Economy and Democracy pp 110-126 | Cite as
The Political Process: Market Place or Battleground?
Abstract
On holiday in a far-away country, I found amongst disintegrating books a copy of Encounter for December 1964. A series of articles under the general heading ‘The New Britain’ dealt with prospects following the election a couple of months earlier of a Labour government. The first of these was by Andrew Shonfield. ‘The distinctive thing’ the new government had to offer, he wrote, was ‘a different way of doing business’.1 That way ‘should in the end produce more wealth more consistently’ than previous governments had succeeded in doing. He went on to refer to the possibility of Labour’s eventually losing office having laid ‘the foundations for a more rapid rate of economic growth’. Making ‘the nation’s productive apparatus yield more’ was the government’s task, with ‘raising the volume of productive investment’ and ‘using our resources in manpower, technology and capital more effectively’ the twin instruments of policy.
Keywords
Political Party Trade Union Pressure Group Middle Ground Labour GovernmentPreview
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Notes
- 1.Andrew Shonfield, ‘The Economic Issue’, in ‘Spectrum’, Encounter, vol. XXII, no. 6, December 1964.Google Scholar
- 6.For the pledge and its consequences, see Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979) pp. 526–8.Google Scholar
- 7.Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).Google Scholar
- 11.For a useful brief discussion of these themes see James Douglas, ‘The Conservative Party: From Pragmatism to Ideology — and Back?’, in West European Politics, vol. 6, no. 4, October 1983.Google Scholar
- 12.See R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971) pp. 126–53 for an account of the adaptibility of the Conservative party in the post-war years by one of its most accomplished practitioners.Google Scholar
- 14.William Rodgers, ‘Government under stress. Britain’s Winter of Discontent 1979’, The Political Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 2, April—June 1984.Google Scholar
- 17.Anthony King, ‘The Rise of the Career Politician in Britain — and its Consequences’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 11, no. 3, July 1981, is a wider discussion of the shift in the personal structure of British politics.Google Scholar
- 19.Cmnd 7321. Cripps owned much to the support of Ernest Bevin whose authority with the trade unions ensured that they supported a wage freeze by more than 2–to–1. Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power 1945–51 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) p. 372.Google Scholar
- 21.Ivor Crewe, Bo Sarlvik and James Alt, ‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964–74’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 7 (1977).Google Scholar