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Political Economy and the Labour Party: the Economics Of Political Economy and the Labour Party Second edition Covering the period from the late nineteenth century to the present, the second edition of Political Economy and the Labour Party introduces key theories, ideas and arguments that have shaped Labour’s economic thinking and policy formation since the Party’s creation in 1900. Setting this critical survey in the context of the Party’s emergence and evolution, the first edition has been revised and updated to take account of the developments of the last decade. In particular, two addi- tional chapters consider in depth the ideological origins and trajectory of New Labour’s political economy and its relation to the conduct of policy since Labour assumed office in 1997. In addition, in a revised and extended conclusion, the volume reviews what may be anticipated as to the future evolution of Labour’s political economy in the light of the recent performance of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. More generally the second edition has also taken account of the historical scholarship that has emerged in the decade since the publication of the first. In addition the list of further reading has been extended to encompass some of this literature and, in particular, a pertinent fraction of the substantial corpus of work that now exists on New Labour. As it has done since it was first published, the volume will prove invaluable to students and scholars of British politics, British history and the history of social democratic political economy. Noel Thompson is Professor of History and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is a respected historian of Labour’s economic thinking and, more generally, of socialist and anti-capitalist political economy in Britain. Political Economy and the Labour Party The economics of democratic socialism, 1884–2005 Second edition Noel Thompson First edition published 1996 Reprinted 2003 Second edition published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 1996, 2006 Noel Thompson This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN10: 0–415–32880–2 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–32881–0 (pbk) ISBN13: 9–78–0–415–32880–7 (hbk) ISBN13: 9–78–0–415–32881–4 (pbk) In memoriam, Harold James Thompson, 1916–94 Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 PART I 1884–1929 7 1 Marxism, state socialism and anarcho-communism 9 2 Fabian political economy 22 3 Guild socialism 31 4 Liberal socialism and the challenge to Fabianism 41 5 R. H. Tawney and the political economy of ethical socialism 52 6 Political economy in the early Labour Party: Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden 63 7 The economic literature of the Labour Party, 1918–29 74 PART II 1929–45 83 8 Labour in office, 1929–31 85 9 Socialist economic management and the stabilization of capitalism, 1931–40 92 10 Building a socialist economy: the market, planning and public ownership, 1931–40 108 viii Contents PART III 1945–70 135 11 Theory into practice, 1945–51 137 12 Socialism in an age of affluence, 1945–64 147 13 Party thought and party policy, 1951–70 173 PART IV 1970–2005 187 14 Rethinking socialism: left-wing revisionism in the 1970s 189 15 Liberal socialism revised: the 1970s 205 16 The alternative economic strategy and after, 1972–86 216 17 Liberal socialism rejuvenated: the 1980s 235 18 Supply-side socialism: the 1990s 250 19 From stakeholderism to the Third Way 267 Notes 287 Bibliography 315 Index 331 Preface This volume represents a revised and extended edition of Political Economy and the Labour Party, which first appeared in 1996. It seeks to take account of some of the excellent work on the history of socialist political economy and on the Labour Party’s thought and policy that has appeared since that date. It has also been extended to encompass a decade that has seen Labour win two landslide electoral victories and one substantial working majority on the basis of economic thinking and economic policies qualitatively different from those to which it has adhered for most of its history.1 A well-founded criticism of the previous edition was the absence of a con- textualizing introduction that also provided a conspectus of the volume’s content. That the work might have done more to ease readers into the subject matter must be conceded and I would hope that the present introduction now fulfils that function. In Part I there has been substantial revision of the chapter on Hyndmanian Marxism in the light of Graham Johnson’s SDF and British politics 1881–1911, the work of Mark Bevir on Hyndman and the Social Democratic Federation and that of Laybourn on the socialist revival.2 What results is I hope a more nuanced and informed treatment than that in the first edition and one that in some measure guards me against the charge of a previous reviewer that I provided an undiscerning identification of Hyndman’s economic categories with those of Marx. Here more might perhaps have been said on the distinctive character of Hyndman’s theory of economic crisis but space did not permit. While admitting that the work must necessarily start somewhere one reviewer suggested that it might have more appositely begun with a discussion of radical liberalism. More specifically, the suggestion was made that some consideration should be given to John Stuart Mill’s contribution to late nineteenth-century socialist political economy. There is some merit in this. The political economy of radical liberalism did impinge both on the political economies of those involved in the early Labour Party, such as Snowden, and on some of those who helped shape its thought, such as J. A. Hobson and the Webbs; the latter citing Mill and acknowledging his influence. The impact of new liberalism is now more clearly noted in Chapter 4, even if space has not permitted anything more than a cursory mention of Mill. x Preface Chapter 5 on Tawney has been redrafted to include a discussion of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Christian socialism. Here I have made use of the work of a number of Christian socialist writers of the period. This has allowed me to locate Tawney more firmly within that tradition and to convey a stronger sense of its contemporary importance within the early Labour party. My understanding of the social evolutionism and organicism of MacDonald and Snowden has been deepened by a reading of David Stack’s The first Darwinian left, 2003 and this is reflected in some revisions to Chapter 6. In Part II the work of Booth, Brooke, Francis, Laybourn, Milward, Riddell, Ritschel, Toye and many others3 has led me to reconsider some aspects of the socialist political economy of the 1930s and the immediate postwar period and has furnished me with a more profound understanding of the work of particular thinkers such as Evan Durbin. It has also helped to inform my appreciation of the impact of ideas on the conduct of policy during the Attlee governments. In Part III my revision of the first edition has been influenced at a number of points by the literature that has appeared since its publication. Specifically there have been contributions to volumes such as Plant, Hickson and Beech (eds), The struggle for Labour’s soul, 2004, Tanner, Thane and Tiratsoo (eds), Labour’s first century, 2000, Jeffery’s excellent biography of Tony Crosland, Tomlinson’s Democratic socialism and economic policy, the Attlee years, 1945–51, 1997 and Modernising Britain? Labour’s economic policy, 1964–70, 2003 and Woodward’s The management of the British economy, 1945–2001, 2004. A fuller list of some of the important work published since the first edition has been provided in the section on ‘Secondary literature’ at the end of this volume. The final chapter of the first edition discussed the political economy of New Labour. It was written in 1994–95 shortly after the advent of Tony Blair as leader, two years before the first landslide electoral victory of the Labour Party and before the trickle of secondary literature on New Labour became a veritable spate. Inevitably, it shows its age, even if subsequent experience has served to vindicate its central premise: that New Labour was in the business of squaring circles, constructing an oxymoronic political economy and, if not reconciling the irreconcilable, at least displaying a lack of sensitivity to the tensions inherent in such notions as hard-edged compassion and the efficiency of social justice. The view of the author was that such tensions would become acute in the economic crisis or crises that usually followed the advent of a Labour government and that, in such a context, they would be resolved in a manner more consistent with the principles of Anglo-American capitalism than those of social democracy.
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