Board: AQA | Option: 2S | Component: Component 2 (Depth Study) | Assessment Objective: AO3
This option covers Britain from Churchill’s last government to Blair’s resignation, tracing the post-war consensus, its breakdown under Thatcher, social and cultural change, Britain’s changing international role, and the New Labour project. Students examine how Britain was transformed across half a century and engage with a growing body of contemporary historical debate about the causes and consequences of economic and social change.
What this option covers
- Churchill and Eden: the consolidation of the welfare state and the Suez Crisis 1956
- Macmillan and Wilson: affluence, modernisation, and the ‘white heat’ of technology
- Industrial decline, trade union power, and the crises of the 1970s
- Thatcherism: economic liberalisation, privatisation, the miners’ strike, and the Falklands
- Social change 1951–2007: immigration, multiculturalism, feminism, and the permissive society
- Major and the end of the Conservative era: Black Wednesday and sleaze
- New Labour: Blair, Brown, the Third Way, and the remaking of the left
- Iraq 2003, the war on terror, and Blair’s legacy
Key historiographical debates
- The post-war consensus: how real was it and why did it break down?
- Thatcherism: economic revolution or political myth? (The debate on Thatcher’s legacy)
- British decline: inevitable, managed, or self-inflicted?
- New Labour: continuation of Thatcherism or genuine social democratic project?
Debate 1 — How real was the post-war consensus? (free sample)
Did Britain’s major parties really share a post-war consensus on the managed economy and welfare state — or is ‘consensus’ a myth that flattens decades of genuine partisan conflict? This first debate is free and open to all. The full pack adds three more debates (below).
Paul Addison — consensus was real. The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (Jonathan Cape, 1975). A genuine social-democratic consensus on the managed economy, welfare and full employment was forged inside the wartime coalition and endured for three decades. (source)
Ben Pimlott — consensus is a myth. ‘The Myth of Consensus’ (1988). The post-war ‘consensus’ is a retrospective optical illusion: politics in these years was marked by real, sustained partisan conflict, not agreement. (source)
Dennis Kavanagh & Peter Morris — qualified consensus. Consensus Politics from Attlee to Major (Blackwell, 1994). A consensus did exist as a set of shared policy assumptions across the economy, employment, unions, welfare and foreign policy — but it rose and fell, breaking down amid the crises of the 1970s. (source)
Comparison task. Compare Addison’s and Pimlott’s interpretations of the post-war consensus. To what extent does Kavanagh and Morris’s account reconcile the two, or merely restate Addison’s case with caveats?
Mark-scheme note. Top-band answers treat ‘consensus’ as a contested construct, not a fact: distinguish agreement on policy outcomes from agreement on principles, and weigh whether its breakdown reflects inherent weakness or the specific shocks of the 1970s.
Provenance prompts. (1) Addison wrote in 1975 near the consensus’s end; Pimlott in the late 1980s after Thatcher had broken it — how does hindsight shape each verdict? (2) Why might a historian writing in the 1980s be drawn to emphasise conflict over agreement? (3) What kind of evidence — party manifestos or actual government policy — best tests whether a consensus really existed?
The full pack — three more debates
Subscribers get the full AO3 pack as a downloadable PDF: Debate 1 above plus three more, each with named historians, a comparison task, mark-scheme guidance and provenance prompts.
- Thatcherism: economic revolution or political myth? — Andrew Gamble, Richard Vinen.
- British decline: inevitable, managed, or self-inflicted? — Correlli Barnett, Jim Tomlinson.
- New Labour: continuity with Thatcherism or genuine social democracy? — Colin Hay, Anthony Giddens.
Download the full pack
The full pack — four debates, eight named historians, AQA-style comparison tasks, provenance prompts, and a review checklist — is available to subscribers.
£9.99 per pack
