“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and
the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of
the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange,
and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each
industry or service.”
Once this programmatic commitment was dropped by Blair, the LP
ceased to have any connection with Social Democracy in its original sense.
It was not until the 1940s that European (as opposed to Russian) Social
Democracy got an opportunity to try changing the economic system. The
UK, the newly formed GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other countries
embarked on an economic transformation that had certain common
characteristics:
쮿 Key industries were taken into state ownership.
쮿 Education and healthcare became free state services.
쮿 Publicly owned housing became the dominant form of new construction.
쮿 Attempts were made, either by confiscation or by inheritance taxation, to
diminish the great landed estates.
쮿 The state attempted to follow a policy of full employment.
There were obviously differences. In Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia
agriculture was largely brought under state control whereas in the UK and
Poland state farms played a much more minor role, with intervention in the
UK being mainly through state marketing boards. We will concentrate for a
while on the UK, both because the authors are particularly familiar with it,
and also because UK economic policy had a big international impact.
The process of nationalisation of industry did not go so far in the UK as
in Eastern Europe, but even there by the late 1970s the state owned among
other things
쮿 the system of energy production and supply: coal, oil, gas, nuclear power
and hydro electricity;
쮿 much of the transport system: roads, railways, buses, airlines, airports,
ports;
쮿 the communication system: radio, TV, post, telephones;
쮿 the majority of the housing stock; and
쮿 many heavy industries: steel, shipbuilding, aircraft construction, car
production.
Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union
3