Years of Opposition, 1951–64

Abstract

‘After 1951’, according to James Hinton, ‘the labour movement entered into a long drawn out and, as yet, unresolved crisis’.¹ Historians and political commentators are generally agreed that, after the heady days of the Attlee government, Labour went into prolonged and steep decline. Much of the evidence speaks for itself. The number of Labour voters fell from 14 million in 1951 to 11 million in 1987; the party’s trade union base was steadily eroded in the wake of profound changes to the industrial workforce; and individual Labour party membership dropped alarmingly — by at least three quarters from its high point in the early 1950s. In this longer-term framework, the thirteen frustrating years in opposition after 1951 have traditionally been portrayed as marking the origins of Labour’s downward slide. The party’s poor electoral showing in the 1950s was clearly the result, in part, of factional in-fighting of the sort that had been absent immediately after the war. Labour’s reaction to the loss of power in 1951 was to enter into protracted internal disputes: between Bevanite ‘fundamentalists’ advocating extensions of public ownership and Gaitskellite ‘revisionists’ seeking to play down nationalisation at the expense of social justice.