Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson and devolution, 1966-70: the making of government policy

This article expands our understanding of devolution, the Britishconstitution, the Wilson government of 1966–70 and thecareers and attitudes of Richard Crossman and Harold Wilson.It shows that devolution was debated not as a simply ‘Celtic’affair, but as part of a long-standing Labour concern with reformingthe ‘machinery of government’. This interest—expressedby Crossman amongst others—became submerged by other eventsand pressures. Perceived nationalist successes and the conflictingaims of (divided) Labour parties in Scotland and Wales pushedout Crossman's little-studied desire to replace ‘nationaldevolution’ with regional devolution across the UK. Wilsonadopted the delaying tactic of a Royal Commission on the Constitution.Using a wide range of private, governmental and Labour sourcesfrom across the UK, the article shows the interchange of policydebate between London and the ‘Celtic fringe’. Inthe process, the article reveals both national tensions anda commitment to Britishness, stemming from shared policy interestsand also from wider cultural influences.     

Guild Socialists after Guild Socialism: the Workers' Control Group and the House of Industry League

The 1930s saw two discrete attempts by former Guild Socialiststo revive aspects of the Guild Socialist Project. While G. D.H. Cole, William Mellor, and other former members and supportersof the National Guilds League took an active lead in developingideas about workers' Control for consideration within the officiallabour movement, S. G. Hobson attempted to propagate the ideaof ‘functional representation’. Discussions initiatedby Cole and Mellor led to a clarification of ideas which contributedsignificantly to the success of advocates of workers' controlat successive TUCs and Labour Party conferences in the early1930s. Hobson's movement, by contrast, was largely abortive.Workers' control and ‘functionalism’ were both constiuentideas of mature Guild Socialism. The failure of their respectiveadvocates to engage with each other effectively during the 1930s,however, reveals theoretical differences within Guild Socialismwhich were never adequately articulated during the active lifeof the movement.     

Playing Both Sides Against the Middle: The Labour Party and the Wholesaling Industry 1919 1951

This article examines the Labour party's attitude towards thewholesaling industry. During the inter-war period wholesalers,‘middlemen’ as they were commonly called, occupiedthe position of bogeyman in much Labour party thinking and literature.As a result the Labour governments of the 1920s took actionsdesigned to achieve two ends: to improve the efficiency of fooddistribution, and to limit the power of middlemen to exploitboth ends of the food production chain, farmers and consumersalike. This ideological positioning of the middleman by Labour,and the reforms introduced under the MacDonald governments,stressed the need to establish farmers’ co-operativesand consumers’ protection agencies, and also emphasizedthe importance of other measures designed to boost efficiency.However, by the time of the Attlee governments the cornerstoneof the inter-war policy, the producer co-operative, had beenabandoned and the focus of debate shifted to various forms ofnationalization. This change of policy is examined in this article.Though post-war Labour manifestos pledged to nationalize sectionsof the wholesaling industry, and despite the fact that the partyunder Attlee discussed the nationalization of wholesaling atlength, the industry remained in private hands. An attempt tounderstand how and why the nationalization of wholesaling wasopposed within the party and shelved by the Attlee governmentsis central to this study.     

MacDonald's Parties: The Labour Party and the 'Aristocratic Embrace', 1922-31

The article tests the claim that certain Labour MPs and ministersin the 1920s succumbed to an ‘aristocratic embrace’.It begins with a short account of debates in the early LabourParty over social mixing, which culminated in the 1924 disputeover the wearing of Court Dress by some Labour ministers. Theextent of ‘embrace’ is assessed through the examinationof who wore Court Dress (and why), who was offered and acceptedhonours, and of patterns of residence, income and wealth, andparticipation in London Society, measured by club membershipsand appearances in the Court & Social columns of The Times.The article concludes by examining the usefulness of the ideaof ‘aristocratic embrace’ in explaining the defectionof J.R. MacDonald and others from the Labour Party in 1931.     

The Decline of the Empire and the Economic 'Decline' of Britain

In the 1950s and 1960s, decolonization coincided with the ‘goldenage’ of British capitalism, with record rises in popularliving standards. Economic historians have understandably usedthis coincidence to suggest that by this period the BritishEmpire was no longer offering substantial economic benefitsto the mass of the metropolitan population. Yet there were linksbetween economic performance and the decline of the Empire.First, despite the good performance, profoundly pessimistic‘declinist’ accounts of British society and theeconomy abounded in the early 1960s, and these had a major impacton policy formation. A key underpinning for such accounts wasthe ‘culture of decline’ intimately linked withthe loss of imperial status. Secondly, while it has become acommonplace of discussion of post-war Britain to assume thatreversing ‘decline’ and modernizing the economyrequired a re-orientation of policy away from the Empire andCommonwealth towards Europe, such a reorientation was not aconstant feature of modernization strategies. Indeed, a centralfeature of the initial period of Wilsonian ‘modernization’after 1964 was its attempt to use closer links with the Commonwealthto achieve this objective.     

Churchill and Britain's 'Financial Dunkirk'

At the end of World War II, the UK, on the verge of bankruptcy,was threatened with ‘a financial Dunkirk’. WinstonChurchill was eager to help the new Labour government tacklethis crisis. However, his ability to give such help, in hisposition as Leader of the Opposition, was constrained by importantdivisions within his own party. These caused him considerablepolitical difficulties as 1945 came to a close, prompting amajor Conservative rebellion against his leadership on the questionof the proposed US loan to Britain. Yet, in spite of his discomfitureon this issue in the domestic sphere, he went on, during his1946 trip to the USA, to play a key role in overcoming congressionalopposition to the loan. Moreover, he did so in close collaborationwith Clement Attlee’s government. In reciprocating thespirit of unity that Labour had showed in 1940, Churchill revived,during Britain’s ‘financial Dunkirk’, thespirit and the ethos of the original. Using previously unpublishedevidence, this article tells the story in full for the firsttime.     

A Duty to Forget? The 'Hitler Youth Generation' and the Transition from Nazism to Communism in Postwar East Germany, c. 1945-49

In Soviet-occupied East Germany during the mid- to late 1940s,a remarkable but scarcely remarked-upon transition took place.Hundreds of thousands of young Germans who had previously beenmembers of the Nazi youth organizations, the Hitler Youth (HJ)and the League of German Girls (BDM) flocked to join the Communist-ledFree German Youth (FDJ), a unisex ‘united youth organization’founded under Soviet auspices in March 1946. This paper examinesthe experiences of this ‘twice betrayed’ generation,whose members rapidly—though with varying degrees of enthusiasm—switchedallegiance from Nazism to Communism after the Second World Warand ultimately exchanged life in one authoritarian youth organizationfor life in another. Drawing on archival and interview material,it first seeks to outline Communist attitudes towards denazificationamong the young in the postwar period, before going on to examinefrom a grass-roots perspective the experiences, motivations,and attitudes of those who exchanged their HJ or BDM membershipbooks for those of the FDJ. Despite, or perhaps because of,East Germany's strongly-espoused and rigidly dogmatic ‘anti-fascism’,open discussion of the Nazi past was—for a variety ofreasons—taboo during the immediate postwar period, particularlyamong the young. This paper concludes by discussing the reasonsbehind this ‘pact of silence’ between the Communistsand the ‘Hitler Youth generation’—and howit impacted upon subsequent generations of young people ‘borninto socialism’.     

The State, Redundancy Pay, and Economic Policy-Making in the Early 1960s

The setting up of the National Economic Development Council(NEDC) and other reforms to the institutions of economic policy-makingin the early 1960s are regarded by commentators as the firstconcerted attempt by government to confront the issue of Britain'srelative economic decline. The general assessment of these reformsis that they failed, largely due to the ‘possessive individualist’culture of British peak organizations. This article investigatesthese issues from the perspective of negotiations on financialprovision for the unemployed—one of the first issues tobe considered by the NEDC. It shows that in this area the mainproblem was the nature of the Whitehall policy-making processand the failure of government to co-ordinate its policy position.This caused both sides of industry to question government commitmentto the tripartite process and seriously undermined the entireNEDC project at an early stage. These findings are consistentwith recent theoretical analyses of British government whichemphasize the complexity of the policy process and co-ordinationproblems within Whitehall.     

'An unholy row in Lancashire': The Textile Lobby, Conservative Politics, and Indian Policy, 1931-1935

This article argues that the ‘Lancashire lobby’remained a vital presence in British politics in the 1930s,not relegated to the political sidelines by ‘gentlemanlycapitalists’ at Westminster. The region's strength, inConservative circles especially, was based not on its numericalstrength in MPs, or in its economic might, but in the symbolicimportance Lancashire had for Conservatives. As this articledemonstrates, this was most evident during the debates overthe Government of India Bill between 1931 and 1935, when theparty's leadership made great, and successful, efforts to keepthe region's representatives from opposing the Bill, and potentiallyswinging many other Tories into opposition as well.     

Imperial Identity in Colonial Minds: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931-50

This article examines how the League of Coloured Peoples, foundedin London in 1931 by the Jamaican Harold Moody, used its versionof a British identity to seek equal rights for Britons of colour.I argue that by invoking an imperial British identity that drewon widely accepted elements of Britishness, namely respectabilityand imperial pride, the League gained support from black colonialsand white English people in its fight for equality. This wastrue despite the fact that a major element of the League's conceptionof British identity, racial equality, challenged the dominantidea that ‘true’ Britons were, by definition, white.The article focuses on the workings of the organization's ideologyin the context of two news-making issues: the campaign to restoreBritish citizenship to ‘coloured’ seamen in Cardiffin 1936, and the parliamentary and judicial reaction to discriminationby London's Imperial Hotel against League member Learie Constantinein 1943. The story it tells indicates that British identitieswere claimed and manipulated not only by natives of the BritishIsles, but also by colonial peoples. It further suggests thatunder the conditions of empire colonial peoples could simultaneouslyidentify with the imperial power and their (potentially national)home colony.     

Networking Health Research in Britain: The Post-War Childhood Leukaemia Trials

The treatment of childhood leukaemia is seen as a successfulhistorical example of the operation of the randomized controlledtrial and continues to inform contemporary policy making onsuch trials within health research. This article analyses thescientists’ ‘story of success’ through historicalresearch. It tells us about the organizational and professionalstructures of such research post-war in the United Kingdom,and examines the history of the cancer clinical trial throughthis particular example. The story reveals a more complex picturethan the ‘heroic’ one, with key developments inthe operation of post-war science, both in terms of its infrastructureand of its scientific networks, not least the rise of co-operativeworking among clinicians and the growing importance of statisticiansin medical research and practice. It also underlines differencesbetween the British and US approaches in which the role of onehealth system, the National Health Service, helped structuredifferent, initially less intensive, patterns of response.     

Bad Language and BBC Radio Four in the 1960s and 1970s

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a new intensityto complaints from listeners to BBC Radio about the strong languagethey heard on the air. There had long been a public expectationthat the BBC had some form of ‘guardianship’ overthe English language, but there was also now a desire from manyproducers within the BBC to reflect contemporary society moreclosely than it had done in the past, and the use of demoticspeech in dramas and documentaries was one dimension of thischange. Such a desire was part of a broader move towards ‘decensorship’in literature, film, theatre, and popular mores in Britain inthis period. The tension this caused between broadcasters andlisteners was especially acute on Radio Four—the main‘broad brow’ speech network of BBC Radio, and onecharacterized by a fiercely conservative audience. Through previouslyunpublished records of its internal discussions between c.1968and c.1979, this article explores the response of the BBC tolisteners’ complaints and press coverage about swearing.It suggests that BBC Radio reacted strongly to audience concern,but that wider anxiety about the reputation of the BBC as awhole also affected decisions over language. In so doing, itillustrates a previously neglected dimension to the BBC's taskof negotiating a precarious consensus on matters of taste anddecency.     

A Matter of Foreign Policy: 'Final Solution' and 'Final Victory' in Nazi Germany

The primacy of foreign policy in Nazi Germany has been debatedfor decades. This article seeks not to re-open an old debate,but focuses on the two big aims of Nazi policy: ‘FinalVictory’ and ‘Final Solution’. In order toanalyse their relationship, they are identified as war aims;there follows an examination of both the role of the war inNazi doctrine and Hitler's role in decision-making in general.It can be shown that Hitler's original war plan saw ‘FinalVictory’ as a prerequisite for the ‘Final Solution’,but that from August 1941 the implementation of the ‘FinalSolution’ followed the intention of achieving ‘FinalVictory’ through the extermination of the European Jews.‘Final Victory’ and the ‘Final Solution’thus appear as goals which illuminate the primacy of foreignpolicy in Nazi Germany.     

'Proactive fast-tracking' diffusion of supermarkets in developing countries: implications for market institutions and trade

Supermarkets have spread extremely rapidly in developing countriesafter the ‘take-off’ in the early to mid-1990s.Former analyses of supermarket diffusion have not adequatelyexplained the sudden burst and then exponential diffusion ofsupermarkets in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We argue thatrather than taking demand and market institutional and organizationalconditions as ‘exogenous’, as former analyses havetended to do, modern food retailers instead have treated localconditions as substantially ‘endogenous’. To enabletheir rapid growth, supermarkets undertake ‘proactivefast-tracking strategies’ to alter the ‘enablingconditions’ of entry and growth. Beside the retail investmentsthat have been extensively treated in recent literature, theseproactive strategies focus on improving the ‘enablingconditions’ via (i) procurement system modernization and(ii) local supply chain development. One important strategyretailers have used to facilitate (i) and (ii) is to form symbioticrelationships with modern wholesale, logistics and processingfirms. An example we address is ‘follow sourcing’,where a transnational retailer encourages transnational logisticsand wholesale firms with whom the retailer is working in homemarkets, to locate to the developing country. This is a spurto globalization of services in support of retail. Follow-sourcinghas been treated for example in the automobile manufacturessector (follow-sourcing from spare parts manufacturers)—butnot in the food sector. A second important strategy is thatof multi-network-sourcing, in which supermarkets source fromnational, regional and global networks. We analyze that strategyhere, adding to the literature which to date has touched onthis theme only scantly, and for the first time identify typicalpaths, present preliminary evidence (from Central America andIndonesia) concerning this multi-sourcing-network strategy anddiscuss trade implications. One of these is the move to primacyof South–South trade in supermarket sourcing—a newdimension of globalization. By introducing this link of retailertransformation and trade into the literature, we hope to spura new line of research that is timely in light of the trade,development and globalization debates in developing countries.     

Why 'Indicative Planning' Failed: British Industry and the Formation of the National Economic Development Council (1960-64)

The NEDC (Neddy) was established in 1962 through a joint initiativeof leading industrialists and the Conservative Government. Itsbroad aim was to improve economic co-ordination between companiesand policy-makers, and thus enable Britain to steer a courseaway from ‘stop-go’ and towards stable growth. Thisarticle examines the sources of the Neddy's swift demise intoirrelevance by 1964. Aspirations for the NEDC were multipleand conflicting. Leading industrialists considered it a vehiclefor increasing their influence over the course of economic policy.The government, however, was jealous of its policy-making autonomy,and interested in the NEDC primarily as a signal to currencyspeculators of their commitment to tackling the various supply-sideproblems of the UK economy. The article stresses two sets of‘institutional’ factors which doomed the NEDC'stransformative potential even as it was being set up. First,business was suspicious of co-operation with (and, more particularlyrevealing sensitive firm level information to) a body that wasso close to central government. Employers were justifiably worriedthat the NEDC would be used by future governments as the basisfor more dirigiste rather than merely indicative planning. Second,companies wedded to the economic organizational principle of‘collective laissez-faire’ resisted peak-level effortsto induce co-ordination. Thus, paradoxically, the very co-ordinationproblems in British business that prompted the NEDC's creationwere the primary reasons for its failure.     

Deconstructing clusters: chaotic concept or policy panacea?

Over the past decade, there has been growing interest in localindustrial agglomeration and specialization, not only by economicgeographers but also by economists and by policy-makers. Ofthe many ideas and concepts to have emerged from this new-foundfocus, Michael Porter's work on ‘clusters’ has provedby far the most influential. His ‘cluster theory’has become the standard concept in the field, and policy-makersthe world over have seized upon Porter's cluster model as atool for promoting national, regional, and local competitiveness,innovation and growth. But the mere popularity of a constructis by no means a guarantee of its profundity. Seductive thoughthe cluster concept is, there is much about it that is problematic,and the rush to employ ‘cluster ideas’ has run aheadof many fundamental conceptual, theoretical and empirical questions.Our aim is to deconstruct the cluster concept in order to revealand highlight these issues. Our concerns relate to the definitionof the cluster concept, its theorization, its empirics, theclaims made for its benefits and advantages, and its use inpolicy-making. Whilst we do not wish to debunk the cluster ideaoutright, we do argue for a much more cautious and circumspectuse of the notion, especially within a policy context: the clusterconcept should carry a public policy health warning.     

Innovative Trends in Women's and Gender Studies of the National Socialist Era

The text is less a review of the new literature than a reflectionon significant and innovative current trends in the historiographyon women and gender in the National Socialist era. The firstpart deals with various women's activities within milieus andprofessions, including their room for manoeuvre: midwives, socialworkers, female Nazi functionaries, and female auxiliary workersof the Nazi Wehrmacht. The second part of the article addressesspecific features of biopolitics, targeted not only againstJews but also against asocial women, homosexuals and prostitutes.It also looks at visual images of bodies. Although the Nazistried to create strongly determined binaries to categorize ‘we’and ‘the others’ in the arts and other propagandamaterial, there existed, in fact, a broad spectrum of body images,especially among media stars. A third trend in the history ofthe Third Reich deals not only with the politics of exclusionbut also of inclusion, as found in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft(national community), a concept that had many facets, such asthe Volksfamilie, comradeship and home front. And it was themedia that had the task of ‘translating’ this conceptto the people in many appealing ways. The fourth part considersthe gendering of memories after 1945 and the dominance of malenarratives and points of view. The four parts of the articleare intended to contribute to intersectional history and thehistory of social engineering.     

'Stop the Flapper Vote Folly': Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail, and the Equalization of the Franchise 1927-28

This essay re-examines the Daily Mail's campaign in 1927–8against the Baldwin government's decision to equalize the franchiseby lowering the female voting age to 21. It argues that theMail's hostility to the ‘flapper vote’ was largelya product of the passionate anti-socialism of its proprietor,Lord Rothermere, and not, as has been suggested, the culminationof a decade of anti-feminism. Rothermere was convinced thatyoung women would vote overwhelmingly for the Labour Party andentrench it in government for a generation. But attacks on the‘flapper’ in 1927–8 were generally confinedto the paper's editorial and political columns, and contrastedwith the much more positive portrayal of young women that hadbeen typical of the Mail's output since 1918. The example ofthe Daily Express, which supported franchise equalization, isused to demonstrate that it was Rothermere's idiosyncratic politicalpinions, rather than the ‘typical’ anti-feminismof the Conservative press, that explained the Mail's stance.The article concludes that the gender discourse of interwarnewspapers has been unfairly stereotyped by historians, andthat media hostility to young, unmarried women in these yearshas been exaggerated.