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.

‘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.

6. The party system

UK Politics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-143
Author(s):  
Andrew Blick
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
System P ◽  
Political Approach ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Uk

This chapter switches the focus to political parties. It looks at their individual roles and how they operate. The chapter discusses the parties that constitute the ‘party system’. It considers the two main parties operating at the UK level: the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. It also looks at the smaller parties, such as the Liberal Democrats. The chapter considers the political approach of the various parties and the type of support they attract. It also looks at how parties are funded. The chapter provides a number of theoretical perspectives to help with an analysis of political parties. These are: the extent to which parties pursue values or power; the respective roles of their members and leaders; groupings within parties; how far the UK has a two-party system or whether our definition of the party system should be revised; and the relationships between the various parities. The chapter then gives examples of how these ideas play out with specific focus on recent events involving the Conversative and Labour parties. The chapter asks: do members have too much influence over their parties? The chapter ends by asking: where are we now?

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.

scholarly journals Politisk avstand ved sametingsvalg: En kartlegging av det samiske ideologiske landskapet i Norge1

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-204
Author(s):  
Johannes Bergh ◽  
Jo Saglie
Keyword(s):  
Coalition Formation ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Party Differences ◽  
Political Differences

In this chapter, we explore the ideological and political landscape of Sámi electoral politics. Which ideological and political cleavages are important in Sámi politics, and how do these cleavages manifest themselves in voting patterns and party differences? We use the Sámi election surveys from 2013 to 2017. The analysis describes a Sámi political landscape with small ideological and political differences, where primarily the Progress Party stands out. Voters who favour this party are far from other party voters on the central issue of Sámi self-determination, and there is a mutually frosty relationship between Progress Party voters and other voters. On some issues, Conservative Party voters are in an intermediate position between the Progress Party voters and the rest, and voters for the Nordkalottfolket party also have a somewhat different profile. However, the differences between the remaining parties are less clear. This also applies to the two main competitors, the NSR and the Labour Party, and the political distances found in our survey questions cannot explain the pattern of coalition formation in the Sámi Parliament. The relatively small distances between the largest parties can be advantageous in dealing outwardly with the Norwegian state. Internally, however, small political distances can blur the political landscape in the eyes of the voters and make it difficult to choose between parties.

Richard Rose,

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred G. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Post War

This chapter comments on Richard Rose’s bookDo Parties Make a Difference?, which examines whether it makes a difference if Britain is ruled by a Conservative or a Labour government, as well as the differences that arise in terms of policy outputs and outcomes. First published in 1980, the book challenges two commonly held views on British politics: the hypothesis that political parties make a difference in public policy and the proposition that Britain’s post-war politics is primarily characterized by “adversarial politics.” The chapter discusses Rose’s claim that “what parties say is not what parties do” and his analysis of similarities and differences between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party.

scholarly journals Welsh devolution as passive revolution

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel John Evans
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Passive Revolution ◽  
Post War ◽  
British State

Welsh devolution has not been adequately theorised. Following the narrow vote for Welsh devolution in 1997, many academics in Wales adopted a nakedly ‘celebratory’, uncritical view of devolution as a radical change to the British state, taking at face value the claim that it was designed to rejuvenate Welsh democracy. The power relations inherent to the transformation of the British state are rarely discussed in Wales. As a consequence, the developments which have occurred in Wales since devolution – political disengagement, the rise of the far right, the vote for Brexit – seem hard to grasp: it is simply presumed that something has ‘gone wrong’ with the application of devolution. This dominant way of thinking assumes that devolution was designed to ‘work’. Using Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, this article argues that devolution to Wales (and Scotland) was a central plank of New Labour’s transformation of both the Labour Party and the British state. Building on a reading of the post-war British state as a historic bloc, I draw attention to the power relations inherent in Welsh devolution and the ‘top down’ nature of the process, which was led by the Labour party in order to preserve its hegemony in Wales and the United Kingdom as a whole. After outlining the political struggles and strategies of transformismo which occurred within the process of passive revolution, where hegemony is temporarily ‘thinned’, I contend that contemporary Wales represents a period of interregnum, where the old world (the traditional centralised British state) has died, but a new Welsh state cannot be born. As Gramsci predicted, this has led to the emergence of a host of ‘morbid symptoms’ in Wales. I conclude by reflecting on the nature of the interregnum and whether ‘restoration’ or ‘revolution’ is likely to triumph in Wales.

Ideas and Welfare: The Conservative Transformation of the British Pension Regime

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
HIROSHI ARAKI
Keyword(s):  
Policy Process ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
Pension Reforms ◽  
The Past ◽  
Post War ◽  
Over Time

Pensions are a controversial issue in Britain. During the past fifty years, pension reforms have been challenged by the competing policies of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. There were differences in the nature, scope and extent of pension policies between them: the Conservatives encouraged private pension provision while the Labour Party promoted state provision. Based on core principles of freedom and personal responsibility, the Conservatives persistently over time implemented policies in line with these beliefs. This article explores this transformation of the post-war pension regime. An attempt is made here to sketch out a new explanation of this transformation in drawing on recent theories of the role of ideas and ideology in the policy process. The recent apparent convergence in policy thinking on pensions between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party highlights the importance of core ideological principles.

Party Bureaucracy in Britain: Regional and Area Organization

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Levels Of Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Basic Information ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Western Democracies

In recent years the discipline of political science has focused much of its attention on political parties. In 1967 Professor L. D. Epstein noted ‘Writing about Political Parties in Western democracies is not a novel enterprise. It is several decades since political scientists, once preoccupied with constitutional forms, ceased to neglect parties’. In Britain, however, there remains much uncharted territory which requires detailed exploration by the political scientist. Much of the research carried out in Britain has concentrated on one of two levels of analysis, either national or local. Basic information about the intermediate branch of party organization, the regional and area structures, is lacking. As Professor J. Blondel has noted: ‘The eleven regions of the Labour Party and the twelve areas of the Conservative Party are rarely examined’. There is, therefore, a gap in our knowledge of political parties in Britain, a gap which Professor R. T. McKenzie readily acknowledged in his own study of British parties.

Factionalism within the Conservative Party: The Monday Club

1972 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Seyd
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Hard Core ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Recent Survey ◽  
The Political ◽  
Party Member ◽  
General Belief

IT HAS BEEN ARGUED THAT FACTIONALISM WHILST APPARENT IN THE Labour Party has no counterpart within the Conservative Party. For example, the authors of a study on the opinions of backbench conservative MPs concluded that disagreements are amongst ‘ad hoc groups’ and that as new issues arise ‘the coherence of the former groups dissolves and new alignments appear. . . .’ A more recent survey of conservative backbenchers concurs with this and argues that the ‘criss-crossing pattern of cleavage (amongst conservative MPs) inhibits the development of Tory factions analogous to those in the Labour Party. Allies on one issue either become enemies on the next, or else simply do not feel strongly enough on the next issue to want necessarily to work together.’ A similar sort of conclusion has been reached by Richard Rose who states that the Conservative Party contains differing sets of political attitudes which remain constant whilst the party member will constantly shift from one attitude to another. Thus he concludes that the Conservative Party is a party of tendencies rather than factions; that it lacks a hard core of organized members within the party adhering to a set of principles which they are attempting to impose on the party in general. These conclusions are typical of a general belief about the political process within the Conservative Party.

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