Austerity Britain 1945-1951, by DJ Taylor

The first tranche of David Kynaston's projected four-decker history of the period between 1945 and 1979 has many symbolic moments. The most resonant takes in the visit of the Minister of Town and Country Planning, Lewis Silkin, to the Hertfordshire town of Stevenage 61 years ago this week. Stevenage, then home to 6,000 people, had been identified as the first postwar New Town, to the great disgust of most residents. At least half packed into the town hall or assembled in the streets outside (to which proceedings were relayed by tannoy) to hear the minister's address.

To shouts of "Gestapo!" and "Dictator!", Silkin informed the seething horde that "It is no good your jeering: it is going to be done." Proceeding to the ministerial car, he discovered its tyres had been deflated and sand poured in its tank. In a referendum, a majority declared themselves "entirely against the siting of a satellite town at Stevenage". A legal rearguard action dragged on, but the juggernaut was unstoppable. The new town fell, as EM Forster put it, "like a meteorite on the delicate and ancient scenery of Hertfordshire".

This, more or less, is Kynaston's theme: the imposition on the British people, throughout a six-year period of quasi-Socialist government, of ideas, policies and decisions which they did not want or to which they were at best indifferent. There is no getting away from this, for it is reinforced by nearly every public-opinion statistic. It was the age of the planner, of Douglas Jay's gentleman in Whitehall who really did know best, the age of a 390-MP Labour Party whose core trades-union base had been bulked out by bourgeois radicals seduced by the vision of a communal Jerusalem. The result was one of the most painful collisions between political idealism and Everyman in 20th-century history.

Kynaston's evidence for this impasse comes from every area of the national fabric. Bevan's establishment of the NHS got a public thumbs-up, but the Attlee government's drive to nationalise major industries was apathetically received. Twice offered seats on the National Coal Board in 1946, the miners' leaders declined them on the grounds that "administration was not their affair".

In the move to regenerate a housing stock ravaged by bombs and dereliction, scarcely one citizen in five (when asked) wanted a high-rise flat, but the government was already offering subsidies and the flats got built. In the vexed arena of town planning, Bristol, whose old Broadmead shopping centre lay in ruins, may be taken as emblematic: 13,000 people voted for the restoration of the old centre and 400 against. The planners ignored the majority.

As social history, Austerity Britain brings off the very difficult trick of combining chronological flow and themed discussion into a seamless narrative. Applying the techniques Kynaston used so successfully in his history of the City of London, it mingles shelf-loads of carefully synthesised research with first-hand testimony, from the great and good (James Lees-Milne, Beryl Bainbridge) to Mass Observation diarists. His gaze is commendably wide - he eavesdrops on soccer matches, he follows one furtively masturbating eye-witness into the Windmill Theatre - but at the centre of its field of vision lies an awareness of the cultural implications of the Attlee project.

The 1939-1945 period, most observers insist, had been a highbrow war: the era of Penguin New Writing's six-figure circulation and audiences flocking to lunch-time concerts in blitzed squares. Most highbrows were keen for this atmosphere of mild uplift to be resolutely maintained. "We do not want greyhound racing and dirt-track performances... at all hours of the day and night," JB Priestley had declared in 1941. Alas, this was exactly what the British public did want. The most popular postwar radio personality was the matily lowbrow Wilfred Pickles; Penguin New Writing, in which so many pious literary hopes had been invested, folded in 1950.

If Austerity Britain's 600-plus pages have a hero it is the Labour MP Evan Durbin, drowned in a holiday accident, who almost alone among his colleagues seemed to appreciate the sterility of some of the prescriptions on offer. In its concluding chapters can be glimpsed two more issues - immigration and crime - in which the legislature's disdain for public consultation created all kinds of future trauma. Overall, its effect is to emphasise what no keen student of our national scene ever fails to appreciate - that we live not in a democracy but an oligarchy, the animating spirit of whose citizens is determinedly individualistic.

The implications, for those of us who believe in such desirable abstracts as the people's will, communal impulses, and the idea that "ordinary people" will read highbrow novels if given the chance, are profoundly depressing and entirely predictable. Not the least of Kynaston's achievements in this extraordinary book is to demonstrate the absolute futility of blaming postwar British society - born out of ration books, shortages and bureaucratic fixers - for its materialism.

DJ Taylor's latest novel is 'Kept' (Vintage)