Social democracy across Europe has been flagging, and has been suffering through with political shortsightedness and lack of bold vision.

Twice since the second world war have had such paradigm shift. The post-war consensus ushered in by the Attlee ministry built the welfare state. This was recast again by the Conservative party of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 which promoted deregulation, privatisation and neo-liberalism.

The spectacular results of New Labour from 1997 and Tony Blair was a seismic shift, but not one that recast the national narrative but one that adapted the party and the left within Thatcher's neoliberalism model as did the Industrial Charter with the Conservatives following Atlee.

On the 70th anniversary since the election of the last Labour agenda-setting government of Clement Attlee in 1945, we are proud to announce a new research project to investigate what the future direction for social democracy and political economy in Britain. The objective of the project is to analyse key societal challenges in the mid-term, develop ideas for a paradigm cast in the values of social democrats and developing a political plan to achieve them.