Abstract
In June 1973 the Labour party published a new policy document entitled Labour’s Programme 1973.1 The first forty pages oudined Labour’s economic policies involving detailed proposals for public ownership, planning, price controls and industrial democracy alongside the more conventional measure of demand reflation. Overall the publication contained a radical and sweeping set of measures and Labour’s leftwingers were jubilant at its adoption. At the core of the new document was an interventionist industrial strategy which proposed that the next Labour government nationalise 25 of the top 100 companies in the UK. Obligatory planning agreements determining output and employment levels would be concluded with the remaining large private firms. One leading member of the left, the MP Tony Benn stated: ‘The party is now firmly launched on a leftwing policy. … it is a remarkable development of views that we have achieved in three years of hard work.’2 Labour’s rightwing leaders made no attempt to conceal their hostility and contempt towards the new policies. One of the party’s foremost intellectuals, Tony Crosland, argued that Labour’s Programme 1973 was ‘written by people who didn’t live in the real world’.3
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References
Labour party, Labour’s Programme 1973 (1973).
Tony Benn, Against the Tide (London, Hutchinson, 1989), pp. 42–3.
From the private political diaries of Tony Benn, 14 May 1973, in the Benn archives, (henceforth, Benn diary).
Anthony Crosland, ‘The Prospects of Socialism — Nationalisation?’, Encounter, XLI (September 1973), pp. 60–1, p. 61.
Labour party, New Hope for Britain (1983), p. 11.
Labour party, Labour’s Programme 1982 (1982), p. 9.
See Paul Whiteley, The Labour Party in Crisis (London, Methuen, 1983).
See, for example, Peter Jenkins, Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution (London, Jonathan Cape, 1987), pp. 102–28.
On Labour’s ‘shift to the left’ see Anthony King, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s First Term’ in Austin Ranney, Britain at the Polls, 1983 (Durham, Duke University Press, 1985), pp. 15–22.
See the discussion in BBC, The Wilderness Years, 3 December 1995;
David Kogan and Maurice Kogan, The Battle for the Labour Party (London, Kogan Page, 1982);
and Austin Mitchell, Four Years in the Death of the Labour Party (London, Methuen, 1983).
Kevin Jeffreys, The Labour Party since 1945 (London, Macmillan, 1993), p. 108.
Peter Dorey, British Politics since 1945 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995), p. 181.
See also David Dutton, British Politics since 1945 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991), p. 89.
Eric Shaw, ‘Towards Renewal? The British Labour Party’s Policy Review’, in Richard Gillespie and William Paterson (eds), Rethinking Social Democracy in Western Europe (London, Frank Cass, 1993), pp. 112–32, p. 115.
A strong statement was Eric Hobsbawm’s The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, Verso, 1981), pp. 1–19.
See also Ivor Crewe, ‘Labour Force Changes, Working Class Decline, and the Labour Vote: Social and Electoral Change in Postwar Britain’ in Frances Fox Piven (ed.), Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies (Oxford, Polity, 1991), pp. 20–46. Similar, though not so pessimistic, arguments had been developed in the 1950s by Labour’s Revisionist thinkers — they are discussed in chapter 1.
I. Crewe, ‘Labour Force Changes, Working Class Decline, and the Labour Vote: Social and Electoral Change in Postwar Britain’, p. 25.
Ivor Crewe, ‘Why the Conservatives Won’, in Howard Penniman, Britain at the Polls, 1979 (London, AEI, 1981), pp. 263–305;
and Ivor Crewe ‘Labour and the Electorate’, in Dennis Kavanagh, The Politics of the Labour Party (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1982), pp. 9–49.
A more up-beat assessment is given by Wolfgang Merkl, ‘After the Golden Age Is Social Democracy Doomed to Decline?’, in Christiane Lemke and Gary Marks (eds), The Crisis of Socialism in Europe (Durham, Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 136–70. Labour movement theorists, whose work is discussed in chapter 1, are also more optimistic about the potential of social democratic parties.
Perry Anderson, ‘Introduction’, in Perry Anderson and Patrick Camiller (eds), Mapping the West European Left (London, Verso, 1994), pp. 1–22.
See also Christopher Pierson, Socialism After Communism (Oxford, Polity, 1995), pp. 7–52.
Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Frances Fox Piven, ‘The Decline of Labor Parties: An Overview’, in Frances Fox Piven (ed.), Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies, pp. 1–19, p. 8.
Jonas Pontusson, ‘Explaining the Decline of European Social Democracy’, World Politics, vol. 47 (1995), pp. 495–533, p. 496.
See Stephen Haseler, The Gaitskellites (London, Macmillan, 1969), pp. 1–15;
and Patrick Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left (London, Macmillan, 1987), pp. 1–17.
P. Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left, pp. 2–3. See also Lewis Minkin, The Labour Party Conference (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 9–11 and p. 383, ft. 42.
L. Minkin, The Labour Party Conference, p. 11.
Labour’s left consists of an ethos as well as a commitment to a doctrine. It also embodies a commitment to internationalism. These features are not as distinctive as its objectives of transforming society. Labour’s right also embodies an ethos (though different) and an internationalism.
T. Benn, Against the Tide, pp. 34–8; and NEC-PC minutes, 16 May 1973.
Benn’s words. T. Benn, Against the Tide, p. 36.
NEC-PC minutes, 16 May 1973, p. 25.
T. Benn, Against the Tide, p. 34; and NEC-PC minutes, 16 May 1973, p. 7.
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© 1996 Mark Wickham-Jones
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Wickham-Jones, M. (1996). Introduction: Economic Strategy and the Labour Party. In: Economic Strategy and the Labour Party. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373679_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373679_1
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