Obstacles to Reform in Britain

Abstract

This article deals with the actual experience of a socialist Minister in the 19749 Labour Government in Britain, and seeks to identify some of the obstacles placed in the way to prevent the policies on which that Government was elected from being carried out. Obviously the circumstances that existed then were different from those which exist today, and the political situation in Britain is very different from that which prevails in other comparable countries, but even so, the lessons learned may have a more general application where a Government with a majority, in a bourgeois democracy, tries to carry through changes which would in any way alter the structure of power and wealth or reforni the institutions which sustain them.