It was the second total war within a generation that finished off for the then-foreseeable future the particular form of politico-economic dispensation which the Conservatives had come to control so firmly by the 1930s .sx The Conservatives of the time could hardly be said to have been entirely in the grip of economic orthodoxy of the kind preached by Alfred Marshall , authority in economics before Keynes .sx While they had little choice about going off the gold standard , the Tories had dispensed with free trade , and behind the shield of protection they showed that they were no slaves to free-market ideology by engaging in substantial intervention in industrial organization in order to ameliorate unemployment .sx The National Government was adventurous in the economic sphere by previous peace-time standards , but what restrained it was the only tenet of Gladstonian Liberalism which it did , if sometimes only emotionally , adhere to - the balanced budget , balanced preferably at low levels of taxation and expenditure .sx In the 1920s , Neville Chamberlain had developed Beveridge-style social security plans , but had drawn back at the cost .sx The means test was more in accord with the maxims of 'sound finance' to which few contemporaries did not subscribe .sx To borrow the Dickensian allusions used in Chamberlain's 1934 Budget speech , the Conservatives could prosper politically in what was later depicted as being Bleak House ( although many , perhaps most , did not see it at the time as being bleak at all ) because the electorate did not have great expectations from the state .sx The Second World War changed that .sx To the neo-classical question , 'Where is the money going to come from ?sx ' the answer became :sx 'They always seem to find it for wars , so they can find it during peace .sx ' Hence , funding the Beveridge plan was supposed to be no problem .sx Moreover , Keynes seemed to be saying that high levels of public spending were a guarantee of peace-time full employment .sx It was not until the war that Keynes's ideas were acted upon - in the 1941 Budget to be precise .sx There is now no compelling reason to believe that adopting his ideas - which kept changing and which were not fully set out until The General Theory was published in 1936 - would have meant a cure for the unemployment of the 1930s .sx As for the foreign examples that the National Government was supposed to have foolishly ignored , the evidence about the effectiveness of the various New Deals in bringing down unemployment now seems , at best , to be inconclusive .sx Nevertheless , in the period immediately afterwards , those who either believed , or affected to believe , that 'something could have been done' about the large-scale unemployment were able to rewrite recent British economic history to the detriment of the Conservative Party .sx As one historian later remarked , " that Jarrow , rather than Coventry , should still be the symbol for a whole decade points to a propaganda victory the Left won not in the thirties but in the forties .sx " .sx This propaganda victory was made possible by the fact that Britain , while not suffering disproportionately during the Depression , did subsequently have a different experience from most other European countries in that she was one of the few which did not suffer the greater hardships of occupation and/or military defeat .sx For those searching for grievances in British politics , the hardships of the 1930s were the best available .sx The peculiar war-time atmosphere in Britain may have been a particularly fertile one for the development of grievances .sx For there was all the disruption of total war , and , yet , from Britain's expulsion from continental Europe in 1940 down to her return four years later on D-Day , it was the minority of her armed forces that had to fight .sx The North African campaign was important to Britain's morale , and El Alamein was a signal victory , but it was a sideshow compared with the Eastern Front .sx Hence , except for the brave and the unlucky , there was plenty of time for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs to do its work , and for events like the Cairo Parliament .sx After all , Nazi Germany was not stopped by Churchill's speeches ( " some chicken , some neck " and so on) .sx The Russians bled Nazi Germany white .sx Evelyn Waugh , in the guise of Guy Crouchback , was dismissive of the Soviet contribution and of King George VI's gift of the Sword of Stalingrad .sx He was able , too , to resist the image of Stalin as 'Uncle Joe' .sx Others perhaps were less resistant , especially as once Nazi Germany had attacked her former Soviet ally , the British official propaganda machine actively promoted a favourable image of Stalin's tyranny .sx A Red Army Day was held in 1943 .sx The Ministry of Information went so far as to advise George Orwell's publishers against bringing out Animal Farm .sx It seems likely that the Russian war achievement reflected favourably on Labour :sx the Soviet Union was the socialist country .sx Moreover , when it came to Britain's evident unpreparedness for war in 1939 , as the title of one infamous pamphlet would have it , the Guilty Men were all supposed to be the Conservative ministers of the 1930s , and if the pamphlet was even one - quarter as effective as propaganda as it is commonly assumed to have been , it may well have helped to pave the way for 1945 , in deflecting attention from Labour's undistinguished record on defence and pinning the blame on the 'Old Gang' .sx If so , it helped to bring down Churchill , one of the few who were 'not guilty' , almost all of them Tories .sx Even the Conservatives' expectation that they would benefit , as they had in 1918 , by being associated with a war-winning leader proved false .sx The situation was different .sx In 1918 , Lloyd George led the war-time Coalition against the rest .sx In 1945 , Churchill led the Conservatives against a Labour Party whose major leaders had been prominent members of Churchill's war-time administration :sx Ernest Bevin , Herbert Morrison , Stafford Cripps and Attlee himself .sx Apart from Churchill , Labour had held the key positions :sx Bevin as Minister of Labour , Morrison as Home Secretary and Attlee often effectively the prime minister while Churchill ran the war .sx The Foreign Secretary had been a Tory , Eden :sx but Churchill was often his own Foreign Secretary .sx A Conservative in name or spirit was always Chancellor of the Exchequer :sx but concern about paying for wars is greatest once they are over .sx If the Conservatives secured some marginal advantage from parading as a National Government in 1935 - and remembering the scale of their 1924 victory , for example , it need only have been marginal - it may have been very much less than Labour derived in 1945 from its association with the war-time National Government .sx The charge of inexperience and incapacity could no longer stick .sx Labour also possibly derived some advantage from believing that they would lose the post-war election anyway .sx It made them less inhibited about promising the New Jerusalem .sx When the Conservatives held back in 1943 from a commitment to the Beveridge plan , the Labour backbenchers pressed for a division .sx James Griffiths said to Beveridge :sx " This debate , and the division , make the return of a Labour Government to power at the next Election a certainty .sx " Possibly it did , but Griffiths was one of the few Labour politicians who saw this .sx The 1945 general election would have been even more remarkable than it was if the Conservative Party had displayed a monopoly of virtue in conducting its campaign .sx Churchill , though , combined promises about executing his 'four year's sic !sx plan' to extend state social provision with a commitment " to make an early reduction in taxation " .sx The Liberals similarly combined pledges to extend public expenditure with " a progressive reduction in the burden of taxation " , and Labour promised " social provision against rainy days , coupled with economic policies calculated to reduce rainy days to a minimum " , and " taxation which bears less heavily on the lower income groups " .sx Churchill , however , not entirely consistently , also reminded the electors that :sx the State has no resources of its own .sx It can only spend what it takes from the people in taxes or borrowing .sx Britain is now a nation of taxpayers .sx .. The willingness of this generation to bear their fair share of sacrifices must , though we hope for relief , be continued .sx .. the plans for social progress which we are determined to carry out , cause and require a much higher expenditure than before the war .sx The burden must be borne by all citizens as taxpayers .sx There is no easy way of one section getting great benefits from the State at the expense of another .sx The nation can have the services it is prepared to pay for .sx Where all benefit , all will have to contribute .sx The revenue is not created by waving a magic wand .sx .sx These economic liberal sentiments were always unlikely to be music to the ears of an electorate then being told that a largely cost-free New Jerusalem was on offer as the alternative .sx Retrospectively , it is not unreasonable for a historian to write that :sx Britain came out of the Second World War as an obsolescent industrial economy with grievous weaknesses .sx Instead of first devoting all possible resources and effort to remedying this , she chose to load this economy with the vast and potentially limitless cost of the Welfare State , placed current expenditure before capital investment , and thus set the pattern of the next thirty years .sx .sx It may well be that " by the time they took the bunting down from the street after VE-Day and turned from the war to the future , the British in their dreams and illusions and their flinching from reality had already written the broad scenario for Britain's post-war descent .sx " In a liberal democracy , though , the electorate had to be persuaded of the necessity for some form of programme of 'national efficiency' involving , as it seemed very likely to do , high social costs with widespread unemployment in what it would have to be hoped would be the interim period , while awaiting problematical long-term benefits for the economy .sx Even dressed up , this would have been an unlikely message to win sufficient support in 1945 in competition with the more comfortable attractions of the Keynesian Welfare State , which do not lack electoral appeal even now .sx " They have had a very hard time " was Churchill's magnanimous verdict on the electorate which had turned him out of office , and the story has been told many times of how , under his leadership , the Conservative Party then modernized itself to become between 1945 and 1951 " the most effective Parliamentary Opposition of the century " .sx Much has tended to be made , not least by that politician's official biographer , of R. A. Butler's work at the Research Department in restoring Tory fortunes :sx It was he .sx .. who cut the Party afloat from its 1930s unemployment moorings ; it was he who had brought it to accept the concept of the Welfare State ; it was he perhaps above all , who made sure that , if the voice of the Tory turtles was still heard in the land , they were henceforth regarded as mere historical curiosities .sx .sx Easily perceived electoral realities in fact dictated the Conservatives' behaviour after the 1945 defeat .sx Labour were " the masters of the moment and not only of the moment but for a very long time to come " , Sir Hartley Shawcross told them from the government benches .sx Churchill was not alone in feeling that there was " some disgrace in the size of the majority " that Labour had obtained .sx It took little insight to appreciate that , in immediate retrospect and for many years afterwards , the popular conception of the interwar era seemed to be less of The Lost Weekend than a mood of Goodbye To All That .sx There was certainly no 'back to 1939' sentiment to parallel that of 'back to 1914' in the 1920s .sx With an electoral base of 39.8 per cent of the vote in 1945 , in reality the Conservative position always was far from being hopeless .sx Given what the war-time Coalition Government had done and planned for with its concurrence and its related promises in 1945 , the difficulty of the Conservative Party was not 'to accept the concept of the Welfare State' , or , come to that , Keynesian economics , but to reassure the electorate that the clock would not be turned back .sx