1945. The rhetoric of ‘property-owning

democracy’ became particularly important because Conservatives were forced to

articulate an alternative to universal social security, advocating a ‘national minimum’, in

order to maintain their electoral credibility. This vision of the welfare state may have

been a response to wider developments, but it was not simply reactionary and it was

imbued with the values of ‘property-owning democracy’.

The second key change prompted by the events of 1939—1945 was an internal change

in Conservative personnel. The shift in the balance of power in the party partly reflected

changed public expectations; but it also reflected the fact that many individuals who had

been largely excluded from the party’s leadership before the war now assumed positions

of influence. While the ‘young men’ of the 1920s had lamented that ‘you will get no

response for thought and sacrifice from the present Unionist party’,4 after 1945 they had

a new sense of optimism. Individuals such as Macmillan became ministers. The CRD

brought into the party figures such as Powell, Macleod and Maudling, and the PWPCC

provided a forum for Conservative ideas. That, after 1945, Eden was seen as Churchill’s

heir apparent emphasised the impression that the party was being led by a new

generation. Thus while changes in Conservative strategy represented both ‘idealism and

calculation’, Ramsden has argued, ‘this was only possible with a group of men from a new

generation at the helm’.5 Particularly relevant to the Conservative attitude to state welfare

was the view of these ‘young men’ that intervention could support, rather than destroy,

individual freedom by protecting wider ownership.6 This view was not one that they held

for the first time in 1945; but it was only after 1945 that they were able to directly

influence policy. These conclusions underline the methodological importance of studying

public discourse. This is especially important in Conservative historiography because

Conservatives’ own non-doctrinaire self image precluded an exhaustive statement of

principles in anything but the most general terms.

4 Skelton, quoted in Macmillan, Winds of Change, p. 256. 5 Ramsden, Churchill and Eden, p. 153. 6 Lowe, ‘Foundation of the welfare state’, p. 162.


Page 51

Conservative success in the period 1918—1951 reflected the fact that ownership was at

the centre of their appeal. ‘Property-owning democracy’ was more than just a phrase; it

described a sophisticated strategy that made longstanding Conservative values

compatible with mass democracy. It may have been inherently inegalitarian, but it

appealed to a broad spectrum of the electorate by drawing upon popular aspirations for

economic security, and drawing attention away from the often-harsh material realities of

their defence of inequality. David Eccles spoke for many Conservatives in 1948 when he

concluded that:

Men are partly selfish and partly idealist, and they give their best when they believe they have a reasonable chance to put something in their pockets and to realise a fragment of their dreams.7

7 Eccles, ‘Alternative to nationalisation’, p. 1.


Page 52

B I B L I OGRA PHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

Archives and collections

Annual Conference Reports of the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations

Archives of the British Conservative Party, series 1, ‘Pamphlets and leaflets’ (Hassocks: Harvester Microfilm, 1978)

Conservative Party Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford

National Union Gleanings and Continuations (Hassocks, 1973)

Parliamentary Debates: Official Report (Commons), 5th series

Published primary sources

Amery, L.S., Framework for the Future (Oxford, 1944)

Barnes, John and David Nicholson (eds.), The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929—1945 (London, 1988)

Boothby, Robert, Harold Macmillan, John V. De Loder, and Oliver Stanley, Industry and the State: A Conservative View (London, 1927)

Craig, F.W.S., British Electoral Facts, 1885-1975 (London, 1976)

Eden, Anthony, Freedom and Order: Selected Speeches 1939—1946 (London, n.d. [1947])

Elliot, Walter, Toryism and the Twentieth Century (London, 1927)

Griffith-Boscawen, Arthur, Memories (London, 1925)

Macmillan, Harold, The Middle Way: A Study of the Problem of Economic and Social Progress in a Free and Democratic Society (London, 1938)

Self, Robert (ed.), The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, ii (Aldershot, 2000)

Skelton, Noel, Constructive Conservatism (Edinburgh, 1924)

Tory Reform Committee, Forward--By The Right (London, 1943)

Newspapers and periodicals

Notes on Current Politics (1944—1952) [NUG]

The Onlooker (1945–1947) [CPA, PUB 213]

Questions of Policy (1945—1955) [CPA, PUB 219]

The Times

Tory Challenge (1947—1951) [CPA, PUB 214]


Page 53

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Documents

"Creating a property-owning democracy"