ABSTRACT

For several years after its 1951 election defeat, the Labour Party gave little thought to the issue of incomes policy. This largely reflected the chastening experience of pursuing a wage freeze from 1948 to 1950, and the consequent realisation of just how strongly the trade unions were committed to free collective bargaining, and their concomitant antipathy to State intervention in wage determination (see, for example, Labour Party, 1952: 136). Consequently, only a few on the left were willing to point out that free collective bargaining was likely to prove inflationary in a period of full employment, as well as inimical to Labour’s professed egalitarianism, owing to the manner in which workers with stronger bargaining power could secure wage increases which maintained, or even increased, socio-economic inequalities (Bevan, 1961: 138-9; Wootton, 1954: 175).