Reconstruction, Affluence and Labour Politics by Nick Tiratsoo

Author:Nick Tiratsoo [Tiratsoo, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Political Science, Labor & Industrial Relations, Social Science
ISBN: 9780429831980
Google: gqp-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T01:34:03+00:00

Most seriously, significant sections of the poor had remained quite untouched by the ameliorating initiatives emanating from the authority. In 1961, for example, 23 per cent of households in the city still did not have regular access to piped hot water.112 Given such statistics, it is unsurprising to find, as well, that infantile death rates for inner-city areas were very much higher than those found in more salubrious neighbouring suburbs.113

In the end, therefore, the 1950s turned out very much like the years 1945–51, with actual achievements, substantial though they sometimes were, falling a long way short of planned targets. How should this ‘gap’ be explained?

Conservative administrations after 1951, of course, were keen to present themselves as practitioners of a very much less directive style of government than that which had allegedly been employed by their Labour predecessors, but as this chapter has made clear, whatever these claims, the reality of the situation was that, at least when it came to centre-periphery relations, Whitehall continued to dominate. Indeed, in relation to the provision of local authority services, central government policies were often decisive, shaping not only levels of supply (through variations in the cost and availability of resources) but also levels of demand (since decisions over industrial location tended to determine the scale of labour inflows).

Yet, having accepted all of this, it would be wrong to conclude that developments in Coventry were totally determined from outside the city. For the Council could, and did, exercise a certain degree of choice, as when it made decisions, for example, over rate levels. It remains, therefore, to elaborate on the logic and circumstances that informed such judgements – a task that will be attempted in the following chapter’s analysis of the local political balance.

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