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Revisionists and Fundamentalists: the Labour Party and Economic Policy during the Second World War1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Stephen Brooke
Affiliation:
The Queen's College, Oxford

Extract

‘Labour Comes of Age’, Kingsley Martin observed a few days after the party's electoral landslide of 1945. This might have been more precise if a chorus had added, sotto voce, ‘…And Comes Into an Inheritance’, for since the publication of Paul Addison's The road to 1945 (1975), the history of the Labour party during and after the war has been dominated by the notion of a political consensus forged during the Churchill coalition and left as a legacy to the Attlee government. According to Addison, it was the consensus of Keynes and Beveridge that shaped post-war politics rather than any distinctive contribution from Labour.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

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