ABSTRACT
None of what follows is the whole picture. Ideas, institutions and interests range wider and deeper than individuals alone. But some leading figures played key roles in throwing away Labour’s industrial strategy in the 1970s and, with it, the chance to avoid decades of de-industrialisation. Roy Jenkins denounced the National Executive Committee’s (NEC’s) Green Paper on the National Enterprise Board (NEB) as ‘outdated nationalisation dogma’, despite its scope and design being identical to the state holding he had himself earlier advocated.1
Tony Crosland condemned the approach despite its extending his own case for competitive public enterprise. Harold Wilson stripped real power for the strategy out of the Industry Act. Tony Benn dogmatised it, and recklessly linked it to the 1975 referendum on Europe. Denis Healey then brutalised the chance to implement it. It is conventional wisdom to blame the unions for Labour’s failure in the 1970s. It would be more appropriate to blame its leaders.2
