Liberal market economies, business, and political finance: Britain under New Labour

The extent and nature of business financing of parties is an important feature of political finance. Britain’s transparent and permissive regulatory system provides an excellent opportunity to study business financing of parties. Business donations have been very important to the Conservative party over the last decade, and of only marginal importance to Labour. Unlike other Conservative contributors, business donors are more likely to contribute when the party is popular. In contrast to the previous period of Conservative government, the biggest British businesses tended to abstain from political finance under New Labour. However, their bias towards the Conservatives is affected by the party’s popularity and the closeness of an election. Britain shares the political importance of business financing of parties and its mixture of ideological and pragmatic motivations with other liberal market economies. However, in Britain the bias towards the right is much stronger and the role of big business more marginal

Further education outside the jurisdiction of local authorities in post-war England

This paper revisits the three decades following the end of World War Two – a time when, following the 1944 Education Act, local education authorities (LEAs) were the key agencies responsible for running the education system across England. For the first time there was a statutory requirement for LEAs to secure adequate facilities for further education (FE), and the post-war era is generally remembered as a period when they dominated FE. Yet this is not the full story of further education in post-war England: it is often forgotten that a significant amount of FE existed outside the municipal framework. This paper returns to the post-war decades and begins to uncover the largely forgotten history of FE outside local authority control at that time. It highlights how voluntary and private organisations offered various forms of post-compulsory education outside the municipal framework, and how they contributed to the eclectic and diverse nature of FE across England. This, I argue, reflected not only the expedience, compromise and inertia that characterised further education in post-war England but was rooted in a capture of educational policy more generally by a privileged elite intent on maintaining a social order characterised by social, economic and cultural divisions