1983 Rafael Enriquezs Foreign Debt

Politics and Graphic Design, two enormous concepts, both areas imbued with a wealth of history, and two areas in which I have a large personal interest in; as a member of the Labour Party and practising Graphic Designer; both form parts of my identity. Both areas are enormous in history and research on their own and can be debated in great depth in isolation, but for me, the real interest is when you bring them together and start to analyse how they interact as a duo. These are realms that are diverse and require a lot more time to explore them in full, you can dip in at any point in time and context and produce a fascinating study in its own right and settling down to write this it wasn’t totally obvious what I should cover, what proverbial sweet should I select, without trying to do it all. This research will focus on the Post-War period and the Posters that the Labour Party were using in General Elections in this timeframe. This research will analyse, explore and debate the vernacular of the Labour party in this period, how it used visual language to influence the public to vote for the party, and explore how the poster was used as a political tool.

For this exploration, I will define the broad term of the ‘post-war period’ as being from 1945 lasting up until 1960. A time of great social but also aesthetic upheaval, as the World was reimagined in the aftermath of World War Two. I will approach this exploration by studying each general election that occurs in this period, starting with the watershed Labour Party win at the 1945 General Election, and continuing to analyse the 3 other elections in this period under the stewardship of Leader, Clement Attlee; 1950, 1951 and ending with the 1955 election. This will allow me to not only discuss the design of each election but it will also allow me to pose each election contextually alongside the happenings of the time; social, political and otherwise. Alongside getting to grips with each election I’ll also preface this research with a broader exploration into the Poster; it’s historical context and use as a political tool and motif. This will help give me a wider and more holistic view of the topic and give me an interesting contextual framework to analyse the content at the heart of the work.

To give a wider understanding of the subject matter it’s important to give context into what and who The Labour Party are. In the United Kingdom, The Party has formed part of the ‘mainstream’ of politics since the realigning election of 1922 in which they consigned the Liberals to ‘Third Party’ status, and all future Governments were commanded by the Labour Party or the Conservatives. The party grew out of the Trade Union movement in the late 19th Century, born out of a recognition of the newly enfranchised workingclass population that Britain had acquired after the enactment of the second parliamentary reform bill in 1867, and widening of suffrage in 18841 and a need for representation of these WorkingClass communities in Parliament. Set against the backdrop of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels' ‘The Communist Manifesto’ published in 1848, Engels’ ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ in 1845 and Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ in 1867, leftist political ideology had a real theoretical grounding, and out of these ideas and with the support of the Trade Union movement, the Independent Labour Party & Scottish Labour Party merged to form the Labour Representation Committee, which later became the Labour Party. As the fight for the advancement of the

1 G. A. Philips, The Rise of the Labour Party, 1893-1931, Lancaster Pamphlets (London ; New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 1.