Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

It took the Labour Party fourteen years and three different leaders to recover from the catastrophe of 1983. Politically, the party had to isolate and destroy the influence of Trotskyites and other ‘hard’ Left activists in some of its regional strongholds (notably Liverpool). Sociologically, it needed to come to terms with its failure to keep abreast with the concerns and aspirations of a new middle class, without whose support it could never again be elected to office, and which outnumbered the evaporating core of industrial proletarians and public sector employees on whom Labour (like all Social Democratic parties) had traditionally relied. Intellectually, Labour’s leaders needed to identify a new set of policy objectives—and a new language in which to present them.