ABSTRACT
The economic failures of the Wilson governments, in particular the failure to effect any significant improvement in Britain’s economic performance, posed more profound problems for the liberal socialist wing of the Party than for the revisionist Left. After all, it was the policies of indicative planning and Keynesian demand management that had been applied and found wanting, the National Plan disintegrating soon after publication and conventional macroeconomic management failing to circumvent the constraints of rising inflation and balance of payments crises. Further, the Left could claim to have both identified the deficiencies and predicted the fate of ‘planning’ without power. So, while the liberal socialists had to set about the task of explaining what had gone wrong with what they had proposed and how it might be set right, the Left had the advantage both of a clear explanation of past policy errors and an alternative approach to a Keynesian socialdemocratic conduct of the nation’s economic affairs. In this period they occupied the high ground reserved for those able to declaim ‘I told you so’.
