Political Economy and the Labour Party

`In Political Economy and the Labour Party, Noel Thompson gives an informative and stimulating outline of the ideas and theories that have shaped the party’s economic policy since 1900.’ - Times Literary Supplement

A new edition of the American Library Association's `Outstanding Academic Book' award winner.

This new volume brings this study of the rich tradition of British socialist political economy and its influence on the British Labour Party fully up-to-date.

Surveying the Labour tradition from the Fabianism of the Webbs to the `social-ism’ of Tony Blair’s Third Way, this new edition considers the critical engagement of these political economies with capitalism and the policies they articulate. It also discusses the manner in which they influence, or establish the context for, Labour’s economic thinking and policymaking and traces the ideological trajectory British social democratic political economy over the course of the twentieth century. In its concluding chapter this volume assesses the present character of the political economy advanced by the Labour Party and raises the question as to whether it can any longer be considered part of the social democratic tradition.

This is an essential new edition of this now standard text for students taking courses on the history of political and economic thought and, more generally, courses on the political and intellectual history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain.

Noel Thompson is Professor of History and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is a respected historian of Labour's economic thinking and, more generally, of socialist and anti-capitalist political economy in Britain.