ABSTRACT
In a rapidly changing economic world a remembrance of things past was not, however, what the Party required to restore its political credibility and repair its electoral fortunes. For in addition to the seeming demise of the Phillips curve and the continuing failure of Keynesian demand management to reverse the nation’s relative economic decline, other developments combined in the 1980s to undermine the theoretical foundations and the prescriptive force of Keynesian social democracy.1 In particular there was the rapid growth of the economic interdependence of national economies that was the salient aspect of what came to be referred to as globalization: a phenomenon that posed major problems not just for Keynesian social democracy but, more generally, for the national economic policy autonomy of medium-sized nations such as Britain.
