A Pledge Betrayed

John Grieve Smith

Chapter 1 in Full Employment: A Pledge Betrayed, 1997, pp 1-14 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract In its 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy the wartime Coalition Government committed its postwar successors to eliminate the disease of mass unemployment which had plagued the economies of the industrial countries in the interwar years. Speaking for the Government in the House of Commons in June 1944 while London was under attack by flying bombs, the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, said that ‘we can start out on this road this week and begin to say that we have left the old vexed disease of unemployment behind us’. For a long time this hope was fulfilled. Unemployment in the UK remained below 3 per cent for the next 25 years. This bipartisan achievement, spanning the periods of office of both Labour and Conservative governments, reflected the success of the postwar consensus to achieve full employment.

Keywords: Labour Market; Exchange Rate; European Union; Full Employment; Labour Party (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
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DOI: 10.1057/9780230372382_1

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