From ‘Consensus’ to ‘Common Ground’: The Rhetoric of the Postwar Settlement and its Collapse

Abstract

There has been much historical debate about whether or not there was a ‘political consensus’ in Britain in the postwar decades. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to what politicians said about ‘consensus’ at the time and what this indicated about the nature of political argument. This article shows that ‘consensus’ and similar terms (such as ‘the middle way’) were in use from the 1940s, but it does not assume that consensus existed just because some contemporaries asserted that it did. Rather, it examines how differing interpretations of consensus were invoked in political debate in order to advance a range of partisan agendas. It further shows how right-wing Conservatives from the late 1960s sought both to attack the consensus rhetorically and to reach out (in Keith Joseph’s phrase) to ‘the common ground’ that New Right policies supposedly represented. It concludes that Thatcher, as Conservative leader and Prime Minister, did not abandon the structure of consensus rhetoric so much as repopulate it with exclusively ‘national’ terms.