Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War. By KitKowol. Oxford University Press, 2024. 352 pp. £30.

In Blue Jerusalem, Kit Kowol tells the story of Britain's Conservatives during the Second World War. Kowol's central argument is that this story is one that has been overlooked by traditional left-wing narratives, which present the wartime Conservative Party as intellectually moribund and politically discredited by appeasement. By emphasizing instead conservatism's influence and vitality, Kowol's work builds on a burgeoning literature that has questioned both the idea of the Second World War as a ‘People's War’ and the notion that the post-war policies of the Attlee government were its inevitable political conclusion. Large parts of Kowol's book are about showing the influence of Conservative politicians and of distinctively Conservative thinking on both domestic policy during the war and the management of the war itself. In terms of wartime strategy, Kowol sets out how Conservatives successfully rejected the ‘People's War’ approach developed by left-wing intellectuals such as the ex-communist Spanish Civil War veteran Tom Wintringham. Instead, they pursued a military strategy centred on mechanized warfare, maintaining air and naval superiority, and drawing on Britain's imperial resources – an approach that drew both on long-standing traditions of ‘liberal militarism’ and Conservative military thinking from the interwar period. In terms of the home front, Kowol rejects the idea of a ‘“New Deal” at Dunkirk’ (p. 99) and makes a compelling case that the democratization that famously occurred during the war was balanced and offset by both a far-reaching ‘militarisation of society’ (p. 70) and a major effort to ‘Christianise the State’ (p. 78), both aggressively pushed by Conservatives. He points, in particular, to the government's public celebration of military professionalism, the traditionally hierarchical (rather than democratic) organization of the Home Guard, the increasingly religious output of the BBC, the 1944 Education Act's introduction of compulsory Christian education in all state schools and the establishment of a generous system of preferential welfare for servicemen and their families. The most interesting sections of the book however are those focused not on the war itself, but on Conservative ideas for what might come after. Kowol highlights the intellectual vitality of the wartime ‘Conservative movement’ (p. 15), presenting an impressive array of largely forgotten Conservative blueprints developed during the war for Britain's post-war future. By drawing our attention to these paths not taken, and by stressing their perceived political viability at the time, he pushes us to view the post-1945 settlement as contingent rather than predetermined – just one of a set of possible outcomes. In particular, Kowol excavates some fascinating rival strains of wartime Conservative collectivism. ‘Conservative Industrial Paternalists’ (p. 195) such as Harry McGowan, the chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), drew up far-reaching plans for a corporatist reorganization of the British economy, in which production would be controlled by a powerful and autonomous Central Council of Industry, and generous social services provided directly by employers. ‘Constructive Imperialists’ (p. 204) such as the Cabinet minister Leo Amery and or the backbench MP David Gammans advocated for the creation of an imperial welfare state, with common levels of social provision across Britain and her colonies. ‘Conservative Ruralists’ (p. 188) organized around the Kinship in Husbandry organization promoted a nostalgic vision of an economically self-sufficient and predominantly agricultural organic society, underpinned by mass peasant farming and a rejection of commercial values. Kowol also highlights the work of the Central Committee for National Policy (CCNP) – later the Post-War Problems Central Committee (PWPCC) – formed in 1940 by the influential Tory minister (and later post-war Chancellor of the Exchequer) R.A.B. Butler to develop future policy for the Conservatives. Explicitly religious in outlook, this body developed schemes designed to re-Christianize the state, and to remake Britain as a community governed by Christian ideals. Inspired by the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim, its concrete proposals included compulsory participation in youth organizations, and the development of a new anti-individualist educational philosophy designed to imbue children with Christian morality and exalt service to nation and state. Such visions were – like those developed on the left during the war – strikingly collectivist. But they were collectivist in a distinctively Tory way. Far from being socialist or egalitarian, they were designed to reinforce and harmonize existing hierarchies of class and empire. They were also generally elitist in focus, with a substantial emphasis on the appropriate training for society's leaders, and on the new values and moral duties that should define their social, political, and economic leadership. Of course, the embrace of collectivism within Conservative ranks was certainly not uncontested, and Kowol equally explores the ideas and influence of tendencies like Ernest Benn's ‘Society of Individualists’, which advocated a return to Victorian political economy and envisaged postwar Britain as a free-trading capitalist nation of hardy and self-reliant citizens. Overall, what Kowol's impressive research demonstrates is the pluralism of the wartime Conservative movement, and the wide range of intellectual sources it drew from. Indeed, Kowol even shows – although he does not choose to particularly press this point – that Conservative politics was often permeated by far-right and even fascist ideas. CCNP members were openly admiring of elements of German and Italian totalitarianism. The pro-peace Union and Reconstruction movement (whose supporters included two government whips) had a membership that overlapped with the openly pro-Nazi Right Club. An influential figure amongst Conservative ruralists was Viscount Lymington, a paranoid antisemite and the founder of a pre-war racialist and neo-feudalist political movement called the ‘English Array’. Even John Baker White – the future Conservative MP whose idealistic collectivist vision of a post-war Britain serves as the book's opener – was a former member of the British Fascisti. Nonetheless, perhaps the most revealing section of the book is the epilogue, in which Kowol details just how quickly wartime Conservatism's collectivist and even utopian visions fell away during and after the 1945 general election. Kowol traces how, faced with the election of a Labour majority in parliament, many Tories reacted with horror and outrage, retreating into an extreme and explicitly class-based resentment against the socialist ‘totalitarianism’ of the new government (whose basic political legitimacy they often appeared to deny), and the supposed selfishness and ingratitude of its ‘base’, ‘black’ and ‘sinful’ working-class supporters (p. 274). In this context, wartime ideas about capitalist planning, social solidarity and the importance of spiritual values rapidly gave way to spirited defences of private property, individualism, and laissez-faire, often combined with anti-Communist paranoia. Erstwhile ‘Industrial Paternalists’ dropped their critiques of rentierism and abstentee owners to wage crusades against nationalization campaigns, and substituted demands for more punitive wage policies for their earlier advocacy of corporate welfare. Wartime ‘Tory Progressives’ meanwhile began arguing for the ‘anti-collectivist road’ and a ‘society based on contract’ (p. 278). Most interestingly, Kowol points out that even R.A.B. Butler's post-war embrace of public ownership and the welfare state was couched in the language of individual freedom and choice – a sharp break from the authoritarian Christian moralism that had defined his wartime work with the CCNP. Ultimately, one is remined of Marx's famous observation from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that ‘the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent’. On reaching the end of Kowol's excellent study, one is left with the suspicion that wartime British Conservatives imagined themselves to be motivated by high ideals of service, community, and Christendom, until the Attlee government wrung from them the confession that they cared first and foremost about the preservation of social deference.