The shift in values and in power

Post-war Britain was a country much changed, bewildering to its rulers, themselves formed in an age which, for all its stresses, had been one in which the appearance at least of a basic continuity had been maintained.

With the old landed families in decline, new men of wealth and power asserted themselves. They were the creators and products of the age of monopoly already apparent before the war, and of the war itself with its immense government contracts and unprecedented finance. A good number of such men had been drawn directly into the war effort as ministers, departmental heads or advisers. They were now almost a new estate of the realm, the custodians of the arcana of big business. There was some inclination among Conservative politicians to think that they should also be in control of public economic affairs. Their outlook was, of course, very different from that of the former mentors of society, the landed class. The minds of the latter had largely been formed by the agricultural estates over which they had presided; their outlook had its roots in the land, its crops and animals and men. The new business men, especially the most powerful among them, the financiers, were often remote from this kind of psyche-building life, being concerned with estimates about the course of markets, or, very often, estimates about the estimates and actions of others.