Abstract

Since losing the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom, Labour has struggled to develop a forceful alternative to the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition’s program for eliminating the public deficit through sweeping and sustained cuts in public spending. Labour’s current difficulties are partly of the party’s own making. They reflect its failure over the last twenty years to develop a social democratic economic alternative underpinned by a consistent, coherent reformist narrative. Too often Labour’s policies have been characterized either by their concessions to neoliberal arguments or by the pragmatic and ad hoc manner in which they were constructed. In government between 1997 and 2007, Labour made much of its apparent capacity to manage the economy successfully during what Gordon Brown called “the longest period of economic stability and sustained growth in our country’s history.”

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