The Economic Legacies of Denis Healey and Geoffrey Howe

A common assertion in studies of the British political economy is that periods of economic, financial and political crisis produce changes in policy. This is particularly evident, for example, in the importance conventionally assigned to the 1976 IMF loan crisis and/or the 1979 General Election. In this standard account, the political and economic crises of the 1970s are presented as leading to the ‘turning points’ of 1976 or 1979 when post-war Keynesian and social democratic economic policy embracing demand management, full employment and the welfare state was replaced with a new set of policies designed to defeat inflation, reduce public expenditure and public sector borrowing and roll forward the frontiers of the market.