{"title":"A ‘Brooding Oppressive Shadow’? The Labour Alliance, the ‘Trade Union Question’, and the Trajectory of Revisionist Social Democracy, c. 1969–1975","authors":"S. Meredith","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.11","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Conventional accounts of the decision of a group of influential British Labour MPs to leave the party in 1981 to found the new Social Democratic Party (SDP) focus on more immediate intra-party constitutional reforms after 1979, or on party divisions over the single question of Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). This article suggests that a wider array of longer-term factors informed the decision to seek an alternative vehicle of social democracy, particularly the critical response to the so-called ‘trade union question’ in British and Labour politics from the late 1960s in a wider ‘post-revisionist’ critique of traditional social democracy. It identifies the centrality and cumulative role of a new ‘post-revisionist’ social democratic critique of the privileged position and influence of an increasingly assertive (left-wing) trade unionism after the failure of Labour’s In Place of Strife legislation in 1969 in the later schism of British social democracy.","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":"82 1","pages":"251-276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2017-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.11","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Labour History Review","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.11","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Conventional accounts of the decision of a group of influential British Labour MPs to leave the party in 1981 to found the new Social Democratic Party (SDP) focus on more immediate intra-party constitutional reforms after 1979, or on party divisions over the single question of Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). This article suggests that a wider array of longer-term factors informed the decision to seek an alternative vehicle of social democracy, particularly the critical response to the so-called ‘trade union question’ in British and Labour politics from the late 1960s in a wider ‘post-revisionist’ critique of traditional social democracy. It identifies the centrality and cumulative role of a new ‘post-revisionist’ social democratic critique of the privileged position and influence of an increasingly assertive (left-wing) trade unionism after the failure of Labour’s In Place of Strife legislation in 1969 in the later schism of British social democracy.