Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), pp. 209–225

By 1945 the Labour Party had abandoned its historic commitment to the nationalisation of agricultural land. Labour retreated from rural land nationalisation not for reasons of pragmatism or for fear of antagonising an electorate suspicious of ideological commitments, but because such a policy did not provide an economic solution to the question of agricultural productivity nor did it guarantee improved nutrition. The war-time agricultural executive committees demonstrated the benefits of state intervention as an alternative to the state ownership of rural land. By 1945 Labour had come to recognize that land nationalisation was an irrelevance to the immediate problem of post-war food shortages which might compromise its relationship with the farmers in the drive for increased productivity. 

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