ABSTRACT
Once agreed, Labour’s Immediate Programme remained the best short summary of Party policy until amended by the 1945 election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future. The difference between the two documents was not great and, with the major proposals contained in the 1937 statement reappearing in the manifesto, wartime did not appear to have altered significantly the policies arrived at in the 1930s. War, however, began a process which eventually fractured the tentative homogeneity of the Immediate Programme. Although serious disagreements did not occur there were nevertheless hints of future divisions in Labour’s wartime discussions. Most obvious was the widening gap between a Left progressively more transfixed by the elevation of public ownership as its principal policy initiative and others of a Keynesian socialist disposition who believed that progress towards equality would require more diverse measures. In the later 1940s, after two years of successful majority government, these disagreements became more pronounced.
