The origins and interpretation of the Prebisch-Singer thesis

© Duke University Press 200

The study of politics as a vocation

© 2005 Cambridge University Press. Review article.The myth of Mr Butskell: the politics of British economic policy, 1950–1955. By Scott Kelly. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. viii+248. ISBN 0-7546-0604-X. £42.50. The Labour party and taxation: party identity and political purpose in twentieth-century Britain. By Richard Whiting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+294. ISBN 0-521-57160-X. £45.00. British social policy since 1945. Second edition. By Howard Glennerster. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 2000. Pp. xii+260. ISBN 0-631-22022-4. £15.99. Governance, industry and labour markets in Britain and France: the modernising state in the mid-twentieth century. Edited by Noel Whiteside and Robert Salais. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Pp. xi+295. ISBN 0-415-15733-1. £45.00. The final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1918–19) Hugh Gaitskell (Labour chancellor of the exchequer, 1950–1) remarked in 1957 that ‘professional politicians, when they have been in the job for any length of time, are not well fitted for really deep thinking, partly because they have no time for it and partly because the very practice of their art involves them in continual simplification’. This candid observation has important implications for the study of how past politicians formulated policy. The books under review all deal with differing aspects of British (and also, in one case, French) economic and social policy in the twentieth century. They all show, to varying degrees, that parties, governments, and other political actors have proffered apparently simplistic and muddled solutions to important problems. But was this because of intellectual deficiency on their part, or was it an inevitable consequence of the exercise of what Rab Butler, Gaitskell's Conservative successor, famously called ‘the art of the possible’

The Rhetorical Premiership: a new perspective on prime ministerial power since 1945

The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.The long-standing debate about the power of the British prime minister has focused excessively on formal instruments of control exercised within Whitehall. By contrast, not enough attention has been paid to the ways in which prime ministers use rhetoric, formally and informally, to maintain themselves in power and to achieve their policy aims. The term ‘rhetorical premiership’ is used here to denote the collection of methods by which prime ministers since 1945 have used public speech to augment their formal powers. Set-piece oratory remained consistently important throughout the period, in spite of new technology and the rise of the sound-bite. However, parliamentary rhetoric underwent some important changes, and prime ministers spoke outside the Commons with increased frequency. Historians of the premiership should draw instruction from those scholars who have studied the rhetoric of US presidents, although caution must be exercised when drawing comparisons. Future study of the rhetorical premiership should involve close textual analysis of prime ministerial speeches, but this should not be at the expense of archival sources, from which important insights into the speech-making process can be gleaned

Developing multilateralism: the Havana charter and the fight for the International Trade Organization, 1947-1948

Since the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established, it has been the subject of vocal, and sometimes violent, international protests. Much of the criticism levelled at it has charged that the WTO régime puts developing countries at various kinds of unfair disadvantage. Yet concerns about international economic organisations’ treatment of poor nations long pre-dated the WTO. Early consideration of such issues had taken place during the negotiations, in the immediate post-WWII years, which aimed at establishing an International Trade Organization (ITO). This is striking because, although the attempt to create the ITO failed, it left a lasting legacy. Not only was the plan a precursor of the WTO, but the supposedly ‘interim’ General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), negotiated during 1947 in parallel with discussions on the proposed charter for the ITO, continued as the basis on which world trade was regulated, until superseded by the WTO in 1995. The GATT rules of 1947, as subsequently amended, were nested inside the Marrakesh Agreement of 1994 as part of that single agreement. Hence, the spirit of the GATT – and, to some degree, that of the ITO - lives on in the WTO

H.G. Wells and the New Liberalism

© The Author [2008].This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Twentieth Century British History following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version 2008, vol. 19, issue 2, pp. 156-185 is available online at: http://tcbh.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/2/156.full.pdf+html.This article offers a new interpretation of H.G. Wells's political thought in the Edwardian period and beyond. Scholars have emphasised his socialism at the expense of his commitment to liberalism, and have misread his novel The New Machiavelli as an anti-Liberal tract. Wells spent much effort in the pre-1914 period in the quest for a ‘new Liberalism’, and did not believe that socialists should compete directly with the Liberal Party for votes. It was this latter conviction that lay behind his much misunderstood dispute with the Fabian Society. His political support for Churchill was one sign of his belief in the compatibility of liberalism and socialism, in which he was far from unique at the time. He also engaged, somewhat idiosyncratically, with the ‘servile state’ concept of Hilaire Belloc. Although he did not articulate his Liberal identity with complete consistency, he did so with increasing intensity as the First World War approached. This helps explain why key New Liberal politicians including Churchill, Lloyd George and Masterman responded to his ideas sympathetically. The extent of engagement between Wells and the ‘New Liberalism’ was such that he deserves to be considered alongside Green, Ritchie, Hobson and Hobhouse as one of its prophets

The Labour Party's external economic policy in the 1940s

This article challenges the view that, in accepting the 1945 American loan and its attendant commitments to international economic liberalization, the Labour party easily fell in behind the Atlanticist approach to post-war trade and payments. It is suggested instead that Labour's sometimes seemingly paradoxical behaviour in office was driven, not only by the very tough economic conditions it faced, but also by a fundamental contradiction inherent in its desire to ‘plan’ at both domestic and international levels. This contradiction – the ‘planning paradox’ – is explored with reference to pre-war and war-time developments, including Labour's reactions to the Keynes and White plans of 1943, and to the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. The decision to accept the US loan, and with it the Bretton Woods agreements, is then examined within this context. Finally, an assessment is made of whether, in this key area of policy, Labour's pre-1945 deliberations were effective in preparing the party for the challenges it would face in government

‘Perfectly parliamentary’? The Labour Party and the House of Commons in the inter-war years

© The Author [2012]. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Ralph Miliband’s influential Marxist critique of Parliamentary Socialism (1961) depicted a Labour Party that had condemned itself to futility by its dogmatic commitment to parliamentary methods. By contrast, Social Democratic writers such as Ben Pimlott have argued that Labour’s reformism secured concrete gains, whilst accepting the premise that the party’s electoralism/parliamentarism went unquestioned at the time. Both sides are right insofar as no group within the party suggested abandoning parliamentary methods. What has been forgotten, however, is that there was considerable debate after 1918 about how Parliament should be used. Not only was Labour’s commitment to Parliament challenged by other parties, which alleged extremism and disregard of the rhetorical conventions of the Commons, but Labour itself accused its opponents of riding roughshod over parliamentary liberties. Thus, the decision of some left-wing MPs to use parliamentary disruption tactics in their quest to present themselves as spokesmen of the unemployed was depicted by them as a proper use of the Commons to challenge capitalism and by Conservatives as proof of Labour’s innate extremism and unfitness to govern. Issues of class were central to these understandings, and gender was also important. This article examines the arguments about Parliament and parliamentary methods that were conducted within and without the Commons, often through symbolic manifestations such as rowdy ‘demonstrations’ within the Chamber. It concludes that the inter-war experience taught Labour not the possibilities of Parliament but its limits.Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC

The rhetorical culture of the House of Commons after 1918

© 2014 The Author. History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The article analyses the rhetorical culture of the House of Commons in the era following the extension of the franchise in 1918, a period in which parliament saw a major influx of new Labour MPs, and also the entry for the first time of small number of women. The article discusses not only the norms and expectations surrounding parliamentary speech but also the ways in which some speaking styles and techniques became controversial. In particular, the Labour Party was accused by its opponents of practising ‘rowdyism’. This allegation was part of a wider effort to undermine the party's constitutional credentials and to present it as unfit to govern. Thus, arguments about styles of arguing went the heart of broader debates over political legitimacy. To a considerable degree, Labour MPs were co-opted over time into existing codes of behaviour. But although Conservative efforts to associate their own oratorical style with political virtue did have some success, partisan factors alone are not sufficient to explain the shifts in rhetorical culture, which changed, in part, for reasons external to the institution itself. As power moved from the legislature to the executive, and as politics became increasingly professionalized, the speaking culture of the House of Commons was affected by a longstanding evolution from a discursive to a programmatic view of statecraft. Styles and techniques of parliamentary argument were thus influenced both by the changing nature of the state and by the shifting bargain between voters and the political classes in the era of universal suffrage

The Forgotten Revisionist: Douglas Jay and Britain’s Transition to Affluence, 1951-1964

© 2004 Ashgate Publishing. An Affluent Society?: Britain's Post-War 'Golden Age' Revisited, edited by Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton, 2004, Ashgate. Details of the definitive version are available at http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/978075463528