The City Of London And British Social Democracy C 1959 1979

How and why did social democracy give way to neoliberalism in Britain in the late 20th century? Aled Davies asks these questions in this exploration of the City of London and its relationship with the post-war social democratic State.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic. Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too; where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the business world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book illuminates other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century. The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.

Poverty and inequality have pervaded British society to this day, but this has not always been self-evident to contemporaries – popular understandings have depended on existing knowledge. Inequality Knowledge provides the first detailed history of the numbers about the gap between rich and poor. It shows how they were produced, used, and suppressed at times, and how activists, scientists, and journalists eventually wrestled control over the figures from the state. The book traces the making and the politics of statistical knowledge about economic inequality in the United Kingdom from the post-war era to the 1990s. What kind of knowledge was available to contemporaries about socio-economic disparities in Britain and how they evolved over time? How was this knowledge produced and by whom? What did policy makers and civil servants know about the extent of poverty and inequality in British society and to what extent did they take the distributional impact of their social and fiscal policies into account? Far from just a technical matter, inequality knowledge had far-reaching implications for key debates and the wider political culture in contemporary Britain. Historicizing inequality knowledge speaks to a long tradition of historical research about social class divisions and cultural representations of economic disparities in twentieth-century Britain.

"This is an urban history of London during the pivotal years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the metropolis was transformed from an industrial city that the Victorians might have recognised to an embryonic modern 'world city.' Previous work on London in these years has tended to focus upon the 1960s -in particular the 'Swinging London' phenomenon. Mary Quant, Carnaby Street and the King's Road, Chelsea, all appear in these pages, but it is argued that the 'swinging moment' of the mid-sixties was a passing symptom of a much broader transformation from an industrial to a service-based city, and it is that transformation which this book examines. London is too complex and diverse a city to be comprehended in a simple linear narrative; this book adopts instead an innovative approach to urban history, by which London life and London's transformation are examined through a number of case studies looking at specific themes and areas of the city. Consumerism and the 'experience economy', home ownership and gentrification, deindustrialisation and deprivation, racial tension and unemployment, the attrition of public services and the steady loss of confidence in public agencies - national and local - emerge as overarching themes from the individual case studies in this book. Their combined effect, it is argued, was to prepare the ground for the Britain that Margaret Thatcher is usually held to have created after 1979 - without Thatcher herself having anything to do it"--

This book analyses the changing nature of the British economy and the consequences of Brexit upon its place within the European economic space. The overhang from the global financial crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the political negotiation of prolonged economic downturn and now the spectre of ‘Brexit’ provide the backdrop for various forms of capitalist restructuring designed to restore competitiveness and prosperity. This re-structuring has clear implications for existing European growth models, the structural imbalances and inequalities which characterise the British economy, the fortunes of the City of London and competing financial districts internationally, and the prospective strategies of progressive politics in this context. Adopting a broadly critical political economy lens – which gives analytical weight to the relationship between economic and political dynamics – the book will draw on the research of eminent scholars to assess divergence in the foundations of economic competitiveness and their social repercussions.

Traces the transformation redevelopment of Britain's cities from post-war reconstruction and modernist urban renewal to the present day.

Capitalism has become 'financialized'. Since the 1970s, the swelling of financial markets and asset price bubbles has occurred alongside weaker underlying economic growth. Yet financialization was not a spontaneous market development - it was deeply political. States fuelled this process through policies of financial liberalization, and the British state lies at the heart of the story. Britain's radical financial liberalizations in the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in creating a financialized global economic order in which the City of London emerged as a central hub. But why did the British state propel financialization? The conventional wisdom points to the lobbying power of financial elites and the strength of neoliberal ideology. However, Governing Financialization offers an alternative explanation through an in-depth exploration of declassified state archives. By examining key financial liberalizations in the 1970s and 1980s - including the notorious 'Big Bang' - this book argues that these policies were not part of an intentional scheme to create a new finance-led economic model. Instead, they were designed to address immediate governing dilemmas related to the grinding 'stagflation' crisis and its aftershocks. In this era, British governments found themselves trapped between global competitive pressures to enforce painful domestic adjustment and national political pressures to maintain existing living standards. Financial liberalization was pursued in a trial-and-error manner to navigate this dilemma. By unleashing financial markets, the state hoped to either postpone the worst effects of the crisis, or enact tough economic restructuring in an arm's-length fashion. Financialization was an accidental outcome, not an intentional result.

Horizons -- Planning -- Architecture -- Community -- Consulting -- Housing.