Contested Issues 1974–76

Abstract

Strivings for influence over government’s general direction, in the first two years after the Labour Party took office, naturally focused on particular areas of public policy. The five most prominent were: banking practice and the financing of industry; industrial adjustment or modernisation; wages and unions’ bargaining power; economic management; and the future of full employment. Not all the interests concerned contested every one, and their influence varied greatly, depending on whether their members’ concern was primary or peripheral. As far as government was concerned, some interests carried heavier guns than the rest, either because they possessed skills or access to knowledge, or because their arguments fitted into an ineluctable international pattern. No one institution could hope for complete success, even on its most urgently chosen issue; and each one underwent changes in its own nature in the process. Only by 1976 had a definite balance of advantage been established; which in fact resembled very closely the line-up as it had existed in 1967–8.