The City of London and Social Democracy

Book excerpt: The City of London and Social Democracy evaluates the changing relationship between the United Kingdom financial sector - the 'City of London' - and the post-war social democratic State. The key argument made in Aled Davies's study is that changes to the British financial system during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key components of social democratic economic policy practised by the post-war British State. The institutionalization of investment in pension and insurance funds; the fragmentation of an oligopolistic domestic banking system; the emergence of an unregulated international capital market centred on London; the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international monetary system; and the popularization of a City-centric, anti-industrial conception of Britain's economic identity, all served to disrupt and undermine the social democratic economic strategy which had attempted to develop and maintain Britain's international competitiveness as an industrial economy since the Second World War. These findings assert the need to place the Thatcher governments' subsequent economic policy revolution, in which a liberal market approach accelerated deindustrialization and saw the rapid expansion of the nation's international financial service industry, within a broader material and institutional context previously underappreciated by historians.