In the dedicated pursuit of dedicated capital: restoring an indigenous investment ethic to British capitalism

Tony Blair’s landslide electoral victory on May 1 (New Labour Day?) presents the party in power with a rare, perhaps even unprecedented, opportunity to revitalise and modernise Britain’s ailing and antiquated manufacturing economy.* If it is to do so, it must remain true to its long-standing (indeed, historic) commitment to restore an indigenous investment ethic to British capitalism. In this paper we argue that this in turn requires that the party reject the very neo-liberal orthodoxies which it offered to the electorate as evidence of its competence, moderation and ‘modernisation’, which is has internalised, and which it apparently now views as circumscribing the parameters of the politically and economically possible

Tale of a Death Exaggerated::How Keynesian Policies Survived the 1970s

It has become a commonplace to divide the post-war period into ‘Keynesian’ and ‘post-Keynesian’ eras, usually with the break point in the 1970s. This article challenges that periodisation and the arguments that underpin it. It is argued that Keynesianism did not die in the 1970s, but survived, if somewhat mutated, into the twenty first century. This proposition is then used to challenge exaggerated views about the scale of the crisis of the 1970s