https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2206-3486
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Jim Tomlinson, On Alan Booth’s ‘How Long Are Light Years in British Politics? The Labour Party’s Economic Ideas in the 1930s’ (1996), Modern British History, Volume 35, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 87–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae008
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
The rise of Labour as a political force coincided with the rise of economics in its modern form—as a ‘specialised form of knowledge acquired through university training, validated not through public discussion and debate, but through the procedural framework of the academy’.1 In the twentieth century, while Labour rose to a governing party, economics eventually emerged as the dominant social science. In the post-1945 period, ‘the economy’ came to be regarded as the key site of political contestation, not least by Labour, with Harold Wilson (himself an economic statistician of repute) famously exclaiming ‘all political history shows that the standing of a government and its ability to hold the confidence of the electorate at a general election depend on the success of its economic policy’.2 The historical relationship between the Labour Party and economics is therefore a hugely important one, and re-reading Alan Booth’s ‘Light Years’ article provides an opportunity to offer some broad reflections on that relationship.3
