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Michael FRENCH and Jim PHILLIPS Protéger les consommateurs ou soutenir les producteurs? La politique alimentaire menée par le Royaume-Uni de 1945 à 1955 Les questions d'approvisionnement, de qualité et de prix des produits alimentaires sont à l'origine de débats politiques animés en Grande- Bretagne depuis le XVIIIe siècle. Cependant, malgré l'existence d'une représentation des consommateurs, il est clair que d'un point de vue historique, la réglementation des produits alimentaires au Royaume-Uni a généralement privilégié les producteurs au détriment des consommateurs. Dans le présent article, nous montrons que cela fut en grande partie le cas au milieu du XXe siècle, à partir de l'analyse des mesures réglementaires qui furent adoptées pour instaurer des normes de composition alimentaires d'une part, et d'autre part, pour promouvoir une amélioration de l'hygiène dans les établissements du commerce de détail et de la restauration. Ces mesures témoignent des changements politiques et économiques qui eurent lieu dans les années 1940 et 1950 et qui, dans une certaine mesure, ont limité l'influence du monde du commerce sur la réglementation. Cependant, cela aboutit à une adaptation plutôt qu'à une transformation du cadre réglementaire, renforçant ainsi la tendance historique de la politique alimentaire britannique à privilégier les intérêts du commerce aux dépens de ceux des consommateurs.

In this article, we explore how reformers, manufacturers, and traders perceived British food consumers and the significance of those perceptions in debates about food quality and regulation. By considering basic commodities, our analysis extends a literature on consumption that is otherwise derived primarily from the study of luxury commodities, and it identifies conflicting images of the interests, competence, and concerns of early twentieth-century consumers. We find that discussions of appropriate policy involved competing interpretations of modernity and its implications for food consumers, and these discussions anticipated later twentieth-century debates.

This highly topical book offers a comprehensive study of the interaction of food, politics and science over the last hundred years. A range of important case studies, from pasteurisation in Britain to the E coli outbreak offers new material for those interested in science policy and the role of expertise in modern political culture

Exploring the social, cultural and political implications of deindustrialisation in twentieth-century Scotland Examines deindustrialisation as long-running, phased and politicised processDraws on documentary source material from a range of industrial sectors, as well as transcripts from over 20 exclusive interviews with industry professionalsRelates Scottish Home Rule to long-running debates about economic security and working class welfareAnalyses longer history of deindustrialisation, with emergence of assembly goods manufacturing alongside shrinkage of established sectors such as shipbuilding Deindustrialisation is the central feature of Scotland's economic, social and political history since the 1950s, when employment levels peaked in the established sectors of coal, shipbuilding, metals and textiles, along with the railways and docks. This book moves analysis beyond outmoded tropes of economic decline and industrial catastrophe, and instead examines the political economy of deindustrialisation with a sharp eye on cultural and social dimensions that were not uniformly negative, as often assumed.Viewing the long-term process of deindustrialisation through a moral economy framework, the book carefully reconstructs the impact of economic change on social class, gender relations and political allegiances, including a reawakened sense of Scottish national identity. In doing so, it reveals deindustrialisation as a more complex process than the customary body count of closures and job losses suggests, and demonstrates that socioeconomic change did not just happen, but was influenced by political agency

AbstractPublic ownership has emerged as desirable and achievable in the United Kingdom in the 2020s. The ongoing water crisis in England and concerns about 'greedflation' in sectors such as electricity and gas following recent price rises have encouraged interest in public ownership. Informed discussion is compromised, however, by a gap in public knowledge. This partly stems from the distance of time, a generation or more, since publicly owned enterprises operated in these sectors across Britain. We argue that public ownership is best understood in terms of fundamentals. Our proposed typology presents the predominant form of public ownership, nationalisation, as a response to fundamental problems, or devised as more efficient management of fundamental sectors, or established to achieve fundamental citizenship values. The typology is developed in dialogue with historical British experiences, then applied to contemporary examples of Scottish government policy, namely shipbuilding, social care and railways.