Lawrence Black

'Making Britain a Gayer and More Cultivated Country': Wilson, Lee and the Creative Industries in the 1960s

Interrogating the Wilson administrations cultural agenda seems key given the seismic shifts assumed to characterise British society and particularly cultural life in the 1960s. Yet historians have given this little attention. Exploring Jennie Lees tenure as Arts Minister this article discloses cultural besides financial tensions over the status and definition of the arts, both within government and between government, a vibrant artistic community and the public. Besides interpreting Wilsons government outside the declinist mainstream, it hints at links with New Labours penchant for the creative industries and at post-industrial contexts for understanding British politics and culture.

The Bitterest Enemies of Communism: Labour Revisionists, Atlanticism and the Cold War

This article explores how Labour revisionists like Denis Healey, Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland viewed the Cold War. It evokes the world of Labour during the Cold War and offers a political anatomy of revisionism. In explaining why revisionists felt there were legitimate reasons for Labour to be committed to the Cold War, it assesses Atlanticism and American influences and the involvement of revisionists in shadowy bodies like the Bilderberg Group. Rather than question how socialist Labours policy was, like much traditional historiography, this article investigates Labours policy in the context of its claims to be the peoples party. It is argued that rather than marking a rupture in Labour thinking, revisionist responses to the Cold War can very much be seen in a traditional light.

An Enlightening Decade? New Histories of 1970s’ Britain

The 1970s have made something of a comeback recently–in terms of interest, if not always reputation. This is partly because it was an unfashionable, “lost” decade, possessed of a depressing image in the shadows of its immediate neighbors and because the present economic crisis has made its difficulties relevant and brought them closer. The decade is ripe for revisionism, as well as for seeking lessons. And what ultimately emerges is not just an arc towards neoliberalism but a more fragmented picture, liberating in many respects–and which demands historians come to terms with the grim decline long associated with the decade.

How self-service happened : The vision and reality of changing market practices in Britain

Self-service has become a normative practice in most UK shops, and in wider society and its attitudes. Self-service is the heartbeat of a liberal economy and consumer society. Yet before 1942, self-service did not exist in the UK. How did it become such a routine part of market activity? This chapter explores the role of distribution and the public reception of self-service. Drawing on a range of sources, it disturbs the assumptions in the existing literature that the concept was an American import and model, and naturally popular with shoppers. It offers a more integrated account of how markets operated and were perceived—from the supply chain to retailers to consumers, and from structural and logistical issues to the emotions and instincts of the shopping public.

Popular Politics? Communication and Representations of Politics

‘The fundamental paradox of politics in modern Britain’ Jon Lawrence argues, has been that ‘as the polity became more formally democratic, so face-to-face public politics, the actual interaction between politicians and people, became less democratic’. After 1918 political parties tried to tame disorderly, heckling at public meetings that had been regarded as vibrant assertions of public opinion. The de-legitimization (not disappearance) of such robust conduct for a more rational, peaceful public came with the franchise expansion, female inclusion in this (by dint, in part, of disruptive suffrage politics), uncertainties about communicating on such a scale and fears about the lower orders being manipulated. This reinforced a trend since the 1870s secret ballot, abolition of nominations ‘hustings’ and other means to ostensibly democratize elections, to increase party control and curb the public character of politics.1

‘Consumers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your illusions’: The Politics of the Consumers’ Association

The consumer has become the lodestar of re-interpreting British politics from the 1940s and as a site on which historians can plot broader debates, something of an all-consuming subject. Zweiniger-Bargielowska has detailed the Conservatives’ assembly of a popular alliance against rationing and control as key to its electoral recovery from 1945 and advantage over a left that struggled with affluence from the later 1950s.2 ‘The battle of the consumer’, as Gurney has it, saw nothing less than the ‘atomized figure of the individual consumer’ became a ‘hegemonic influence across both polity and civil society, shaping the epistemologies and languages through which the political and economic domains were… represented’. For Gurney, this ‘helped undermine the Co-operative alternative to mass consumption’, but Hilton sees the same process serve as the basis for new forms of citizenship and politics, in which the Consumers’ Association (CA) was a prime mover. Mort similarly points to the increasingly common conception of political and consuming subjects, practices and discourses in this period, notably through the technologies of marketing and polling. Politics, no less than the rest of society, was consumerized or, critics felt, colonized by consumer values and practices.3

Introduction: Political Cultures

If the 2009 MPs expenses scandal was the acme of how remote Parliament seemed from the people, it also revealed more enduring popular frustrations with formal politics — that far from confined to Britain, were common to many liberal democracies. Musing on ‘the contemporary condition… of political disaffection and disenchantment’ in 2007 Colin Hay argued, ‘“Politics” has increasingly become a dirty word’.1 And, as Lawrence’s timely history of electoral conduct contends, both politicians and the modern media have effectively marginalized the public from political debate. Representative politics has been challenged not just by falling party membership and participation, but has been a victim of a secular decline in a range of other forms of associational activism. Given diminishing trust and interest in party, part of the alleged falling stock of social capital and health of the public sphere, and studies like Why We Hate Politics, a political version of Callum Brown’s The Death of Christian Britain thesis might recommend itself to cultural historians aiming to capture the essence of politics’ history since the 1950s.2

Whitehouse on Television: The National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association and Moral and Cultural Politics

If seeking an alter-ego to Howard Kirk, Malcolm Bradbury’s ‘history man’, as a portal on the sixties, it would be a struggle to invent anything better than Mary Whitehouse’s career as a moral campaigner. Their mutual penchant for politicizing the personal apart, if Kirk was the quintessence of sixties radicalism, Whitehouse was its antithesis — quite as stereotyped and exaggerated, but no work of fiction. This chapter uses Whitehouse’s campaign to ‘clean-up TV’ and the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA) as a register of shifts in the form, content, style, motivations and strategies of politics, and more specifically of how culture and morality became politically charged, a process most readily associated in histories of this period with the New Left and feminism. Like the Consumers’ Association (CA), NVALA’s politics were not of the party or parliamentary kind; they were middle class in its core participants but national, even international in its aspirations, concerned with consumers rather than producers and with the politics of everyday life. It offers historians not only insights into the politics of culture, as further discussed in Chapter 6, but into the texture of political culture. Television increasingly figured in the communication and representation of politics as Chapter 7 discusses, but this chapter is concerned with the politics of television itself as a cultural form and activity and contends this was as much a key way in which British political culture was redefined.1

Shopfloor Politics: Co-operative Culture and Affluence

If CA’s successes offer historians valuable insights into key characteristics and trends in British political culture, then so do the Co-op’s difficulties in this period. It too claimed to be the voice of consumers and thus provides a test of findings based on CA about the impact of consumerism. Like the CA it straddled politics and consumerism and had long combined them as a social movement — ‘trying to sell a parcel of politics with a parcel of groceries’, as it put it, charging shopping with meaning over and above its material functions.1 The Co-op, like CA, can be used as an entrepot for a medley of debates about the politics of consumerism and other themes in Redefining British Politics, such as participation. Not least, organizations, practices and ideas that appear to struggle in this period, particularly in dealing with the emergent popular desires and tastes involved in affluence, as later in this book with NVALA and Wesker’s Centre 42, are useful to historians. No less than those that flourish, they are illustrative of trends in and facets of political culture — its structures, resources, values and demands. The Co-op’s purpose had long been to manage and escape material problems, yet it seemed to struggle in the very context in which post-materialism might flourish. Yet whatever the fact or causes of its decline, its principles of ethical, fair trade were also markers for the future.

‘The largest voluntary political youth movement in the world’: The Lifestyle and Identity of Young Conservatism

As a social institution organized under party auspices, the Young Conservatives (YC) intersect political and social change, like other core samples in Redefining British Politics. Making a virtue of its apolitical reputation to recruit a mass, if mainly middle-class membership, the YCs deployed a rhetoric of service and citizenship to embed themselves in local civil society through the 1950s. Its low key, light-hearted and associational appeal attests to the persistence of strands identified by historians of inter-war Conservative political culture — deftly avoiding the appearance of being political or partisan in much other than name. If this amounted to evidence of a relatively unpolitical culture, it was also testimony to party’s ability to negotiate this. After The Macleod Report (1965) into the YC’s falling membership, debate ensued about the impact of social change on YC fortunes, whether the ratio of social to political activities needed adjusting and whether a smaller membership of greater political quality was preferable. The ‘politicization’ of YC activity initiated by Macleod was not uncontested, but provides a means of tracing shifts in the texture and parameters of not only YC and Conservative, but the wider political culture.