Also on March 27, May pledged to resign as party leader and prime minister if the House of Commons were to approve her plan, a gambit that won support from some “hard Brexit” opponents of the plan. On March 29, owing to an antique procedural rule invoked by Speaker of the House John Bercow, only the withdrawal agreement portion of May’s plan was voted upon by the House of Commons (excluded was the “political declaration” that addressed what the U.K. and EU expected of their long-term relationship). Although the vote was closer than the previous two (286 in support, 344 in opposition), the plan once again went down in defeat. The U.K. now had until April 12 to decide whether it would leave the EU without an agreement on that day or request a longer delay that would require it to participate in elections for the European Parliament. May asked the EU to push back the deadline for Brexit until June 30, and on April 11 the European Council announced that it was granting the U.K. a “flexible extension” until October 31.
Shortly thereafter, in response to the Conservative Party’s seeming inability to position the country to leave the EU, Nigel Farage launched the Brexit Party. It proved to be a big winner in the elections for the European Parliament in May, capturing about 31 percent of the vote. The next closest finisher was the Liberal Democrats, with about 20 percent of the vote, while Labour claimed some 14 percent and the Conservatives only about 9 percent.
Having failed to garner sufficient support from Conservatives for her exit plan, May entered discussions with Labour leaders on a possible compromise, but these too proved fruitless. When May responded to that disappointment by proposing a new version of the plan that included a temporary customs relationship with the EU and a pledge to hold a parliamentary vote on whether to stage another referendum on Brexit, her cabinet revolted. Isolated as never before, the prime minister announced on May 24 that she would step down as leader of the Conservative Party on June 7 but would remain as caretaker premier until her party had chosen her successor. After a series of votes by the parliamentary Conservative Party winnowed a list of 10 candidates to two, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt stood in an election in which all of the party’s roughly 160,000 members were eligible to vote. Johnson took some 66 percent of that vote to assume the leadership. He officially replaced May as prime minister on July 24. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Society, state, and economy State and society
Despite the so-called “dismantling of controls” after the end of World War I, government involvement in economic life was to continue, as were increased public expenditure, extensions of social welfare, and a higher degree of administrative rationalization. In the interwar years the level of integration of labour, capital, and the state was more considerable than is often thought. Attempts to organize the market continued up to the beginning of World War II, evident, for example, in government’s financial support for regional development in the late 1930s. Few Britons, however, felt they were living in a period of decreased government power. Nonetheless, attachment to the “impartial state” and to voluntarism was still considerable and exemplified by the popularity of the approved organizations set up to administer health insurance in the interwar years. The governance of society through what were now taken to be the social characteristics of that society itself, for example, family life as well as demographic and economic factors—developed by Liberal administrations before World War I—along with the advent of “planning,” continued to be the direction of change, but the connection back to Victorian notions of moral individualism and the purely regulative, liberal state was still strong. Even the greatest exponent of the move toward economic intervention and social government, John Maynard Keynes, whose General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935–36) provided the major rationale for subsequent state intervention and whose work downgraded the importance of private rationality and private responsibility, nonetheless believed that governmental intervention in one area was necessary to buttress freedom and privacy elsewhere, so that the moral responsibility of the citizen would be forthcoming.
There was, however, only an incremental increase in the level of interest in state involvement in the economy and society in the immediate years before World War II, when the fear of war galvanized politicians and administrators. It was the “total war” of 1939–45 that brought a degree of centralized control of the economy and society that was unparalleled before or indeed since. In some ways this was an expression of prewar developments, but the impetus of the war was enormous and felt in all political quarters. In 1941 it was a Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, who introduced the first Keynesian budget. Cross-party support was also evident in the response to the 1942 Beveridge Report, which became the blueprint of what was later to be called the welfare state. After 1945 a decisive shift had taken place toward the recognition of state intervention and planning as the norm, not the exception, and toward the idea that society could now be molded by political will. Nonetheless, there was much popular dislike of “government controls,” and the familiar rhetoric of the impartial state remained strong, as reflected in Beveridge’s attack in 1948 on the Labour government’s failure to encourage voluntarism. This voluntarism, however, was decidedly different from 19th-century voluntarism in that Beveridge advocated a minister-guardian of voluntary action. So pervasive was the postwar party consensus on the welfare state that the term coined to identify it, “Butskellism,” is at least as well remembered as the successive chancellors of the Exchequer—R.A. Butler and Hugh Gaitskell—from whose amalgamated surnames it was derived.
Lord Beveridge, photograph by Yousuf Karsh.Camera Press/Globe Photos
From the 1960s onward this consensus began to unravel, with the perception of poor economic performance and calls for the modernization of British society and the British economy. The mixed economy came under pressure, as did the institutions of the welfare state, especially the National Health Service (NHS). In the 1970s in particular, older beliefs in constitutional methods came into question—for instance, in the first national Civil Service strike ever, in 1973, and in the strikes and political violence that marked that decade as a whole. The result was a revolution in the relationship between state and society, whereby the market came to replace society as the model of state governance. This did not, however, mean a return to 19th-century models, though the character of this manifestation of the relationship between state and society was clearly liberal, in line with the long British tradition of governance.
Institutionally, this way of governing was pluralistic, but its pluralism was decidedly statist. It was not, as in the 19th century, a private, self-governing voluntarist pluralism but one that was designedly competitive, enlisting quasi-governmental institutions as clients competing with one another in a marketplace. In economic and cultural conditions increasingly shaped by globalization, the economy was exposed to the benign operations of the market not by leaving it alone but by actively intervening in it to create the conditions for entrepreneurship.