Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Graph
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Rise and Fall of British Social Democracy, 1945–2016
- 2 A European Love Affair, 1960–1973?
- 3 The Voices of Dissent, 1960–1973
- 4 The Referendum and its Aftermath, 1975–1983
- 5 The Tories Turn Against Europe, 1983–2005
- 6 Labour Changes Position, 1983–2005
- 7 Crisis, Renegotiation and Referendum, 2005–2016
- Conclusion
- Notes to the Text
- Bibliography and Other Sources
- Index
1 - The Rise and Fall of British Social Democracy, 1945–2016
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Graph
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Rise and Fall of British Social Democracy, 1945–2016
- 2 A European Love Affair, 1960–1973?
- 3 The Voices of Dissent, 1960–1973
- 4 The Referendum and its Aftermath, 1975–1983
- 5 The Tories Turn Against Europe, 1983–2005
- 6 Labour Changes Position, 1983–2005
- 7 Crisis, Renegotiation and Referendum, 2005–2016
- Conclusion
- Notes to the Text
- Bibliography and Other Sources
- Index
Summary
The social revolution which we are peacefully bringing about must be established not merely in institutions but in the hearts of men and women. I look forward to the continuance of the spirit of enthusiasm, idealism, and self-sacrifice which has brought us thus far. It will carry us further on our journey to freedom.
(Clement Attlee, 19 May 1948)Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first … there is no such thing as society.
(Margaret Thatcher, 23 September 1987)Introduction
In June 2014, at the start of the fifth year of the Clegg–Cameron coalition, the celebrated playwright Alan Bennett gave a sermon at King's College Chapel, Cambridge. Bennett, as he pointed out, had been ‘educated at the expense of the state, both at school and university’. After a grammar school education in Leeds, he had gone on to Oxford and then become a star of the 1960s satire boom. In a sense Bennett's life story had embodied the social democratic system that had held sway in the UK from 1945 onwards. But since the 1980s, things had changed, and not for the better:
without ever having been particularly left wing, [he was] happy never to have trod that dreary safari from left to right … there has been so little that has happened to England since the 1980s that I have been happy about or felt able to endorse. One has only to stand still to become a radical.
This chapter seeks to outline the system that made Bennett and his ilk, and the changes that have occurred since the 1980s.
Bennett's sermon highlighted some of the key policy changes that the nation as a whole experienced since the 1980s: the declining role of the state; increasing inequality; heightened class divisions. In this chapter, a sketch will be offered of the UK as a social democracy in the period from the 1940s to the late 1970s, together with some brief observations on the neoliberalism that increasingly usurped that system thereafter. For shorthand, the post-1979 approach will, generally, be referred to as ‘Thatcherism’, a mix of policies that sharply departed from those pursued in the earlier period.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Europe and the Decline of Social Democracy in Britain: From Attlee to BrexitFrom Attlee to Brexit, pp. 21 - 58Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019