The chapter looks in detail at Churchill’s post-Second World War campaign for European unity. It begins by explaining the concepts of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ and ‘Christian civilisation’ that informed his thinking, before outlining the evolution of his thought through exposure to the ideas of Coudenhove-Kalergi and Briand. Prior to the Second World War, Churchill stated explicitly that Britain should not be a member of a proposed United States of Europe, but his ideas continued to evolve. In 1940 his government made the offer of Franco-British Union, and by 1942 he was promoting the idea of a Council of Europe as a counterweight to Russian ‘barbarism’. Defeated at the 1945 election, his Zurich speech and ensuing United Europe campaign are seen within the context of his desire to demonstrate his continued relevance on the world stage and against the backdrop of the developing Cold War. Nonetheless, they were based on sincere beliefs that helped inspire a broader transnational movement. The chapter concludes with the ambiguities in Churchill’s views on the role of Britain in Europe and argues that they may be a ‘problematic guide’ to more recent European politics.

H. G. Wells's novel The New Machiavelli (1911) contains some notable criticisms of the Edwardian Liberal party. The hero, Richard Remington, is elected as Liberal MP in 1906, but becomes disillusioned with the party and with ‘our self-satisfied new Liberalism and Progressivism’. Of the Liberals themselves he says mockingly: ‘It was tremendously clear what they were against. The trouble was to find out what on earth they were for’! (Wells 1911, II, pp. 31, 20). Commended as ‘the equal of any political novel in the English language’ (Clarke 1996, p. 40), it has also been described as ‘an anti-Liberal tract’ (Cowling 1985, p. 216). That interpretation might seem to be a natural one, given that, in his extensive nonfiction political writings, Wells is generally thought to have presented ‘a fundamentally socialist doctrine of reform’ (Hyde 1956, p. 217). Believing that ‘the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology’, he put much effort into describing the ideal society (Wells 1916). His earliest and best-known attempt at this was A Modern Utopia (1905a), which described an idyllic World State ruled over by ‘voluntary noblemen’ known as ‘Samurai’. Therefore, much as Wells has been hailed for his penetrating satirical comments on the Edwardian social-sexual-political milieu, it might seem that he was, mentally speaking, almost on a different planet from the practical-minded men who designed the pre-1914 welfare reforms. Yet Wells undoubtedly had a significant impact on key New Liberal reformers.

In September 1994, during the early months of the phenomenon known as ‘New Labour’, The Independent carried the headline ‘Blair ditches Keynes’. It was reported that Labour leaders would tell a conference of businessmen and academics ‘that the party has turned its back on Keynesian economics and “the old ways of corporatism”’. In fact, Blair used his speech to insist that Keynes's legacy of demand management had never implied increasing demand ‘irrespective of economic circumstances and even at a time of inflation and high borrowing’. Real Keynesianism, in his view, represented a wider critique of the functioning of capitalism – not a call for permanent government pump-priming. Likewise, Gordon Brown stated on the same occasion that ‘I am not here to bury the real Keynes but to praise him’. This is an approach that New Labour followed in government. Blair continued to cite Keynes as an example of the beneficial influence of Liberalism on the Labour party. Brown, as Chancellor, asserted that although New Labour rejected ‘crude “Keynesianism”’, the government sought ‘to draw on the best of Keynes’ insights about political economy and put a modern Keynesian approach into practice'.

Blair and Brown's approach represents an attempt, whether conscious or otherwise, to employ Peter Clarke's useful distinction between ‘Keynesianism’ and ‘the historical Keynes’. In their opinion, the views of the ‘real’ (or ‘historical’) Keynes were misinterpreted by the economists and politicians who came after him.

‘What is national planning but an insistence that human beings shall make ethical choices on a national scale?’ asked Aneurin Bevan at the 1949 Labour Party conference. He continued: ‘Planning means that you ask yourself the question: which comes first? What is the most important? … The language of priorities is the religion of Socialism.’ This was a subtle, oblique and persuasive defence of the government's programme of cuts in investment and social services, of which Bevan's own housing programme had been a notable victim. Chiefly associated not with Bevan, but with the famously ascetic figure of Cripps, this policy was accompanied by a marked change in Labour's rhetoric about the planned economy. Once, to use Attlee's pre-war phrase, planning had been seen as the key to the treasure house of a better world. Now, in the aftermath of the annus horrendus of 1947, it was a means of imposing hard economic choices in the interests of national survival. Labour's ‘plan for plenty’ had been supplanted by the necessary expedient of austerity.

Of course, this change was a reaction (perhaps somewhat belated) to the extreme economic situation in which Britain found herself. The problems the nation now faced were of an entirely different order from those of the 1930s, which Labour's policy of planning had originally been designed to rectify. Accordingly, the measures which the government took – and which it nonetheless presented as consistent with Labour's previous ideas – were in important respects different from the planning solutions that Labour had proposed since 1931.

The outbreak of war in September 1939 created mixed feelings of moral relief and terrified apprehension. An end had come at last to the National government's policy of appeasing Germany, so recently hugely popular with the public, but now widely seen as a miserable sequence of betrayals. But the horrors of the great war seemed, if anything, likely to be exceeded, given the ‘progress’ of military technology. Stanley Baldwin's famous phrase, ‘the bomber will always get through’, continued to resonate. A typical view from within the Labour Party was recorded by Barbara Betts (later Castle) in her memoirs: ‘We were immensely relieved that our timorous government had at last been forced to stand up to Hitler, and we prepared to play our part in the anti-fascist war. But I was under no illusions about what war would mean, and I dreaded it.’

Yet the phoney war that followed was eerily uneventful, creating an unease that was reflected in the political peculiarity of the period. Labour remained outside the government, believing, as Dalton argued, that in entering an administration headed by Neville Chamberlain and John Simon, the party would not only be uninfluential from within, but would lose its power to influence from without. The spirit of national unity had not yet taken over. Although the Labour movement was fully pledged to the war effort, and in spite of the electoral truce, relations between the unions and the government were still mired in mutual suspicion.

In December 1945 the new Labour government accepted an American loan on terms which one cabinet minister, Emanuel Shinwell, declared would make socialist planning in Britain impossible, a view some historians have endorsed. According to this theory, Labour's manifest failure to construct a planned economy after the war was a consequence of accepting the commitments to international economic liberalisation which the Americans demanded as the conditions of the much-needed loan. By this argument, making these commitments (which included membership of the newly formed International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, early sterling convertibility and participation in an international system of multilateral freer trade) out of short-term expediency, Labour scuppered its own domestic economic aspirations almost before it had a chance to enact them. Proponents of this logic argue that the construction of a socialist economy in Britain was dependent on the ability to plan foreign trade via bilateral deals and rigorous exchange control, a privilege which was now foregone. However, the claim that in 1945 the lamb of planning was, at the behest of the Americans, sacrificed on the altar of international economic liberalisation, is seriously flawed; and it can be refuted by putting the acceptance of the loan conditions within the context of Labour's broader aspirations towards ‘international planning’. In 1945, Labour was caught between its desire to make world planning a reality, and the consequences of the compromises such planning turned out to involve.

At the end of September 1939, the young James Callaghan, at that time the assistant secretary of the Inland Revenue staff federation, wrote that ‘Socialists must be ready to take advantage of the war and the immediate post-war situation’. A few days later, he jotted down his own personal aspirations, calling for colonial freedom, an end to the system of imperial preference, and for fundamental social and economic change at home: ‘Britain to cease enduring two millions unemployed; the Bank of England to be controlled and a National Investment Bank to be established; coal-mining, cotton, woollen and agriculture industries to be planned in the national interest.’ Whether or not Callaghan was typical of the forthcoming 1945 generation of Labour candidates, he did at least hold views which were a fairly close approximation of the party's pre-war programme; and, significantly, he saw reconstruction, at both domestic and international levels, as a vital topic even at this early stage of the conflict. Indeed, as was seen in chapter 4, talk of ‘peace aims’ was endemic throughout the Labour Party from the first days. Kevin Jefferys has written that, in terms of discussion of reconstruction, the war fell into two phases. In the first, he argues, the coalition directed its energies almost exclusively to matters of military strategy and production; once the military situation had improved there was ‘an active phase of reconstruction’, with the government under increasing pressure to outline its reform plans.