ABSTRACT
The roots of the Social Contract lie in the traditional vicissitudes of the party-union relationship exacerbated by the hostility and recrimination caused by In Place of Strife. The Social Contract was too underdeveloped to be electorally presentable in February 1974. The first fruits of the Liaison Committee outside industrial relations legislation were the document Economic Policy and the Cost of Living. This, the basic text of the Social Contract, was a collation of ideas, aspirations and policy proposals which had been circulating for some time. The TUC would encourage unions to adopt negotiating policies which focused on the need to restrain unit costs and which ensured a response to effective developments on the prices front’. Price control would break the wage-price spiral but price levels were a consequence of wage claims, so a government ‘must take a view about incomes movement’.
