BOOK REVIEWS
| Date | 01 March 1977 |
| Published date | 01 March 1977 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1977.tb00079.x |
British Journal
of
Indusirial Relations
Vol.
XV
No.
1
BOOK
REVIEWS
Economic Planning and Politics in Britain
by JACQUES LERUEZ. Martin Robertson,
197
1,
324
pp.,
E8.25.
Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy: The Labour Party, The Trade
Unions
and
Incomes Policy
1945-1974
by LEO PANITCH. Cambridge University Press,
1971,
318
pp.,
f8.50.
Strikes and the Government,
1893-1974
by ERIC WIGHAM. Macmillan,
1971,
206
pp.,
f10.00.
IT
is difficult to know whether to feel relieved
or
depressed when, at
a
time of economic
crisis generally regarded as unprecedentedly dangerous, one recalls how many of the com-
ponents of current problems have recurred
so
often during
our
post-war history. This is
not intended
to
disguise the intensified nature of the present situation, sharpened as it is by
being part of a generalised crisis of western economies. However, the recent
book
by
Panitch, and the appearance in English of Leruez’s study, do give one the occasion for
a
remarkable sense of
d4u
vu;
and such a perspective is instructive for it enables one to dis-
cern the overall parameters which have structured British economic and industrial
relations policies in
a
way which the specifities of the present often obscure. One sees in
particular the straitjacket imposed on policy by the retention of certain attributes which
suited a dominant imperial power, but which sit heavily on an ordinary medium-sized
nation with no particular advantages of world pre-eminence. The role of sterling as a
reserve currency, the associated importance of the City
of
London as a financial centre,
the vast defence commitments all imposed constraints on an economy which already had
enough problems of industrial modernisation. The persistence for
so
long of these features
is usually attributed to imperial nostalgia
or,
more substantively, to the entrenched place in
policy-making of the groups associated with them. But an additional important source is
noted in both these works (particularly by Leruez-ne of the advantages of a French
perspective on Britain): pressure from the USA. on British governments to sustain these
policies in order to protect America from itself having to carry the full burden of major
guarantor of the security and stability of the West. In exchange the Americans have of-
fered ‘support’ for the
U.K.
economy in securing the international credit which has been
continually necessary if this country were to continue such an expensive role-support
which, in the circumstances, seems increasingly to have resembled the protection offered
by a protection racket.
One way in which these strains might have been accommodated would have been for
the economy to have been run at
a
constant under-capacity, avoiding inflation and thus
enabling the currency to play its international role without stress, and for public spending
to be heavily contained, with the exception of defence. But here other characteristic British
attributes, themselves partly
a
legacy from the confident domestic liberalism of the im-
perial period, intervened to prohibit such a course: a powerful trade union movement, lar-
gely free from legal repression, with its centre of gravity on the shop floor and with a com-
mitment to an advanced level of welfare-state expenditure. This has led governments to
seek alternative methods of control, and repeatedly they have tried to use the device of
turning the leadership of this movement to exercise control over its membership to pursue
a lower level of pay and other advances than their market position would give them, les-
sening the need for fiscal demand restrictions. The strategy is most readily pursued by
Labour Governments, though it has by no means been limited to them, and Panitch’s
book is a study of its development over the post-war period.
It is a useful contribution to the literature, reconstructing the pattern of forces which
determined the succession of events clearly, concisely but fully. He draws out well the
continuities of the British problem: the responses of governments to the demands of the
International Monetary Fund and the holders of sterling by putting pressure on union
leaders, in the national interest, to restrain their members; and the subsequent crisis of
122
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