The Charter was first published in May 1947. It was the outcome of a process of rethinking brought about by the Conservative's landslide defeat in the 1945 United Kingdom general election. This process had begun a year earlier when the party's newly extended Research Department began work on defining a policy that was both Conservative and progressive. The policy statement was accepted on 2 October 1947 at the Conservative's Annual Conference being held in Brighton.
Content
The Industrial Charter was a collection of distinct economic policies and included a separate "Pledge to the Consumer", a "Woman's Charter" and a "Workers' Charter". It accepted the idea of a mixed economy, gave a commitment that the party would protect labour rights, stressed the need for fairness and opposed protectionism. Its emphasis was, though, placed squarely upon the individual and the document was highly-critical of its opponents. The Labour Party's attempts at economic planning were criticised for having created an incompetent and swollen civil service focused on administering a multitude of overlapping and unnecessary restrictions. It argued that the party had removed economic incentives and enforced a 'rigid straight jacket of doctrinaire political theory… unnecessary controls'. Instead it called for a rolling back of the state and urged that a 'sense of realism, free opportunity, incentives and justice' should 'inspire all industrial policy'.
Reception
The Charter and a shortened 'popular' version were generally well received, sold an estimated 2.5 million copies and have often been to have helped "rehabilitate" the Conservative Party after 1945. Despite this the document caused a notable degree of debate at the 1947 Conservative Party Conference and Winston Churchill's initial reaction is reputed to have been 'but I do not agree with a word of this'. Despite its favourable press, the historian Andrew Taylor also contends that the Charter should be seen as a propaganda failure as it failed to reach its intended audience. This is backed up by a report conducted by Mass Observation which found that eighty per cent of a sample had no knowledge at all of the Charter in the month after its publication.
Historical significance
Although perhaps not as a pivotal a moment of the Conservative Party's history as often claimed, the Charter remains historically symbolic as marking the acceptance of the post-war consensus that would later be satirised as Butskellism. This owes much to the significance later imbued into the document by those responsible for its publication.
