Abstract
Two factors kept the Labour question high on the political agenda after 1945. One was the consolidation of the Conservative-Labour two-party system, based loosely (or so it was believed) on the assertion respectively of the industrial perspectives of the employers and the trade unions. The other was Britain’s continuing long-term decline as a world economic power, which made industrial policy a central concern of governments of both parties and issues like productivity and wage restraint of prime political importance. The election in 1945 of a majority Labour government committed to a programme of nationalisation and the restoration of trade union immunities seemed to conform to a pattern of party politics derived from industrial conflict, even if the reality was rather different and a fair degree of harmony (political and industrial) persisted through the 1940s and 1950s. When the two-party system began to break up in the 1960s the Liberals attacked a habit of adversarial politics which they said mirrored and exacerbated the antagonism of management and unions. There were those too who sought to place the blame for Britain’s economic and industrial problems on an outdatedly confrontational framework of industrial relations and on the unrestrained growth of trade union power.
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Notes
On the political background to the 1945 election, See Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (London, 1975); Henry Pelling, ‘The 1945 General Election Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, June 1980.
Dutton, British Politics Since 1945, pp. 22–40. The standard accounts of the Attlee governments are Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford, 1984)
and Henry Pelling, The Labour Government, 1945–51 (London, 1984).
Arthur Marwick points out, however, that the Conservatives did force a division on the third reading of the National Health Service Bill. Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (Penguin, 1982), p. 104.
The economic policies of the Labour government cannot be studied in detail here. Morgan, Labour in Power, contains a full account. For a briefer summary, see Alan Sked and Chris Cook, Post-War Britain (3rd edn, Penguin, 1990), pp. 26–38.
The best treatment of the Wilson governments is Clive Ponting, Breach of Promise: Labour in Power 1964–1970 (London, 1989), although this may be supplemented by the diaries and memoirs of many of the participants.
This point is developed more fully in Robert Currie, Industrial Politics (Oxford, 1979), Ch. 5.
The Times, 25 July 1991. For a summary of the reforms and their effects see Christopher Johnson, The Economy Under Mrs Thatcher, 1979–1990 (Penguin, 1991), Ch. 7.
Geary, Policing Industrial Disputes, pp. 136–45; M. Adeney and J. Lloyd, The Miners’ Strike, 1984–5 (London, 1986).
E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (London, 1968), p. 7.
This theme is more fully dealt with in its wider context in Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society (London, 1989).
A. J. Taylor, Trade Unions and the Labour Party (London, 1987), quoted in Laybourn, Rise of Labour, p. 159. It is worth noting, moreover, in the context of the debate about links between the trade unions and the Labour party, that fewer than half the unions in the TUC were affiliated to the Labour party at the beginning of the 1980s.
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© 1992 David Powell
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Powell, D. (1992). British Politics and the Labour Question since 1945. In: British Politics and the Labour Question, 1868–1990. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22464-7_6
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