Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-62 by David Kynaston review – humorous, compassionate and shrewd

In the book trade there is a buzz word: "Kynastonesque". It describes big social history books, with expansive narrative sweeps and formidable sources, which celebrate domestic intimacies against the background of public events. David Kynaston's gift is to find the significance in banality and the common threads in humanity – without lapsing into condescension or sentimentality. The sixth book of his multi-volume history of Britain since 1945 will delight his admirers. A Shake of the Dice has all the tender humour, compassion and shrewdness of its predecessors. It gives a distinctive treatment to the familiar story of how a war-weary, traditionally frugal population, many of whom believed that physical discomfort and emotional repression were character-forming, turned into a nation of unashamed consumers and cry-babies. And although Kynaston is never argumentative or scolding, his writings teem with pointers and cautionary tales for today's policy-makers on the left.

He is now halfway through his sequence, which is scheduled to close with Margaret Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street in 1979. The emphasis on private virtues, on community loyalties, on apologetic decency is already receding. By the early 1960s many traditional notions of self-respect and self-restraint are beginning to be laughed at. Acquisitiveness, the proliferation of gimcrack modernity, the abuse of trade-union power, the decline of neighbourly responsibility all obtrude on Kynaston's narrative. While he recognises that improving prosperity alleviated hardships, and that consumerism brought worthwhile amenities to many households, he seems to feel saddened by a nation of unsuccessful materialists, behaving in unseemly ways to buy objects that they do not really need and cannot reasonably afford.

A Shake of the Dice spotlights new trends among male factory workers that contributed to Labour's defeat in the general election of 1959. Researchers and pollsters reported rising material expectations, sharper acquisitive instincts and increased presumptions of personal economic security. Experiences of wartime dangers and National Service disruptions had intensified men's appreciation of marriage, domesticity, stability and home comforts. One working-class man is quoted as saying that mates at work "are not pals". The basis of working-class solidarity was shifting.

A sociologist reported after extensive interviews with industrial workers in 1959 that "The worker wants little things instead of big things, he wants them for himself rather than for society at large … old slogans, old loyalties tend to leave him cold." A Gallup poll in 1960 found that 25% of voters would support a new Consumers' Party, non‑aligned to the trade unions or to big business. In the same year the sociologist Michael Young predicted: "Politics will become less and less the politics of production, and more and more the politics of consumption."

The prodigiously clear-thinking Oxford intellectual Jeremy Wolfenden posed some disconcerting questions for Labour leaders in 1960: "How can we know that a community of equals, rather than a world of I'm-all-right-Jacks and kept-up-with-the-Joneses, is what the average free man would choose? May he not prefer material goods to hospitals, lavish Hollywood epics to documentaries, TV commercials to Shakespeare?" Wolfenden warned that the vast majority of voters would want to invent capitalism if it did not already exist. "The New Left put their faith in the community and the mutual interests it contains, demanding a standard of clear thinking and unselfishness that the ordinary man cannot bear. They overrate people in their social behaviour."

Fifteen years' experience of nationalised industries and services had shown that state ownership was no panacea for social injustice or economic inefficiency. British Railways was notorious for its dirty rolling-stock, unpunctual services, dismal station buffets, grimy dining cars with chipped crockery, fractious staff, go-slows and strikes. Once the railways were subsidised by public funds, taxpayers expected to be treated with the respect accorded to owners. Nationalisation thus aroused a habit of mutual aggression between passengers and railwaymen. "The public don't trouble a button whether they are polite to us or not," said a train guard with 40 years' service. "Before the war they used to think the world of the railwayman and now they don't give a fig."

Nationalisation was an end in itself for many socialists and for communists. Moderates hoped it was a means to improved productivity and full employment. Trade union leaders welcomed it as a means to tighten their negotiating stranglehold on state managers. Harold Wilson, who was to become leader of the Labour Party in 1963, said that nationalisation's relation to socialism resembled that of Genesis to the Bible – it was the fundamental opener. Wilson's prudery and hypocrisy are well drawn by Kynaston. His frontbench colleague Richard Crossman took him to dine at a Pall Mall club. "He talked a good deal," recorded Crossman, "about the need to revive some kind of Puritanism in the party, some self-dedication, and he was careful to remind me twice that he couldn't tell the difference between hock and burgundy."

Another future Labour leader, Michael Foot, crowed in 1960 about the Soviet economy and its subjugated East European satellites: "Like it or not, one of the most spectacular events of our age is the comparative success of the communist economic systems." There is a major chapter on Britain's declining industrial position and encroaching labour unrest. The Treasury concentrated "first and foremost on symbolic figures and quantities, like prices, exchange rates and balances of payment, to the neglect of real quantities, like goods and services produced and traded," Kynaston judges.

He gives powerful accounts of sex discrimination in employment, domestic drudgery, the loneliness of housebound mothers, the stigmatisation of divorced women, and disgusting attitudes to white women with black boyfriends or husbands. There are jaunty passages on advertising jingles ("Oxo gives a meal man-appeal"; "Don't forget the fruit gums, Mum"). The 10 most heavily advertised products in 1960 (in descending order) were Persil, Tide, Omo, Daz, Stork, Guinness, Nescafé, Surf, Maxwell House, Ford. The most popular TV ads were for Esso petrol and Sunblest sliced bread. Kynaston includes happy evocations of such marketing innovations as the stripe in Signal toothpaste, ready-salted crisps from Golden Wonder, Lego toys and plastic carrier bags. He reminds readers, too, of the perceived "moral danger" of stiletto heels.

As usual in Kynaston's books there are matchless quotations from diarists. In this volume the palm must go to the future children's laureate Jacqueline Wilson, then a Surrey schoolgirl, gushing about her new record-player, the film Expresso Bongo showing at the Regal cinema, nail varnish, the samba, Adam Faith, turquoise duffle coats, cha-cha shoes and spotty teddy boys.

If there are huge amounts to praise in this vivid, amusing and yet serious-minded book, a few mild criticisms can be made. Some names and cultural allusions are dropped too briskly for readers under the age of 50 to grasp them. Occasionally linking passages are too scant. Two long sections about slum-clearance schemes, urban dual carriageways and the brutalisation of cityscapes are written with passion, but some of their relentless details will be skimmed by many readers. The erection of shoddy concrete council tower-blocks, the demolition of the picturesque and the celebration of eyesores all deserve attention for their part in social disintegration and lawlessness. Yet Kynaston's determination to be fair in acknowledging the primitive squalor of old tenements and the idealistic hopes of urban planners makes for unwontedly heavy reading.

In common with most contemporary historians, Kynaston skirts the effect of taxation. He mentions that the 1960 budget, presented by a Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, raised taxes on profits and restricted dividend-stripping. He is unsparing in his indictment of the cosiness, defeatism, inertia and lack of initiative in many private businesses, which partly arose from decades of wartime and postwar regulations, and partly from a national hostility to making big profits. The creation of an "expense-account" culture, the proliferation of perks to evade a confiscatory tax regime, all the "fiddles" that a traditionally law‑abiding workforce improvised to evade taxation, and the underlying puritanism of Labour's fiscal planners will be crucial in Kynaston's next volume, and perhaps deserved more consideration in A Shake of the Dice.

This richly flavoured, particoloured, polyvocal melange deserves a slow, luxuriant read. Impatient readers should consult the index under "food" or "Daily Mail" if they wish to feel sick, and "Hancock, Tony" if they need a laugh.