Peter Weiler

British Labour and the Cold War: The Foreign Policy of the Labour Governments, 1945–1951

Labour took office in 1945 amid high hopes that its socialist message could be applied abroad as well as at home. Although Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and other Labour leaders had had almost as much responsibility as their Conservative counterparts for Britains wartime foreign policy, it was widely believed that once on its own Labour would play a different role in world affairs. Let Us Face the Future , the partys election manifesto, pledged to “apply [a] Socialist analysis to the world situation.” Bevins famous “Left understands Left” remark was widely taken to mean that Labour would be more sympathetic to revolutionary developments throughout the world but above all to the Soviet Union. For many in the Labour movement, a socialist foreign policy and sympathy for the Soviet Union also implied distrust of the United States and its attempt to create what the New Statesman called a capitalist “economic empire.” For the Labour movement as a whole, the story of these years can be summarized simply: the reluctant abandonment of hopes of Anglo-Soviet friendship and the grudging acceptance of an Anglo-American alliance. Labour leaders, of course, did not fully share the assumptions of their more enthusiastic followers, and they made clear from the start that they intended no radical break with the foreign policy of the wartime coalition that they had helped to shape. Ernest Bevin told the Commons in his first major speech as foreign secretary that he accepted the foreign policy of his predecessor, Anthony Eden. But a commitment to continuity in foreign policy did not immediately entail complete hostility to the Soviet Union or a special relationship with the United States.

The rise and fall of the conservatives' ‘grand design for housing’, 1951–64

When they returned to power in 1951 the Conservatives aimed to restore the dominance of the market in housing and property and by early 1953 Harold Macmillan, the Minister of Housing, had put forth a ‘grand design’ to achieve that goal by phasing out rent control, making council housing a residual social service only for those in need, and thus further encouraging home ownership. But, as the Conservatives had feared from the start, the various steps they took to achieve this goal proved unpopular. As rents and land prices rose in the property boom of the early 1960s, Conservative housing policies became widely associated with profiteering and homelessness. The Rachman scandal of 1963 put the Tories even more on the defensive and forced them to retreat from what were widely seen as the unacceptable consequences of an unrestrained market in housing and land.

Labour and the Land: The Making of the Community Land Act, 1976

Angered by an unprecedented rise in house and land prices and by the depredations of property developers such as Harry Hyams, who built Centre Point, the Labour Party unanimously embraced land nationalization at the 1972 and 1973 conferences. In the event, the Labour government that came to power in 1974 did not nationalize the land, but it did pass the Community Land Act empowering local authorities to acquire at ‘use value’ land that could be used for development. This was the third and, as it turned out, last time since 1945 that the Labour Party enacted legislation to limit the free market in land and property. This article examines why Labour in spite of its previous failures tried again to secure a permanent change in land ownership and why this last attempt also failed because of a combination of external economic pressures and the inherent limitations of Labours reform effort.

The Making of British Socialism

cism and Pietism to the first decades of the eighteenth century. Longo observes that thanks to Christian Thomasius, the history of philosophy became a permanent and fundamental discipline of the German universities. Eclecticism promoted the study of the history of philosophy as the recognition of the truth that was already revealed by the philosophers of the past. Histories of philosophy were deeply influenced by the religious context, and the history of philosophy itself was considered as a chapter of ecclesiastical history and an essential introduction to the study of theology (306). In this period the history of philosophy itself became a problem and established itself as an autonomous discipline. Historia philsophica became truly philosophical and philosophical issues became its main driving force. This was also a period which saw an increase in the production and dissemination of new textbooks such as those of Friedrich Gentzken, Lorenz Reinhard, and Johann Gottlieb Heineccius. But from the perspective of the general histories of philosophy, the period from 1720 to 1750 is best typified by the historiographical work of Jakob Brucker, to which the eighth chapter is devoted. Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae soon became the standard work in the history of philosophy and it was the main source for the entries in D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. But, as Longo points out, Brucker’s work was also theologically oriented – in Brucker’s view, the history of philosophy led to the discovery of heresy and provided ways of combating atheism (especially Spinozism). With the translation of this second volume of the Models of the History of Philosophy, the most important historiographical endeavour of Italian scholarship in the past fifty years is finally available to the English-speaking world – it will be a precious reference work for future generations.