Having It So Good

A great thing about Hennessy's research is that he keeps an open mind while using his first class access to political figures and exhaustively reading cabinet minutes, diaries and essentially collating everything that could be of relevance. The result is a remarkable portrait of the decade. The book full of surprises. He shows for example that the fast exit from empire had as much to do with removing financial burdens as accepting independence movements, or the way that successive Conservative governments carried the crushingly expensive "British New Deal" welfare state and Keynesian big government spending as a "modern" understanding of the economy (uncomfortable but we can't do anything about it). Almost nowhere do 1950's British government ministers examine the positive aspects or German and European economic success (Eden did slightly but didn't act) and the first stages of the European Community were treated with disdain as governments followed the chimera of a Commonwealth economic community. To greatly generalize, he shows a group of British aristocrats, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan who were formed by, and reached power, within an unchanged imperially structured education and governmental system. Had the pre WW1 British empire still existed then maybe they could have completed the work they wished to do through a bureaucracy that was finely adapted to carry it out, but in the event the withdrawal of American financial and political support in the Suez crisis made the real position plain for the world to see. Its fascinating to see how 60 years later, Great Britain is still struggling with its imperial class system and the "Europe" question.