Conservative Governments Morality And Social Change In Affluent Britain 1957 64

'[During the 1960s] a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others' - Tony Blair, July 2004In this fascinating and timely book, Mark Jarvis explores the validity of such notions, together with related views held by those who blame British moral decline on legislation enacted by Harold Wilson's governments. This book strongly challenges this perspective, arguing that it was actually Harold Macmillan's Conservative administrations which introduced social legislation that would be termed 'permissive'. The dilemma faced by the Tories was clear: Macmillan encouraged affluence and presided over a Britain that had more money to spend on pursuing pleasure, but how could government manage this demand while still conserving traditional social bonds? Jarvis discusses some of the most controversial social issues faced by the conservative administration at the time, from crime, gambling, drinking, homosexuality, prostitution, pornography, to Sunday observance and the challenges imposed by the new medium of television. This revolution still reverberates in Britain today, and this book will make fascinating reading for those looking at British society in the 1960s, as well as those looking for a historical perspective on related contemporary issues.

This book is a study of the British casino industry and how it has been shaped by criminality, prohibition, regulation and liberalization since the beginning of the First World War. The reader will gain a detailed knowledge of the history, culture, identity and participants within the British casino industry, which has, to date, escaped the attention of a dedicated historical and criminological investigation. This monograph fills this gap in inquiry while drawing on primary source material that has not been used previously, including, but not confined to, records in the National Archives relating to the Gaming Board of Great Britain and the Metropolitan Police. In addition to archive material, oral histories, newspapers, published journals and books have been utilised and referenced where appropriate. Envisaged to close a gap in historical research, this book will be of interest to historians, criminologists, regulators, students and individuals interested in gambling, society and cultural history.

Nowhere in Europe are people more likely to enjoy a regular flutter in stocks and shares than in Britain. Whether we consider the millions of online stockbroking accounts or the billions spent on spread betting - it is a national pastime in today's Britain to play the markets. How did this distinctively British obsession with investment and speculation come about? Playing the Market tells this story by exploring the history of financial capitalism in Britain during the twentieth century from below. It explains how and why everyday British people increasingly invested, speculated, and gambled in stocks and shares from the outbreak of World War I, over the postwar decades and the Thatcher years, up until the premiership of Tony Blair. The study accounts for a momentous shift in attitudes towards stock market investment that occurred throughout the twentieth century. In the interwar period, traditional moral and cultural constraints about the stock market, which were still powerful in the Victorian period, gradually began to collapse in public and private life. In the following decades, financial securities lost their stigma of being either immoral or suitable only for the upper classes. Promising higher than average returns and a similar thrill of risk and reward as gambling in horses or the football pools, the stock market became a popular pastime for millions of Britons - even in the postwar decades, when Britain had nationalized industries and politicians of both parties indulged in staunchly anti-finance rhetoric. With the expansion of popular investment after both world wars, Britain developed a stock market culture that was unique across Europe and gave rise to a market populist sentiment that eventually proved fertile soil for the arrival of Thatcherism.

The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism is an examination of government tensions and frustrations during a time of economic and social flux. It concentrates on the development of domestic industrial policy in the Conservative Party between 1945 and 1964, with particular emphasis on Harold Macmillan’s and Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s administrations. Between the general elections of 1959 and 1964, the Conservative Government effected a series of striking and dangerously controversial policy transformations in response to its recognition of Britain’s relative economic decline. These adjustments were both practical and strategic. The administration’s aim was extraordinarily ambitious. It sought to fashion a recognisably modern and dynamic, yet socially stable, nation that could retain its place in the international élite. Thereby, the Party hoped to ensure its own continuation in power. The author considers policy innovations that included an ill-starred attempt to join the European Community, the development of macro-economic planning, and the abolition of resale price maintenance–an exploit which roused the Tory Party to unusual heights of passion. The book does not simply regurgitate an orthodox high political narrative. Instead, it investigates topics of interest to modern historians and political scientists alike. It will be of value to anyone interested in questions of modern political ideology, social and economic change, the nature of popular political support, or the constraints on state power in the post-war world.

A history of 1950s and 1960s British political culture, Redefining British Politics interrogates ideas, movements and identities bordering social and political change: consumer organisations; campaigns about TV, morality and culture; Young Conservatism; and how party politics used media like TV and was represented in popular culture.

Enoch Powell's explosive rhetoric against black immigration and anti-discrimination law transformed the terrain of British race politics and cast a long shadow over British society. Using extensive archival research, Camilla Schofield offers a radical reappraisal of Powell's political career and insists that his historical significance is inseparable from the political generation he sought to represent. Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain follows Powell's trajectory from an officer in the British Raj to the centre of British politics and, finally, to his turn to Ulster Unionism. She argues that Powell and the mass movement against 'New Commonwealth' immigration that he inspired shed light on Britain's war generation, popular understandings of the welfare state and the significance of memories of war and empire in the making of postcolonial Britain. Through Powell, Schofield illuminates the complex relationship between British social democracy, racism and the politics of imperial decline in Britain.

This book is open access under a CC BY license and charts the rise and fall of various self-harming behaviours in twentieth-century Britain. It puts self-cutting and overdosing into historical perspective, linking them to the huge changes that occur in mental and physical healthcare, social work and wider politics.

This collection of twelve essays reviews the history of welfare in Britain over the past 150 years. It focuses on the ideas that have shaped the development of British social policy, and on the thinkers who have inspired and also contested the welfare state. It thereby constructs an intellectual history of British welfare since the concept first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The essays divide into four sections. The first considers the transition from laissez-faire to social liberalism from the 1870s, and the enduring impact of late-Victorian philosophical idealism on the development of the welfare state. It focuses on the moral philosophy of T. H. Green and his influence on key figures in the history of British social policy like William Beveridge, R. H. Tawney, and William Temple. The second section is devoted to the concept of 'planning' which was once, in the mid-twentieth century, at the heart of social policy and its implementation, but which has subsequently fallen out of favour. A third section examines the intellectual debate over the welfare state since its creation in the 1940s. Though a consensus seemed to have emerged during the Second World War over the desirability and scope of a welfare state extending 'from the cradle to the grave', libertarian and conservative critiques endured and re-emerged a generation later. A final section examines social policy and its implementation more recently, both at grass roots level in a study of community action in West London in the districts made infamous by the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, and at a systemic level where different models of welfare provision are shown to be in uneasy co-existence today. The collection is a tribute to Jose Harris, emeritus professor of history in the University of Oxford and a pioneer of the intellectual history of social policy. Taken together, these essays conduct the reader through the key phases and debates in the history of British welfare.