The British Labour Party is unique among social democratic parties in the way that over the past generation programmatic change has, rather than being incremental, been sudden and sharp, taking the form of paradigm shifts, as the term is understood by Peter Hall. This brief survey of the party over the last thirty years uncovers four actual or attempted paradigm displacements under the leaderships of Tony Blair, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, and Keir Starmer. The chapter argues that Labour’s propensity for paradigm shifts is due to two principal factors: fluctuations in social learning processes and instabilities in institutional settings, in particular the structure of power within the party. It finds that the learning process, while to a degree evidence-based, is inherently both subjective and political, with much depending on how problems are framed and the lessons of the past interpreted. But the most important variable explaining why Labour is prone to a greater extent than other social democratic parties to ideological volatility is the fluidity of its power structure which, in turn, reflects its institutional structure, especially its pluralist and federal character.

The chapter investigates the persuasiveness of moral rhetoric, that is, effects on nonsupporters of the party. Based on insights from previous work, I develop theoretical expectations that suggest that moral rhetoric is unlikely to be persuasive, or make nonsupporters see the party more favorably. Previous studies on moral persuasion suggest moral-value alignment between a moral message and the recipient can make the message persuasive. Yet previous work on attitudinal bias suggest that moral rhetoric may be unpersuasive regardless of moral alignment and even further alienate nonsupporters with negative preexisting attitudes. I test the hypotheses using experiments in Britain. I find that moral rhetoric does not easily convince nonsupporters. However, moral rhetoric can be quite persuasive when the message is strong and the party has moral credibility. Under those conditions, moral rhetoric increases favorable attitudes, on average and among nonsupporters who prioritize the moral intuition in the message. There is no evidence that moral rhetoric further alienates hostile nonsupporters. The findings present a rather optimistic picture about the persuasiveness of moral rhetoric.

The most significant late twentieth-century executions in a British Dependent Territory occurred in 1977 when Erskine Burrows and Larry Tacklyn were hanged in Bermuda for a series of politically motivated murders. While previous studies have argued that British ministers could readily have dispensed with the Creech Jones doctrine and prevented these executions, Chapter 5 makes the case that, for political and constitutional reasons, this was not a straightforward proposition, but nor was abandoning Creech Jones a necessary precondition for commuting the death sentences. It further argues that from a long-term perspective, the Bermuda executions were an anomaly rather than a turning point in British death penalty policy. Colonial capital punishment continued to operate into the 1980s much as it had since British abolition, with the British government working behind the scenes to prevent most executions and tolerating periodic political crises over controversial death sentences for fear that advocating abolition would have still more damaging repercussions.

Describes first two years as Fellow, including postgraduate year in Cambridge.

Describes academic and other activities, 1933–36.

The Left has long critiqued charity’s role in the alleviation of poverty. In the immediate post-war years, the Labour Party’s position was strongly influenced by Harold Wilson who was closely associated with War on Want, the ‘labour movement’s charity’. As Prime Minister, he brought into office an attitude that saw the real solution to the relief of poverty abroad to be state planning and the massive coordination of all local and national efforts through international government. The Ministry for Overseas Development, launched in 1965, looked to the UN agencies, to technical assistance programmes, to the creation of an International Development Agency. Yet within a few years, the ministers recognised that the humanitarian charities had a positive role to play. The Labour Party embraced charity as an ‘alternative’ provider of aid, initiating the Joint Funding Scheme in 1975 in which official funds were channelled through the charities. The Labour government embraced charity as a partner in development, helping to rethink state and voluntary sector relations more generally, and well before more ideologically driven pressures were placed on the social democratic welfare state.

By looking at the impact of migration within Britain and concentrating on the industrial workplace in Luton, this chapter shows how different forms of mobility within ‘working-class culture’ were consonant with the enduring salience of stories about historical hardships drawn from early life. It explores how, even as the Labour Party shied away from discussing the inter-war Depression, many manual and non-manual workers still spoke about politics in these older terms. However, remarkably similar stories about unemployment and the Depression before the war could also feed into Conservative support. The chapter closes with a discussion of attitudes towards immigration and the welfare state.

Looking at London, a relatively prosperous area between the wars, this chapter points to the persistence of ambiguous memories of the inter-war period, with partial achievements in social reform, efforts to halt international conflict, and decent standards of consumption recognised alongside poverty, unemployment, and the slide towards war. This chapter establishes some of the challenges that people faced in passing on stories about the past to younger generations shortly after the Second World War, in a landscape in which different political parties were competing to ‘fix’ the memory of the inter-war decades in place.

This chapter opens up a fuller discussion of how sites of socialisation outside the family reworked the meaning of stories about the past. Looking at Huddersfield, it focuses on the consequences of selective grammar schooling for disrupting ‘traditional’ attachments to working-class cultures of politics, shifting people’s class- and place-based identities and weakening the political status of memory. It explores these issues from the perspectives of both socially mobile grammar school leavers and their parents left in Huddersfield. It also highlights cases in which parents and their children concurred about these issues.

This chapter is concerned with the constitutional position of trade unions in the United Kingdom. Modern trade unionism emerged from the industrial revolution to protect the interests of workers, and from the late eighteenth century increased in membership and influence, both of which peaked in the 1970s. There were then about 13 million trade unionists, representing some 60 per cent of the working population. But trade union influence extended more widely, touching the lives of almost every worker in the country, either through the coverage of collective agreements negotiated with employers or employers’ associations, or through legislation on a wide range of matters that trade unions had persuaded governments to introduce.

Chapter three measures the political influences of ‘new’ and ‘old’ Irish nationalisms in Britain from the aftermath of the 1916 Rising to the aftermath of the 1918 general election. It profiles the political languages and cultures of ‘Irish-Ireland’ nationalism in British centres: Gaelic League-Sinn Féin-I.S.D.L.; charts the decline of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s British political influence; and evaluates the impact of the 1918 Representation of the People Act on Irish political representation in Britain. While advanced Irish nationalist associations were central to the organisation of relief campaigns for interned rebels in British centres, the 1916 Rising, this chapter submits, did not fundamentally change Irish nationalist politics in Britain. Conflicted over Redmond’s earlier refusal to join the British Cabinet, the Irish Party was instead debilitated by the absence of political leadership, and a post-war political manifesto, in Britain. While the Irish Party in Ireland was decisively defeated by Sinn Féin at the 1918 general election, the Irish Party in Britain was effectively displaced by the Labour Party. The ‘victory’ of Sinn Féin in Britain was predicated less on the democratic legitimacy of Dáil Éireann and more on its recognisable post-war mandate: an Irish Self-Determination League.

This chapter explores the transition from the politics of identity to what we define as ’the unfinished politics of race’. It moves on from the substantive accounts of specific types of mobilisations to the broader transformations that characterise the current conjuncture, in which we see a continually shifting relationship between counter publics and alternative public spheres on the one hand and the mainstream institutions of society on the other. An important theme in the chapter is an account of the changing political debates on race and multiculturalism in both the Conservative and Labour Parties. This includes a critical analysis of the arguments put forward under the labels of Red Tory and Blue Labour. We argue that these arguments, although they cover a wide range of social and political issues, have been deeply inflected by continual preoccupations about the articulation of a new form of identity politics framed by concerns about race, immigration, and the positioning of whiteness in the current period.

This chapter examines the politics and the practice of partnership in the urban renewal era. This public-private dynamic was the central political relationship which drove urban transformation; it was codified and mandated explicitly within planning legislation and central policy diktats and pursued energetically by many individual local authorities eager to remake the image and economy of their towns. I show how this hybrid, mixed economy of planning was situated within the wider political economy of post-war Britain, tracking the political influence and connections of the property and construction sectors as well as the attitudes and policy positions of both the Conservative and Labour Parties. I also trace the operation and impact of partnership-based urban renewal on the ground in various cities, focusing in particular on Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham. Local authorities had a range of motivations for working with the commercial development sector and their experiences were not uniform. The chapter shows that some cities managed to navigate the new terrain of public-private developmentalism more successfully than others, but I also stress the basic asymmetries involved in these relationships, particularly for those places that were struggling most economically.

The National Government entered a new phase in the spring of 1937, as Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Conservative leader and Prime Minister. As this chapter shows, appeasement, though controversial, preserved peace in the present and did little to disrupt the Conservatives’ continuing efforts to construct their popular appeals around the government’s record of economic recovery from 1931. Drawing upon all twelve constituency case studies, the chapter considers the impact of rearmament on employment levels and assesses the local implications of the government’s social reform programme, including the Education Act 1936, the Holiday with Pay Act 1938 and especially the impact of the Physical Training and Recreation Act 1937 on local government facilities. The chapter also demonstrates how Labour wrestled back some control of the political initiative in the late 1930s. It argues that Labour began to restore its own reputation for competent government through a well-publicised programme of municipal social reform in London, its growing presence in neighbourbood organization (including among the suburban electorate), and its critique of the government’s handling of the distressed area. In doing so, Attlee’s party not only contested the government’s narrative of recovery, it also began the process of articulating a particular version of 1930s Britain that ultimately defined Britons’ political and historical imaginary for several generations.

Drawing upon the case studies of Norfolk North and Devizes, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in rural, mixed-class constituencies. Through its policies of tariff protection, targeted subsidies, marketing reforms and, in due course, preparations for wartime food production, the National Government transformed British agriculture in the 1930s. This was orchestrated on behalf of the government by Walter Elliot, the ambitious and reformist agriculture minister between 1932 and 1936, who projected the policies as integral to national recovery both by means of self-sufficiency and improved public health. The chapter shows that, despite their interventionist nature, these policies were embraced by local Conservatives as demonstrable evidence of the party’s commitment to agriculture. It also shows that historical critiques centred around the political and social control allegedly wielded by the Conservative landholding interest remained a common and updated feature of Labour and Liberal politics. Under the National Government, however, Conservatives were able to combine modernity and paternalism. Government policies helped to modernise farming methods and restore profitability, and in consequence rehabilitated traditional paternalist politics through new methods of welfare provision. Whether by means of private largesse (as in the case of Sir Thomas Cook MP in Norfolk North) or public provision, the amenities and improvements championed by rural Conservatives aimed to match those already available to the urban population and to secure for the rural worker a share in the national recovery.

Drawing upon the case studies of Ilford, Epping, Birmingham Moseley and Liverpool East Toxteth, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in suburban, predominantly middle-class constituencies. In the 1920s, as chapter 2 argued, suburban Conservatives rejected Baldwin’s attempts to appeal to voters along apolitical lines and instead urged a robust party stance; however, their own struggle to rehabilitate the conspicuous partisanship that had characterised the civic culture of Edwardian Conservatism – and which they interpreted as apathy among ‘known’ local Conservatives - led many activists to doubt the future prospects of Conservatism in the face of Labour competition. Chapter 5 argues that 1931 proved a turning point. The experience of the general election of that year initiated Conservative activists to the advantages of articulating a non-party variety of anti-socialism that matched the cross-party makeup of the National Government. It also encouraged them to cultivate an ostensibly non-party presence in the associational life of the suburbs, including in the new housing estates. Yet, as the chapter demonstrates, the National Government continued to challenge the suburban Conservative activist in some ways: National anti-socialism could be as much a source of competition as cooperation between local Conservatives and Liberals, and the government’s policy of Indian constitutional reform antagonised elements within the party. Even so, by 1935, the Conservatives’ suburban grassroots, so often the voice of diehard Conservatism, remained wedded to the National Government and looked enthusiastically to Baldwin as both the embodiment and facilitator of its ‘national’ appeal.

This chapter charts the overall course and key episodes of the National Government during Ramsay MacDonald’s premiership (1931-1935) and that of Stanley Baldwin (1935-37), considering in particular the fortunes of popular Conservatism in the constituencies. It has four sections. The first explores how the Conservatives exploited the financial and political crises of August 1931 to construct a new anti-socialist paradigm that gave the outgoing Labour government’s alleged failing a concrete form around which all Conservatives could mobilise. The second and third sections outline the National Government’s work in securing economic recovery and responding to the plight of the unemployed. It argues that this reflected a culture of active and imaginative government. The final section explores the relationship between party and ‘national’ political identities in the constituencies. IT argues that the process of defining the National Government in the interests of local Conservatism introduced the rank and file to a broader range of political discourses, which complemented but did not supplant their preoccupation with rehabilitating a traditional politics of place.