Playing Both Sides Against the Middle: The Labour Party and the Wholesaling Industry 1919–1951

This article examines the Labour party's attitude towards the wholesaling industry. During the inter-war period wholesalers, ‘middlemen’ as they were commonly called, occupied the position of bogeyman in much Labour party thinking and literature. As a result the Labour governments of the 1920s took actions designed to achieve two ends: to improve the efficiency of food distribution, and to limit the power of middlemen to exploit both ends of the food production chain, farmers and consumers alike. This ideological positioning of the middleman by Labour, and the reforms introduced under the MacDonald governments, stressed the need to establish farmers’ co-operatives and consumers’ protection agencies, and also emphasized the importance of other measures designed to boost efficiency. However, by the time of the Attlee governments the cornerstone of the inter-war policy, the producer co-operative, had been abandoned and the focus of debate shifted to various forms of nationalization. This change of policy is examined in this article. Though post-war Labour manifestos pledged to nationalize sections of the wholesaling industry, and despite the fact that the party under Attlee discussed the nationalization of wholesaling at length, the industry remained in private hands. An attempt to understand how and why the nationalization of wholesaling was opposed within the party and shelved by the Attlee governments is central to this study.