The 1980s “may have been Thatcher's decade,” wrote the pop singer Tracey Thorn in a line that Stephen Brooke seizes on to introduce his book, “but it didn't feel like that at the time” (10). In this book, Brooke presents London as “the epicentre of a political fracture in the late twentieth century,” a fracture that he characterizes as essentially marked by a division between “social democracy” on the one hand and “Thatcherite neo-liberalism” on the other (17). Concentrating on “social democratic London” (269), Brooke shows us the London that did not feel like Thatcher's: London in a “last blush of social democracy” (269), holding out against the “new neoliberal consensus” (6); London as a space not only of neoliberal “enterprise zones,” but also of “zones of social democracy” (9).

I quote liberally from Brooke in introducing this book because the vocabulary of social democracy versus neoliberalism is central to how he makes his argument. London matters, for Brooke, because in the decade of “ascendant Thatcherite neoliberalism,” there was also a “resurgent social democracy” (13), which neoliberalism failed fully to defeat. He makes this argument through a series of case studies, ranging from studies of a Dalston children's center, an anti-apartheid demonstration, a pop festival for the unemployed on the South Bank, and local protests against the Docklands redevelopment, to a police raid on a Bloomsbury gay book shop, racism and resistance to it on housing estates in Tower Hamlets and Tottenham, and the feminist architectural collective Matrix. Linking all of these is the Greater London Council (GLC), which receives a chapter of its own at the start of the book to illustrate the anti-Thatcherite, anti-neoliberal London that Brooke is writing to recover, but which then re-appears throughout, funding or supporting most of the various initiatives that follow. Brooke is surely correct when, quoting Stuart Hall, he describes the political project pursued under Ken Livingstone's GLC as one of the key fronts around which a battle between two competing principles of political life were fought out—between “the camp of private profit and possessive liberalism … and the camp of collective social need and public interest” (25). No wonder it was abolished.

It is invigorating to read about this London, most (but not all!) of which is now lost to us. Brooke's emphasis on the multiple sources and sites of what he terms “social democracy,” and on the uneven victory of “neoliberalism” and its varied trajectories, has similarities with the historical perspective offered in other recent works by, for example, Sam Wetherell, John Davis, Andrew Seaton, and many of the contributors to the recent collection The Neoliberal Age?. However, it is in his attempt to cast the variety of oppositional politics in 1980s London into the framework of “social democracy,” and as holdouts against “neoliberalism,” that Brooke's work is least convincing. The sheer variety of political projects that Brooke discusses undoes this ambition. When he focuses on opposition to neoliberalism, for example, Brooke draws on David Harvey and Wendy Brown to define neoliberalism as “the primacy of the free market in social relations” and “the financialization of everything” (4). His illustrations of “conflict, dissent, and, sometimes, violence” that resisted the “neoliberal consensus,” however, bear no obvious relationship to these rationalities and certainly cannot be reduced to them: the riots and demonstrations against racist policing and racial violence of the early 1980s; the IRA's London bombings; and the revived momentums of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the anti-apartheid movement.

To frame the initiatives covered in the book as “social-democratic” holds similar difficulties. Brooke is careful to emphasize that the social democracy he is referring to is a new and expanded one, taking on the priorities of the new social movements of the 1960s. However, for many of these social movements, “social democracy” was precisely what they rallied against. As an ideology or a form of government, it was criticized as anti-democratic, as bureaucratic and statist, as paternalistic, as reformist, and, crucially, as failing—siding, repeatedly by the later 1960s, with capital against labor. It was rarely a renewed social democracy that they called for. More often, it was a renewed socialism, more radical in its demands for a transfer of power to the powerless and a true equality of condition. In other guises, the demands of these movements were shaped by freedom dreams that drew from substantially beyond the repertoire of socialisms or social democracies past, and with political horizons that were global more than they were national.

The variety of ambitions held by these various initiatives was irreducibly plural, and while some on the left—Stuart Hall, most prominently—hoped that they might be articulated together into a new political bloc capable of challenging Thatcherite hegemony, this remained, in the end, a dream unfulfilled. To ask how we might describe them accurately is not simply a semantic matter. Whether we describe the political moment captured in Brooke's book as social democratic, socialist, or by some other vocabulary, matters for how we understand its historical dynamics. It is only in recognizing the extent to which, for those who lived through it, social democracy as it had existed in the middle decades of the twentieth century was in crisis by the 1980s, exhausted of solutions, that the restless, volatile but always hopeful oppositional politics of that decade (“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”) can make sense. But more than this, it is only by seeing the political visions forged beyond the exhausted debates of British social democracy altogether that we can get beyond the peculiarly social-democratic habit of historians of modern Britain to either misrecognize or disavow the political cultures that sought solutions beyond the horizons of reform, compromise, accommodation or power-sharing with oppressive social structures and practices; cultures that did not win—but that won some significant victories in defeat. Today's London, Brooke tells us, is still in part shaped in its “progressiveness, its diversity, and its cosmopolitanism” (22) by the “last blush of social democracy” in the 1980s. That's only half the story.