Building Socialism British Style

2019 ◽  
pp. 255-301
Author(s):  
Isser Woloch
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Health Service ◽  
Health Service ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Program ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Decisive Victory ◽  
Union Bargaining Power

This chapter examines the postwar legacy of the Labour Party. Labour's legacy included a fully formed welfare state with the National Health Service (NHS) at its core; an ambitious public housing program; strong trade union bargaining power; quasi-Keynesian fiscal tactics to sustain purchasing power; a degree of central planning for a mixed economy; and a constant reiteration of egalitarian values. A few of Labour's far-reaching programs no doubt had roots of a sort in the thought and experience of the coalition years of World War II. However, the forms and transformational heft of Labour's postwar settlement derived in the main from the party's prewar social democratic agenda, its surprisingly decisive victory in 1945, and its hard-fought exercise of power. After 1951, the Conservatives came to terms with Labour's bedrock achievements but worked steadily to modify them incrementally in favor of free enterprise.

scholarly journals Commentary: Serving the nation, serving the people: echoes of war in the early NHS

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-156
Author(s):  
Roberta Bivins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Health Service ◽  
Health Service ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
State Institution ◽  
World War ◽  
Total War ◽  
The People ◽  
Post War ◽  
British People

It is something of a cliché to speak of Britain as having been transformed by the traumas of World War II and by its aftermath. From the advent of the ‘cradle to grave’ Welfare State to the end of (formal) empire, the effects of total war were enduring. Typically, they have been explored in relation to demographic, socioeconomic, technological and geopolitical trends and events. Yet as the articles in this volume observe across a variety of examples, World War II affected individuals, groups and communities in ways both intimate and immediate. For them, its effects were directly embodied. That is, they were experienced physically and emotionally—in physical and mental wounds, in ruptured domesticities and new opportunities and in the wholesale disruption and re-formation of communities displaced by bombing and reconstruction. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Britain’s post-war National Health Service, as the state institution charged with managing the bodies and behaviour of the British people, was itself permeated by a ‘wartime spirit’ long after the cessation of international hostilities.

scholarly journals Brexit, the NHS and the double-edged sword of populism: Contributor to agonistic democracy or vehicle of ressentiment?

Organization ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Hensmans ◽  
Koen van Bommel
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Health Service ◽  
Health Service ◽  
National Health ◽  
The European Union ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Agonistic Democracy

In this paper we argue that mature political democracies require an agonistic form of populism in order to function. Agonistic populism counters technocratic apathy and instrumental reductionism and provides democracies with discursive legitimacy for the expression of antagonisms. We draw on the exemplary case of Brexit to show how the long-term suppression of English populism by an all-conquering British imperial discourse, and the hegemony of technocratic solutions in Europe, transformed populism’s potentially virtuous agonistic effects into an often anachronistic, toxic and ill-directed ressentiment against the European Union. We call upon management scholars to focus on how popular ressentiment can be used as a force for good in two ways: (1) by contributing agonistically to an alternative, emotionally founded discourse about England, the European Union and a new popular civilizational project that could bind them; and (2) by inducing the creation of collective moral categories embraced across the elite/non-elite divide in the image of the post-World War II National Health Service.

Our Crow Indian Hospital

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-146
Author(s):  
Brianna Theobald
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Health Service ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Bureau Of Indian Affairs ◽  
Treaty Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Infant Welfare ◽  
Comprehensive Health ◽  
Crow Indian

This chapter explores how members of the Crow Nation—especially women—navigated the various terminationist pressures of the post-World War II period. In these years, an influential group of policy makers pursued the dissolution of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the termination of tribal members’ political status as “American Indian.” In practice, one of the most immediate threats was the reduction or elimination of reservation health services. The chapter reveals that the female members of a new Crow Health Committee emerged as leaders in the community’s effort to protect the reservation hospital and to reform the colonial institution to meet the evolving needs of Crow people. In regular meetings with medical officers in the newly created Indian Health Service, these women presented comprehensive health services, and particularly maternal and infant welfare, as a federal obligation and a matter of Indian treaty rights.

The Cultural Origins of the Dutch Economic Modeling Practice

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne van den Bogaard
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Economic Modeling ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
Macroeconometric Modeling

The ArgumentThe Netherlands has been a pioneering country in the development of macroeconometric modeling and its use in economic policy. The paper shows that the model was used to overcome the fragmented culture of Dutch pillarization. It proves that the specific use (and institutionalization) of modeling in the policy process is at least partly shaped by a nation's (historical) social structure. The case study relates to the outcome of a controversy within the social democratic pillar in the Netherlands in the period 1930–50 as to how to plan the economic system in the context of the social developments leading up to the crisis, World War II, and the postwar recovery.

“Termites in the Temple”: Fundamentalism and Anti-Liberal Politics in the Post–World War II South

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf ◽  
Ken Fones-Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
World War ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
American Society ◽  
The New Deal

AbstractFrom 1946 to 1950, East Tennessee was embroiled in a bitter campaign over the radio preacher and evangelist, J. Harold Smith. More than a curiosity, this confrontation helps us understand a much broader struggle that cut deeply through American society in the post-World War II era. It was a conflict that grew out of a conservative political effort to roll back the New Deal, the union-led regime of collective bargaining, and the tide of modernist religion. These issues overlapped with concerns about African-American equality and the Soviet Union’s threat to the nation’s security. Although recent scholarship has revealed the symbiotic relationship between postwar evangelicalism and free-enterprise ideology, we know little about how and why that message resonated for many middling and working-class individuals. Fortunately, supporters of Smith’s radio program wrote thousands of letters that illuminate what normally anonymous people were thinking about God, society, and politics in the postwar years.In this paper, we use the events in Knoxville as a window into the broader contest over religion and politics in postwar America. Smith’s struggle in Knoxville occurred during an especially tumultuous time in the South. As such, it reveals one regional context for the unsettling political changes and religious conflicts that were occurring nationally. Finally, a study of the responses of Smith’s supporters affords a rare opportunity to analyze one base of postwar fundamentalism and what drew them to the politics and theology of men like J. Harold Smith.

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