Journal Articles

Chronicles of a Death Foretold: the Winter of Discontent and Construction of the Crisis of British Keynesianism

---

Thirty years on, and in the context of a new crisis, it is time to return to the Winter of Discontent and to the mythology that it has generated. In this paper, I show that the Winter of Discontent was in many respects a manufactured crisis—lived, experienced and responded to through a very particular construction of the events. And I show that such a construction of events is difficult to reconcile with the evidence itself. The Winter of Discontent, I suggest, did mark the passing of Keynesianism, corporatism and the post-war consensus. But it did so not because the events of the winter of 1978–1979 were precipitated by union power nor by the inherent contradictions of the Keynesianism economic paradigm, but because the crisis that it was seen to symbolise was constructed in precisely such terms. Keynesianism's death in Britain was not economically given, but politically orchestrated. The implications of this for our understanding of the present crisis are highly significant and are explored in the final section of the paper.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Parliamentary Affairs

Call Number

-

Publisher

United Kingdom : Oxford University Press., 2010

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

00312290

Classification

-

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Vol. 63 No. 3, July 2010. pp. 446-470.

Subject(s)

-

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment