''The Industrial Charter: A Statement of Conservative Industrial Policy'' was a 1947 pamphlet and
policy
Policy is a deliberate system of guidelines to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an organ ...
statement by the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
Conservative Party
The Conservative Party is a name used by many political parties around the world. These political parties are generally right-wing though their exact ideologies can range from center-right to far-right.
Political parties called The Conservative P ...
. The ''Charter'' is widely regarded as representing a seminal moment in the history of post war Conservatism as the party reconciled itself with many of the economic and social policies introduced by
Clement Attlee
Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, (3 January 18838 October 1967) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. He was Deputy Prime Mini ...
's
Labour
Labour or labor may refer to:
* Childbirth, the delivery of a baby
* Labour (human activity), or work
** Manual labour, physical work
** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer
** Organized labour and the labour ...
government following the
1945 United Kingdom general election
The 1945 United Kingdom general election was a national election held on 5 July 1945, but polling in some constituencies was delayed by some days, and the counting of votes was delayed until 26 July to provide time for overseas votes to be bro ...
.
History
The ''Charter'' was first published in May 1947. It was the outcome of a process of rethinking brought about by the Conservative's landslide defeat in the
1945 United Kingdom general election
The 1945 United Kingdom general election was a national election held on 5 July 1945, but polling in some constituencies was delayed by some days, and the counting of votes was delayed until 26 July to provide time for overseas votes to be bro ...
. This process had begun a year earlier when the party's newly extended
Research Department began work on defining a policy that was both Conservative and progressive. The policy statement was accepted on 2 October 1947 at the Conservative's Annual Conference being held in Brighton.
Content
The ''Industrial Charter'' was a collection of distinct economic policies and included a separate "Pledge to the Consumer", a "Woman's Charter" and a "Workers' Charter". It accepted the idea of a
mixed economy
A mixed economy is variously defined as an economic system blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy, markets with state interventionism, or private enterprise with public enterprise. Common to all mixed economi ...
, gave a commitment that the party would protect
labour rights
Labor rights or workers' rights are both legal rights and human rights relating to labor relations between workers and employers. These rights are codified in national and international labor and employment law. In general, these rights influen ...
, stressed the need for fairness and opposed
protectionism
Protectionism, sometimes referred to as trade protectionism, is the economic policy of restricting imports from other countries through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, import quotas, and a variety of other government regulations. ...
.
Its emphasis was, though, placed squarely upon the individual and the document was highly-critical of its opponents. The Labour Party's attempts at
economic planning
Economic planning is a resource allocation mechanism based on a computational procedure for solving a constrained maximization problem with an iterative process for obtaining its solution. Planning is a mechanism for the allocation of resources b ...
were criticised for having created an incompetent and swollen civil service focused on administering a multitude of overlapping and unnecessary restrictions. It argued that the party had removed economic incentives and enforced a 'rigid straight jacket of doctrinaire political theory…
ndunnecessary controls'. Instead it called for a rolling back of the state and urged that a 'sense of realism, free opportunity, incentives and justice' should 'inspire all industrial policy'.
Reception
The Charter and a shortened 'popular' version were generally well received, sold an estimated 2.5 million copies and have often been thought to have helped "rehabilitate" the Conservative Party after 1945. Despite this the document caused a notable degree of debate at the 1947 Conservative Party Conference and
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, dur ...
's initial reaction is reputed to have been 'but I do not agree with a word of this'.
Despite its favourable press, the historian Andrew Taylor also contends that the ''Charter'' should be seen as a propaganda failure as it failed to reach its intended audience. This is backed up by a report conducted by
Mass Observation
Mass-Observation is a United Kingdom social research project; originally the name of an organisation which ran from 1937 to the mid-1960s, and was revived in 1981 at the University of Sussex.
Mass-Observation originally aimed to record everyday ...
which found that eighty per cent of a sample had no knowledge at all of the ''Charter'' in the month after its publication.
Historical significance
Although perhaps not as a pivotal a moment of the Conservative Party's history as often claimed, the ''Charter'' remains historically symbolic as marking the acceptance of the
post-war consensus
The post-war consensus, sometimes called the post-war compromise, was the economic order and social model of which the major political parties in post-war Britain shared a consensus supporting view, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the ...
that would later be
satirised as
Butskellism
The post-war consensus, sometimes called the post-war compromise, was the economic order and social model of which the major political parties in post-war Britain shared a consensus supporting view, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the ...
. This owes much to the significance later imbued into the document by those responsible for its publication.
[E.H.H. Green, 'The Conservative Party, the State and the Electorate, 1945-1964', in ''Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820'' (Aldershot, 1997), 176-200 (pp. 179-80); John Ramsden, ''The Age of Churchill and Eden, 1940-1957'' (London, 1995), p. 94; and R.A. Butler, ''The Art of the Possible'', p. 126.]
References
Additional Bibliography
* (
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...
)
*
*{{ cite book , title=British Trade Unions, 1945-1995 , author=Wrigley, C. , isbn=0719041473 , publisher=Manchester University Press , location=Manchester , year=1997 , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SAV5K4MkWZoC&dq=industrial+charter+conservative+1947&pg=PA5 , pages=5 (Google Books)
Conservative Party (UK) publications
History of the Conservative Party (UK)
One-nation conservatism
1947 in the United Kingdom
Political manifestos
1947 in British politics
1947 documents
Pamphlets
Progressive conservatism