‘A Party for Owners or a Party for Earners?’ How far did the British Conservative Party Really Change After 1945?

1987 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 49-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ramsden
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Characteristic Mode ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Electoral Defeat ◽  
Post War ◽  
Looking Back

THE period spent in opposition between 1945 and 1951 has generally been thought of as a key to the understanding of the activities of the post-war British Conservative Party. Autobiographies of the Party leaders of the time began to appear at the end of the Fifties, already looking back to a period in which the Conservatives had decisively changed their approach. So for example, Lord Woolton's Memoirs reviewed not only a term as Party Chairman which had been a highlight of his own crowded career, but also his sharing in a major act of transformation, a transformation that had led on to Conservative success since 1951: ‘the change was revolutionary’. Other key figures in the organisation reached similar conclusions as their own accounts appeared: David Maxwell-Fyfe argued that the new Party rules which he had drawn up had not only decisively widened the political base of British Conservatism, but that events since had confirmed the importance of the change. R. A. Butler's account of The Art of the Possible argued in 1971 that ‘the overwhelming electoral defeat of 1945 shook the Conservative Party out of its lethargy and impelled it to re-think its philosophy and re-form its ranks with a thoroughness unmatched for a century’. The effect was to bring both the policies of the Party and ‘their characteristic mode of expression’, as he puts it, ‘up to date’. As recently as 1978, Reginald Maudling—a key figure behind the scenes in 1945–51 as a speechwriter from Eden and Churchill and as the organising secretary of the committee which produced the Industrial Charter of 1947—reached much the same view: ‘We were at that time developing a new economic policy for the Conservative Party … It marked a substantially different approach for post-war Conservative philosophy.

The Political Function of Domestic Objects in the Fiction of Aleksandra Kollontai

Slavic Review ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgitta Ingemanson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Function ◽  
The Status ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Status Of Women

During the winter of 1922-1923 when she was just beginning her diplomatic career, Bolshevik activist Aleksandra Kollontai wrote two novels and several short stories that were immediately published in Russia and subsequently combined into two volumes under the titles Liubov’ pchel trudovykh and Zhenshchina na perelome. They were dismissed as mere autobiographical romances, indulging in unhealthy introspection and dangerously divorced from the “real” demands of society. At a time when Soviet Russia was facing enormous challenges connected with the reconstruction after the civil war and with the partial return to a market economy under the New Economic Policy (NEP), Kollontai's focus on domestic relationships and the status of women seemed narrow and excessively private.

Must Labour lose? Lessons from post-war history

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Jefferys
Keyword(s):  
Conservative Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Question ◽  
Standing Question

Kevin Jefferys addresses the long-standing question of whether ‘Must Labour Lose?’ This has been an intriguing political question ever since it was first posed in 1960 by Mark Abrams and Richard Rose. Examining the post-war record of the Labour Party, alongside that of the Conservative Party, Kevin Jefferys questions the inevitability of Labour’s decline through a detailed examination of the political results since 1945. Instead of Labour’s inevitable decline he suggests that there is a pattern of the Labour Party success and defeats that are conditioned by the economic circumstances, the performance of the Conservative party, and the leadership of the Labour Party. In the end, he argues that Labour may not always lose but that, given the gap between the opinion about the leadership in the party and the electorate in the country, it may be some time before Labour regains power.

The role of social communications in the modernization of the Russian village in the 1920s (based on the materials of the Bryansk, Smolensk, Gomel, Oryol and Kursk provinces)

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-4) ◽  
pp. 93-103
Author(s):  
Vadim Kulachkov ◽  
Irina Goncharova ◽  
German Chuvardin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Technical Problems ◽  
Communication Models ◽  
Social Communications ◽  
The Village

The article examines the role of social communications in the modernization of the Russian village in the 1920s, which were used by the authorities to transform rural life and form “Pro-Soviet” attitudes in the village. On the basis of archived data, we analyze communication models and determine the political and social order in this area. It is proved that the achievement of optimal results was hindered by material, financial and technical problems of the period of the new economic policy.

THE BIRTH AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE “GENERAL LINE” OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE VKP(B) IN THE POLITICAL STRUGGLE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1920S AND EARLY 1930S

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-113
Author(s):  
Andrey L. Yurganov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Administrative Management ◽  
General Line ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Village ◽  
General Secretary

The article studies the concept of “general line” in the history of the Bolshevik Party during the second half of the 1920s. N.I. Bukharin first introduced that concept into the political lexicon, speaking at the Fourteenth Party Conference (1925). The concept fixed the basic idea of the new economic policy – that it was necessary to fight against two tendencies: against considering the kulaks as the main peasant force in the village and against ignoring the main figure in the village – the middleman. That notion had a debatable meaning – above all. It was actively used by representatives of the united opposition. It was not until the beginning of 1929, when the transition from the new economic policy to the methods of military-administrative management of agriculture was outlined, that the notion of the “general line” of the Party began to express the opinion of the Central Committee of the Party and the General Secretary personally. At the beginning of 1929, Stalin posed the question that any disagreement, even the slightest, with the “general line” of the Party in conditions of aggravation of the class struggle meant a “rightwing deviation”. Subsequently, the concept became the symbolic designation of totalitarianism.

Churchill, women and the politics of gender

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Toye
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
World War ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Post War

This chapter investigates how Churchill related to women at the political level, and how women voters in turn related to him. Churchill had a blurred Conservative-Liberal identity, and this affected his approach to ‘the woman question’. Hostile to female enfranchisement at the start of his career, he became a reluctant convert during his Edwardian Liberal phase, provided that it could be done in such a way as to benefit his own party electorally. As a renegade Tory during the 1930s he drew on the services of a range of female anti-appeasers such as Shiela Grant Duff. During World War II, however, he controversially opposed equal pay for women teachers. It is well-established that, in the post-war years, the Conservative Party benefitted from its gendered approach to rationing and austerity, Churchill himself did little to appeal explicitly to women voters. Although he did accept a role for a limited number of ‘exceptional’ women in the public sphere, he was never an enthusiast for substantive gender equality.

The Politics of ‘Affluent’ and ‘Traditional’ Workers in Britain: an Aggregate Data Analysis

1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Crewe
Keyword(s):  
White Collar ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
National Average ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Behaviour ◽  
Class Level ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
Post War

In their study of the ‘affluent worker’ in Luton,1 Goldthorpe and his colleagues reached a number of important conclusions about the political behaviour of the ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ working class in post-war Britain. They rejected the belief, commonly held by the late 1950s, that a growing proportion of manual workers was beginning to support the Conservative Party as a result of attaining a middle class level of income and material possessions (the ‘embourgeoisement’ theory). In their sample, which was elaborately designed to ensure the most favourable conditions for confirmation of the embourgeoisement theory, they found (i) that the level of stable Labour support was higher than the national average for manual workers; (ii) that there was no evidence of any gradual, long-term shift of support towards the Conservatives or away from Labour; and (iii) that the small minority of Conservatives was distinguished not by a higher than average standard of living, but by a relatively large number of white collar workers among their kin. The notion that there was a necessary connection, among manual workers, between growing material prosperity and increased support for the Conservative Party was therefore decisively rejected.

Civil-Military Relations and the Evolution of the Soviet Socialist State

Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark von Hagen
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Military Relations

For the past few years, Soviet historians have fixed their attention on the problem of "alternatives," a shorthand for wide-ranging attempts to free historical thinking from the overly determinist schemes of Stalinist orthodoxy. The question is posed most often as the possibility of a more humane alternative to Stalin and the political order associated with his name. Some historians and publicists, however, have gone beyond the Stalin period to reflect on, for example, how even the 1917 revolutions might have been avoided. The leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev and reformist allies among the intelligentsia have singled out the New Economic Policy, or NEP, as the legitimate socialist forerunner to the present reformist programs. In so doing, they approach consensus with an influential group of western historians, including Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin, and Robert Tucker, who have kept alive the memory of Nikolai Bukharin in particular, but a non-Stalinist path to socialism as well.

scholarly journals Agitation, Propaganda, and the 'Stalinization' of the Soviet Press, 1922-1930

1998 ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Lenoe
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
American Reader ◽  
Editorial Commentary ◽  
The Press ◽  
Production Plans

Between 1925 and 1933 the layout and tone of the Soviet central press underwent a plainly discernible change. Issues of Pravda and Izvestiia from the period of the New Economic Policy or NEP ( 1921-1927) contain journalistic genres familiar to the American reader: the wire service report written in an "objective" style, the editorial commentary, the economic analysis, the shortsatirical piece about everyday life. The shrill declamation, exhortation, and didacticism of the same newspapers in the early 1930s, on the other hand, seem alien and bizarre. Exclamation marks, commands, military metaphors, and congratulations from Party leaders to factories for surpassing their production plans fill central Soviet papers from 1933. Sometimes the press castigates readers like a parent scolding naughty children, sometimes it lectures them like a teacher,sometimes it exhorts them to action, like a platoon leader urging his troops forward. Aggressive declamation about "Bolshevik tempo," "Bolshevik competition," "Fascist depravity," and "gargantuan victories of the proletariat" blares from the pages.

scholarly journals Sources on Social and Political Moods of Peasants of the Ishim District of the Ural Region in 1925?27: Materials of the District OGPU Department Reports

2021 ◽  
pp. 418-427
Author(s):  
Igor V. Kuryshev ◽  
◽  
Andrey A. Lyubimov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
Political Resources ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Rich

The article uses previously unstudied reports of the Ishim district OGPU department to describe social and political attitudes of various groups of peasantry in the palmy days of the New Economic Policy (1925–27). The study is to consider the influence of social rural stratification on peasants’ mindsets and the relationship between the authorities and the peasantry; to assess the political resources of the Ishim peasantry through the lens of the OGPU reports; and to show the intransigence in social interests of the rural poor and the kulaks. The authors assess political moods of peasant population as a whole and those of particular social groups: poor, middle peasants, and kulaks. Political moods of the peasantry differentiated with respect to the following criteria: attitude to the Soviet government and various groups and strata, attitude to agricultural tax, attitude to religion, and church, and also according to the degree of political consciousness. On the basis of this analysis, we put forward an idea of multidirectional, heterogeneous participation of peasant population in the political life of the second half of the 1920s and of its significant social differentiation. In general, in the rural areas, the Soviet government was unequivocally supported by the poor, who were to some degree influenced by the kulaks. The middle peasants were characterized by their changing attitude; they symptomatically juxtaposed Soviet government and communists. The rich peasants took an extremely negative position to the Soviet government and tried to exert pressure on the local authorities (i.e. village soviets). However, discontent with the New Economic Policy encompassed all strata of the peasantry. Persistent confrontation between peasants fighting each other in the Ishim anti-communist peasant uprising of 1921 did not weaken for quite a long time. In conclusion, it is noted that protests, social deviations, and negative stance on the New Economic Policy gradually intensified in the political behavior of the Ishim district peasantry. The OGPU reports are a representative source that permits to reconstruct the social and political attitudes of the Ishim region peasantry.

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