Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reviews the relevant economic thought and an account of Britain’s economic problems, the Labour party’s policy debates in the 1920s and its internal political conflicts, which climaxed in the dramatic split of August 1931. It presents their attack on the party’s traditional policies towards nationalization and redistribution and discusses a socialist policy to cope with unemployment and explores the beginnings of the work on a theory of democratic socialist planning. The book examines the work of Hugh Dalton’s finance and trade subcommittee of the Labour party’s policy committee and its contributions to the party’s official and unofficial programme and the new socialist economics, which emerged from the economic revolutions. The book describes the final stages of hammering out the Labour party’s official and unofficial economic policy positions. It analyses the new economic revisionism, which provided its intellectual justification.