Throughout its history, internal conflict has divided and threatened to rupture the British Labour Party. Yet even by the standards of a party accustomed to internal dissension, conflict during the period 1951-59 was particularly intense. It becomes the purpose of the thesis to consider the sources and nature of conflict during the period, and in particular to examine the character of the Bevan/Gaitskell relationship relative to that conflict. It was found that Bevan and Gaitskell were both intellectuals and advanced theoreticians whose analyses led them to adopt different if not always opposing policy positions. On occasions these differences heightened the rivalry between them, and provoked conflict. However, Bevan in particular was willing to restrain his radical, fundamentalist insticts in the interests of preserving party unity. He was also prepared, on occasions, to attempt the influence of policy development not through rebellion, but rather as a participating member of the party leadership group. Just as it is possible to overestimate the importance of ideological difference as a source of conlict between the two men, so too the importance of rivalry between them for power and position is easily overestimated. The research indicates that conflict within the party was created not so much by direct rivalry between Bevan and Gaitskell as by the reaction of Gaitskell, Morrison and most particularly the trade union leadership to the threat posed by organized Bevanism, and by the subsequent reaction and interaction of the fundamentalist and social democratic associates of Bevan and Gaitskell.

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Historians and political scientists have explained the pre-eminence of Social Credit in British Columbia during the last half of this century as an institutionalized protest against the seeming inactivity of partisan governments and as a reaction to the strength of the social democratic element in the province's political culture. This thesis examines the period from 1932 up to and including the BC Social Credit movement's electoral breakthrough in 1952 and suggests that economic and political conditions during that time affected the way that Social Crediters organized and changed the focus of Social Credit ideology in BC from monetary reform to a call for good government and conservative values. It also suggests that some previous conclusions about BC's Social Credit movement - that it was an outgrowth of Alberta Social Credit, that it was a populist organization, that it was too small to be intellectually significant - should be modified in the light of new evidence. This thesis should serve as a starting point for more specialized studies of the Social Credit movement in British Columbia.

Historians and political scientists have explained the pre-eminence of Social Credit in British Columbia during the last half of this century as an institutionalized protest against the seeming inactivity of partisan governments and as a reaction to the strength of the social democratic element in the province's political culture. This thesis examines the period from 1932 up to and including the BC Social Credit movement's electoral breakthrough in 1952 and suggests that economic and political conditions during that time affected the way that Social Crediters organized and changed the focus of Social Credit ideology in BC from monetary reform to a call for good government and conservative values. It also suggests that some previous conclusions about BC's Social Credit movement - that it was an outgrowth of Alberta Social Credit, that it was a populist organization, that it was too small to be intellectually significant - should be modified in the light of new evidence. This thesis should serve as a starting point for more specialized studies of the Social Credit movement in British Columbia. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

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The traditional objectives of leadership conventions have been two-fold; First, the choice of a new party leader; second, the reaffirmation and renewal of party activists as well as unification of them behind the newly chosen leader. This thesis analyzes the Social Credit party leadership selection process with particular focus on the 1991 leadership convention. The study draws upon data and written material with respect to the 1986 leadership convention, but primarily information gathered from an extensive survey of behavior and attitudes of the nearly 1900 delegates to the 1991 leadership convention as well as newspapers and personal observation and interviews with attendees. It explores how the Social Credit party tried but failed to achieve both of the traditional objectives with their 1991 leadership convention. They chose a new party leader. However, entering the 1991 convention, the party was divided by numerous rifts which had developed during the 1986 leadership convention and since that event. Rather than heal the rifts, the 1991 leadership convention exacerbated them. Thus, as the 1991 leadership convention closed the party was more divided than when the year's leadership politics had begun.

The traditional objectives of leadership conventions have been two-fold; First, the choice of a new party leader; second, the reaffirmation and renewal of party activists as well as unification of them behind the newly chosen leader. This thesis analyzes the Social Credit party leadership selection process with particular focus on the 1991 leadership convention. The study draws upon data and written material with respect to the 1986 leadership convention, but primarily information gathered from an extensive survey of behavior and attitudes of the nearly 1900 delegates to the 1991 leadership convention as well as newspapers and personal observation and interviews with attendees. It explores how the Social Credit party tried but failed to achieve both of the traditional objectives with their 1991 leadership convention. They chose a new party leader. However, entering the 1991 convention, the party was divided by numerous rifts which had developed during the 1986 leadership convention and since that event. Rather than heal the rifts, the 1991 leadership convention exacerbated them. Thus, as the 1991 leadership convention closed the party was more divided than when the year's leadership politics had begun. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

In this thesis I explore the attitudes, arguments, and actions of British political elites in connection with the development of human rights law in Europe and the UK. I do this by examining British input into five key episodes for the development of European supranational rights and their incorporation into domestic legal orders (namely the drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights 1950, the drafting of the European Social Charter 1961, the acceptance of individual petition in 1966, the failed 1970s Bill of Rights debate, the passing of the Human Rights Act 1998, and recent developments such as the UK ‘opt-out’ to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the emergence of a new ‘British Bill of Rights’ debate). Casting light on British involvement in less examined periods in European rights development, I challenge existing, isolated, explanations for the more focal episodes (such as Simpson’s rational-choice post-colonial thesis for individual petition acceptance, and ideological accounts for New Labour’s post-1997 constitutional reform). Responding to the most recent literature in the area, central to my analysis is the question of how rights progress relates to inter-party conflict. By considering continuities and discontinuities in elite political discussion of rights I argue that while conflict is a significant underlying feature of every major episode of rights progress during the last sixty years, and is less evident in less progressive periods, other factors have had a greater influence over the form, timing, and extent of rights progress. Most significant amongst these is the constitutional ideological development of the Labour party and the critical connection between Labour’s elevation of the Convention within the UK constitutional space and revisionist shifts in party thinking.

The Labour Party was a prominent political party amongst coloured people for more than twenty-five years. Formed in 1965 to contest elections for the Coloured Persons' Representative Council (CRC), the Labour Party at the outset adopted an anti-apartheid, anti-separate representation and anti-eRe stance. During the first five years of its existence, the party tried to muster coloured support for its policies. Its promise to cripple the CRC by refusing to occupy seats in the council became the rallying call. The Labour Party won a majority of the elected seats in the first CRC election in 1969 but the government nominated progovernment candidates to all the nominated seats, depriving the Labour Party of an overall majority. Thwarted in their bid to "wreck" the CRC, Labour Party members instead took their seats in the council, vowing to destroy it from within. For the next five years the Labour Party pursued a policy of "confrontation. " By using a "boycott" strategy, it not only hamstrung the effective working of the CRC but thwarted the government in other areas of its "coloured" policy. In the 1975 election the Labour Party won an outright victory, giving it the power to cripple the CRC. However, it did not seize this opportunity. Its decision to "govern" in the CRC constituted a decisive step in the change from confrontation to cooptation. The Labour Party's continued support of the CRC drew widespread criticism from supporters and opponents alike. Its leaders tried to hold together a disaffected party and eventually agreed to the dissolution of the CRC in 1980 in an effort to paper over the cracks in party unity, and to forestall growing coloured opposition to the CRC at the next election. In 1983, the Labour Party displayed a decisive shift in its anti-separate representation stance by lending support to the tricameral system. By doing so, it laid itself open to the same charge of collaboration it had levelled at the other CRC parties. This thesis will examine the history of the Labour Party from its formation in 1965 as an anti-government party, to one of cooperation with its erstwhile opponent by 1984.