'Divided Within Itself’: The Parliamentary Labour ‘Right’ and the Demise of Post-war Revisionist Social Democracy in the 1970s

Abstract

The article identifies a neglected dimension of the ‘crisis’ and schism of British social democracy in the 1970s from within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour ‘right’ itself. Ii evaluates differential responses of Labour’s ‘right-wing’ and revisionist tendency to the implosion of its loosely cohesive post-war framework of Keynesian social democracy in the 1970s as a means of demonstrating its relative incoherence and fragmentation in the face of new external and internal pressures.
The so-called ‘crisis of social democracy’ revealed much more starkly its complex, heterogeneous character, irremediably ‘divided within itself’ over a range of critical political and policy themes and the basis of social democratic political philosophy itself. The article argues that it was its own wider political fragmentation and ideological introspection in the face of the ‘crisis’ of its historic ‘belief system’ which led to the facture of Labour’s ‘dominant coalition’ and subsequent rupture of British social democracy.