The Politics of the Future in Britain 1958 to 2004

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The primary objective of this research is to investigate British people's perceptions of the future between 1958 and 2004. Ranging from the bleak to the bright, the preposterous to the probable, what do these 'futures past' tell us about the popular politics of post-war Britain? Since 1945, political parties have dealt in competing visions of Britain's future: the socially-democratic 1945 Labour Manifesto, 'Let Us Face The Future'; Macmillan's vision of an 'affluent' Britain in the late-1950s; the technocratic revival of Harold Wilson's 'White Heat'; Enoch Powell's prophesised 'Rivers of blood'; Margaret Thatcher's attempts to 'roll back the tide of Socialism'; and Blair's vision of a 'Third Way'. But how far did 'ordinary' Britons buy in to these visions? Or, alternatively, did they develop their own vernacular visions? Thanks to the ever-growing study of public memory, historians have demonstrated that post-war Britons were incapable of agreeing on their past and its meaning; this research will explore how - through the lenses of race, class, gender and nation - Britain looked to its future.Historians have a tendency to teleology, to view the past in light of subsequent events. A historical investigation that focuses on imagined futures avoids this pitfall by recreating the uncertainty and contingency of the past. To date, there have been relatively few histories of modern Britain's 'futures past': just three journal articles (by Ortolano, Crowcroft, and Kowol) have explored perceptions of the future among Conservative Party leaders and urban planners. Rob Waters' Historical Research Lecture in October 2019 demonstrated the utility of a 'futures past' perspective in his analysis of Black political cultures in the 1970s. As of yet, however, no historian has adopted a future-focused perspective for a sustained cultural and political history of post-war Britain.