ABSTRACT
Must Labour Lose? was the title of a book published after the Labour Party had suffered a third successive general election defeat in 1959. Answers to the question were not optimistic. Basing their work on a survey of 500 voters, the authors found that Labour was widely seen as an outdated force, representing mainly the poor at a time when ‘many workers, regardless of their politics, no longer see themselves as working class’ (Abrams and Rose, 1960: 23). It was widely agreed that after the heady days of the Attlee government, the Labour Party had consigned itself to opposition – perhaps permanently – as a result of factional in-fighting. Labour’s reaction to the loss of power in 1951 had been to enter into protracted internal disputes between Bevanite ‘fundamentalists’ advocating an extension of public ownership, and Gaitskellite ‘revisionists’ seeking to play down nationalisation in favour of social justice.
