Although always popular, revisionist history is an area fraught with pitfalls. This is because, fundamentally, most historians are not idiots, and the standard version of history is more often than not broadly correct. Archives may be opened, errors corrected, and characters added to the storyline, but truly revolutionary reinterpretations, at least sane ones, are uncommon.
Kit Kowol’s first book, Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War, released at the end of 2024, achieves the rare feat of fundamentally revising our understanding of British politics and society during the Second World War and, with it, our interpretation of what happened next. Despite its subtitle, it is not a Churchill book, although he does figure here and there. Instead, Kowol’s thesis, which goes far beyond Churchill, is, “The Conservative Party lost the 1945 general election but won the Second World War.”
To understand how radical this proposition is, one must understand how the Second World War is remembered and mythologized today. The accepted narrative, that of the “People’s War,” goes something like this: After the failure of pre-war Conservative appeasers, Britain fought aimlessly until 1940, when Neville Chamberlain was ousted, and the British Expeditionary Force was saved from annihilation on the beaches of Dunkirk by a flotilla of civilian small boats which embodied the defiance of the British people against the threat of annihilation.
Meanwhile, Churchill and Clement Attlee (the leader of the socialist Labour Party) entered into a wartime coalition, which mobilized the entire British people, who stood alone (the British Empire being conveniently forgotten). They fought with one heart and voice, not only to defeat Nazism but for a better, fairer, progressive, even socialist Britain after the war — a new “Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land” in the immortal lines of William Blake. The Tories stuck to war-making while Labour ministers, who ran the homefront, began to lay the basis for this post-war Britain.
In 1945, Britons duly voted out Churchill, who misread the public’s mood by campaigning on foreign policy and denouncing socialism while Labour was speaking about free healthcare and social welfare. They installed Attlee as prime minister, who then rebuilt British society along lines that were developed by progressive thinkers during the war. When the Tories returned to power in 1951, they accepted the Labour welfare state as a given. Not until Margaret Thatcher did anyone try to dismantle parts of it, and even then, only with limited success.
Today, this account is hegemonic in the British public’s consciousness to a degree that is unintelligible to most non-British people. Its most emblematic symbol today is the National Health Service, conceived in the Beveridge Report of 1942, an institution often described as modern Britain’s national religion. It is barely hyperbole: during the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches flew the NHS’s flag, while the government encouraged people to stay home to “protect the NHS”, a telling inversion of the normal patient-healthcare relationship.
All of this, Kowol says, is nonsense. It is true that Labour fundamentally transformed British society after its 1945 victory, but the war itself was fought according to Tory ideas, using Tory methods. What’s more, during the war itself, many Tories articulated visions for Britain’s post-war future, which were every bit as detailed as the utopian blueprints of their progressive counterparts. So, it is wrong to say that the British Right gave no thought to the thorny matter of post-war reconstruction, even if most of its ideas were not realized.
Many of these right-wing visions of post-war Britain seem quaint, if not incomprehensible, today. There were the “Ruralists,” who advocated organic agriculture by yeomen farmers superintended by landed aristocrats as the basis for a feudal Merrie England, away from American and Soviet influences. There were the “Constructive Imperialists,” who wanted a welfare state that spanned the British Empire to encourage the intra-imperial migration, which would wield its disparate units together once and for all. And there were those who sought to use the war and the upheavals it generated to create a new Christian state in Britain and a revived Christendom in Western Europe.
It may be tempting to dismiss these ideas as nothing more than curios from minds that were out of tune with the spirit of their age. Yet, as Kowol reminds his readers, this would be to commit the common fallacy of forgetting that what is now the distant past once lay in the future. Recreating an agrarian society did not seem outlandish when many bemoaned the ugliness of industrial life, even though not everyone thought that feudalism was necessary for its realisation. Imperial federation, to those who saw hundreds of thousands of dominion and colonial troops arriving to defend Britain, must have seemed tantalisingly close to becoming a reality. And in the midst of another world war, a Christian revival must have appeared to many to be the only possible way for civilization to survive.
Indeed, in most areas, Conservatives succeeded in running the war along conservative lines. For instance, industrial production remained in the hands of private enterprise — a grand total of three companies were nationalised during the war, while the “Bevin Boys” conscripted to work as coal miners did so in privately owned mines, both to the great frustration of many socialists. The Education Act of 1944, meanwhile, mandated daily prayers in all government-maintained schools for the first time during a period when the government held regular national days of prayer, during which all work was stopped for workers to listen to religious services on the radio.
Even Britain’s military organisation, Kowol argues, reflected the predominance of Tory ideas over socialistic ones. Many on the British Left hoped for a People’s War characterised by the revolutionary levée en masse, with a huge “democratic People’s Army” as its centrepiece. Some, such as George Orwell, hoped that the Home Guard, the part-time home defence militia made up of those ineligible for regular military service, could serve in this role.
Instead, the British armed forces remained hierarchical organisations led by professional officers, whose members received much better welfare than civilian war workers (and officers more so than their men), despite all the talk of a People’s War. Even their chosen armaments, the tank and the bomber, reflected a conspicuous preference for technology over socially transformative mobilisations of manpower, though it is possible to take this argument too far — the Red Army did not eschew tanks simply because they were not as proletarian as the rifle.
Perhaps the greatest strength of Kowol’s book is his willingness to take wartime conservatives’ goals, even ones which are unfashionable today (and that would be almost all of them) at face value. If they supported European federalism or corporatism or even (in the case of the Canadian press baron Lord Beaverbrook) a close alliance with the Soviet Union in order to balance against an over-mighty America, it was in order to perpetuate the British Empire and capitalism and the class system, not to bury them. As he writes, British Tories “were radical about means, not ends.”
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Of course, Labour won in 1945, and most of the conservative plans for a post-war future went precisely nowhere. Kowol blames the fact that the Conservative Party had too many radical and often incompatible visions to choose from and ended up fighting the 1945 election based on what could be agreed upon and no more. By the opening stages of the Cold War, the British Right had settled on anti-communism, close collaboration with the United States, and free trade as its core beliefs. Ideas such as imperial trade preferences and hostility toward unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism were quietly forgotten.
Does any of this still matter today? Kowol is too good a writer to force-feed his readers with pithy lessons, although he hints at dissatisfaction with the modern Tories’ anti-establishment rhetoric. However, the book’s most important message for the world’s oldest political party, which is now fighting for its survival, must be that conservatism is not only about the careful preservation of forms but the achievement of conservative ends. In that sense, sometimes the most radical ideas are also the most conservative of them all.
Yuan Yi Zhu is an assistant professor at Leiden University and a member of Nuffield College, Oxford.