Resale Price Maintenance and the Character of Resistance in the Conservative Party: 1949-64
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the development of Conservative party policy during the 1950s and early 1960s towards resale price maintenance (rpm), the procedure by which companies stipulated the minimum price at which their products could be sold, which ended with the abolition of the practice. It attempts to place this policy evolution within the context of the party leadership’s gradual adoption, from 1959, of industrial modernization and economic growth as the technocratic solutions to Britain’s perceived relative decline. Modernization generally and rpm in particular caused a remarkable split in the Tory party, both in Parliament and in the country. Price maintenance was considered, by those Conservatives who favoured modernization, to be a significant impediment to the development of an efficient and competitive distributive industry. Unfortunately, the most tenacious defenders of the practice were small retailers, a group assumed by most politicians to be a solid Tory-voting constituency. Tory MPs were very sensitive to any measure that might disproportionately damage the interests of shopkeepers. In 1964, the government’s attempt to rescind rpm led, unsurprisingly, to the largest revolt on a major issue by Tory back-benchers since 1940 and to considerable antagonism towards the administration on the part of its grassroots support. The dispute between modernizers and traditionalists in the party was fierce and its outcome in part determined the strategy pursued at the 1964 general election and the future direction of Conservative policy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".