Abstract
The second strategy to be discussed is the alternative economic strategy of the Left in the Labour movement. Like the free economy strategy this was not a single strategy. Many variants existed and many different groups on the Left contributed to it. There is considerable ambiguity surrounding the alternative economic strategy because it drew on two different traditions of political economy — national political economy and the socialist critique of political economy. The free economy strategy fits into a tradition of liberal political economy that stretches back through the nineteenth century. But the immediate precursors of the alternative economic strategy with its concern for the national economy and making the state an ‘enterprise state’, devoted to raising industrial output and social wealth, were the alternative strategies of Joseph Chamberlain and the Social Imperialists, and Oswald Mosley and the Fascists. Neither movement at the time attracted significant support from the organised Labour movement. But just as the programme of Margaret Thatcher is not that of Richard Cobden, so the alternative economic strategy is different from these predecessors.
The post-war consensus, built upon full employment and the welfare state, failed to command the support of people because they have seen first that it did not contain within it any element whatsoever of transformation, and secondly, that even by its own criteria it failed. That policy could not bring about growth, it could not extend freedom, it could not even maintain let alone develop welfare and it could not sustain full employment.
Tony Benn1
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Notes and references
Tony Benn, Interview with Eric Hobsbawm, Marxism Today, October 1980, p. 6.
Prominent among them was the economist, and intellectual opponent of Ricardo, Thomas Malthus. See B. Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
See M. E. Hirst, Life of Friedrich List (London: Smith, Elder, 1909).
The major study in B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960).
The last stand of the Social Imperialists, led by Leo Amery, was made at the Conservative Conference in the early 1950s. They were brushed aside. See Andrew Gamble, The Conservative Nation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974) ch. 7.
Julian Amery, Joseph Chamberlain and the Tariff Reform Campaign (London: Macmillan, 1969) p. 998.
Joseph Chamberlain, quoted by Henry Page-Croft, My Life of Strife (London: Hutchinson 1948) p. 47. See also Chamberlain’s series of speeches delivered in 1903, collected in Imperial Union and Tariff Reform (London: Grant Richards, 1903).
Their fears proved justified. When conscription was introduced in 1917, 10 per cent of young men were fouud to be totally unfit for service, 41.5 per cent had marked disabilities, 22 per cent had partial disabilities, and only one-third were completely fit. See E. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) pp. 164–5.
See Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (London: Macmillan, 1975) ch. 11.
The evidence of such overcapacity was striking. In the United States in 1932 one-half of the total productive capacity of the economy was unused. See M. Flamant and J. Singer-Kerel, Modern Economic Crises (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1968).
Strong hostility to the Common Market was a major theme in the National Front’s economic policies. See Martin Walker, ‘The National Front’, in H. M. Drucker (ed.), Multi-party Britain (London: Macmillan, 1979).
Powell’s standpoint is shared by several committed economic liberals in the Conservative party. See, for example, John Biffen, Political Office and Political Power (London: Centre for Policy Studies, 1977).
The simple opposition between reform and revolution was never clear-cut. See Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford University Press, 1977) for an examination of the problem.
On trade, see, for example, the writings of one of the most influential intellectuals in the Labour Movement, G. D. H. Cole: for example, Principles of Economic Planning (London: Macmillan, 1935).
See E. Durbin, The Politics of Democractic Socialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1940).
The most influential works were Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: Cape, 1966), and
John Strachey, Contemporary Capitalism (London: Gollancz, 1956).
The flavour of the programme is captured nowhere better than in the pages of Harold Wilson’s The New Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).
Foremost among them were the women’s movement, the campaign against the Vietnam War, and new tenants and community groups. The scope of the new movements are explored in Nigel Young, An Infantile Disorder: Crisis and Decline of the New Left (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), and by
David Widgery, The Left in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). On the left-wing political parties see Peter Mair, in Drucker (ed.), Multi-party Britain.
Amongst their writings see particularly Michael Barratt Brown, From Labourism to Socialism (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1972),
K. Coates and T. Topham, The New Unionism (London: Peter Owen, 1972), and
Stuart Holland, The Socialist Challenge (London: Quartet, 1974).
The Referendum campaign and results are analysed in David Butler and Uwe Kitzinger, 1975 Referendum (London: Macmillan, 1976).
See David Coates, Labour in Power (London: Longman, 1980) for a full assessment.
This wider conception of rights is most fully set out in T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge University Press, 1950).
See the evidence presented in John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler, Class in a Capitalist Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975);
Peter Townsend, Poverty in the UK (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); and
Frank Field et al., To Him Who Hath (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
See, for example, the analysis put forward by Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe, Workers, British Capitalism and the Profits Squeeze (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
The most detailed advocacy of import controls has been made by the Cambridge Economic Policy Group. See their annual Economic Policy Review from 1975; also the summary of their position by Wynne Godley, ‘Britain’s Chronic Recession — Can Anything be Done?’, in W. Beckerman, Slow Growth in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1978).
Among the critics are Andrew Glyn and John Harrison, The British Economic Disaster (London: Pluto, 1980);
David Coates, Labour in Power, A. Cutler et al., Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Capitalism Today, vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978) Conclusion;
Alan Freeman, ‘The Alternative Economic Strategy: A Critique’, in CSE Conference Papers, 1980; and David Purdy’s contribution to Politics and Power I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
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© 1994 Andrew Gamble
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Gamble, A. (1994). The enterprise state. In: Britain in Decline. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23620-6_6
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