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BRITTAN ON BRITAIN: ‘THE ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS OF DEMOCRACY’ REDUX*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2011

ROGER MIDDLETON
ROGER MIDDLETON*
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
*
School of Humanities, University of Bristol, 11 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TBroger.middleton@bristol.ac.uk
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Abstract

This review furthers our understanding of the history of neo-liberalism in Britain, and more particularly of the economics and politics of the 1970s and 1980s, through an examination of the writings of the economic journalist, Samuel Brittan, widely regarded as a central figure in undermining the intellectual basis for the Keynesian consensus about big government. This review provides a close study of Brittan's ‘The economic contradictions of democracy’ (1975, hereafter ECD) – one of the most cited contributions to the declinist literature of the decade – in which Brittan warned that, without remedial action, liberal democracy ‘is likely to pass away within the lifetime of people now adult’. In this reappraisal of Brittan's ECD, it is argued that this paper is much more than just eloquent, scholarly declinism, and in the process, the generic problem facing all contemporary historians of thought and policy is confronted: what is the influence of any one individual and/or work? The reappraisal relates directly to central themes of the 1970s ‘crisis’, especially ‘overload’ and ‘ungovernability’; it examines the competitive nature of the market for declinist prognostications (notably the Jay–Brittan nexus), with one objective being to provide a counterbalance to much recent scholarship which has over-focused on think-tanks at the expense of elite journalists who were very far from being academics manqués; and, finally, it reviews Brittan's role in the so-called Thatcher revolution, where much has been claimed but little documented.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 1141 - 1168
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

I should like to thank Sir Samuel Brittan for extended conversations over a number of years on this and related projects. For comments on earlier versions of this article, I thank participants at the British Academy-sponsored ‘Reassessing the 1970s’ conference (September 2009), the Centre for Contemporary British History conference of the same title (July 2010), and the Third International Workshop, ‘A study of thoughts on improvement of Economic Society in 20th century Britain: from New Liberalism to New Labour’, Faculty of Economics, University of Kyushu, Fukuoka (Jan, 2011), two anonymous referees, Roger Backhouse, Ben Jackson, George Peden, Hugh Pemberton, Neil Rollings, and James Thompson. All remaining errors are mine. A companion piece to this review, ‘Brittan on Britain: decline, declinism and the “traumas of the 1970s”’ will appear in L. A. Black, H. Pemberton, and P. M. Thane, eds., Reassessing 1970s Britain: a benighted decade (Manchester, 2012).

References

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20 Jackson, ‘Think tank archipelago’.

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25 S. Brittan, Foreword to N. Bosanquet, After the New Right (Aldershot, 1983), p. vi.

26 King, A., ‘Overload: problems of governing in the 1970s’, Political Studies, 23 (1975), pp. 284–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and T. Wilson, ‘The economic costs of the adversary system’, in S. E. Finer, ed., Adversary politics and electoral reform (London, 1975), pp. 99–116.

27 Brittan, S., The Treasury under the Tories, 1951–1964 (Harmondsworth, 1964)Google Scholar.

28 Brittan, S., ‘“The economic contradictions of democracy” revisited’, Political Quarterly, 60 (1989), pp. 190–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Brittan, ‘Samuel Brittan’, p. 281.

30 Brittan, S., Capitalism and the permissive society (London, 1973), pp. xi–xiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Jay, P., ‘Powerful challenge to fashionable dogmas’, Times, 26 Apr. 1973, p. 23Google Scholar.

32 Published as ‘The economic contradictions of democracy’, in K. J. W. Alexander, ed., The political economy of change (Oxford, 1975), pp. 1–30, at p. 29 n. 2, for its publishing history.

33 Brittan in ECDR, pp. 190–1, later desired readers to consult not the BJPolS version but the unchanged version published as chapter 23 of S. Brittan, The economic consequences of democracy (London, 1977), as it was ‘surrounded by other essays, some of which throw light on the so-called economic contradictions’. An abbreviated version was also published in King, A., ed., Why is Britain becoming harder to govern? (London, 1976), pp. 96–137Google Scholar, being part of a three-episode BBC 1 series ‘Politics now’ beginning in February 1976. Again, a slightly different version (‘The economic tensions of British democracy’, in Tyrrell, R. E., ed., The future that doesn't work: social democracy's failures in Britain (New York, NY, 1977), pp. 126–43Google Scholar) was published for an American audience but was much noticed in Britain and has become a staple of the declinist canon. In short, context matters intensely for this essay.

34 King ‘Overload’, p. 164.

35 Jay, P., ‘Pursuit of group self-interest seen as main threat to liberal democracy’, Times, 4 Sept. 1974, pp. 1, 17Google Scholar.

36 ‘Times diary: the detached approach to gloom’, Times, 9 Sept. 1974, p. 12Google Scholar.

37 See Hayward, J. and Norton, P., eds., The political science of British politics (Brighton, 1986)Google Scholar, esp. chs. 1, 13; Hayward, J., Barry, B., and Brown, A., eds., The British study of politics in the twentieth century (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Dunleavy, P. J., Kelly, P., and Moran, M., eds., British political science: fifty years of political studies (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; M. Kenny, ‘Birth of a discipline: interpreting British political studies in the 1950s and 1960s’, in R. Adcock, M. Bevir, and S. C. Stimson, eds., Modern political science: Anglo-American exchanges since 1880 (Princeton, NJ, 2007), pp. 158–79; and Flinders, M., Gamble, A. M., Hay, C., and Kenny, M., eds., The Oxford handbook of British politics (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chs. 1–3.

38 Shonfield, A., British economic policy since the war (Harmondsworth, 1958)Google Scholar.

39 From, for example, Capitalism and the permissive society through to Capitalism with a human face (Aldershot, 1995)Google Scholar, Essays, moral, political and economic (Edinburgh, 1998)Google Scholar and Against the flow: reflections of an individualist (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

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41 The phrase originates from Alan Ryan in 1984, cited in Parsons, Power of the financial press, p. 180.

42 Jay, P., ‘On being an economic journalist’, Listener, 88 (24 Aug. 1972), pp. 239–41, at p. 239Google Scholar; see also Parsons, Power of the financial press, p. 183.

43 G. C. Peden, ‘Economic knowledge and the state in modern Britain’, in S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting, eds., The boundaries of the state in modern Britain (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 170–87, at pp. 171–2; see also Middleton, R., Charlatans or saviours? Economists and the British economy from Marshall to Meade (Cheltenham, 1998)Google Scholar, ch. 2.

44 Roberts, R., ‘“A special place in contemporary economic literature”: the rise and fall of the British bank review, 1914–1993’, Financial History Review, 2 (1995), pp. 41–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 For example, Brittan, , Participation without politics: an analysis of the nature and role of markets (London, 1975)Google Scholar, part 2, comprised extensive extracts from Capitalism and the permissive society and Is there an economic consensus? An attitude survey (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

46 R. Middleton, ‘Royal Economic Society’, in S. N. Durlauf and L. Blume, eds., The new Palgrave dictionary of economics (8 vols., London, 2008), vii, pp. 253–5.

47 The fixed exchange rate was finally abandoned in June 1971. In print, Brittan first supported floating in September 1970 in The price of economic freedom: a guide to flexible exchange rates (London, 1970)Google Scholar, although in the second ‘intermediate’ edition of the Treasury book (Steering the economy: the role of the Treasury (London, 1969), p. 295Google Scholar) he made clear that a ‘floating exchange rate is at the heart of [his preferred] long-term strategy’ (see also, though more equivocally, pp. 319–22).

48 Brittan, ‘Samuel Brittan’, p. 280.

49 Heclo, H. and Wildavsky, A., The private government of public money: community and policy inside British politics (London, 1974), p. 9Google Scholar. Brittan reviewed this (for American Political Science Review, 71 (1977), pp. 772–4)Google Scholar, in the process venting some of his frustrations with Britain's ‘secretive and fetish-bound governmental system’ (at p. 774).

50 Farrell, M. J., Collaborative circles: friendship dynamics and creative work (Chicago, IL, 2001)Google Scholar.

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52 For example, Brittan in the preface to Capitalism and the permissive society, p. xvii, and Jay, , ‘Left, right, left’, Financial Times Magazine, 92 (12 Feb. 2005), pp. 25–7Google Scholar. Both went out of their way to make these points at the 2009 British Academy conference where a first draft of this paper was discussed, as did Brittan in his written response (‘A time for confession’) available at www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/spee60_p.html.

53 A search of EconLit, the American Economic Association's Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) dataset yields no citations for ECD but this is not surprising as the JEL does not include the BJPolS amongst the journals enumerated.

54 His next four most cited publications barely amount to half of the ECD citations, a not unexpected pattern for scientists' work: ‘The politics and economics of privatisation’, Political Quarterly, 55 (1984), pp. 109–28 (N=14)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘How British is the British sickness?’ Journal of Law and Economics, 21 (1978), pp. 245–68 (N=9)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘Privatisation: a comment on Kay and Thompson’, Economic Journal, 96 (1986), pp. 33–8 (N=9)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Towards a corporate state?’ Encounter, 44 (1975), pp. 58–63 (N=3)Google Scholar. Search conducted 8 June 2011.

55 In The Economist, Brittan scored forty-eight gross hits (twenty-eight net of book advertisements etc.) between 1960 and 2011 and Jay sixty-six gross hits (forty-two net); searches conducted on Economist Historical Archive 1843–2006 www.tlemea.com/economist/home.asp and, subsequently, Economist online edition www.economist.com/. Search conducted 8 June 2011.

56 In both political science and economics, the book remains a significant medium for publication, and bibliometrics methodology in the social sciences (and humanities) has begun to embrace this plurality; see Nederhof, A. J., ‘Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the social sciences and humanities: a review’, Scientometrics, 66 (2006), pp. 81–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 For example Biddle, J., ‘A citation analysis of the sources and extent of Wesley Mitchell's reputation’, History of Political Economy, 28 (1996), pp. 137–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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59 Giles, M. W. and Garand, J. C., ‘Ranking political science journals: reputational and citational approaches’, Political Science and Politics, 40 (2007), pp. 741–51, at p. 749CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 A. King, ‘Adventures in bureaucracy’, Economist, 14 Jan. 1989, p. 97. Neither Jenkins nor Riddell appear in the SSCI or A&HCI with cited items.

61 Blaug, M. and Sturges, R. P., Who's who in economics: a biographical dictionary of major economists, 1700–1981 (Brighton, 1983), pp. 49–50Google Scholar.

62 Harzing, A.-W. and van der Wal, R., ‘Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis’, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, 8 (2008), pp. 62–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Search conducted 9 June 2011 on ‘Brittan economic contradictions’.

64 Search conducted 9 June 2011. The three most cited works are: The workers’ cooperative economy (Manchester, 1977) (N=28)Google Scholar; ‘Regionalism as geopolitics’, Foreign Affairs, 58 (1979), pp. 485–514 (N=23)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and, for the IEA, A general hypothesis of employment, inflation and politics (London, 1976) (N=18)Google Scholar.

65 Developed by Harzing and available from www.harzing.com/pop.htm, accessed 9 June 2011.

66 Middleton, ‘Brittan on Britain: decline, declinism’.

67 The forthcoming REF exercise in British higher education has prompted some disciplinary discussions about appropriate metrics; for political science, see ‘the symposium’, ‘Assessing research quality.’, Political Studies Review, 7 (2009), pp. 1–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and I. McLean, ‘Reputational and bibliometric methods of evaluating people and journals in political science: a UK perspective’, PSA conference paper, Apr. 2010.

68 For once, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number is an appropriate source, accessed 9 June 2011; see also Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld, ‘Political science 400’, p. 143, who reject the h-index as it can have ‘very strange properties’.

69 H. Pemberton, ‘The future of contemporary political history’, mimeo (2007).

70 ‘How British is the British sickness?’, p. 245.

71 Tomlinson, Politics of decline, p. 89. The works referenced are, in the first paragraph, Jay, General hypothesis, and ‘Englanditis’, in Tyrrell, ed., Future that doesn't work, pp. 167–85; those in the second paragraph, Johnson, N., In search of the constitution: reflections on state and society (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar, and Alt, J. E., The politics of economic decline: economic management and political behaviour in Britain since 1964 (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar.

72 Crewe, I., ‘Reputation, research and reality: the publication records of UK departments of politics, 1978–1984’, Scientometrics, 14 (1988), pp. 235–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 His published work appeared in a number of the standard decline collections; for example, ‘How British is the British sickness?’ was reproduced nearly in full in the much used (for undergraduate teaching) Coates, D. and Hillard, J., eds., The economic decline of modern Britain: the debate between left and right (Brighton, 1986), ch. 30Google Scholar; he is a staple of key declinist ‘political economy’ works between the late 1970s and mid-1980s (from Alt, Politics of economic decline, through A. Gamble and Walkland, S. A., The British party system and economic policy, 1945–1983: studies in adversary politics (Oxford, 1984))Google Scholar; and, amongst commentators, he features in the standard textbooks of the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Kavanagh, D., Thatcherism and British politics: the end of consensus? (2nd edn, Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar, esp. pp. 124, 147, on Thatcherism, , and Gamble, A. M., Britain in decline: economic policy, political strategy and the British state (4th edn, London, 1994), pp. 33–4, 125, 155Google Scholar, on Britain in decline.

74 English, R. and Kenny, M., eds., Rethinking British decline (London, 2000), p. ixGoogle Scholar.

75 English, R. and Kenny, M., ‘Public intellectuals and the question of British decline’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3 (2001), pp. 259–83, at p. 277CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 See e.g. Collini, S., Absent minds: intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar.

77 A poll of 100 public intellectuals by Prospect magazine (21 Aug. 2004) had Brittan ranked 71st.

78 Johnson, R. W., ‘Nairn and the break-up of Britain’, Political Studies, 26 (1978), pp. 119–22, at p. 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Brittan, S. and Lilley, P., The delusion of incomes policy (London, 1977), p. 178Google Scholar.

80 Tomlinson, Politics of decline, pp. 105–9; for Brittan's journalism and essays, see his collection Against the flow and, additionally, ‘Time to end the export drive’, 3 Mar. 2000; ‘Maybe I need an economist to tell me that’, 13 Oct. 2003; and ‘“Competitiveness” rears its ugly head’, 31 Aug. 2007; all available from www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/.

81 S. Brittan, ‘The Thatcher government's economic policy’, in Kavanagh, D. and Seldon, A., eds., The Thatcher effect: a decade of change (Oxford, 1989), pp. 1–37Google Scholar, and Capitalism with a human face, ch. 11.

82 Most notably Holland, S., The socialist challenge (London, 1975)Google Scholar, the ‘most complete account of [the Alternative Economic Strategy's] theoretical underpinnings’ according to Wickham-Jones, M., Economic strategy and the Labour party: politics and policy-making, 1970–1783 (London, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 54, the standard history of the AES; see also Callaghan, J., ‘Rise and fall of the alternative economic strategy: from internationalisation of capital to “globalisation”’, Contemporary British History, 14 (2000), pp. 105–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 113–15 on Holland.

83 Duncan, G., ‘A crisis of social democracy?’ Parliamentary Affairs, 38 (1985), pp. 267–81, at p. 278Google Scholar.

84 S. Blank, ‘Britain's economic problems: lies and damn lies’, in I. Kramnick, ed., Is Britain dying? Perspectives on the current crisis (Ithaca, NY, 1979), pp. 66–88, at pp. 71–2; Caves, R. E. and Associates, Britain's economic prospects (London, 1968)Google Scholar, and Caves, R. E. and Krause, L. B., eds., Britain's economic performance (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

85 Minogue, K., ‘Politics and the gross intellectual product’, Government and Opposition, 21 (1986), pp. 396–405, at p. 396CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the ‘transition’ to political science, entailing in Britain the trend to professionalization and positivism, see D. Kavanagh, ‘Antecedents’, and R. E. Goodin, ‘The British study of politics’, in Flinders et al., eds., Oxford handbook of British politics, pp. 25–41, 42–55, at pp. 33–6, 43–6.

86 A search of the main British journals in the 1970s (British Journal of Political Science, Government and Opposition, Parliamentary Affairs, Political Quarterly, Political Studies and Public Administration) yields an average of less than one paper per year per journal which might be defined as declinist.

87 Debnam, G., ‘The adversary politics thesis revisited’, Parliamentary Affairs, 47 (1994), pp. 420–33Google Scholar.

88 Tyrrell, ed., Future that doesn't work; Kramnick, ed., Is Britain dying?; and W. B. Gwyn and R. Rose, eds., Britain: progress and decline (London, 1980).

89 Douglas, J. E., ‘Review article: the overloaded crown’, British Journal of Political Science, 6 (1976), pp. 483–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, R., ‘Overloaded government: the problem outlined’, European Studies Newsletter, 5 (1975), pp. 13–18Google Scholar, and idem, ed., Challenge to governance: studies in overloaded polities (London, 1980)Google Scholar; Parsons, D. W., ‘Politics without promises: the crisis of “overload” and governability’, Parliamentary Affairs, 35 (1982), pp. 421–35Google Scholar; and Birch, A. H., ‘Overload, ungovernability and delegitimation: the theories and the British case’, British Journal of Political Science, 14 (1984), pp. 135–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 Jay, General hypothesis, and ‘Englanditis’.

91 Beetham, D., ‘Four theorems about the market and democracy’, European Journal of Political Research, 23 (1993), pp. 187–201, at p. 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Brittan, S., Second thoughts on full employment policy (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Friedman, M., ‘The role of monetary policy’, American Economic Review, 58 (1968), pp. 1–17Google Scholar; Cockett, Thinking the unthinkable, pp. 184–5.

93 Brittan, ‘Economic tensions of democracy’, p. 143.

94 Brittan, Capitalism with a human face, and idem, Essays, moral, political and economic.

95 King, ‘Overload’, p. 290.

96 Blank, ‘Britain's economic problems’, p. 70.

97 The first version of what will become Bacon, R. W. and Eltis, W. A., Britain's economic problem: too few producers (London, 1976)Google Scholar, are the Sunday Times articles, 2, 9, and 16 Nov. 1975.

98 Friedman, M., ‘The line we dare not cross: the fragility of freedom at “60%”’, Encounter, 47 (Nov. 1976), pp. 8–14Google Scholar; Hayek, Road to serfdom, p. 61.

99 In turn, Brittan and his ECD paper are noted in the public choice literature; for example, Mueller, D., Public choice II: a revised edition of Public choice (Cambridge, 1989), p. 107Google Scholar.

100 Thompson, N., ‘Hollowing out the state: public choice theory and the critique of Keynesian social democracy’, Contemporary British History, 22 (2008), pp. 355–82, at p. 372CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson further identifies the importance of the April 1978 IEA seminar which produced IEA, The economics of politics (London, 1978). Brittan was not amongst the 109 participants who were academics (from both sides of the Atlantic), politicians, and the commentariat.

101 Cockett, Thinking the unthinkable, p. 282; cf. Denham, A. and Garnett, M., ‘The nature and impact of think tanks in contemporary Britain’, Contemporary British History, 10 (1996), pp. 43–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for scepticism on the impact of this and other think-tanks on British government policy in the 1970s and beyond.

102 Goodhart, C. A. E. and Bhansali, R. J., ‘Political economy’, Political Studies, 18 (1970), pp. 43–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 Brittan, ‘Samuel Brittan’, p. 282.

104 Goodhart and Bhansali, ‘Political economy’, pp. 45, 59, 63.

105 Douglas, ‘Review article’, p. 486.

106 Parsons, ‘Politics without promise’, p. 431.

107 Offer, A., The challenge of affluence: self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar.

108 Beetham, ‘Four theorems’, p. 199.

109 Skelcher, C., ‘Changing images of the state: overloaded, hollowed-out, congested’, Public Policy and Administration, 15 (2000), pp. 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Rhodes, R. A. W., ‘The governance narrative: key findings and lessons from the ESRC's Whitehall programme’, Public Administration, 78 (2000), pp. 345–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

110 ‘Ring-a-ring o’ roses’, Economist, 22 Aug. 1981, p. 83Google Scholar.

111 Cowling, ‘Sources of the New Right; see also idem, ed.,Conservative essays (London, 1978)Google Scholar.

112 Cockett, Thinking the unthinkable, p. 214.

113 Desai, ‘Second-hand dealers’, p. 53. Denham and Garnett, Keith Joseph, p. 255, have the speech as mainly the work of Alfred Sherman with Brittan and Alan Walters assisting.

114 Pepper, G. T., Inside Thatcher's monetarist revolution (London, 1998), p. 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

115 See Oliver, M. J., Whatever happened to monetarism: economic policy-making and social learning in the United Kingdom since 1979 (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 52–3Google Scholar.

116 See, for the IEA, Brittan, How to end the ‘monetarist’ controversy: a journalist's reflections on output, jobs, prices and money (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

117 Letwin, S. R., The anatomy of Thatcherism (London, 1992), pp. 155, 290Google Scholar; and Cockett, Thinking the unthinkable, p. 215.

118 Financial Times, 12 Mar. 1981, cited in Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, ii, p. 112.

119 Booth, P., ed., Were 364 economists all wrong? A discussion of the impact and legacy of the 1981 budget (London, 2006)Google Scholar; and Fry, G. K., ‘“A bottomless pit of political surprise”? The political “mystery” of the Thatcher era’, Twentieth Century British History, 21 (2010), pp. 540–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 552 for this not being some sort of Stalingrad.

120 Brittan, Government and the market economy, p. 19.

121 Harvey, Brief history, pp. 79–80.

122 Brittan, Against the flow, p. xi.

123 English and Kenny, eds., Rethinking British decline, p. 92.

124 Ibid., p. 100.

125 Pemberton, H., Policy learning and British governance in the 1960s (London, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

126 Brittan, S., Left or right: the bogus dilemma (London, 1968)Google Scholar.

127 Ibid., p. 131.

128 Rose, R., ‘Ungovernability: is there fire behind the smoke?’ Political Studies, 27 (1979), pp. 351–70, at p. 352CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

129 Brittan, Left or right, pp. 145–6.

130 Hailsham, Lord, ‘Elective dictatorship’ [Richard Dimbleby Lecture], Listener, 96 (21 Oct. 1976), pp. 496–500Google Scholar.

131 Beetham, ‘Four theorems’, p. 199.

132 Brittan, ‘Samuel Brittan’, p. 289.

133 A theme developed in Brittan, ‘Can democracy manage an economy?’, in R. J. Skidelsky, ed., The end of the Keynesian era: essays on the disintegration of the Keynesian political economy (London, 1977), pp. 41–9, and ‘Inflation and democracy’, in Hirsch, F. and Goldthorpe, J. H., eds., The political economy of inflation (Oxford, 1978), pp. 161–85Google Scholar.

134 Notably, Second thoughts and ‘Full employment policy: a reappraisal’, in Worswick, G. D. N., ed., The concept and measurement of involuntary unemployment (London, 1976), pp. 249–78Google Scholar.

135 Lindsay, C., ‘A century of labour market change: 1900 to 2000’, Labour Market Trends, 111 (Mar. 2003), pp. 133–44Google Scholar, figure 5.

136 An important interim report was Jenkins, S. P. and Cowell, F. A., ‘Dwarfs and giants in the 1980s: trends in the UK income distribution’, Fiscal Studies, 15 (1994), pp. 99–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar, this building on work published in this, their in-house journal, since the early 1980s, and with particular press attention directed to Dilnot, A. W. and Stark, G. K., ‘The distributional consequences of Mrs Thatcher’, Fiscal Studies, 7 (1986), pp. 48–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

137 See, in particular, the contemporary to ECDR, ‘Postscript to the 1987–8 edition’, pp. 235–40.

138 Brittan, ‘How British is the British sickness?’, pp. 263–4; Brittan, ‘Postscript to the 1987–8 edition’, p. 284; see Layard, P. R. G., How to beat unemployment (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

139 Brittan, Against the flow, pp. xi, 86.

140 Ibid., p. 242 on the ‘egalitarian religion’; and ‘Redistribution: yes. Equality: no’, in Capitalism with a human face, pp. 235–41.

141 Brittan, ‘Postscript to the 1987–8 edition’, pp. 267, 269.

142 Brittan and Lilley, Delusion of incomes policy.

143 Guardian, 21 Apr. 1993, cited in Jenkins and Cowell, ‘Dwarfs and giants’, p. 108.

144 Brittan, ‘Time for confession’, p. 3.

145 S. Brittan, ‘The changing economic role of government’, in J. D. Hirst, ed., The challenge of change: fifty years of business economics (London, 2003), pp. 66–81, at p. 81.

146 R. Rose, ‘The nature of the challenge’, in idem, ed., Challenge to governance, pp. 5–28, at p. 23.

147 Stoker, G., Why politics matters: making democracy work (London, 2006), pp. 127–32Google Scholar.