Tensions and Contradictions Left and Right: The Predictable Disappointments of Planning under New Labour in Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article situates the disappointments of New Labour's record over environmental planning within the longer historical perspective of British post-Second World War social democracy and planning. It makes two main claims. First, that New Labour ideology should be viewed (as proponents of so-called ‘Third-Way’ ideology have held) as a version of social democracy, albeit a new, more liberalized version than that propounded by ‘old Labour’. And second, that, in its commitment to some combination of both state and private action within the context of market capitalism, social democracy has always been liable to internal tensions, if not contradictions, so that any tensions and contradictions in New Labour's record over planning should not surprise us. On the contrary, they were as predictable as were the contradictions in Conservative government policy through the 1980s and 1990s.