ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the organized consumer was almost completely marginalized by the Labour government and goes on to suggest that the continued subordination of the cooperative alternative meant that the Labour Party, like the Conservatives, increasingly embraced an individual, competitive model of consumption and the consumer during the second half of the 1950s. The development of a ‘consumer society’ in post-war Britain was not a smooth, inexorable process facilitated merely by changes in supply and demand. Transformations were no doubt also facilitated by the expanding reach of advertising agencies that, according to study of the London office of the American firm J. Walter Thompson, played a vital role in ‘assembling’ and ‘mobilizing’ the post-war housewife-consumer in a specifically national context. The tendency was to follow the lead of the Conservative Party, which claimed insistently to both champion and speak on behalf of the acquisitive individual consumer.
