The Battle of the Consumer in Postwar Britain

Voice of Civilisation: advertising and its critics in austerity Britain

“…Heated debate preceded the introduction of commercial television in 1955, for example, which provoked anxieties across the political spectrum. 97 However, the attack on advertising from the labour movement now lacked its earlier focus as part of a more sustained critique of capitalism. When the literary intellectual Richard Hoggart declaimed against the industry towards the end of the decade, he employed liberal Leavisite arguments, along with the snobbishness they entailed.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2005

“…Hilton reminds us of the importance of Michael Young in the nascent consumer movement, though Thane charts Young’s growing disillusion with the Labour Party and his belief that the social and economic institutions it created between 1945 and 1951, whether nationalized industries or social services, were excessively centralized. Elsewhere, Gurney highlights the left’s failure to engage with consumerism, exploring the failure of the cooperative movement and the Labour Party’s inability to integrate the interests of organized producers with those of consumers. Jackson discusses the political ideals and motivations of revisionist socialists in the 1950s and 1960s and argues that, whilst the revisionists supported the welfare state, they also aimed to promote social equality via an egalitarian version of a ‘property‐owning democracy’.…”

‘Co-operation and Communism cannot work side by side’: Organized Consumers and the Early Cold War in Britain

“…In order to give working-class consumers a voice in parliament, the movement had established a Co-operative Party in 1917, which won twenty-three seats in the 1945 general election. 8 Beyond these brute facts, from its very beginning co-operative consumerism had generated a culture or way of life, with social and educational classes, separate associations such as the Women's Cooperative Guild (WCG) as well as youth groups, and an extensive weekly and monthly press, including a popular Sunday paper, Reynolds's News. At the end of the war, significant numbers of activists within the co-operative movement desired to use this powerhouse to drive radical economic and social transformation.…”

“…The conflicts within the co-operative movement generated by the early Cold War, which have been before been a vibrant culture of co-operation. 110 As dissent was squeezed out, periodicals that were expressions of that culture such as Our Circle, Millgate and Playgoer and Woman's Outlook, were drained of what was now regarded as subversive content, becoming in the process poor reflections of commercial publications aimed at different constituencies of consumers. Academic studies of the problem of 'apathy' in the movement conducted in the mid 1950s found that participation rates in local societies were desperately low, with only 0.5% of members attending meetings.…”