British party labels shifted unpredictably across a century of market-state politics

Evidence

Political theory was never widely debated with any great enthusiasm or sophistication in twentieth-century Britain, and so this internal disconnection in Hayek’s argument seems to have gone unnoticed. His work was taken up by individuals who argued almost exclusively in terms of economic, not political, liberties. When set against the history of liberalism in twentieth-century Britain, the placing of such liberal economic arguments within the political landscape is not a straightforward matter. “Liberalism” was a moveable feast. In later Victorian Britain, the Liberal Party was identified with issues such as Irish Home Rule, social and electoral reform, and promotion of the early development of what became the Labour Party, funded by the trade-union movement. Social welfare in Britain was a Liberal innovation, dating from the 1906 election following which Winston Churchill became Liberal President of the Board of Trade. Later on, when the Liberal Party had been eclipsed by the Labour Party, the figures whom Hayek most closely associated with the forces of collectivism, Keynes and Beveridge, were Liberals—not Labour, nor Conservative. The postwar Labour government did of course enact the legislation that created the welfare state, but the reflexes of British business at this time, as of also the Conservative Party, were strongly corporatist. It was a Labour government that in 1949 created the Monopolies (and Restrictive Practices) Commission to report on private-sector cartels and monopolistic firms, making it the first government in Europe to introduce legislation directed to the ending of restrictive practices and the promotion of competitive markets. The Conservative Party remained the party of corporatism through the 1950s and 1960s, with the Liberal Party adopting increasingly social liberal policies. This changed first in 1970 with the election of Edward Heath’s Conservative government on an uncompromising free market agenda. But Heath was also a supporter of European integration, later anathema to Margaret Thatcher, who in many respects revived the economic sentiments of postwar Liberals. … In 1997 the Labour Party was reelected under the New Labour banner, and in its second and third terms term began to complete implementation of reforms to health, education, and welfare that Margaret Thatcher had failed to carry through in the 1980s. But the final execution of centralized state planning for health, education, and welfare was achieved during the term of New Labour, building on a policy agenda that was supposedly the essence of Thatcherism. Characteristic of government policy in health and education in the early twenty-first century is a rolling program of reform and marketization in which the language of markets and choice is coupled with micromanagement on the part of central government departments. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 393

Categorization

• XREF: The blurring of Thatcherism into New Labour connects to the recent scholarship on ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and the continuity-of-neoliberalism critique (e.g. Colin Crouch’s ‘strange non-death of neoliberalism’). — connects to: Party-line shifts cannot be read as ideological shifts in the mass public; Interwar British liberalism re-founded itself on economics rather than politics — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 395; Ideological labels track whichever social cleavages dominate each era.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 393

Broader Connections

• Ideological labels track whichever social cleavages dominate each era. #expands (0.88)
• Party-line shifts cannot be read as ideological shifts in the mass public #expands (0.82)
• Interwar British liberalism re-founded itself on economics rather than politics #exemplifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 395