Rethinking Revisionist Social Democracy: The Case of the Manifesto Group and Labour's 1970s ‘Third Way’

Abstract

The Manifesto Group of centre-right Labour MPs was established in December 1974 to combat the growing organizational strength and success of the left-wing Tribune Group in elections to Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) office, and to buttress the 1974 Labour government against the general advance of the left within the party. It was also an attempt to respond to the emerging incoherence of the personnel and programme of revisionist social democracy and to attempt to organize the centre-right of the PLP under a single banner. In policy terms, it concerned itself inevitably with analysis of economic and industrial policy, both as a critique of the perceived limitations of Labour's attachment to conventional tools of Keynesian social democratic political economy as it crumbled in the 1970s and as a ‘moderate’ social democratic ‘third way’ response to the emerging alternatives of the Labour left's Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) and the neo-liberalism of the New Right. Much of the meaning and impact of Man...