IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-15863-8_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

First Steps Towards a Solution

In: Britain’s Economic Problem: Too Few Producers

Author

Listed:
  • Robert Bacon
  • Walter Eltis

Abstract

In the winter of 1975 and the spring of 1976 it became clear that several members of the British Labour government saw Britain’s economic predicament in terms very similar to those set out in this book and the previously published ‘Declining Britain’ articles. On 20 November 1975 Mr Harold Wilson made his celebrated Eastbourne speech where he said that British local government had seen a considerable increase in the number of chiefs working for it at the expense of the Indians, ‘the people who are doing the work on the spot’.1 On 25 February 1976, the Chancellor Mr Healey said in a major speech that: The TUC and Labour party are united in believing that the steady contraction in our manufacturing industry is the main reason for our disappointing economic performance since the war. This contraction must be halted and reversed. But we cannot reverse the trend if we plan to take more resources into the public services. It is not just the question of material resources. In recent years our competitors have increased the manpower in their manufacturing industry; we have seen a massive shift of manpower out of manufacturing into the public services. Local authority manpower alone rose from 1,250,000 in 1960 to nearly 3,000,000 in 1975. We cannot afford to continue eroding the foundation of our prosperity in this way.2

Suggested Citation

  • Robert Bacon & Walter Eltis, 1978. "First Steps Towards a Solution," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Britain’s Economic Problem: Too Few Producers, edition 0, chapter 5, pages 117-138, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-15863-8_5
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-15863-8_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-15863-8_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.