ABSTRACT
By the early 1980s the egalitarian visions that had informed Labour Party doctrine for the past fifty years were discredited. Centre-left technocratic ideals, briefly triumphant twenty years before, had been found wanting during the 1960s and the Bennite Left, successful in gaining a hold in the constituencies and the NEC, had subsequently failed to convince the Party and trade union leaderships either of the viability, or wider popularity, of the AES. Keynesian socialism, rocked by internal disagreements and the consequences of low growth, could offer no alternative proposals for the social equality that Crosland and others had desired. Qualitative socialism, first narrowed to a concern for welfare issues, had become confined to the margins of Party thinking as hopes for classless fellowship faded in the heated atmosphere of the late 1970s.
