The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain

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The same ‘serious, sober virtues’ animated the early Labour movement, haunted the pages of the Beveridge Report and shaped the culture of much of the working class. Not the least of the reasons for Mrs Thatcher’s electoral success was that they gave her rhetoric a popular resonance that the hedonistic collectivists of the 1960s and 1970s could not emulate. And, to complete the story, the moral activism of the Blair generation of collectivists draws on essentially the same reservoir of virtues and traditions.

The moral activist strand in British political culture can perhaps be traced back, through the liberal collectivists of the early twentieth century, the popular radicals of the nineteenth and the Country Party of the eighteenth to the puritans of the seventeenth. But the details of its lineage need not concern us here. What matters is that the roots of the moral-activist sensibility lie deep in the history of western civilisation, in the legacy of Athens on the one hand and of Jerusalem on the other. The most striking feature of the story I have tried to tell is that in a secular, heterogeneous, supposedly multi-cultural late twentieth century society, faced with challenges almost inconceivably different from those that faced classical Greece or ancient Israel, those roots can still put forth fruit.