Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
International Monetary System ◽  
The State ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

The aim of this book has been to evaluate the relationship between Britain’s financial sector, based in the City of London, and the social democratic economic strategy of post-war Britain. The central argument presented in the book was that changes to the City during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key post-war social democratic techniques designed to sustain and develop a modern industrial economy. Financial institutionalization weakened the state’s ability to influence investment, and the labour movement was unable successfully to integrate the institutionalized funds within a renewed social democratic economic agenda. The post-war settlement in banking came under strain in the 1960s as new banking and credit institutions developed that the state struggled to manage. This was exacerbated by the decision to introduce competition among the clearing banks in 1971, which further weakened the state’s capacity to control the provision and allocation of credit to the real economy. The resurrection of an unregulated global capital market, centred on London, overwhelmed the capacity of the state to pursue domestic-focused macroeconomic policies—a problem worsened by the concurrent collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Against this background, the fundamental social democratic assumption that national prosperity could be achieved only through industry-led growth and modernization was undermined by an effective campaign to reconceptualize Britain as a fundamentally financial and commercial nation with the City of London at its heart....

The City of London and Social Democracy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
International Monetary System ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-War Britain evaluates the changing relationship between the United Kingdom financial sector (colloquially referred to as ‘the City of London’) and the post-war social democratic state. The key argument made in the book is that changes to the British financial system during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key components of social democratic economic policy practised by the post-war British state. The institutionalization of investment in pension and insurance funds; the fragmentation of an oligopolistic domestic banking system; the emergence of an unregulated international capital market centred on London; the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international monetary system; and the popularization of a City-centric, anti-industrial conception of Britain’s economic identity, all served to disrupt and undermine the social democratic economic strategy that had attempted to develop and maintain Britain’s international competitiveness as an industrial economy since the Second World War. These findings assert the need to place the Thatcher governments’ subsequent economic policy revolution, in which a liberal market approach accelerated deindustrialization and saw the rapid expansion of the nation’s international financial service industry, within a broader material and institutional context previously underappreciated by historians.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....

The Politics of Banking and Social Democracy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Banking System ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Demand

This chapter concerns the politics of managing the domestic banking system in post-war Britain. It examines the pressures brought to bear on the post-war settlement in banking during the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, the growth of new credit creating institutions and the political demand for more competition between banks. This undermined the social democratic model for managing credit established since the war. The chapter focuses in particular on how the Labour Party attempted in the 1970s to produce a banking system that was competitive, efficient, and able to channel credit to the struggling industrial economy.

scholarly journals ‘Heading up a blind alley’? Scottish psychiatric hospitals in the era of deinstitutionalization

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicky Long
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Care ◽  
Psychiatric Hospitals ◽  
Blind Alley ◽  
Department Of Health ◽  
Institutional Services ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City

This article examines Scottish provision of psychiatric care in the 1960s and 1970s. It demonstrates that institutional services did not rapidly disappear across the UK following the Ministry of Health’s decision to shut down psychiatric hospitals in 1961, and highlights Scotland’s distinctive trajectory. Furthermore, it contends that psychiatric hospitals developed new approaches to assist patients in this era, thereby contributing towards the transformation of post-war psychiatric practice. Connecting a discussion of policy with an analysis of provision, it examines the Department of Health for Scotland’s cautious response to the Ministry’s embrace of deinstitutionalization, before analysing Glasgow’s psychiatric provision in the 1970s. At this point the city boasted virtually no community-based services, and relied heavily on its under-resourced and overburdened hospitals. Closer analysis dispels any impression of stagnation, revealing how ideologies of deinstitutionalization transformed institutional care.

scholarly journals From Big Bang to Brexit: The City of London and the Discursive Power of Finance

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172098571
Author(s):  
Scott James ◽  
Hussein Kassim ◽  
Thomas Warren
Keyword(s):  
Big Bang ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Business Power ◽  
Financial Power ◽  
Discursive Power ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
The Eu

This article aims to generate new insights into the City’s influence during the Brexit negotiations. Integrating theories of discursive institutionalism and business power, we set out to analyse the dynamic ‘discursive power’ of finance. From this perspective, a key source of the City’s influence historically has been a powerful strategic discourse about London’s role as Europe’s leading global financial centre. This was strengthened following the financial crisis to emphasise its contribution to the ‘real’ economy and emerging regulatory threats from the EU. We argue that Brexit challenges the City’s discursive power by removing ‘ideational constraints’ on acceptable policy discourse, and undermining the ‘discursive co-production’ of financial power by government and industry. By encouraging financial actors to re-evaluate their interests, this has contributed to increasing discursive fragmentation and incoherence. Evidence for this comes from the City’s ambiguous policy preferences on Brexit, and the emergence of a rival pro-Brexit ‘discursive coalition’.

Decision-making under duress: the treatment of churches in the City of London during and after World War II

Urban History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER J. LARKHAM ◽  
JOE L. NASR
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Multiple Experts ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACT:The process of making decisions about cities during the bombing of World War II, in its immediate aftermath and in the early post-war years remains a phenomenon that is only partly understood. The bombing left many church buildings damaged or destroyed across the UK. The Church of England's churches within the City of London, subject to a complex progression of deliberations, debates and decisions involving several committees and commissions set up by the bishop of London and others, are used to review the process and product of decision-making in the crisis of war. Church authorities are shown to have responded to the immediate problem of what to do with these sites in order most effectively to provide for the needs of the church as an organization, while simultaneously considering other factors including morale, culture and heritage. The beginnings of processes of consulting multiple experts, if not stakeholders, can be seen in this example of an institution making decisions under the pressures of a major crisis.

Stuart Hall's Discursive Turn

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 556-563
Author(s):  
JAY GARCIA
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

Recalling his work as cofounder and contributor toUniversities and Left Review, or the ULR group, in the lead-up to the founding of cultural studies during the 1950s, Stuart Hall noted that much of that work had to do with the United States. “In geopolitical terms we were of course neutralists, hostile to the politics emanating from the State Department in Washington,” Hall wrote, “but culturally we were nonetheless attracted by the vitality of American popular life, indeed to the domain of mass culture itself.” If the ULR group and similar collectives shared an “anxiety about the stupendous power of the booming consumer capitalism of post-war America,” they were also united by an appreciation for the ways the “vitality and raucousness of American culture certainly loosened England's tight-lipped, hierarchical class cultures and carried inside it possibilities – or the collective dream? – for a better future, which we felt was a serious political loss to deny.” Not unrelatedly, by the 1960s and 1970s, cultural studies and certain quarters of American intellectual life were proceeding along comparable tracks. Many American scholars and at least some working in cultural studies moved toward social history that emphasized the “hidden experiences of subordinated groups and classes.” Undertaken in concert with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this version of social history would ramify widely, furnishing the very questions and analytic habits of many fields, not least American studies.

Certification, Lawsuits and the Role of Epidemiology in the Yokkaichi Asthma Episode in the 1960s and 1970s: Lessons and Legacy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danyang Feng
Keyword(s):  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Related Factors ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Certification System ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City ◽  
Asthma Episode

Summary Yokkaichi asthma, one of the four big pollution diseases of Japan, occurred as a result of the operation of local petrochemical complexes in the city of Yokkaichi in the early 1960s. This article explores how Yokkaichi asthma was caused, how it was certified by local government and how the air pollution victims ultimately won a lawsuit against the polluting corporations. Yoshida Katsumi, a Medical Professor at Mie Prefectural University, consulted the Atomic Bomb Medical Law to establish Yokkaichi’s own certification system. Because both leukaemia and asthma are non-specific diseases, they may also be caused by non-pollution-related factors. In the Yokkaichi lawsuit, Yoshida applied the epidemiological causation to the legal judgment for the purpose of providing compensation to individuals. As the case for compensation unfolded from 1967 to 1972, epidemiological knowledge, legal theory and social norms were deployed to advance the plaintiffs’ claim, whose success set a good example for other legal proceedings.

Globalization and Corporatism: The Growth and Decay of Organized Labor in Venezuela, 1900–1998

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 180-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trudie Coker
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Foreign Debt ◽  
The State ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Private Capital ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
State Capital ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

The contradictory goals of state capital accumulation and redistribution eventually led to the demise of corporatism in Venezuela and probably in much of Latin America. When the Venezuelan state was at its zenith of intervention in the economy, it globalized accumulation via foreign debt. Rather than emphasize accumulation and redistribution as it had during the 1960s and 1970s, accumulation to service the debt became the state's central goal by the 1980s. Declining oil prices by the early 1980s highlighted the weakness of a state caught in the grips of antithetical demands from labor and an increasingly impoverished population, on the one hand, and private capital demanding debt repayment, on the other hand. By definition, corporatism creates a dependency between the state and organized labor. Historically, labor depended on the state for economic subsidies, and the state relied on labor to maintain legitimacy. By the late 1990s, lack of labor autonomy literally dragged labor down with a state drowning in debt and incapacitated by lack of legitimacy. While corporatism is more a relic of things past, the positive implications of increasing labor autonomy are dismal as organized labor has been disarticulated and the democratic state is all but a skeleton.

Soviet Perspectives and Policies toward Reactionary Regimes in the Developing World

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-263
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Surovell
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sector ◽  
Progressive Development ◽  
The Third ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Third World

In their assessments during the 1960s and 1970s of the state of affairs of Third World “revolutionary democracies” and nations that had taken the “non-capitalist road to development,” the Soviets employed a mode of analysis based on the “correlation of forces.” Given the seeming successes of these “revolutionary democracies” and the appearance of new ones, Moscow was clearly heartened by the apparent tilt in favor of the Soviets and of “progressive” humanity more generally. These apparently positive trends were reflected in Soviet perspectives and policies on the Third World, which focused confidently on such “progressive” regimes. Nonetheless, so-called “reactionary” regimes continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet policy makers. This study offers a fresh examination of the Soviet analyses of, and policies towards three “reactionary” Third-World regimes: the military dictatorship in Brazil, the Pinochet dictatorship of Chile, and Iran during the reign of the Shah. The article reveals that Soviet decision makers and analysts identified the state sector as the central factor in the “progressive” development of the Third World. Hence the state sector became the focal point for their analyses and the touchstone for Soviet policies; the promotion of the state sector was regarded as a key to the Soviet objective of promoting the “genuine independence” of Third World countries from imperialist domination.

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