Introduction

The period from 1945 to the late 1970s is often characterised as the high water mark of direct state intervention in the spatial economy of the UK. The experiences of recession in the 1930s and the obvious achievements of the wartime administrations created a political climate in which strong welfare state programmes and strategies could be established and implemented. The provision of a just and equitable spatial distribution of work and economic activity was seen as a moral requirement for the state and from the end of the Second World War up until the late 1970s both Conservative and Labour governments worked, to a greater or lesser extent, towards this end. This chapter, drawing on archival sources and contemporary accounts, examines the diverse ways in which the object of what would now be termed sustainable labour markets was defined and redefined in this post-war period. It argues that the state's role became one of regulating and controlling spatial development and matching labour supply with labour demand in ways that were seen to ‘balance’ spatial, social, and technical divisions of labour. The chapter demonstrates how more interventionist British governments in the first decades after the Second World War saw the engineering of regional economies, through selected inter-regional labour migration and resettlement, as a core component of broader regional development agendas.

The focus of policy was on the presence or absence of particular types of skilled private sector workers and their needs and aspirations. This, in turn, required the implementation of positive discrimination programmes by the state towards particular types of worker-citizen or ‘key worker’ (KW) based on the ascribed skills that they possessed and how these could be mobilised to fulfil the wider agendas of spatial development policy. The chapter begins by exploring inter-war policy towards labour migration as the experiences of the 1930s were instrumental in shaping post-war agendas. It then discusses the role of labour market policy during the Second World War before looking at the period 1945-79. It shows that while such strategies existed, their form, character, and implementation were subject to contestation and challenge. In many ways these worker mobility and labour market strategies reflected wider problems within regional policy, succinctly expressed by The Economist (1969, p 75) as being ‘beset by confusion in the analysis of the problem, fuzziness about objectives, ignorance of the benefits, rampant anomalies and outrageous political opportunism about results that cannot be achieved’.