The book considers Labour's economic strategy as it developed through the party's long period of opposition between 1979 and 1997. This history argues strongly that accounts of Labour's recent past which claim that the Party was driven by a combination of Thatcherism and opinion polls are flawed. It offers an alternative account which stresses the importance of debates within and around the Party about how the economy should be understood, the role of markets and the state, and British industrial decline.
Blazing the Neoliberal Trail asks how and why urban policy and politics have become dominated, over the past three decades, by promarket thinking. Drawing on extensive archival research, Timothy P. R. Weaver shows how elites became persuaded by neoliberal ideas and remade political institutions in their image.
This book provides a novel account of the Labour Party’s years in opposition and power since 1979, examining how New Labour fought to reinvent post-war social democracy, reshaping its core political ideas. It charts Labour’s sporadic recovery from political disaster in the 1980s, successfully making the arduous journey from opposition to power with the rise (and ultimately fall) of the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Forty years on from the 1979 debacle, Labour has found itself on the edge of oblivion once again. Defeated in 2010, it entered a further cycle of degeneration and decline. Like social democratic parties across Europe, Labour failed to identify a fresh ideological rationale in the aftermath of the great financial crisis. Drawing on a wealth of sources including interviews and unpublished papers, the book focuses on decisive points of transformational change in the party’s development raising a perennial concern of present-day debate – namely whether Labour is a party capable of transforming the ideological weather, shaping a new paradigm in British politics, or whether it is a party that should be content to govern within parameters established by its Conservative opponents. This text will be of interest to the general reader as well as scholars and students of British politics, British political party history, and the history of the British Labour Party since 1918.
Tony Blair has dominated British political life for more than a decade. Like Margaret Thatcher before him, he has changed the terms of political debate and provoked as much condemnation as admiration. At the end of his era in power, this book presents a wide-ranging overview of the achievements and failures of the Blair governments. Bringing together Britain's most eminent academics and commentators on British politics and society, it examines the effect of the Prime Minister and his administration on the machinery of government, economic and social policy and foreign relations. Combining serious scholarship with clarity and accessibility, this book represents the authoritative verdict on the impact of the Blair years on British politics and society.
This book chronicles the rise and especially the demise of diverse revolutionary heterodox traditions in Cambridge theoretical and applied economics, investigating both the impact of internal pressures within the faculty as also the power of external ideological and political forces unleashed by the global dominance of neoliberalism. Using fresh archival materials, personal interviews and recollections, this meticulously researched narrative constructs the untold story of the eclipse of these heterodox and post-Keynesian intellectual traditions rooted and nurtured in Cambridge since the 1920s, and the rise to power of orthodox, mainstream economics. Also expunged in this neoclassical counter-revolution were the structural and radical policy-oriented macro-economic modelling teams of the iconic Department of Applied Economics, along with the atrophy of sociology, development and economic history from teaching and research in the self-purifying faculty. This book will be of particular interest to researchers in the history of economic thought, sociology of knowledge, political economy, especially those engaged in heterodox and post-Keynesian economics, and to everyone wishing to make economics fit for purpose again for negotiating the multiple economic, social and environmental crises rampant at national and global levels.
Peter Shore worked under Hugh Gaitskell, serving in successive Labour Cabinets under first Harold Wilson and subsequently James Callaghan. He wrote the 1964, 1966 and 1970 general election manifestos for the party and stood in both the 1980 and the 1983 party leadership elections. He would go on to be known as one of the Labour Party's most important thinkers. He had a long political career at the upper levels of the Labour Party and was close to successive leaders. Despite this, he was also independent minded, as evidenced by the 1976 IMF crisis and his long-standing opposition to European integration. As well as this key debate, the authors also address crucial issues within the Labour movement, from macroeconomic management to the extent to which the party can be a force for socialism. This remarkable new study offers a comprehensive and timely reappraisal of the man and his record, examining the context within which he operated, his approach and responses to changing social and economic norms, his opposition to Britain's membership of what is now the EU, and how he was viewed by peers from across the political spectrum. Finally, it examines the overall impact of Peter Shore on the development of British politics. With contributions from leading experts in the fields of political theory, and from Shore's own contemporaries, this book is an important new assessment of one of Labour's most interesting political thinkers in twentieth-century British politics.
Provides an analysis of the relationship between the UK and the EU, treating the key overarching issues in the 1975 referendum and looking ahead to the prospect (eventually) of further referendums on the subjects of EMU and a European constitution.
Austerity became the predominant fiscal policy response to the Great Recession in Europe. After a brief period of 'emergency Keynesianism' from 2008 to 2010, even the centre-left abandoned plans for deficit spending and accepted austerity as the dogma of the day. In this book, Björn Bremer explains how this came about and explores its political consequences, combining qualitative and quantitative methods and drawing on a wide range of empirical evidence to study both the demand- and supply-side of politics. Based on this evidence, the book argues that a complex interaction of electoral and ideational pressures pushed social democratic parties towards orthodox fiscal policies. As government debt became a taboo following the Greek sovereign debt crisis, social democratic parties endorsed austerity to increase their perceived economic competence and fiscal credibility. This decision was legitimized by economic ideas inspired by supply-side economics, which had become popular among social democrats at the end of the twentieth century. Although the book shows that social democratic austerity was not inevitable, powerful feedback effects of the Third Way thus trapped and divided the centre-left during the crisis. This undermined the ability of social democratic parties to oppose austerity and eventually contributed to their electoral crisis in the shadow of the Great Recession.
This book explores the background of the eurozone crisis, outlining a number of potential solutions. It attempts to discover if the problems could have been anticipated, and examines how well have the fiscal EMU rules been adhered to and how appropriate they are.
