Defeated Labour adopted Thatcherite economics before Thatcher governed

Evidence

There now seems little doubt that, as we moved through the 1970s, the popular mood shifted decisively against the Left. This fact was mirrored in the decline of Mr. Callaghan’s government. As Labour lost parliamentary strength, so it has drifted deep into the ideological territory of the Right, occupying with panache many of the positions only just evacuated by the Right. It was Labour, not the Conservatives, which applied the surgical cut to the welfare state. And there was Mr. Healey’s not wholly unexpected conversion to orthodox monetarism and fiscal restraint—tutored by the IMF and the oil price. In this climate of austerity, Keynes has been decently buried; the Right has re-established its monopoly over “good ideas”; “capitalism” and “the free market” have come back into common usage as terms of positive approval. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1090

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that opposition parties adopt the defeated ideology’s positions resonates with later accounts of ‘Third Way’ triangulation and the exhaustion of social democracy. — connects to: New Labour’s welfare-subsidised precarity made the Tory austerity assault easier — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1819; New Labour’s 1997 election completed Thatcherite neoliberalism’s ideological victory. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2103
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the paradox that parties lose elections by first losing the ideological argument, migrating into the winner’s territory before actually losing power.