Harold Wilson, ‘Selsdon Man’, and the defence of social democracy in 1970s Britain

Harold Wilson's attack on ‘Selsdon Man’ in the run-up to the 1970 general election has generally been seen as a flawed rhetorical gambit, which inadvertently gave coherence to Edward Heath's policies. The subsequent invocation of ‘Selsdon’ by critics of Heath's ‘u-turns’ has meant that the episode has mainly attracted scrutiny from historians of the Conservative Party. Yet the debate over Selsdon can also be seen as a landmark in Wilson's transition from the ‘modernizing’ politics of the 1960s to a more defensive posture, in which he presented Labour as a bulwark against regressive market-liberal policies. This article explores Wilson's critique of the ‘new Conservatism’ and argues that the themes which he established in 1970 played an important role in framing Labour's opposition to the Heath government during the subsequent Parliament. In particular, his focus on the distributional effects of Tory policies dovetailed with an emerging body of social science research on income and wealth and so contributed to a ‘rediscovery of inequality’. In the turbulent economic climate of the mid-1970s, however, Labour's efforts to protect working-class households from the effects of market pricing proved difficult to sustain in office. The rise and fall of this politics of ‘decommodification’ has important implications for our understanding of the changing fortunes of British social democracy.

‘Flying Gas Mains’: Rumour, Secrecy, and Morale during the V-2 Bombardment of Britain

Britain was the first country to suffer casualties as the result of a ballistic missile attack, when German V-2 rockets began landing in London and the South-East in September 1944. This new menace posed critical challenges, not only to the civilians whose lives were endangered once again, but also to the British government. Policymakers had to decide what, if any, information they released to the public, amid fears of creating panic, providing free propaganda to the Nazis, and helping the V-2 launching units improve their aim. Their commitment to secrecy in this period was both resolute and largely unnecessary, not to mention ineffective. In the absence of official information released from above, the public drew their own conclusions and myriad rumours emerged, many of which were remarkably accurate. This article will explore the ways in which government policy surrounding censorship and publicity changed during the V-2 bombardment and the extent to which this affected those in the firing line. It will also add considerable nuance to our understanding of public morale in this period, which was rather less steadfast than many accounts suggest, and which continued to be a major government preoccupation, despite the diminishing likelihood of a descent into mass panic or defeatism.

Ending the ‘Cult of the Broken Home’: Divorce, Children and the Changing Emotional Dynamics of Separating British Families, c. 1945–90

From the 1960s, rising divorce rates forced a re-thinking of family dynamics beyond the nuclear. Traditionally, experts and the public had presumed that children from ‘broken homes’ typically drifted into juvenile delinquency and crime. Children of divorce were blamed for a plethora of social problems. The increasingly common nature of divorce rendered this model unsustainable. Post-war children of divorce were more likely to be framed as ‘emotionally vulnerable’ and studied in more nuanced ways, not least because it seemed increasingly obvious that not all affected children grew up delinquent. A new consensus emerged that problems could only be avoided if parents created appropriate emotional conditions while separating and divorcing, and if parents and children openly communicated their feelings throughout the process. Children themselves were actively encouraged, through a new genre of divorce manuals often aimed at them, to express their emotions with parents and friends. Using Britain as a case study, this article argues that emotions became central to discussion of divorce in the post-war period, placing onuses on breaking down families to create a positive emotional space for affected children.