Peter Sloman
Biographic Data
| ID | 253079 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Sloman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Sloman |
| SIGNATURE | SLOMAN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6087-0476 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Paddy Ashdown’s Third Way: The Liberal Democrats and the Politics of the 1990s
Existing accounts of policy change in 1990s Britain focus primarily on New Labour. Tony Blair’s 1994 election as Labour leader signaled a period of growing elite convergence around a post-industrial economic model, rule-based economic management, and the use of market mechanisms to achieve social objectives. For all Blair’s claims to novelty, however, his “third way” chimed closely with the policy agenda that Paddy Ashdown had developed as Libera…
Why do parties (not) support Universal Basic Income? The case of the UK Liberal Democrats
The period since 2008 has seen high-profile debates over radical policy ideas such as universal basic income. As Jurgen De Wispelaere has noted, basic income has attracted interest from a wide range of political actors, but parties have struggled to sustain a firm commitment to the idea, especially as they have moved closer to power. This article tests and refines De Wispelaere’s analysis of ‘cheap political support’ for basic income through a ca…
Introduction: Governing from the Centre‐Left in the 2020s
The UK Labour Party's return to power in 2024 followed a wave of victories by its centre‐left counterparts in the period during and after the Covid pandemic. From the perspective of 2025, however, the ‘progressive moment’ of the early 2020s looks short‐lived, as the political pendulum has swung rightwards in the United States and elsewhere. This special collection examines the experiences of recent centre‐left governments in five countries—Portug…
Ed Davey's Tory Removals: The Liberal Democrats and the 2024 General Election
The 2024 general election represented a remarkable comeback for the Liberal Democrats. Less than a decade on from the coalition and the 2015 election debacle, Sir Ed Davey's party reclaimed third‐party status in the House of Commons with seventy‐two MPs—the largest total for the Liberal Democrats or their Liberal Party predecessors since the 1920s. This article explores how Davey's disciplined campaign strategy enabled the Liberal Democrats to ma…
Labour, more or less? Policy reasoning in a fiscal register
Michael Jacobs and Andrew Hindmoor’s analysis of ‘Labour, left and right’ is a salutary corrective to ‘electoral-ideological’ accounts of party strategy in Britain, and rightly urges scholars to pay more attention to substantive ‘policy reasoning’. Jacobs and Hindmoor’s account of Labour policy is only partly convincing, however, because it is based on a sharp distinction between left-wing ‘structural reform’ and moderate ‘redistributive’ strateg…
Rethinking Postwar Liberalism: The Road to 2010 and Beyond
The nineteenth and early twentieth century Liberal Party has been well served by British political historians. By contrast, research on the post‐1945 Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats has become a specialised field, with strong empirical foundations (including in biographies and political science work) but few connections with the larger narratives that historians tell about postwar Britain. This article explores how the story of the ‘long Libe…
Take Power—Vote Liberal’: Jeremy Thorpe, the 1974 Liberal Revival, and the Politics of 1970s Britain
The Liberal Party’s 1972–4 revival under Jeremy Thorpe placed it at the heart of political debate in 1970s Britain—a period marked by inflation, strikes, and recurrent talk of political ‘crisis’. This article explores the evolution of Liberal policy, strategy, and support between 1970 and 1979, and argues that Thorpe and his colleagues were agents as well as beneficiaries of electoral dealignment. As long-standing critics of class politics, Liber…
Better off with Labour'? Fiscal policy, electoral strategy and the road to John Smith's shadow budget, 1979-92
The failure of John Smith's 'Shadow Budget' to deliver a Labour victory in the 1992 general election has taken on a mythical status in narratives around the development of New Labour. This article sets the episode in a larger context by examining the development of Labour's fiscal policies in opposition after 1979, in the face of rising inequality, public-sector austerity, and regressive tax reforms. It traces how successive election defeats drov…
Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective
Harold Wilson, ‘Selsdon Man’, and the defence of social democracy in 1970s Britain
Harold Wilson's attack on 'Selsdon Man' in the run-up to the 1970 general election has generally been seen as a flawed rhetorical gambit, which inadvertently gave coherence to Edward Heath's policies. The subsequent invocation of 'Selsdon' by critics of Heath's 'u-turns' has meant that the episode has mainly attracted scrutiny from historians of the Conservative Party. Yet the debate over Selsdon can also be seen as a landmark in Wilson's transit…
Where’s the money coming from?’ Manifesto costings and the politics of fiscal credibility in UK general elections, 1955–2019
Tax and spending are central to democratic politics in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, but psephologists have paid surprisingly little attention to the practice of manifesto costings or the ways in which fiscal promises shape voting behaviour. This article uses qualitative research to trace how British parties have used manifesto costings to frame prospective choices for voters since the 1950s and develops a theoretical framework for understand…
Resource Extraction, Economic Growth, and the Climate Dilemma in Canada and Australia
Canada and Australia are two of the economic success stories of the last thirty years, enjoying rapid growth during the 1990s and 2000s and (unlike the UK and US) escaping the worst effects of the 2008 financial crisis. In both countries, however, economic growth has become highly dependent on commodities extraction, leaving them vulnerable to fluctuations in commodity prices, and imposing political constraints on tackling climate change. This ar…
Squeezed Out? The Liberal Democrats and the 2019 General Election
The 2019 general election was a crushing disappointment for the Liberal Democrats, as Jo Swinson lost her East Dunbartonshire seat to the SNP and the party’s anti‐Brexit stance failed to deliver gains from the Conservatives. Although the Liberal Democrats’ poor performance can partly be blamed on a misfiring campaign strategy, it also reflected the structural difficulties which the party faces in an increasingly polarised political environment. T…
Redistribution in an Age of Neoliberalism: Market Economics, ‘Poverty Knowledge’, and the Growth of Working-Age Benefits in Britain, c. 1979–2010
The expansion of cash benefits to low-paid workers has been one of the most significant developments in recent UK public policy. Since 1979, transfer payments to working-age households have trebled in real terms, helping to offset increases in wage inequality. Adopting a discursive institutionalist approach, this article argues that the growth of transfer payments partly reflects the influence of what John Kay has called ‘Redistributive Market Li…
The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn, by Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg
The Sverige Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is the youngest and most controversial of the six Nobel Prizes. Since it was created in 1968 to mark the tercentenary of the Bank of Sweden, the prize has been the ultimate distinction of the economics profession, crowning the careers of scholars as diverse as Milton Friedman and Angus Deaton. Yet the very existence of the prize raises in an acute form the question of what …
Universal Basic Income in British Politics, 1918-2018: From a 'Vagabond's Wage' to a Global Debate
The idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) has moved rapidly up the British political agenda in recent years, with support from the Green Party, the Royal Society of Arts, and left-wing writers such as Paul Mason. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has set up a working group to examine its implications, and four Scottish councils are hoping to launch pilot schemes. Contemporary British interest in UBI forms part of a lively global debate about auto…
Conservative Economic Policymaking and the Birth of Thatcherism, 1964–1979, by Adrian Williamson
The collapse of the post-war ‘settlement’ and the rise of ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1970s and 1980s is by now firmly established as the central question in late twentieth-century British political history. Many of the landmarks are very familiar, but the opening of official and private papers has made possible a wave of detailed research which fleshes out and refines contemporary judgements on the period. Adrian Williamson’s study of Conservative econ…
The Pragmatist’s Solution to Poverty’: The Heath Government’s Tax Credit Scheme and the Politics of Social Policy in the 1970s
The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ in the mid-1960s prompted a wide-ranging debate over how the British government could best support low-paid workers and their families. Historians’ attention has largely focussed on the formation of the Child Poverty Action Group and its long campaign to persuade Harold Wilson and James Callaghan’s Labour governments to introduce a universal Child Benefit. The most radical response to the poverty problem, however, cam…
The Life of R.H. Tawney: Socialism and History, by Lawrence Goldman ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson: Her Ideas, Movements and World, by Matt Perry
Despite two decades of concern about a ‘crisis in labour history’, the personalities that shaped the twentieth-century Labour movement continue to attract attention. The subjects of these two new biographies, R.H. Tawney and Ellen Wilkinson, have long figured prominently in the Labour Party’s pantheon of heroes—Tawney as the author of influential treatises on The Acquisitive Society (1921) and Equality (1931), Wilkinson as the orchestrator of the…
Julie V. Gottlieb. “Guilty Women,” Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain
For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the social and political landscape of the 1930s was central to the historiography of modern Britain. The Great Depression, the “bankers’ ramp,” the Jarrow March, “middle opinion,” the Munich Crisis, and the debate over appeasement: all were familiar landmarks to generations of British history students. Since the turn of the millennium, scholarly interest has faded, partly with the passage of t…
Beveridge’s rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams and the campaign for basic income, 1942–55
Historians of Britain’s post-war welfare state have long been aware of the shortcomings of the social insurance model, but the political impact of the Beveridge report has tended to obscure the alternative visions of welfare canvassed in the 1940s and 1950s. This article examines the social activist Juliet Rhys-Williams’ campaign for the integration of the tax and benefit systems and the provision of a universal basic income, which attracted wide…
Can we conquer unemployment? The Liberal party, public works and the 1931 political crisis: The Liberal party, public works and the 1931 political crisis
David Lloyd George's 1929 pledge to ‘conquer unemployment’ through loan-financed public works was a landmark in the development of Keynesianism as a policy option in Britain, yet just two years later the Liberal party which Lloyd George had led would play a central role in the formation of the highly orthodox National Government. This article uses archival and published sources to explain the shift in Liberal thinking, and argues that the party's…
Planning for War and Peace, 1939–45
The Liberal Party and the Economy, 1929-1964
This book explores the reception, generation, and use of economic ideas in the British Liberal Party between its electoral decline in the 1920s and 1930s and its post-war revival under Jo Grimond. Drawing on archival sources, party publications, and the press, it analyses the diverse intellectual influences which shaped British Liberals’ economic thought during the twentieth century, and highlights the ways in which the party sought to reconcile …
Partners in Progress? British Liberals and the Labour Party since 1918
Britain's Liberal and Labour Parties have long identified themselves with the progressive tradition, but have often disagreed about what progress means. This paper examines British Liberals’ efforts to critique state socialism during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and to articulate an alternative vision of progress based on wider property ownership, competitive markets and consumer choice. Although this vision sharpened the Liberal Party's political …
Universal Basic Income in British Politics, 1918-2018: From a 'Vagabond's Wage' to a Global Debate
The idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) has moved rapidly up the British political agenda in recent years, with support from the Green Party, the Royal Society of Arts, and left-wing writers such as Paul Mason. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has set up a working group to examine its implications, and four Scottish councils are hoping to launch pilot schemes. Contemporary British interest in UBI forms part of a lively global debate about auto…
The Pragmatist’s Solution to Poverty’: The Heath Government’s Tax Credit Scheme and the Politics of Social Policy in the 1970s
The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ in the mid-1960s prompted a wide-ranging debate over how the British government could best support low-paid workers and their families. Historians’ attention has largely focussed on the formation of the Child Poverty Action Group and its long campaign to persuade Harold Wilson and James Callaghan’s Labour governments to introduce a universal Child Benefit. The most radical response to the poverty problem, however, cam…
Where’s the money coming from?’ Manifesto costings and the politics of fiscal credibility in UK general elections, 1955–2019
Tax and spending are central to democratic politics in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, but psephologists have paid surprisingly little attention to the practice of manifesto costings or the ways in which fiscal promises shape voting behaviour. This article uses qualitative research to trace how British parties have used manifesto costings to frame prospective choices for voters since the 1950s and develops a theoretical framework for understand…
Beveridge’s rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams and the campaign for basic income, 1942–55
Historians of Britain’s post-war welfare state have long been aware of the shortcomings of the social insurance model, but the political impact of the Beveridge report has tended to obscure the alternative visions of welfare canvassed in the 1940s and 1950s. This article examines the social activist Juliet Rhys-Williams’ campaign for the integration of the tax and benefit systems and the provision of a universal basic income, which attracted wide…
Squeezed Out? The Liberal Democrats and the 2019 General Election
The 2019 general election was a crushing disappointment for the Liberal Democrats, as Jo Swinson lost her East Dunbartonshire seat to the SNP and the party’s anti‐Brexit stance failed to deliver gains from the Conservatives. Although the Liberal Democrats’ poor performance can partly be blamed on a misfiring campaign strategy, it also reflected the structural difficulties which the party faces in an increasingly polarised political environment. T…
Labour, more or less? Policy reasoning in a fiscal register
Michael Jacobs and Andrew Hindmoor’s analysis of ‘Labour, left and right’ is a salutary corrective to ‘electoral-ideological’ accounts of party strategy in Britain, and rightly urges scholars to pay more attention to substantive ‘policy reasoning’. Jacobs and Hindmoor’s account of Labour policy is only partly convincing, however, because it is based on a sharp distinction between left-wing ‘structural reform’ and moderate ‘redistributive’ strateg…
Harold Wilson, ‘Selsdon Man’, and the defence of social democracy in 1970s Britain
Harold Wilson's attack on 'Selsdon Man' in the run-up to the 1970 general election has generally been seen as a flawed rhetorical gambit, which inadvertently gave coherence to Edward Heath's policies. The subsequent invocation of 'Selsdon' by critics of Heath's 'u-turns' has meant that the episode has mainly attracted scrutiny from historians of the Conservative Party. Yet the debate over Selsdon can also be seen as a landmark in Wilson's transit…
Resource Extraction, Economic Growth, and the Climate Dilemma in Canada and Australia
Canada and Australia are two of the economic success stories of the last thirty years, enjoying rapid growth during the 1990s and 2000s and (unlike the UK and US) escaping the worst effects of the 2008 financial crisis. In both countries, however, economic growth has become highly dependent on commodities extraction, leaving them vulnerable to fluctuations in commodity prices, and imposing political constraints on tackling climate change. This ar…
Practice Notes
Rethinking a progressive moment: The Liberal and Labour parties in the 1945 general election
Revisionist writing on the 1945 general election has suggested that the Labour victory largely reflected voters' hostility to the Conservative party, and a general enthusiasm for social reforms such as the Beveridge scheme, rather than widespread support for Labour's socialist agenda. This article argues that the Liberal party's poor performance in the 1945 election, and the low incidence of tactical voting against Conservative candidates, sugges…
The Revival of British Liberalism: From Grimond to Clegg
Planning for War and Peace, 1939–45
The Liberal Party and the Economy, 1929-1964
This book explores the reception, generation, and use of economic ideas in the British Liberal Party between its electoral decline in the 1920s and 1930s and its post-war revival under Jo Grimond. Drawing on archival sources, party publications, and the press, it analyses the diverse intellectual influences which shaped British Liberals’ economic thought during the twentieth century, and highlights the ways in which the party sought to reconcile …
Partners in Progress? British Liberals and the Labour Party since 1918
Britain's Liberal and Labour Parties have long identified themselves with the progressive tradition, but have often disagreed about what progress means. This paper examines British Liberals’ efforts to critique state socialism during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and to articulate an alternative vision of progress based on wider property ownership, competitive markets and consumer choice. Although this vision sharpened the Liberal Party's political …
Crossing the Floor: Reg Prentice and the Crisis of British Social Democracy
Beveridge’s rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams and the campaign for basic income, 1942–55
Historians of Britain’s post-war welfare state have long been aware of the shortcomings of the social insurance model, but the political impact of the Beveridge report has tended to obscure the alternative visions of welfare canvassed in the 1940s and 1950s. This article examines the social activist Juliet Rhys-Williams’ campaign for the integration of the tax and benefit systems and the provision of a universal basic income, which attracted wide…
Can we conquer unemployment? The Liberal party, public works and the 1931 political crisis: The Liberal party, public works and the 1931 political crisis
David Lloyd George's 1929 pledge to ‘conquer unemployment’ through loan-financed public works was a landmark in the development of Keynesianism as a policy option in Britain, yet just two years later the Liberal party which Lloyd George had led would play a central role in the formation of the highly orthodox National Government. This article uses archival and published sources to explain the shift in Liberal thinking, and argues that the party's…
The Pragmatist’s Solution to Poverty’: The Heath Government’s Tax Credit Scheme and the Politics of Social Policy in the 1970s
The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ in the mid-1960s prompted a wide-ranging debate over how the British government could best support low-paid workers and their families. Historians’ attention has largely focussed on the formation of the Child Poverty Action Group and its long campaign to persuade Harold Wilson and James Callaghan’s Labour governments to introduce a universal Child Benefit. The most radical response to the poverty problem, however, cam…
The Life of R.H. Tawney: Socialism and History, by Lawrence Goldman ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson: Her Ideas, Movements and World, by Matt Perry
Despite two decades of concern about a ‘crisis in labour history’, the personalities that shaped the twentieth-century Labour movement continue to attract attention. The subjects of these two new biographies, R.H. Tawney and Ellen Wilkinson, have long figured prominently in the Labour Party’s pantheon of heroes—Tawney as the author of influential treatises on The Acquisitive Society (1921) and Equality (1931), Wilkinson as the orchestrator of the…
Julie V. Gottlieb. “Guilty Women,” Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain
For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the social and political landscape of the 1930s was central to the historiography of modern Britain. The Great Depression, the “bankers’ ramp,” the Jarrow March, “middle opinion,” the Munich Crisis, and the debate over appeasement: all were familiar landmarks to generations of British history students. Since the turn of the millennium, scholarly interest has faded, partly with the passage of t…
Conservative Economic Policymaking and the Birth of Thatcherism, 1964–1979, by Adrian Williamson
The collapse of the post-war ‘settlement’ and the rise of ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1970s and 1980s is by now firmly established as the central question in late twentieth-century British political history. Many of the landmarks are very familiar, but the opening of official and private papers has made possible a wave of detailed research which fleshes out and refines contemporary judgements on the period. Adrian Williamson’s study of Conservative econ…
The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn, by Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg
The Sverige Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is the youngest and most controversial of the six Nobel Prizes. Since it was created in 1968 to mark the tercentenary of the Bank of Sweden, the prize has been the ultimate distinction of the economics profession, crowning the careers of scholars as diverse as Milton Friedman and Angus Deaton. Yet the very existence of the prize raises in an acute form the question of what …
Universal Basic Income in British Politics, 1918-2018: From a 'Vagabond's Wage' to a Global Debate
The idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) has moved rapidly up the British political agenda in recent years, with support from the Green Party, the Royal Society of Arts, and left-wing writers such as Paul Mason. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has set up a working group to examine its implications, and four Scottish councils are hoping to launch pilot schemes. Contemporary British interest in UBI forms part of a lively global debate about auto…
Redistribution in an Age of Neoliberalism: Market Economics, ‘Poverty Knowledge’, and the Growth of Working-Age Benefits in Britain, c. 1979–2010
The expansion of cash benefits to low-paid workers has been one of the most significant developments in recent UK public policy. Since 1979, transfer payments to working-age households have trebled in real terms, helping to offset increases in wage inequality. Adopting a discursive institutionalist approach, this article argues that the growth of transfer payments partly reflects the influence of what John Kay has called ‘Redistributive Market Li…
Where’s the money coming from?’ Manifesto costings and the politics of fiscal credibility in UK general elections, 1955–2019
Tax and spending are central to democratic politics in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, but psephologists have paid surprisingly little attention to the practice of manifesto costings or the ways in which fiscal promises shape voting behaviour. This article uses qualitative research to trace how British parties have used manifesto costings to frame prospective choices for voters since the 1950s and develops a theoretical framework for understand…
Resource Extraction, Economic Growth, and the Climate Dilemma in Canada and Australia
Canada and Australia are two of the economic success stories of the last thirty years, enjoying rapid growth during the 1990s and 2000s and (unlike the UK and US) escaping the worst effects of the 2008 financial crisis. In both countries, however, economic growth has become highly dependent on commodities extraction, leaving them vulnerable to fluctuations in commodity prices, and imposing political constraints on tackling climate change. This ar…
Squeezed Out? The Liberal Democrats and the 2019 General Election
The 2019 general election was a crushing disappointment for the Liberal Democrats, as Jo Swinson lost her East Dunbartonshire seat to the SNP and the party’s anti‐Brexit stance failed to deliver gains from the Conservatives. Although the Liberal Democrats’ poor performance can partly be blamed on a misfiring campaign strategy, it also reflected the structural difficulties which the party faces in an increasingly polarised political environment. T…
Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective
Harold Wilson, ‘Selsdon Man’, and the defence of social democracy in 1970s Britain
Harold Wilson's attack on 'Selsdon Man' in the run-up to the 1970 general election has generally been seen as a flawed rhetorical gambit, which inadvertently gave coherence to Edward Heath's policies. The subsequent invocation of 'Selsdon' by critics of Heath's 'u-turns' has meant that the episode has mainly attracted scrutiny from historians of the Conservative Party. Yet the debate over Selsdon can also be seen as a landmark in Wilson's transit…
Take Power—Vote Liberal’: Jeremy Thorpe, the 1974 Liberal Revival, and the Politics of 1970s Britain
The Liberal Party’s 1972–4 revival under Jeremy Thorpe placed it at the heart of political debate in 1970s Britain—a period marked by inflation, strikes, and recurrent talk of political ‘crisis’. This article explores the evolution of Liberal policy, strategy, and support between 1970 and 1979, and argues that Thorpe and his colleagues were agents as well as beneficiaries of electoral dealignment. As long-standing critics of class politics, Liber…
Better off with Labour'? Fiscal policy, electoral strategy and the road to John Smith's shadow budget, 1979-92
The failure of John Smith's 'Shadow Budget' to deliver a Labour victory in the 1992 general election has taken on a mythical status in narratives around the development of New Labour. This article sets the episode in a larger context by examining the development of Labour's fiscal policies in opposition after 1979, in the face of rising inequality, public-sector austerity, and regressive tax reforms. It traces how successive election defeats drov…
Labour, more or less? Policy reasoning in a fiscal register
Michael Jacobs and Andrew Hindmoor’s analysis of ‘Labour, left and right’ is a salutary corrective to ‘electoral-ideological’ accounts of party strategy in Britain, and rightly urges scholars to pay more attention to substantive ‘policy reasoning’. Jacobs and Hindmoor’s account of Labour policy is only partly convincing, however, because it is based on a sharp distinction between left-wing ‘structural reform’ and moderate ‘redistributive’ strateg…
Rethinking Postwar Liberalism: The Road to 2010 and Beyond
The nineteenth and early twentieth century Liberal Party has been well served by British political historians. By contrast, research on the post‐1945 Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats has become a specialised field, with strong empirical foundations (including in biographies and political science work) but few connections with the larger narratives that historians tell about postwar Britain. This article explores how the story of the ‘long Libe…
Political science (27 works) · Politics (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Political and Economic history of UK and US (21 works) · Political economy (20 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Economics (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (13 works) · Liberal Party (7 works)