ABSTRACT
Socialist hopes in twentieth-century Britain have flourished best in opposition. In office, by contrast, the contradictions both in Labour’s ideology and indeed in the very structure of the Labour movement have often become painfully apparent. So it had been with the first Wilson Government of 1964-70. For that Government’s most powerful defeats had been inflicted not by its political enemies but by its trade union allies, who had rejected both a statutory incomes policy and the curbs on their legal immunities proposed in the White Paper, ‘In Place of Strife’.
