The Political and Moral Economies of Post-War British Culture
The transformation of Britain’s political economy during and after the Second World War likewise reshaped its cultural industries, and the moral economies represented in their outputs.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.
Last Autumn, I wrote a piece for this newsletter on the depiction of national service in British footballers’ autobiographies published between the 1940s and the 1960s.
As I stated in that post:
I am…concerned with reconstructing the ‘moral economy’ of the post-war British professional footballer as it was presented within those books, and its relationship with the wider context of both elite football as an industry, and Britain more generally.
This is part of a broader area of interest of mine, in the political and moral economies of British culture after the Second World War. How did the particular circumstances of that period, of increased economic interventionism, improved living standards and higher expectations, and an antagonistic relationship with the Soviet bloc, impact the way British culture functioned as an industry? How did that political economy of culture shape the moral economies of what appeared on screens and in books and elsewhere? How did wider sentiments of the period find expression in popular culture, and how did their expression shift over time? These are questions I am going to try and address in this post, synthesising existing historical scholarship and then offering some tentative conclusions.
The post-war British political economy
During the Second World War, British state institutions absorbed and directed different capital flows within the national and imperial polity at previously unparalleled levels through fiscal policy and physical controls. This provided part of the blueprint for a post-war political economy centred on full employment, state welfare, worker unionisation, nationalisation of industry, pursuit of continued economic growth, initially stringent rationing and import restrictions, and imperial trade.
Successive administrations also secured American economic and military support for Britain and other Western European states in response to the perceived threat of the Soviet Union and the alternative lure of communism. They buttressed Britain’s security and global role by channelling extensive resources into defensive measures such as a nuclear weapon programme and mandatory national service.1
The model of national political economy remained largely intact until the 1970s, but was contingent on its capacity to satisfy multiple potentially and frequently conflicting moral economies. This set of policy instruments and norms had to balance the contrasting worldviews and perceived entitlements of uncompromising managers and increasingly assertive workers, of expectations of both fair shares for all and greater individual spending power.2 Their persistence also owed to rough parity between the two major parties disincentivising ideological nonconformity in power.3
However, those holding the levers of power neither intended nor expected to operate a closed, command economy in perpetuity, while endogenous and exogenous factors forced changes of tack in any case. Between 1951 and 1964, the Conservatives loosened economic controls to capitalise on rising income levels and consumer demands, belatedly pursued rapid decolonisation and membership of the European Economic Community, abolished national service and downgraded Britain’s European and global defence commitments, and began incremental corporatisation of economic policymaking and expansion of prices and incomes policy.4
The British state and the political economy of culture
The British state, as in other areas of national life, became a far more active agent in cultural production during the Second World War. To an existing public monopoly over domestic broadcasting and involvement in documentary filmmaking, it added the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) and Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), as well as expanding the BBC’s external services – particularly its European provision. It also taxed its cultural industries more heavily (including through the pre-existing Entertainments Tax, originating in the First World War), curbed production by restricting access to key materials, enlisted many male performers for combat roles, and censored and propagandised more extensively through the Ministry of Information (MOI).5
After the war, continued state intervention, expanded production, and cautious liberalisation all proceeded unevenly. ENSA, CEMA, and the MOI were succeeded by the Combined Services Entertainment, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Central Office of Information respectively, while the Foreign Office continued to fund the BBC’s enhanced external services and established its own clandestine Information Research Department to circulate propaganda through both British and overseas media channels.6
Meanwhile, lowered taxation of cultural industries (with the gradual reduction and eventual 1960 abolition of the Entertainments Tax) and restrictions on access to physical input materials, combined with rising incomes, facilitated heightened demand for and supply of commercial cultural products, but also increased competition. Britain’s film studios, for example, had long suffered for lack of access to finance, relatively small domestic audience, and Hollywood’s dominance (only partly mitigated through quotas for distributing and screening British films).
When domestic audiences peaked and then drastically fell from the late 1940s, government policy towards the sector shifted, through directly financing film and guaranteeing exhibition for films deemed ethically and culturally significant, to directing cinema’s subsidisation from its audience (via the National Film Finance Corporation) and securing loans and external financing to ensure international appeal, often supporting independent productions outside established studios.7 Censorship remained the purview of the British Board of Film Classification (BFFC) – an industry body that nonetheless often drew its senior officialdom from former civil servants; a shifting and shrinking audience for films compelled the BBFC to move in a more liberal direction as the 1950s proceeded.8
Radio and television broadcasting were initially solely the legal remit of the BBC. Demand for television sets drastically increased after the war and the new Conservative government of 1951 deemed this growing audience insufficiently served by the BBC alone. It thus passed legislation in 1954 establishing the Independent Television Authority (ITA). The ITA awarded regional franchises to companies who monetised their output through advertising; it was charged by the government with ensuring proper moral standards, political impartiality, sufficiency of output of British origin, and clear demarcation between advertising and programming.9
Publishing had fared reasonably well during the war, despite restrictions on resources, but was harder hit by post-war circumstances. From the 1950s, the industry expanded as new companies and European emigres exploited growing demand through diversification of output.10 Censorship of published output continued to be unpredictably administered under the 1857 Obscenity Act, which penalised publishers and distributors for output targeted at audiences for whom its content was deemed unsuitable. This shielded the operation of censorship from wider social changes until the passing of the 1959 Obscenity Act, which made literary merit and expert testimony legitimate defences against suppression. Its passing and operation symbolised a combined emphasis on democratisation and meritocratic leadership.11
Moral economies of post-war British culture
Expanding production and changing gatekeeping practices within the cultural industries enabled new moral economies to be manifested in their output, in ways shaped by existing frameworks, but also begetting new or hybrid ones. Ealing Studios’ post-war output offers an early example of how this could work in practice. Under the headship of Michael Balcon from 1938 onwards, a new team of inexperienced filmmakers was installed, and existing theatrical and music hall conventions pared down in favour of documentary realism with narrative conventions suited to representing the war experience.
In peacetime, Ealing’s relationship with the larger Rank Organisation ensured it could continue to provide relative novices space for innovation within its limited roster of productions, albeit with Balcon, and his moralistic view of cinema, as gatekeeper as to what was made. The result was a series of films that broadly retained the narrative conventions of wartime and their connected ideologies of liberal paternalism blended with social democracy, but individually comprised diverse authorial traces and dimensions in tension with each other, especially between community and collectivism on the one hand, and individuality and acquisitiveness on the other. Yet worsening industry conditions badly damaged Ealing’s viability and it ceased making films in 1957, although its most famous films would become a staple of television schedules from the 1960s.12
This approach to social realism was joined from the late 1950s by a bleaker, slower paced, ‘kitchen sink’ variety. A younger generation of upwardly mobile writers and filmmakers produced popular plays and films depicting confident, affluent, antiauthoritarian working-class characters, wrestling with consumerism and domesticity. This was rendered possible by the levelling of broader economic circumstances to favour them and their target audience, establishment of new independent theatre and film production companies, and more indulgent forms of censorship.13
Independent, regionally-based television companies like Granada also produced more realistic dramas with a distinctly local flavour made by relative newcomers – a policy subsequently replicated by the BBC.14 Class consciousness, racial and gendered rejections of the post-war settlement, and dramatisation of its breakdown were also embodied in often independently produced elements of 1970s youth culture.15
Britain and the cultural Cold War
The evolving moral economies crystallised in British culture were intricately linked with those of the Cold War. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht has characterised the Cold War in Europe as a contest between ‘two different Weltanschauungen, two ways to organize cultural life, two possibilities of defining modernity and grappling with its most daunting cultural challenge: how to preserve cultural tradition in the face of impending massive social change’.16 Yet as David Caute has noted, the cultural Cold War was possible primarily because both sides competed in agreed fields of play.17
Emphasis on direct interstate engagement through cultural diplomacy, state sponsorship of the arts, and covert intelligence service interference in particular cultural institutions ought not though obscure the extent to which, on the Western side, the cultural Cold War was pluralistically waged by non-state agents. In Britain, longstanding anti-Russian tropes and patronising portrayals of its satellite states were easily integrated within existing generic forms across British popular cultural formats, from newspapers to children’s fiction to cinema, with their portrayals of foreign spies and homegrown communist intelligentsia.18 Meanwhile, the case of John Berger’s A Painter of Our Time, its alleged censorship by Secker & Warburg (which had links with the CIA), and its hostile reception, illustrated potential constraints upon work considered ideologically beyond the pale.19
On the other hand, from the late 1950s, film and television programmes increasingly engaged with the threat of nuclear destruction and mind-control techniques, depicting British government and intelligence community as amorally adopting parallel methods to their Soviet counterparts. The James Bond film series downplayed direct Cold War confrontation, reflecting contemporary easing of East-West tensions and the filmmakers’ prioritisation of entertainment for an international audience. Instead, they instead celebrated social mobility and aspiration and the trappings of capitalism.20 These trends represented a wider anti-establishmentarian bent in British culture and its integration into generic tropes, made possible by more independent television and filmmaking, and (in the case of Bond) the channelling of American money into the British film industry.
Final reflections
The Second World War and its aftermath left the state with an enhanced presence in British cultural production. This involved direct employment and funding of cultural producers, higher taxation of and regulation of industries, and new modes of censorship and propaganda. Yet the state would subsequently liberalise many of those controls, while rising living standards and investment from elsewhere increased both the scale of cultural production and competition within it, creating opportunities for younger producers from working and lower middle-class backgrounds.
Public and to an extent private sector cultural production during this time sought to communicate a sense of shared moral economy to the wider British population. These institutions and their gatekeepers were, broadly speaking, paternalistic but optimistic, drawing on a sense of national purpose and past sacrifice, imagining a more enlightened citizenry but also still shaped by class assumptions and aversion to both communism and excessive commercialism.
Yet this moral economy was not homogenous, but rather an aggregate of competing demands. It was dynamic and so too were the conditions in Britain’s cultural industries. As the social composition of cultural producers and their audiences changed, so they adapted existing and pioneered new generic conventions to better tell the types of story they wanted to tell: kitchen sink dramas; soap operas; gameshows; punk rock. They expressed demands for more instant gratification, a sense of entitlement to that beyond which was on offer, a rejection of traditional authority, and at times a feeling of being trapped. Paradoxically, such narratives often chafed against the very circumstances that had made it possible for them to be voiced.
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On the development of this political economy during and after the Second World War, see:
Paul Addison, ‘The Impact of the Second World War’, in Paul Addison and Harriet Jones (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 3–22.
David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Penguin Books, 2007), Ch. 1.
Alan S. Milward, The UK and The European Community, Vol. I: The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy 1945–1963 (London and Portland, OR: Whitehall History Publishing in Association with Frank Cass, 2002).
On the competing moral economies of post-war Britain, see:
Laurence Black, ‘The Impression of Affluence: Political Culture in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Laurence Black and Hugh Pemberton (eds.), An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War ‘Golden Age’ Revisited (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 85–106.
Sheila Cohen, ‘Equal Pay – or what? Economics, Politics and the 1968 Ford Sewing Machinists’ Strike’, Labor History, Vol. 53, No. 1 (2012), pp. 51–68.
Peter Gurney, ‘Voice of Civilisation: Advertising and Its Critics in Austerity Britain’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2018), pp. 190–208.
Alysa Levene, ‘The Meanings of Margarine in England: Class, Consumption and Material Culture from 1918 to 1953’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2014), pp. 145–165.
Jim Phillips, ‘The 1972 Miners’ Strike: Popular Agency and Industrial Politics in Britain’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2006), pp. 187–207.
Jim Phillips, ‘Industrial Relations, Historical Contingencies and Political Economy: Britain in the 1960s and 1970s’, Labour History Review Vol. 72, No. 3 (2007), pp. 215–233.
Jim Phillips, ‘Deindustrialization and the Moral Economy of the Scottish Coalfields, 1947 to 1991’, International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 84 (2013), pp. 99–115.
Mike Richardson, Paul Stewart, and Andy Danford, ‘Shop-Floor Bargaining and the Struggle for Job Control in the British Automobile and Aerospace Industries, 1950–82’, in Mike Richardson and Peter Nicholls (eds.), A Business and Labour History of Britain: Case Studies of Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 182–201.
Mark Roodhouse, Black Market Britain: 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Jack Saunders, ‘The Untraditional Worker: Class Re-Formation in Britain 1945–65’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2015), pp. 225–248.
Jim Tomlinson, ‘Re-inventing the ‘Moral Economy’ in Post-War Britain’, Historical Research, Vol. 84, No. 224 (2011), pp. 356–373.
Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
See Ross McKibbin, ‘A Brief Supremacy: The Fragmentation of the Two-Party System in British Politics, c. 1950–2015’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2016), pp. 450–469.
For shifts in Britain’s political economy under the Conservatives during this period, see:
S. J. Ball, ‘A Rejected Strategy: The Army and National Service, 1946–60’, in Hew Strachan (ed.), The British Army, Manpower and Society into the Twenty-First Century (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999), pp. 36–48.
Martin Cohen, The Eclipse of ‘Elegant Economy’: The Impact of the Second World War on Attitudes to Persona Finance in Britain (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Milward, The UK and The European Community, Ch. 11 and 12.
Glen O’Hara, ‘‘Intractable, Obscure and Baffling’: The Incomes Policy of the Conservative Government, 1957–64’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2004), pp. 25–53.
Astrid Ringe, ‘Background to Neddy: Economic planning in the 1960s’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1998), pp. 82–98.
Astrid Ringe and Neil Rollings, ‘Responding to Relative Decline: The Creation of the National Economic Development Council’, The Economic History Review (New Series) Vol. 53, No. 2 (2000), pp. 331–353.
On wartime state involvement in cultural production, see:
Bill Baillieu and John Goodchild, The British Film Business (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), Ch. 4.
Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 3: The War of Words, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
F. M. Leventhal, ‘‘The Best for the Most’: CEMA and State Sponsorship of the Arts in Wartime, 1939–1945’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1990), pp. 289–317.
Iain Stevenson, Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century (London: British Library, 2010), Ch. 5.
Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), Ch. 7.
Zoe Varnals, ‘The Entertainments National Service Association (E.N.S.A.) during World War II’ (PhD thesis, King’s College London, 2010).
On the development of post-war public communication and propaganda, see:
Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53: The Information Research Department (London: Routledge, 2004).
Ruth‐Blandina M. Quinn, ‘Distance or Intimacy? – The Arm’s Length Principle, the British Government and the Arts Council of Great Britain’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1997), pp. 127–159.
Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century, Ch. 10
Alban Webb, London Calling: Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
See Baillieu and Goodchild, The British Film Business, Ch. 5 and 6.
See Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema in the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Ch. 11.
See Amy Sergeant, ‘Bright New Dawns and Bastard Children’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2018), pp. 252–270.
See Stevenson, Bookmakers, Ch. 6.
See Christopher Hillard, ‘‘Is It a Book That You Would Even Wish Your Wife or Your Servants to Read?’ Obscenity Law and the Politics of Reading in Modern England’, American Historical Review, Vol. 118, No. 3 (2013), pp. 653–678.
For analysis of Ealing’s film production processes and output, see:
Lindsay Anderson, Making a Film: The Story of ‘Secret People’ (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952).
Charles Barr, Ealing Studios: A Movie Book, 3rd edn (Berkley and Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1998).
John Ellis, ‘Made in Ealing’, Screen, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1975), pp. 78–127.
Lee Paul Freeman, ‘‘The Mild Revolution’: The Politics of Ealing Studios’ (PhD thesis, University of Hull, 2014).
Tim O’Sullivan, ‘Ealing Comedies 1945–57: ‘The Bizarre British Faced with Another Perfectly Extraordinary Situation’’, in I. Q. Hunter and Laraine Porter (eds.), British Comedy Cinema (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 66–76.
Tim Pulleine, ‘A Song and Dance at the Local: Thoughts on Ealing’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 3rd edn. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 258–266.
Tony Williams, ‘The Repressed Fantastic in Passport to Pimlico’, Film Criticism, Vol. 16, Nos. 1–2 (1991–1992), pp. 52–66.
For discussion of the development of the British New Wave, see:
John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (London: BFI Publishing, 1986).
Terry Lovell, ‘Landscapes and Stories in 1960s British Realism’, Screen, Vol. 31, No. 4 (1990), pp. 357–376.
See Lez Cooke, ‘Regional British Television Drama in the 1960s and 1970s’, Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2005), pp. 145–155.
For discussion of 1970s youth culture, see
John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts, ‛Subcultures, Cultures and Class’, in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 3-59.
Jon Garland, Keith Gildart, Anna Gough-Yates, Paul Hodkinson, Bill Osgerby, Lucy Robinson, John Street, Pete Webb, and Matthew Worley, ‘Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of ‘Consensus’ in Post-War Britain’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2012), pp. 265–271.
Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, ‘Culture and the Cold War in Europe’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume I: Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 398–419 (p. 398).
David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 4–6.
For the development of stereotypes regarding Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, both before and during the Cold War, see:
P. M. H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear: British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1941–45 (London: Edward Arnold, 1990).
Anthony G. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature from the 16th Century to 1980: An Introductory Survey and a Bibliography (Oxford: Meeuws, 1985).
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, ‘On Small Nations and Bullied Children: Mr Punch Draws Eastern Europe’, Slavonic and Eastern European Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (2006), pp. 280–305,
Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: “The East” in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Ch. 2.
Michael Paris, ‘Red Menace! Russia and British Juvenile Fiction’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2005), pp. 117–132.
Tony Shaw, ‘The British Popular Press and the Early Cold War’, History: Journal of the Historical Association, Vol. 83, No. 296 (1998), pp. 66–86.
Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001).
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
See Gordon Johnston, ‘Writing and Publishing the Cold War: John Berger and Secker & Warburg’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol 12, No 4 (2001), pp. 432–460.
For shifting engagements with Cold War themes in popular culture from the late 1950s onwards, see:
Jonathan Bignell, ‘Spies, Style and the Cold War: James Bond in the 1960s and 1970s’, Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, Vol. 10 (2010), pp. 81–92.
Alan Burton, ‘Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2013), pp. 27–48.
James Chapman, License to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, 2nd edn. (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
Nicholas Cull, ‘Was Captain Black Really Red? The TV Science Fiction of Gerry Anderson in Its Cold War Context’, Media History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2006), pp. 193–207.
Matthew Grant, ‘Images of Survival, Stories of Destruction: Nuclear War on British Screens from 1945 to the Early 1960s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2013), pp. 7–26.
Eric J. Morgan, ‘Whores and Angels of Our Striving Selves: The Cold War Films of John le Carré, then and now’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2016), pp. 88–103.