A strange eventful history : Democratic Socialism in Britain

Blurb

Edmund Dell reviews the century and chronicles Labour's reluctant transition from socialism, advocated as a new form of society, to its acceptance of the market economy. He traces the fortunes of both the people and the politics.
The cast of characters includes not only leading figures in the Labour party, from Ramsay MacDonald to Tony Blair, but also others such as Harold Macmillan and Mrs. Thatcher who in their different ways contributed to the post-war consensus, but then felt betrayed by it. Tracing the transition from the visions of the Clause Four socialists to the conception of a modernised social democracy in the Third Way, Dell elucidates successive attempts to adapt both socialist theory and practice. He concludes that each attempt has only created a further set of unresolvable problems and that, in the end, socialism died at the hands of its advocates, trying but failing to bring it to terms with reality.