The British Labour Party's Transition from Socialist to Capitalism

Abstract

The Labour Party was, to be sure, not formed as a political party dedicated to replacing capitalism with socialism, but as a parliamentary voice for wage workers. But electoral success led to the evolution of the LRC into a mass political party which by 1944, when the 1930s depression had been followed by the social mobilisation of the second world war, led it to adopt and then implement a programme of reforms which in 1945 its leaders were happy to call socialist: including a commitment to full employment, the nationalisation of 20 percent of the economy, and the establishment of a comprehensive system of state-provided social security, health and other social services. By 1995 all this had been abandoned as party policy, and the word 'socialism' now figured in party literature and the leader's speeches rather rarely, and always in carefully circumscribed language, usually emphasising the degree to which it is not socialism as it used to be understood. Socialism, for Blair in particular, refers to an ethical ideal: and for him, 'modernising' Labour policy means dropping all previous ideas about the application of that ideal; i.e., not just 'old Labour' ideas about public ownership or the welfare state, but also, if not even more so, all the 'new left's' thinking and practice about participative democracy in the 1970s.