ABSTRACT
Labour in 1979 confronted a triple crisis: ideological decomposition, a breakdown of governance and electoral disintegration. Although in each case the roots lay in the period before 1979, they only reached crisis proportions in the following four years. The ideological crisis arose from the disintegration of Labour’s ruling discourse, revisionist social democracy. A combination of Keynesian economics, social welfare and corporatist decision-making, it was posited on the belief that socialist goals could be realised within the framework of a largely privately owned regulated market economy. This fell apart under the strains of government between 1974 and 1979 which gave impetus to the adoption of a far more radical programme during the transient period of left-wing ascendancy. The 1983 manifesto, New Hope for Britain, promised a massive programme of public sector-led reflation to regain full employment and expand the public services, the reinstatement of exchange controls, the introduction of selective controls on imports, a comprehensive system of planning and withdrawal from the European Community. Although the 1983 programme was not the massive departure from traditional thinking that it has been portrayed to be, it nevertheless displayed a degree of radicalism which was wholly unpalatable to both elite and mass opinion. The left exhibited curiously little interest in the profound changes that were reconstructing the political economy both at home and abroad and undermining the feasibility of purely national-based alternative strategies whilst displaying undue confidence in the capacity of their programme to
galvanise public opinion. The sheer scale of the 1983 defeat both discredited the left and its most distinctive policy planks whilst seriously exacerbating Labour’s ideological crisis.
