etarism. It won the 1997 and 2001 elections easily, expounding a rather vague
doctrine of theThird Waymeant to replace evensocial democracyfrom its
past ideological commitments.
The British Labour Party has always had the problem of its close links to the
trade-union movement, to which it owes its birth. Although these have
provided it with most of its funds and much of its membership, they have also
tied the party to often unpopular positions on industrial relations and in
general acted as a restraint on the party developing policies that could be
advantageous electorally. Part of what made Blair’s reformulation possible was
the decline in power of the trade unions following Thatcherite reform in
employment law under the preceding Conservative governments.
Many other countries have labour parties, some of which pre-date the
British Labour Party. All of these parties follow socialist or social democratic
paths, and many also have links with their countries’ trade-union movements.
Australia, Norway and Sweden are examples of countries with powerful labour
parties.
Laissez-faire
Laissez-faire is the doctrine that the government of a state should have no
control at all over economic matters. It is especially associated with 19th-
centuryLiberalism, butis by no means absent from the modern world. In
origin it was a liberal opposition to traditional, semi-feudal, monopolistic
patterns in which the state involved itself in direct control of aspects of the
economy for general purposes of policy. It later came to signify opposition to
any governmental infringement on the absolute freedom of contract, because it
was believed that maximal economic performance was possible only where the
market forces of supply and demand were allowed to find their own balance,
under which conditions everyone, whether entrepreneur or unskilled worker,
would be better off. Thus controls, even minimum-wage laws or restrictions
on child labour hours, were seen as unacceptable infringements on total
economic freedom. The political theory of laissez-faire was buttressed by
adherence to the early versions of technical economic theory, the ‘perfect
competition’ theories of writers like David Ricardo (1772–1823) and Alfred
Marshall (1842–1924), who tried to show that an economy consisting of many
equally-small units of production would automatically work to maximize
social value. For a long time the common law doctrines of contract also
operated to support this position, despite the fact that both legal and effective
monopolies were distorting the perfect competition model, and inequalities of
bargaining power, especially between workers and employers, were reducing
the theoretical fairness of laissez-faire policies. Although it was claimed that
laissez-faire required a total independence of the economy and the political
Laissez-faire