A State of De-Subordination

In time to come the seventies in Brimn may well be seen as an uneasily transitional decade, in which what I will call the settlement of I945 slowly came apart under the pressure of forces and tendencies which pushed the country sn new directions. My purpose here is to discuss some of these forces and tendencies and the directions in which they may be leading. The settlement of I945 was made up of a number offarniliar elements. Among the most important of them was a commitment by the state to full employment and economic growth, with a much higher level of state interventisn in economic life than hitherto in peace-time. After the naiionalization measures undertaken by the Labour Government post x945, this state intervention was largely conceived in terms of fiscal and budgetary measures designed to help an enfeebled British capitalism; and this, it was thought, would achieve both filll employment and economic growth. The settlement also involved a commitment by the state to a much enlarged system of welfare and social service provisions most of them on a 'de-commodified' basis, by way of non-market and collective assurance of various supports and gllarantees. The prevailing wind was in the direction of egalitarsanism; and while this indeed mostly remained little more than wind, aggressive inegalitarianism tended to be intellectually and poliiically unfashionable, and was thercfore somewhat muted. Ecorlomic interveniiom and social welfare were intended by different people to achieve different goals. But one goal which was crucial and which was shared by the leaderships of both the Labour and Conservative Pariies, was the prevention or at least the drastic reduction of social and industrial conflict. The two men whose names are most closely associated with the main lines of the settlement of I945Keynes and Beveridge-were dedicated and self-conscious seekers after social pacificaiion uithin the ambit of capitalism, soon to be renamed 'the mixed economy'. Much the same purpose was at the very centre of the policy orientations which came to be known as 'Butskellism': the idea was not of course to do away with class society, only with class struggle. The trade unions, or rather trade union leaders, were expected