The Middle Way: Post-War Conservative and Labor Party Convergence

(4) During the Middle Way period, after the war, Macmillan, Butler, Quentin Hoag, and other leftists in the party gradually became the mainstream of the party, and the 'middle way' became synonymous with conservatism (Broockman et al., 2021). Modern conservatism followed the Conservative party's tradition of supporting state intervention and authority. After the war, the Conservative Party and the Labor Party reached a consensus on the use of state power to intervene in social and economic life. Both saw stark contrasts between the state and the market, workers and capitalists, private enterprise and public ownership, individual liberty and social justice. The upper mainstream figures of both parties had experienced the violent turmoil in British society between the two wars, and they were determined to eliminate class contradictions. They reached a compromise on the three aspects of full employment, the welfare state, and a mixed economy, forming a social-democratic consensus politics with Keynesianism at its core (Malka et al., 2017).