This article explores the dilemmas at the heart of the economic strategy of Keir Starmer’s government by tracking developments in British (centre-)left political economy since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. It first traces the emergence of a shared narrative of political economy circulating among the UK and transatlantic centre-left, as well as some further left and right, over the 2010s and into the early 2020s. Identifying the core diagnoses and prescriptions contained within this narrative, this article situates them in economic, ideological, and political developments since 2008. It then traces the fragmentation of this economic imaginary from 2022. In combination with an unhappy transition to office, this fragmentation has generated a deeply confused and internally contradictory economic strategy in the UK Labour government. This paper then explains this process by placing ideological and political developments in their material and external contexts. A worsening macroeconomic and geopolitical context actively decomposed the constituent parts of the narrative and challenged some of its assumptions; in turn, this revived submerged disagreements within the governing party. The paper consequently argues that while these tensions can be explained partly by ideological closure, they derive to a significant and probably greater extent from institutional and material factors, especially questions of statecraft and the UK’s misfiring growth regime in an increasingly gloomy global context. The paper ends, however, by cautioning against an overbearing determinism. It indicates the remaining arenas for political agency open to the government, should it prove able and willing to act.

Advocates of the ‘abundance’ agenda dream of a bright future, but in the UK its possibility relies on economic sacrifices in the present. The consequent politics are wicked and demand ideologically informed choices about scarce resources.

The political science debate over macroeconomic policy in western Europe has focused extensively on critiquing ‘austerity’ policies since the Great Financial Crash of 2008. That includes the literature on ‘austerity from the left’, which sought to explain the decisions of social-democratic parties to adopt policies that undermined the capacity of the state to intervene in the economy, the ideological goals of conventional social democracy, and ironically the electoral support of those parties. However, by focusing on the 2010s, this literature risks descriptively conflating ‘orthodox fiscal policies’ with ‘austerity’, and in doing so, misdiagnosing the former in a different political and economic context. Adopting a long-term historical perspective challenges this conflation. This article examines the historical case study of the British left’s attempt to navigate the politics of fiscal restraint since 1945, advancing two central arguments. First, strategies of economic restraint, including but not limited to fiscal consolidation, have been endorsed by an assortment of social democrats and socialists at various junctures of post-war history, even at the height of Keynesian influence in economic policymaking. The left has turned to ‘prudential’ macroeconomics because of perceived economic and electoral constraints, but also due to a persistently powerful ‘moral economy’ that attempts to rein in private consumption to boost production and strengthen the public realm. Second, strategies that acknowledge those constraints and draw on that moral economy have been used by political actors to introduce policies broadly favourable to traditional social democratic ends. While the emphasis on fiscal sustainability and monetary stability is, no doubt, a restraint on governing autonomy in capitalist economies, it is also a potential resource , creating governing space to enact distinctive progressive policies. Understanding this point raises the possibility for centre-left governments of enacting public, social and green investment strategies from the left that are compatible with policy frameworks committed to forms of macroeconomic restraint.

In histories of Western political economy in the 1970s–1980s, Keynesianism is conventionally depicted as a victim of neoliberal ascendancy. Building on revisionist scholarship, this article looks beyond neoliberalism to explain the fate of Keynesianism in the transforming political economy of the United Kingdom in its global contexts. It explores a neglected case study: the intense controversies sparked by the Keynesian policy makers Wynne Godley and Francis Cripps. Responding to stagflation and strikes, Godley and Cripps demanded sweeping import controls to forestall mass unemployment and reverse Britain’s ‘decline’. They became celebrity economists, attracting admiration and opprobrium from government ministers and officials, political parties, journalists, and the City. Their arguments raised thorny questions, not just over economic policy, but also over Britain’s domestic statecraft and geopolitical relations after empire, during the Cold War, and inside the European Community. Revisiting these debates underscores the destabilizing impact of de-industrialization. It also reveals that (geo)political calculation determined the fate of Keynesian policy making more directly than neoliberal ideology. Godley and Cripps’s failure therefore illuminates a deeper political dilemma for fin-de-siècle Keynesians across Europe: upon which territorial order could they, and should they, exercise demand management as globalization accelerated? This question continues to shape Western politics in the twenty-first century.

This article argues that a 'constitutional lens' sheds light on British political contestation in the 1990s. It is commonly suggested that 1990s politicians merely consolidated the hegemony of 'Thatcherism'. Yet, this struggles to encompass the decade's political volatility, from the Conservatives' descent into internecine warfare over the Maastricht Treaty to the fraught Irish peace process. Though varied, these developments shared a key theme: controversy over the constitution of the United Kingdom. To illustrate its case, this article applies the constitutional lens to the 1990s left. Existing accounts emphasise Labour's concessions to Conservative opponents. By 2001, however, the first Blair government had enacted contentious constitutional changes: devolution, proportional voting systems, and a Human Rights Act. These policies reflected a dynamic, new, liberal-left politics of constitutional reform. From the 1980s, liberals, social democrats and Marxists forged a new constitutional agenda, responding to trends since the 1960s-growing 'popular individualism', agitation for 'human rights', European integration, and Scottish nationalism-and to the end of the Cold War. By the 1990s, campaigners had developed a bold programme for 'modernising the constitution', which influenced Labour's programme. Through New Labour's governments, this agenda profoundly reshaped the institutions of British politics in the twenty-first century.

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In recent years, historians of modern Britain have focused on reconstructing its 'political culture', drawing extensively upon print sources. This work routinely highlights the commercial pressures that shape some types of print media-especially popular newspapers-but is less attentive to others. This article argues for closer attention to the business and financial contexts of a broader spectrum of Britain's political culture in the late twentieth century. Drawing on histories of publishing, it illustrates the importance of business through a case-study of party-political intellectual journals for the 1980s British left. No history of the 1980s is complete without reference to the Communist Party's glamorous Marxism Today. However, scholars have overlooked one of its significant market competitors. In 1981, the Labour Party founded its own intellectual magazine, the New Socialist. Initially, it was highly successful, recording healthy circulation figures and attracting iconoclastic pieces by leading socialists. Its early commercial success shows that it has been unjustly neglected since. Yet unfavourable political winds and internal editorial divisions fatally overlapped with ruinous business decisions in a worsening financial environment. This precipitated the collapse of New Socialist in the later 1980s-just as its Eurocommunist rival declared the arrival of the 'New Times' and wrote itself into history books. Closer attention to business contexts thus returns New Socialist to histories of the left and provides a better map of its ideological debates during a transformative decade. It also situates the travails of the 1980s left within social and cultural trends over the twentieth century.

Politics and history are closely intertwined and historians play a vital role in British public life. Yet, British political history, which has a critical contribution to make for understanding British politics today, faces two urgent challenges. First, academic history has retreated from subjects that remain hugely popular in media and trade publishing and of interest to social scientists, such as the histories of political institutions and formal power structures. Second, political history is disconnected from innovative trends in the wider historiography of modern Britain. Combined, these issues leave political historians in an ambiguous position in relation to the wider field, to other academic disciplines and to contemporary political debates. After discussing these challenges, this introduction surveys this special issue, which reflects on what (if anything) is distinctive about political history as practised today, and what its contribution to historiography, social science and public life should be. It ends by posing key questions for historians of all methodological stripes who investigate Britain's political past.

The transformation of the Labour Party by 1997 is among the most consequential political developments in modern British history. Futures of Socialism overhauls the story of Labour's modernisation and provides an innovative new history. Diving into the tumultuous world of the British left after 1973, rocked by crushing defeats, bitter schisms, and ideological disorientation, Colm Murphy uncovers competing intellectual agendas for modern socialism. Responding to deindustrialisation, neoliberalism, and constitutional agitation, these visions of 'modernisation' ranged across domestic and European policy and the politics of class, gender, race, and democracy. By reconstructing the sites and networks of political debate, the book explains their changing influence inside Labour. It also throws new light on New Labour, highlighting its roots in this social-democratic intellectual maelstrom. Futures of Socialism provides an essential analysis of social democracy in an era of market liberalism, and of the ideas behind a historic political reconstruction that remains deeply controversial today.

At a recent conference, a fellow attendee told me (in jest) that the word ‘neoliberalism’ should be banned. If that would prevent the publication of books like The Neoliberal Age?, then I must respectfully disagree. The volume’s editors and contributors are to be commended for producing a stimulating, provocative, and useful book. While mainly a series of essays on Britain after the 1970s, the volume’s interrogation of ‘neoliberalism’ provokes wide-ranging reflections: on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries more broadly, on post-imperial Britain’s place in a comparative, transnational, and global lens, and on fundamental questions of causation and periodization. As contributor (and sceptic of ‘neoliberalism’) Guy Ortolano suggests, the term has served as the ‘banner’ under which ‘broader conversations about political life in the late twentieth century’ can take place (p. 319). In their introduction, the editors (Aled Davies, Ben Jackson, and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite) first tackle the vexed question of definitions. ‘Neoliberalism’ is a popular concept across disciplines and appears in multiple forms: a ‘political ideology’; a ‘form of capitalism’; and a Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ (pp. 2–6). The introduction also provides three lucid literature reviews of the uses of neoliberalism and their critics in political and intellectual history, economic history, and social and cultural history. This work of contextualization and clarification is immensely helpful for framing the subsequent chapters, which are organized into four parts: the welfare state and social policy, work and family, politics, and political economy.

Undergraduate students at Cambridge come disproportionately from independent schools, high participation neighbourhoods and high socio-economic groups (SEGs). This article examines the process of designing a foundation year (FY) for Cambridge aimed at promoting SEG diversity. The transformative potential of Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capitals and field are explored to frame the curriculum development process. Working in an intercollegiate group and drawing on international pedagogical research, we first embarked on mapping the architecture of a FY, then analysed potential students' responses to the initiative. Our survey of 304 students suggests that those from low SEGs might be encouraged to apply by a FY. They also preferred a discipline-based, not thematic, approach to developing students' academic capital. However, financial costs and concerns about 'fitting in' constituted barriers for many students. We suggest field and pedagogical transformations that are necessary to promote SEG diversity at Cambridge, rather than a FY alone.

In the 1980s, Labour struggled to respond to a hostile political context during a protracted period of opposition. Diverse figures claimed that the Left was suffering from a structural decline in a supposed 'traditional working class' voting base: contentions which only became more influential after the 1983 electoral catastrophe. Competing solutions were proffered-including building a 'rainbow alliance' informed by equalities politics, or appealing to a southern 'new working class'. The latter interpretation gained greater influence on Neil Kinnock's leadership. To fully understand why one triumphed over the other in the evolving strategy of the Labour Party, we should in part trace discourses, including contemporary 'loony Left' scandals. However, we must also recognize the importance of 'epistemological practice', which was crucial in shaping how political actors acquired knowledge and forged interpretations of the electorate. Focusing on the evolution of the epistemological practice of Kinnock's leadership team-in particular, their increasing reliance on qualitative opinion research techniques like focus groups to supplement quantitative attitudinal polling-helps explain why they became convinced that recent controversies involving race and sexuality were having acutely negative consequences for Labour nationally. This furnishes us with a deeper understanding of the relationship between grassroots and national Left-wing politics in the 1980s. It also illuminates Labour's cautious approach to equalities politics into the 1990s.