Britain’s postwar radical program collapsed under 1960s economic deterioration

Evidence

We must first examine the precipitating conditions. These are the result of a set of discontinuous but related histories. In economic terms, Britain’s structural industrial and economic weakness emerged in the immediate aftermath of the postwar boom. The 1960s were marked by the oscillations between recession and recovery, with a steady underlying deterioration. These effectively destroyed the last remnants of the “radical program” on the basis of which Wilson won power in 1964, and to which he tried to harness a new social bloc. By the end of the 1960s, the economy had dipped into full-scale recession—slumpflation—which sustained the exceptional “Heath course” of 1971–1974, and its head-on collisions with organized labor. By the mid-1970s, the economic parameters were dictated by a synchronization between capitalist recession on a global scale, and the crisis of capital accumulation specific to Britain—the weak link in the chain. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1100

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: the parallel economic conditions (global recession synchronizing with national weakness) that felled center-left programs in the 1970s and again post-2008.