Glen O'Hara

Towards a new Bradshaw? Economic statistics and the British state in the 1950s and 1960s

This article outlines the attempts of British central government to react to the perceived inadequacy of official economic statistics. A huge amount of work went into this project, the main aim of which was to speed up the production of statistics so that the economy could be analysed in more detail, and thus better managed. If this was to work, more data was required on the labour market, on productivity, on production, and on the interlinkages between those indicators. British official statistics clearly were more comprehensive and more detailed at the end of this period than they had been at the start. Even so, the effort was usually thought to have been a failure by the early 1970s. More detail took time to produce; it was difficult to recruit the necessary staff; successive administrative reorganizations also absorbed energies. The devolved informality of British government hampered the emergence of an overall picture. Businesses and trade unions resisted attempts to collect more data, especially when it showed them in an unflattering light. Above all, the elite, specialist, and technical nature of the reform process meant that very little political and popular pressure built up to force through further changes.

From planning to opportunism? Re-examining the creation of the London Docklands Development Corporation

East Londons former docklands have been at the centre of planning and regeneration debates for the past four decades. The setting up of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) has been variously interpreted as ‘3-D Thatcherism’ in action, a symbol of the death of comprehensive planning and the replacement of a corporatist, Keynesian era of urban policy with a more neoliberal approach. Moving away from simplistic and straightforward interpretations of the processes happening at this time, this article uses new archival and interview material to re-examine the setting up of the LDDC and its early years, revealing a more complex and contradictory picture than existing accounts suggest. It focuses on three themes: changing forms of state intervention; the uncertain ‘break’ in the post-war consensus as evidenced by the changes in approaches to the regeneration of Docklands; and the unintended, disordered process of actual policy change. As such we aim to reveal how shifting visions, modes of governance and practices could compete and co-exist in the midst of seemingly coherent ‘eras’, as Docklands as a place and as an approach to regeneration was constantly made and re-made – a process that continues to this day.

The Complexities of ‘Consumerism’: Choice, Collectivism and Participation within Britain's National Health Service, c.1961–c.1979

This article explores the overlapping and conflicting points of contact between ‘consumerism’, collectivism and participation in Britains National Health Service during a period of relatively well-funded expansion during the economic ‘golden age’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite recent neo-liberal attempts to define ‘consumerism’ around the wishes and choices of the individual, and to conceptualise areas such as individual hospital referrals as particularly ‘consumerist’, this article demonstrates that collective provision, the protection of disadvantaged groups and the concept of ‘participatory’ citizen involvement were all alternative meanings of the concept during this period, co-existing uneasily with the competitive concepts that have become more familiar since the late 1980s. This insight is then utilised to show how health care debates today might become better informed, ignoring extreme claims for all three concepts and focusing instead on a theoretically informed but ultimately empirical grasp of constant flux in any health care system.

‘What the electorate can be expected to swallow’: Nationalisation, transnationalism and the shifting boundaries of the state in post-war Britain

This article attempts to show that there were three key elements to the changing policy mix as regards state economic intervention and ownership in post-war Britain. These have been relatively neglected by economic historians in favour of questions concerning ‘objective’ performance. They were: the uncertainty, confusion and competition of the two main political parties as to what the nationalised sector was for; attempts to escape an unpopular and bureaucratic policy model; and recommendations and techniques copied from other countries. It is posited that these three analytical categories provide an explanation for the shifting boundaries of the state in post-war Britain.

‘This is What Growth Does’: British Views of the European Economies in the Prosperous ‘Golden Age’ of 1951—73

This article attempts to deconstruct and analyse British views of the European economies during the post-war years of fast growth, low unemployment and subdued inflation. Though there had been a great deal of academic attention paid to Britons’ self-perceptions, less research has been conducted as to how they saw the most relevant ‘other’: the societies and economies on either side of the English Channel. Two case-studies are utilized here to suggest both how Britons saw themselves by reference to their near-neighbours, and to study how policy ideas moved around the international world of advice, interpretation and global governance that was emerging after the Second World War. The French and Soviet examples, so scrutinized and apparently fascinating at the time, are the main focus of the article, though other sources of inspiration — German, Scandinavian, Italian — are also suggested. The article concludes with a brief sketch of the main reasons other Europeans’ apparent ‘success’ came to seem so important. These include a national sense of ‘declinism’; the importance of international bodies such as the United Nations; and the intertwined relationship between domestic and foreign policy during the Cold War.

The Politics of Housing: Power, Consumers, and Urban Culture (2007)

Amanda Flather uses space as a lens to examine the workings of gender in Essex between 1580 and 1720. By comparing middling-sort people’s experience of space with prescriptive rules about its gendered use, she aims to show that space was not just an arena reflecting social organization and values, but a medium through which society was produced. Five chapters focus on prescriptive, domestic, work, social and sacred space. Flather concludes that gendered space in practice was complex, dynamic, often contradictory, and dependent upon context. Drawing on an abundance of ecclesiastical and secular court records, this book successfully pulls together several disparate themes through the organizing framework of space. The chapter on prescription’s dictums on gendered space confirms the internal inconsistencies in print culture’s advice on gender practice. Where domestic space is concerned it is clear that, while power could be enacted through gendered household spaces, age and status were also significant. The chapter on the spatial division of labour substantiates the current historiographical consensus that, while tasks might be separated according to sex, joint labour was frequent and neither need conform to any public/private binary. Flather shows that homebased sociability followed a pattern of ‘separate socializing’ (103), whereas women frequented drinking houses for similar reasons to men: to drink, eat, socialize and discuss business. The chapter on sacred space offers evidence that nuances generalizations about the gendered seating arrangements of the post-Reformation parish church. It is this chapter, therefore, that gives a flavour of the enormous social, economic, political and demographic upheaval in England in the period covered which is less apparent in the preceding chapters. While it is an interesting book and concept, some profitable areas for research are underdeveloped. Largely confirming existing conclusions about early modern women, masculinity needed to be more intensively explored in order to offer new insights into gender as an experience or concept. Similarly, there is little reflection of the enormous advances in spatial analyses of several historical phenomena in recent years. Despite the study’s ambitions, it does not consistently apply a theoretical framework in which space facilitates and constructs behaviour. Instead, people’s use of space is more often than not simply described. An alternative approach would have been to combine spatial analysis with the exciting field of material culture, thereby enriching the somewhat static accounts of eating, sleeping, labour, leisure, clothing and worship. Still, the picture of how people moved about different spaces, and what went on in different spaces, deepens our understanding of everyday life in early modern England. Joanne Bailey Oxford Brookes University a 2009, Joanne Bailey