‘Consumers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your illusions’: The Politics of the Consumers’ Association

Abstract

The consumer has become the lodestar of re-interpreting British politics from the 1940s and as a site on which historians can plot broader debates, something of an all-consuming subject. Zweiniger-Bargielowska has detailed the Conservatives’ assembly of a popular alliance against rationing and control as key to its electoral recovery from 1945 and advantage over a left that struggled with affluence from the later 1950s.2 ‘The battle of the consumer’, as Gurney has it, saw nothing less than the ‘atomized figure of the individual consumer’ became a ‘hegemonic influence across both polity and civil society, shaping the epistemologies and languages through which the political and economic domains were… represented’. For Gurney, this ‘helped undermine the Co-operative alternative to mass consumption’, but Hilton sees the same process serve as the basis for new forms of citizenship and politics, in which the Consumers’ Association (CA) was a prime mover. Mort similarly points to the increasingly common conception of political and consuming subjects, practices and discourses in this period, notably through the technologies of marketing and polling. Politics, no less than the rest of society, was consumerized or, critics felt, colonized by consumer values and practices.3