The success of the middle class alliance depended on the acceptance by the working class element of middle class leadership and middle class ideas. - Hugh Gaitskell

Between the wars, the heavy unemployment in Great Britain and keenly competitive conditions abroad were factors which had to be taken into account in wage negotiations. Employers were afraid that higher wages, by adding to their costs, would make it more difficult for them to sell their goods, especially in export markets. If this happened unemployment would increase and workers' representatives had to bear this in mind also. The larger the number of unemployed, also, the more difficult it was to maintain full workers' solidarity, i.e. an employer could resist a strike, and make cuts in wages more easily the more workers were out of work. Thus in the last resort it was the existence of heavy unemployment, at home and abroad, which allowed employers to resist wage claims and discouraged workers from pressing them too far.

[T]he common ideals of racial equality, political freedom, extending the right of self-government to the rest of the Commonwealth, non-aggression in international affairs, economic co-operation, and aid between nations. These ideals may be imperfectly realised in many instances, but, nevertheless, they, and they alone, give the Commonwealth its real justification today, just as the extraordinary variety in terms of geography, race and religion of the Commonwealth provides a wonderful opportunity to advance these ideals in a practical form in the world as a whole.

You can be assured of this. There will be no increase in the standard or other rates of income tax under the Labour Government so long as normal peacetime conditions continue.