[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Theywill have to do more than that to justify themselves.When Macmillan resigned because of ill-health in October 1963 it washoped in some quarters that the Conservatives would choose a much· 6 9 · SB_C04.qxd 03/12/2004 15:23 Page 70SI XTI ES BRITAINyounger replacement to renew the party s moral and political purpose perhaps Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling or Edward Heath.Instead,in the days before Conservative leaders were elected on a formal ballot,the choice came down to three candidates from the same generation asMacmillan: Rab Butler, Lord Hailsham and Lord Home.Despite his ill-ness, Macmillan was determined to control the succession and preventButler from taking over, largely because he doubted his deputy s strengthof character.Hailsham, the popular choice of the party outside parlia-ment, ruined his own chances with a vulgar display of self-promotion atthe Conservatives Blackpool Conference.This left Home to emerge insoundings among Tory parliamentarians as the least divisive candidateand most MPs second preference.The sixty-year-old Home (pronouncedHume), who was a landowner, former Etonian and student of ChristChurch Oxford, renounced his peerage and became Sir Alec Douglas-Home, finding a seat in the Commons at a hastily-engineered by-electionat Kinross and West Perthshire.Tony Benn had predicted in his diaryon 14 October that Home would be a dud when it comes to exciting theelectorate , and that Labour s own recently elected leader, Harold Wilson will make rings round him (1987: 70).Home was by no means the liab-ility for the Tories that some expected, but he was a gift to the satiristsof Private Eye and That Was The Week That Was, not least when headmitted that he used matchsticks to help him count.Home also facedsimmering resentment from frustrated senior colleagues and their alliesat the way the succession had been handled, highlighted by the refusal ofEnoch Powell and Iain Macleod to serve under him and Macleod s publiccriticism of how Macmillan and a magic circle of Old Etonians hadmanipulated the arcane consultation process to thwart Rab Butler(Macleod 1964).To make matters worse, he also had only a year in whichto make an impression on the wider public and find a compellingresponse to Labour s charge that after twelve wasted years the Con-servatives were no longer fit for office.The new Prime Minister s area ofexpertise was foreign affairs, but his government urgently required someeye-catching domestic measures.Unfortunately, the only significant pol-icy initiative implemented during Home s brief premiership was Heath splan to abolish Resale Price Maintenance (RPM), a new measure thatcompelled manufacturers to abandon their right to control the retail priceof their goods.Heath s intention was to stimulate competition among· 7 0 · SB_C04.qxd 03/12/2004 15:23 Page 714 u Conservative crisis and Labour recovery, 1959 64retailers as part of an overall drive towards economic modernisation, butpolitically the policy backfired as thousands of Conservative-supportingsmall traders and shopkeepers protested against the measure, assisted bysome 40 Tory rebels on the backbenches (Findley 2001: 327 353).Withan election due in 1964 the prospects of a fourth consecutive triumph forthe Conservatives depended heavily on whether Labour could manage tothrow away their best opportunity for taking office since 1951.Old Labour, New Britain andthe 1964 electionLabour s political recovery from the continual defeats of the 1950s waslong and difficult.It was a process that was complicated by personalityclashes at a senior level, damaging disputes over policy and a fallingparty membership.Much of Labour s energy was spent on an internal fight for the soul of the party between traditionalists and revisionists(sometimes called modernisers), which centred in particular on the placeof public ownership in the party s programme.The reforms of thewartime coalition and the post-war Attlee government had delivered toministers the tools of macro-economic management and the superstruc-ture of the modern welfare state, enabling them apparently to consign themass unemployment and poverty of the inter-war years to the past.Whatwas to be the next stage of the British socialist project? Traditionalistscalled for an expanded programme of public ownership and further stateeconomic planning , remaining committed to a class-based analysis ofsociety in which Labour was the defender of working-class interests.Revisionists, however, believed that cloth-capped socialism was nolonger relevant in the changed conditions of affluent post-war Britain, notleast because social researchers told them that working-class identity wasbeing eroded by a combination of rising living standards and structuralchanges in the economy (Abrams 1960; Zweig 1961).Articulated mostcoherently in Tony Crosland s The Future of Socialism (1956), the revi-sionists case was that the control of industry by a salaried managerialclass and the growing power of trade unions had made the question ofownership of capital less important than government s ability to redis-tribute its returns.Instead of a programme of public ownership, thepriorities for a future Labour administration should be greater social· 7 1 · SB_C04.qxd 03/12/2004 15:23 Page 72SI XTI ES BRITAINequality which in effect meant redistribution of income and wealth anda fairer education system together with improved public services andextensions of personal freedom.So convinced were some revisionists after the 1959 defeat thatLabour s working-class identity was a liability, they suggested a radicalmakeover for the party.The Hampstead Set revisionists, whichincluded party leader Hugh Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland,Douglas Jay, and Patrick Gordon Walker floated ideas such as a namechange perhaps to Labour and Radical or Labour and Reform cut-ting the party s link with the trade unions, abandoning the constitutionalcommitment to public ownership and exploring a progressive associationwith the Liberals.In the end the wilder ideas were abandoned and theleadership focused its attention on removing from Labour s constitutionClause Four, the principled commitment to common ownership whichhad served as the party s socialist myth since 1918.Gaitskell opened upthe issue at the party s post-election Conference, arguing that Clause Fourcreated the false impression that public ownership for Labour was an endin itself rather than a means to an end that of creating a more equal soci-ety.He was also well aware of mounting evidence that nationalisationwas a vote-loser for Labour.But the party was not ready to surrenderwhat had become a symbol of its historic struggles and it forced Gaitskellto climb down in March 1960 (Jones 1996: 41 64).The rancour generatedby the dispute showed how badly damaged was Labour s collective psy-che after three successive defeats, a mood that darkened still furtherwhen the leadership refused to accept a vote in favour of unilateralnuclear disarmament in October 1960: Gaitskell mobilised right-wingand trade union support and overturned the unilateralist vote at the fol-lowing year s Conference [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl centka.pev.pl
.Theywill have to do more than that to justify themselves.When Macmillan resigned because of ill-health in October 1963 it washoped in some quarters that the Conservatives would choose a much· 6 9 · SB_C04.qxd 03/12/2004 15:23 Page 70SI XTI ES BRITAINyounger replacement to renew the party s moral and political purpose perhaps Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling or Edward Heath.Instead,in the days before Conservative leaders were elected on a formal ballot,the choice came down to three candidates from the same generation asMacmillan: Rab Butler, Lord Hailsham and Lord Home.Despite his ill-ness, Macmillan was determined to control the succession and preventButler from taking over, largely because he doubted his deputy s strengthof character.Hailsham, the popular choice of the party outside parlia-ment, ruined his own chances with a vulgar display of self-promotion atthe Conservatives Blackpool Conference.This left Home to emerge insoundings among Tory parliamentarians as the least divisive candidateand most MPs second preference.The sixty-year-old Home (pronouncedHume), who was a landowner, former Etonian and student of ChristChurch Oxford, renounced his peerage and became Sir Alec Douglas-Home, finding a seat in the Commons at a hastily-engineered by-electionat Kinross and West Perthshire.Tony Benn had predicted in his diaryon 14 October that Home would be a dud when it comes to exciting theelectorate , and that Labour s own recently elected leader, Harold Wilson will make rings round him (1987: 70).Home was by no means the liab-ility for the Tories that some expected, but he was a gift to the satiristsof Private Eye and That Was The Week That Was, not least when headmitted that he used matchsticks to help him count.Home also facedsimmering resentment from frustrated senior colleagues and their alliesat the way the succession had been handled, highlighted by the refusal ofEnoch Powell and Iain Macleod to serve under him and Macleod s publiccriticism of how Macmillan and a magic circle of Old Etonians hadmanipulated the arcane consultation process to thwart Rab Butler(Macleod 1964).To make matters worse, he also had only a year in whichto make an impression on the wider public and find a compellingresponse to Labour s charge that after twelve wasted years the Con-servatives were no longer fit for office.The new Prime Minister s area ofexpertise was foreign affairs, but his government urgently required someeye-catching domestic measures.Unfortunately, the only significant pol-icy initiative implemented during Home s brief premiership was Heath splan to abolish Resale Price Maintenance (RPM), a new measure thatcompelled manufacturers to abandon their right to control the retail priceof their goods.Heath s intention was to stimulate competition among· 7 0 · SB_C04.qxd 03/12/2004 15:23 Page 714 u Conservative crisis and Labour recovery, 1959 64retailers as part of an overall drive towards economic modernisation, butpolitically the policy backfired as thousands of Conservative-supportingsmall traders and shopkeepers protested against the measure, assisted bysome 40 Tory rebels on the backbenches (Findley 2001: 327 353).Withan election due in 1964 the prospects of a fourth consecutive triumph forthe Conservatives depended heavily on whether Labour could manage tothrow away their best opportunity for taking office since 1951.Old Labour, New Britain andthe 1964 electionLabour s political recovery from the continual defeats of the 1950s waslong and difficult.It was a process that was complicated by personalityclashes at a senior level, damaging disputes over policy and a fallingparty membership.Much of Labour s energy was spent on an internal fight for the soul of the party between traditionalists and revisionists(sometimes called modernisers), which centred in particular on the placeof public ownership in the party s programme.The reforms of thewartime coalition and the post-war Attlee government had delivered toministers the tools of macro-economic management and the superstruc-ture of the modern welfare state, enabling them apparently to consign themass unemployment and poverty of the inter-war years to the past.Whatwas to be the next stage of the British socialist project? Traditionalistscalled for an expanded programme of public ownership and further stateeconomic planning , remaining committed to a class-based analysis ofsociety in which Labour was the defender of working-class interests.Revisionists, however, believed that cloth-capped socialism was nolonger relevant in the changed conditions of affluent post-war Britain, notleast because social researchers told them that working-class identity wasbeing eroded by a combination of rising living standards and structuralchanges in the economy (Abrams 1960; Zweig 1961).Articulated mostcoherently in Tony Crosland s The Future of Socialism (1956), the revi-sionists case was that the control of industry by a salaried managerialclass and the growing power of trade unions had made the question ofownership of capital less important than government s ability to redis-tribute its returns.Instead of a programme of public ownership, thepriorities for a future Labour administration should be greater social· 7 1 · SB_C04.qxd 03/12/2004 15:23 Page 72SI XTI ES BRITAINequality which in effect meant redistribution of income and wealth anda fairer education system together with improved public services andextensions of personal freedom.So convinced were some revisionists after the 1959 defeat thatLabour s working-class identity was a liability, they suggested a radicalmakeover for the party.The Hampstead Set revisionists, whichincluded party leader Hugh Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland,Douglas Jay, and Patrick Gordon Walker floated ideas such as a namechange perhaps to Labour and Radical or Labour and Reform cut-ting the party s link with the trade unions, abandoning the constitutionalcommitment to public ownership and exploring a progressive associationwith the Liberals.In the end the wilder ideas were abandoned and theleadership focused its attention on removing from Labour s constitutionClause Four, the principled commitment to common ownership whichhad served as the party s socialist myth since 1918.Gaitskell opened upthe issue at the party s post-election Conference, arguing that Clause Fourcreated the false impression that public ownership for Labour was an endin itself rather than a means to an end that of creating a more equal soci-ety.He was also well aware of mounting evidence that nationalisationwas a vote-loser for Labour.But the party was not ready to surrenderwhat had become a symbol of its historic struggles and it forced Gaitskellto climb down in March 1960 (Jones 1996: 41 64).The rancour generatedby the dispute showed how badly damaged was Labour s collective psy-che after three successive defeats, a mood that darkened still furtherwhen the leadership refused to accept a vote in favour of unilateralnuclear disarmament in October 1960: Gaitskell mobilised right-wingand trade union support and overturned the unilateralist vote at the fol-lowing year s Conference [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]