The Political Modernisation of the Labour Party 1955-59: Conditions, Content and Contingency

Labour’s ‘thirteen wilderness years’ (1951-64) remain one of the most understudied periods in modern British political history. With the party losing seats at four consecutive elections, historians have characterised the era as counterproductive and crisis ridden. Only Harold Wilson’s ‘style’ could claw the party back to government in 1964 and mask the movement’s rotten political culture. Yet, with such a heavy focus on Wilson’s ‘style’ and these ever-present crises, Labour’s long-term process towards electoral success has been neglected. This paper will address this neglect by linking the party to a sustained long-term modernisation process that began years before Wilson won the leadership in 1963. As early as the mid-1950s the Labour Party was in a position to modernise with several new languages of modernisation emerging through revisionist social democracy and the centre-left technocratic group. The historiographically neglected three-year policy review (1956-58) provided a cross-party modernising space for these factions to flourish and provide the policy foundation to the 1964 victory. This is not to say that traditional accounts that emphasise Labour’s improved image in 1964 are incorrect, rather this account supplements such work by illuminating the substance behind the style. By highlighting the paramount significance of the three-year policy review in Labour’s response to the affluent society, this paper aims to uniquely recontextualise the 1964 electoral victory within a long-term sustained modernising strategy.