Conference of the British Sociological Association, 1955. Ill Power in British Political Parties.

The article focuses on power in British political parties, discussed at the Conference of the British Sociological Association in 1955. Two autonomous political entities face each other in Parliament; they are the Conservative Party and the Parliamentary Labor Party. Each is associated with a voluntary mass organization of its supporters outside parliament, the former by the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, the latter by a body known as The Labor Party. The Labor Party has been transformed in the course of 50 years of parliamentary and, latterly, of governmental experience. The chairman-spokesman of 1906 has become party leader and prime minister or potential prime minister. When Labor is in opposition, its leader must work with a Shadow Cabinet elected by the parliamentary party. In opposition, the Labor leader and his Shadow Cabinet, unlike their Conservative opposite numbers, must present and defend their policies at meetings of their parliamentary supporters. The constitution of the Labor Party provides that no proposal shall be included in the Party Programme unless it has been adopted by the Party Conference by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the votes recorded on a card vote. The inner life of the Labor mass organization is in many respects different from that of the National Union. The Conservative mass organization is much less disputatious; at the constituency level it rarely debates policy questions and in annual conference it is even less likely than the Labor conference to reject the advice of its leaders. Indeed the Conservative conference contemplates its leaders in variegated moods of deference and adulation.