Contesting Affluence: An Introduction
Abstract
Introduction The idea that Britain was becoming an 'affluent' society came to be central to debates in the later 1950s and the 1960s about the nature of social change. With the end of rationing in 1954, haltingly at first, people witnessed small changes in mundane living. These were later claimed as decisive moments of social change. Harold Macmillan's famous 'we never had it so good' speech in Bedford 1957 and the Labour Party's response—'should have had it a whole lot better'—in its 1964 manifesto, testify to this new sense of emerging social change. 1 There are telling signs of this change in the papers of this special issue. In 1954, an American parent firm which for years had been sending food parcels to a ration-stricken branch in London finally stopped its aid (Nixon, this issue). In Liverpool in 1956 the local council ventured into slum clearance and sent university sociologists to investigate whether poverty continued (Todd, this issue). In London in 1961 the Central Statistical Office began inscribing standards of living in the weekly Family Expenditure Survey, which became a key part of new governmental machinery (Majima, this issue). Sociologists such as John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood went