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.     

The Liberal Party and Patriotism in Early Twentieth Century Britain

Many historians have highlighted the role played by ‘languagesof patriotism’ in the political appeal of the BritishConservative Party in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The present article engages with this debate by pointing tothe fact that the Liberals, in the Edwardian period at least,could also articulate patriotic languages That this was thecase is demonstrated by an examination of Liberal attitudesto the Education Act of 1902, the tariff reform controversy,and the issue of the ‘land question’. The widelyheld view that the Conservatives enjoyed a complete monopolyon patriotism is called into doubt. Furthermore, this articlecontends that the Liberal Party's use of patriotic rhetoricprovides a new means of making sense of their policies in thisperiod. These policies, it is suggested, cannot simply be understoodas expressive of a ‘new Liberal’ system of thoughtincreasingly influenced by collectivist ideas ^*I would like to thank Jon Parry for his very many helpful commentsand suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. The researchpresented here was assisted by the financial support of Christ'sCollege, Cambridge, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board.