This chapter reflects on how both Soviet and neoclassical economic doctrines impose a practice of ‘organised forgetting’: the omission and rejection of knowledge that does conform to the presumed ontology. In adopting the language of science, both Soviet and neoliberal ideologies would attack their political opponents as primitives, unschooled in their singular methods of reasoning. Neoliberalism, in particular, is neverthless more accurately understood as working against the scientific method, depending as it does on argument from abstract, de-historicized assumption, as distinct from evidence-based justification, theoretical review and adaptation. The chapter traces how neoclassical theory was translated into a political agenda for the New Right through the 1970s. It closes by introducing the neoliberal governmental toolkit of the New Public Management, and explains why, following the isomorphism in their forms of reasoning, NPM would recreate the Stalinist toolkit of quantification, output planning, targets and managerial ‘correct lines’, only now in capitalist form. The analytical foundations are thus set for the policy chapters that follow.

The introduction begins by demonstrating the importance of ‘modernisation’ for left-wing debates in the second half of the twentieth century. After recapping the key staging posts of Labour’s trajectory from the 1970s to the 1990s, it then argues that existing histories obscure the diverse meanings and appeal of ‘modernisation’ through their current use of the term. I suggest that this hinders our understanding of both New Labour and many of their left-wing critics, and too readily accepts a teleological reading of history. Following a brief discussion of the method of the book, the introduction touches on the wider historical significance of this revised understanding of Labour’s ideological debates. It questions the idea of an ‘age of neoliberalism’ and introduces other themes of the late twentieth century of comparable significance to market liberalism: the challenge to the nation state from above and below; the rise of post-1968 ‘liberation movements’; deindustrialisation; and constitutional agitation. It ends by outlining the chapters.

This chapter examines late twentieth-century trends in city centre management, showing how the models of organising commercial selling space that had been developed within individual shopping complexes came increasingly to be applied to the city centre in its entirety. It considers the impact of a significant national change in planning policy as large, out-of-town shopping centres were allowed to emerge for the first time in Britain in the 1980s. The rise of out-of-town centres intensified the competitive pressures that were already present within the British urban system, forcing towns and cities to push ever harder for new forms of retail development in their own locales. Smaller urban centres were consistently disadvantaged by these dynamics and by the 1990s a narrative of ‘dying’ towns and abandoned high streets had already taken shape. Earlier post-war efforts to adapt waning industrial centres for new, consumer-driven models of growth acquired a renewed urgency and were placed at the centre of the new national policy agendas of ‘urban regeneration’ and ‘renaissance’. The chapter concludes by highlighting the inadequacy of such retail-led regeneration strategies for the most structurally disadvantaged locales.

The arrival of 19,000 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ after 1979 came after nearly two decades of immigration restriction, when Britain was entering its deepest recession for fifty years and just as Thatcher’s New Right government’s marketisation and anti-statist policies were being enacted. If this signalled new and significant challenges facing these refugees to Britain, this chapter shows that the reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam also saw a number of significant continuities with earlier periods. Internationally, this included the continued importance of colonial and Cold War geopolitical considerations, which pushed Britain into reluctantly participating in the UNHCR-led Vietnamese resettlement programme. Domestically the reception programme emphasised the ongoing importance of voluntary action and revealed the persistence of housing problems, poverty and racism for the new arrivals. This all took place against the backdrop of the continued emergence of an ever more diverse – ‘multicultural’ – society where the state and refugee agencies alike were being reshaped by their own increasingly heterogeneous workforces. And yet, despite this apparent new openness, educational and linguistic disadvantages of the refugees themselves collided with limited state support and high levels of unemployment to ensure that the Vietnamese were often only able to establish lives for themselves at the margins of British society.

This concluding chapter draws together the strands of argument in the book by surveying the political thought of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. The chapter then examines why the 2014 case for independence had changed in significant respects from the earlier versions of the case examined in this book. Finally, the chapter weighs up the changes that will be needed to the case for Scottish independence as nationalists look towards another referendum.

The conclusion underscores the many ways that new town planning illustrated a dynamic social democracy. Yet these responses to the 1970s yielded unintended consequences, as strategic accommodations of individualism, markets, and private finance became ends unto themselves. If market liberalism initially figured as but one response to emergent priorities and constraints after 1973, Thatcherism represented the subordination of those more various possibilities to a market logic. By the 1990s, in order to distance itself from left as well as right, New Labour endorsed a reading of postwar history as having been dominated by the state and then the market on either side of 1979. This erasure of social democracy’s more supple history requires its recovery – the recovery of ambitions and innovations that, however imperfectly enacted, remain visible all around us in new towns housing millions. Today, as cities around the world face dramatic housing crises, the history of new town planning attests to precedents and procedures that states recently deployed in their efforts to confront these recurrent urban challenges.