ABSTRACT
It seemed for a time, therefore, that the basis might exist for a new, radical, humanresource-based, social-democratic political economy; one that eschewed Clause IV fundamentalism while differentiating itself from the reconfigured Keynesian social democracy of the late 1980s. By the mid-1990s, largely owing to Hutton’s bestselling The state we’re in, 1995, the concept of stakeholding had not only been taken up by many within the ranks of the Labour Party but had also impinged on popular consciousness sufficiently to have a powerful purchase on the minds of the electorate. If it was not exactly an idea whose time had come, neither was it one that could be ignored. It was unsurprising, therefore, that Tony Blair adopted ‘the stakeholder economy’ as Labour’s ‘big idea’ in his Singapore speech of 8 January 1996 and developed it further in speeches at Derby, 18 January, Southwark Cathedral, 29 January, and the John Smith Memorial Lecture on 7 February.
