Abstract

The text examines what revisionism meant in a British context and how it differed from its counterparts in continental Europe. It asks why revisionism did not effect an explicit change in the Labour Party in the late 1950s/early 1960s. The author suggests that this was largely because so much of what revisionists proposed was implicitly accepted, and practiced, by the Labour Party in the 1960s. In the end the paper discusses the crisis of the revisionists in the 1970s and it tries to ask why a decade that seemed promising for them should have ended with their apparent defeat. Finally, the author looks at the relations between the revisionism of the period from the 1950s to the 1970s and the innovations of Blair's New Labour in the 1990s.