The Labour governments 1974–1979: social democracy abandoned?

Drawing on his article 'The Labour governments 1974–1979: social democracy abandoned?’, recently published in the academic journal British Politics, in this guest post Max Crook questions the view that the Labour government in office from 1974 to 1979 started the transition to neo-liberalism in the UK. He, thus, challenges structural approaches to social democratic decline. In his focus on electoral politics, he makes two key claims: Firstly, Labour did not abandon the social democratic postwar consensus. Any fundamental challenge to it remained politically unthinkable. Secondly, the eventual collapse of the consensus was not the product of structural changes in the global economy, but was the highly contingent outcome of an electorally motivated gamble.