The 1950s have been back in the headlines, thanks to viral tik-tok videos of “trad wives” donning aprons and talking about their desire to be stay at home mothers. Progressive publications have been duly horrified by this retrograde trend, with Grazia lamenting that the hapless would-be housewives’ 50s cosplay was “romanticizing an era where sexism and racism ruled”. 

Romanticism has a very bad press on the liberal Left, with one furious Labour member denouncing Keir Starmer’s “Blue Labour strategy” as such. It apparently involves the idea that “the British public are fundamentally racist & nostalgic for a mythical world before multiculturalism” and that “those who subscribe to this version of social conservatism believe that the myth — of a return to an idealised 1950s — is powerful enough to move politics & win elections”.

Important to realise that @Keir_Starmer isn’t a Blairite in the the strict sense. He’s borrowing, not from the New Labour playbook, but the Blue Labour one. That holds that the British public are fundamentally racist & nostalgic for a mythical world before multiculturalism. (1/8)

— Ben Sellers (@MrBenSellers) March 10, 2023

The 1950s has entered the progressive imaginary as a terrible savage era of stuffy social conservatism, unbridled prejudice and brutal injustice, a gloomy age romanticised by unpleasant reactionaries who want to “put the clock back” and oppress women and minorities. Ironically, this is as much the stuff of myth and (dark) romance as the most Ladybird Book fantasy of a perfect 1950s Britain.

If we step back from the myth-making and sweep the argument out of the mists of political legend, and back into the realm of solid fact, it is very odd indeed that those who claim to be on the Left are so hostile to positive accounts of the 50s. Unemployment was lower than it has ever been since (at an average of two per cent over the entire decade). More of the economy was in state hands than ever before or since, and the government built more houses every year despite 16 million fewer people living in the country than today. 

There was a 40 per cent rise in average real wages from 1950 to 1965, and these gains were distributed more fairly than ever before, with inequality continually declining throughout the decade. In 1950 about 40 per cent of wealth was held by 10 per cent of the population, and by 1960 that had fallen to 30 per cent. Today inequality is now worse than it was at the start of the 50s, with the top tenth of the population owning 43 per cent of national wealth. This is a level of inequality unknown since the 1920s, when the landed aristocracy still had a dominant role in British politics. Research suggests that of those whose wealth has increased since the 2008 financial crisis, the vast majority have achieved it through the increase in the assets’ value rather than savings. In other words, we are increasingly a rentier economy in which wealth is increasingly accumulated through assets and passive income rather than through wages and savings. 

Why should a more equal time in our history not be a touchstone for the Left?

Similar patterns emerge in America and Western Europe, where the 1950s were an unprecedented period of economic growth, falling inequality, increased state spending and rising social mobility. 

So much for the economic facts, but what about the culture and society of the 50s? Surely those who hearken back to 1950s culture must be quietly indicating their preferences for racial homogeneity and the subjugation of women? This seems to ignore the rather more basic and pertinent cultural fact that the 1950s were a communitarian age that cut across right and left. 

Party membership levels in Britain were at an all time high, with 2.8m Conservative Party and 1m Labour Party members, a number supplemented by 4-5 million members of trade unions and co-operative party members. By 1950 over 9.5 million people were trade union members. By 2021, only 6.4 million people were still in a trade union, the majority of whom (3.9 million) were public sector workers. Conservative Party membership has fallen to around 200,000, and the Labour Party is down to about 430,000. 

If democracy is defined by participation in public life, and a say over your own political and economic destiny, the 1950s was not only a more economically equal decade — they were also a vastly more democratic period in our history. Why should an objectively more democratic and equal time in our history not be a touchstone for the Left, rather than a bogeyman? Why are countries like Sweden the social democratic dream, rather than the example bequeathed by our own history? Why are racism and sexism imputed to those who look back with affection on this era, whilst the facts I cite above are ignored?

The answer is straightforward: today both Right and Left have covertly converged in their endorsement of an increasingly radical libertarianism. Though there are some on the Left who would like the economics of the 50s, and some on the Right who are fond of its social conservatism, the economics and culture of the 50s are entangled in ways that neither side are fully comfortable with. 

The Left would far rather look to the 70s, where its favoured economics were wedded to a liberalising and increasingly individualistic society. These very developments, alongside growing social division and conflict, saw the social democratic dream become a nightmare, however. The decade became a byword in British politics for dysfunction, shortages and crisis. Many on the Right started to conclude that the statism and welfare of the previous decades had undermined personal responsibility and social conservatism. Thatcher’s government would oversee a reversal in the trends towards economic equality, helping spawn a new generation of right wing libertarians, yuppies and individualists.

This led to the Right-Left division as it is still understood by many in politics and the media today (and certainly by those progressives howling about the 50s) — as a confrontation between a socially conservative and economically liberal Right, and a socially liberal and economically conservative Left. This model has long since been abandoned in practice, for all that it persists discursively. Blair decisively positioned Labour as an economically and socially liberal party, a model closely imitated by Cameron who abandoned what remained of the socially conservative identity of the Tories. Where once the major parties broadly agreed on a shared economic and social conservatism, they have now converged around their exact opposites. 

A 2020 survey demonstrated something that many political analysts had long intuited: MPs are wildly out of step with the British public. Conservative voters tended to agree with statements like “Big business takes advantage of ordinary people”, “Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance”, “There is one law for the rich and one for the poor” and “Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth”. Meanwhile Tory MPs were overwhelmingly likely to disagree with these statements.

Though Labour MPs on average agreed with these statements, they were less likely to agree than their own voters. Amazingly, they were also less likely to agree with them than the general public. 

A successful past model offers fuel for a third party or internal populist takeover

Meanwhile on social issues, the same pattern of divergence with voters persisits. When given statements like “Young people don’t have enough respect for traditional British values”, “People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences”, “Schools should teach children to obey authority”, and “For some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence”, Conservative MPs were not only less likely to agree with them than their voters, not only less than the general public, but in many cases less than Labour voters. The pattern likewise held true with Labour MPs, who were found less likely to agree with these statements than both their voters and the general public. 

Even more tellingly, the 2019 voters who swung from Labour to Tory were to the left of the general public on economics, but to the right of Conservative voters on social issues. Not only do conservative social and economic values represent the median view of British voters, they’re also the key motivator for the most important section of voters in any forthcoming general election.

No wonder, perhaps, that 1950s nostalgia is knocked so hard by members of the political and media classes. It’s this precise offer of economic equality and social cohesion that decides elections. Blair effectively pulled off the trick of offering a 1950s style settlement rhetorically (“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”) whilst in practice presiding over economic and social liberalisation. 

This trick has a deep cost, one that has helped drive everything from Scottish nationalism to the anger of Brexit, whilst sending faith in politicians and public institutions plummeting to all-time lows. Meanwhile, the remaining symbols of 1950s Britain — the NHS and the Monarchy (and to a lesser extent the BBC and the Army) — have taken on a talismanic significance, commanding a level of abiding trust critics have rarely understood. 

1950s romanticism is most dangerous by making concrete the intuitions much of the public have about the dominance of untrammelled capitalism and ultra-permissive social liberalism. So long as this time is remembered, and accurately remembered, disturbing trends towards greater inequality, lower wages and rising crime are revealed as what they are – the product of political choices.  Rather than a series of cynicisms that can be exploited at election time, the reality of a successful past model offers the sort of fuel that could be used for a third party or an internal populist takeover. It is for this precise reason that tendencies like Blue Labour and Red Tory, or political parties like the SDP, are subjected to such excessive, malevolent and borderline defamatory commentary from progressive commentators of both Left and Right. 

For perhaps the greatest nostalgic power of the 50s is not conservative or retrograde, but progressive, in the real sense of the word. It was a decade in which things were getting better, rather than getting ever worse. It was an optimistic and forward-looking decade in which the potentials of technology seemed more obviously utopian rather than dystopian. 

For a political class addicted to progressive nostalgia for the 70s and conservative cosplaying of the 80s, the retro radicalism of the 50s offers a third way. It is the restoration of a lost social covenant, a nation no longer at war with itself or bitterly divided by class, ideology or region.