Recent Developments in the Political Economy of British Social Democracy
In Britain, the ascendancy of AES socialist fundamentalism in the 1970s and early 1980s was relatively short lived. The rise and ultimate triumph of Thatcherism, the Labour Party’s subsequent years in the political wilderness, an increasing globalisation of economic activity that militated against the pursuit of socialism in one country and an increasing willingness of many on the Left to make their peace with the market, spelt its demise by the mid-1980s.
In its place there emerged in Britain a Leftist political economy to which many would hesitate to apply the epithet of socialism and whose proponents were fundamentally influenced by the seeming dynamism of the Anglo-American model of capitalism. As two New Labour theorists put it, “all the big new companies of the 1990s such as Microsoft, Netscape and Oracle” came from “the entrepreneurial culture of the United States”. So, “rather than forlornly searching the Rhineland or suburban Nagoya for models of the future, British [social democratic] policymakers would do better to look at the fleet-footed, information, entertainment and software companies on the US West Coast” (Leadbeater and Mulgan 1996). This was the kind of business culture which social democracy should embrace and, where possible, replicate across the public sector.
In tandem with this went a New Labour emphasis on the need for investment in human capital; something that, on the surface, seemed to resonate with a tradition of socialist political economy that prioritised the development of labour’s creative faculties. However, in the hands of New Labour theorists this ambition assumed a different character, with emphasis put on the individual’s responsibility to acquire the requisite marketable skills to make him or her attractive to potential employers. To this end, and in keeping with the spirit of this, New Labour proposed an individually based knowledge investment fund and stressed the need for the greater flexibility of a less-regulated labour market to make highly skilled labour more freely and readily available.
So, as one commentator put it, New Labour therefore saw work “not in... socialist terms of human creativity, not even in social liberal terms as a quid pro quo for services granted... but as the far starker assumption of individual responsibility for financial independence, and as an activity subservient to the goals established by market forces” (Freeden 1999: 47). Education in this context became something good for an individual’s marketability, rather than their self-development.
As for New Labour’s approach to the public sector, this was consistent with Gordon Brown’s (b. 1951) general injunction to the Labour Party that “instead of being suspicious of competition we should embrace it... Instead of being suspicious of entrepreneurs, we should celebrate an entrepreneurial culture” (Brown 2003: 271); an ethos that was to be extended to public services which should view their users as customers not supplicants and embrace quasi-market disciplines to ensure efficiency and responsiveness to service users’ needs. As a Labour Minister, Alan Milburn (b. 1958), put it in a speech in 2002:
[T]hirty years ago the one size fits all approach of the 1940s was still in the ascendant. Public services were monolithic. The public were supposed to be truly grateful for what they were about to receive. People had little say and precious little choice. Today we live in a quite different world. We live in a consumer age. People demand services tailor made to their individual needs. (Milburn 2002 [2006]: 195, emphasis added)
For some this evocation of “models of consumer empowerment” could be seen as an attempt to “revitalize the languages of representative democracy”, particularly with respect to public services (Newman and Vidler 2006: 195). For others it was an attempt to re-connect with the middle classes, both for reasons of political expediency but also to secure their buy-in to public provision, “by ensuring a more personalised, consumerfriendly and choice-oriented service.” So, as one commentator saw it, “by promising choice in valued public services...
the defection of the affluent to privately purchased choices could be averted” (Clarke et al. 2007: 41). From a more critical perspective, however, New Labour was seen as using a language which conceptualised “the voter as a consumer to be pleased rather than a citizen to be enlightened”; though New Labour theorists would have responded that there was no fundamental tension here between the two (Needham 2003: 18). Whatever the motivation, the narrative of consumer empowerment altered conceptions of the nature of public provision and the relationship between user and provider, the citizen and the state. It has also fundamentally altered the character of the ascendant ideological strains within social democracy in Britain.Noel Thompson
See also:
John Atkinson Hobson (I); Nicholas Kaldor (I); John Maynard Keynes (I); James Edward Meade (I); NonMarxian socialist ideas in France (II); Non-Marxist socialist ideas in Germany and Austria (II); Poverty (III); Philip Henry Wicksteed (I).