Faces of Labour

Faces of Labour
Author: Andy McSmith
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 412
Release: 1996
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781859849682

McSmith focuses on key individuals in the party whose careers cast a complex story into sharp relief. His choice of subjects is deliberately eclectic. It includes portraits of politicians like Peter Mandelson, Clare Short, David Blunkett, John Prescott and Tony Blair, who will play a leading role in any Labour government.

Militant Liverpool

Militant Liverpool
Author: Diane Frost
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2013-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 184631805X

An even-handed reassessment of the 'Militant' period in Liverpool, including interviews with many of the key protagonists.

Labour and the left in the 1980s

Labour and the left in the 1980s
Author: Jonathan Davis
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-12-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1526106450

This volume of essays constitutes the first history of Labour and left-wing politics in the decade when Margaret Thatcher reshaped modern Britain. Leading scholars explore aspects of left-wing culture, activities and ideas at a time when social democracy was in crisis. There are articles about political leadership, economic alternatives, gay rights, the miners’ strike, the Militant Tendency and the politics of race. The book also situates the crisis of the left in international terms as the socialist world began to collapse. Tony Blair's New Labour disavowed the 1980s left, associating it with failure, but this volume argues for a more complex approach. Many of the causes it championed are now mainstream, suggesting that the time has come to reassess 1980s progressive politics, despite its undeniable electoral failures. With this in mind, the contributors offer ground-breaking research and penetrating arguments about the strange death of Labour Britain.

The Labour Party

The Labour Party
Author: B. Brivati
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2000-05-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230595588

On 27 February 1900, the Labour Representation Committee was formed to campaign for the election of working class representatives to parliament. One hundred years on Labour is in government with an overwhelming majority. This book is a unique opportunity both to celebrate and assess critically the Labour Party's role in shaping events of the twentieth century. It brings together academics from a variety of disciplines to examine the history of the Party's development. Each chapter includes contributions in the form of commentary and analysis from former Labour leaders, cabinet ministers and backbench MPs. Contributors include: Michael Foot, Denis Healey, David Owen, Keith Laybourn, Robert Taylor, Steve Ludlam, Nick Ellison, Clare Short and Austin Mitchell, among others.

Labour Inside the Gate

Labour Inside the Gate
Author: Matthew Worley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2005-03-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0857714163

In 1906, a confident Labour Party felt that it was already rattling the governing classes. Its campaigning cartoon, which gives this book its title, showed the party wielding an axe towards the gates of Parliament, cutting through the special interests protecting the old system to aid the working classes. What followed was the remarkable transformation of a parliamentary pressure group into a credible governing force. The inter-war years were a crucial stage in the development of the Labour Party as it grew from pressure group status, to national opposition, to party of government. At the end of the Great War (1914-1918) Labour had a developing national organisation and a fledgling constitution. By 1922, it rivalled the war-ravaged Liberals as the party of opposition; a fact that was affirmed with the formation of the first minority Labour government in January 1924. The second Labour administration of 1929 collapsed amidst the whirlwind of the 'great depression' but the organisational basis of the party remained solid allowing Labour to reinvent itself over the 1930s. By the Second World War, the foundations had been laid for the landslide victory that brought in the Attlee government of 1945. Matthew Worley has written the first study dedicated solely to this crucial period in Labour's development. In an accessible style, he provides a comprehensive account of all aspects of the movement. Using a wide range of sources, he explores this often-marginalised period in Labour's history both looking at the parliamentary party and the growing network of constituency parties. Worley's approach unites high politics and issues that cross local and national boundaries. He combines policy, social history and economics with broader themes such as gender and culture. Labour inside the Gate will appeal to students and scholars as well as all those interested in Labour's history. Its new insights into the 1945 landslide victory illuminate this important period in the growth of the Labour Party as it continues to redefine and realign itself as the new “party of government”

Labour's Lost Leader

Labour's Lost Leader
Author: Paul Tyler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2007-06-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0857714171

The life story of Will Crooks has a Dickensian resonance. As a working class child, born into abject poverty, he experienced the rigours of Poplar Workhouse and Poor Law school. Nearly forty years later Crooks became Chairman of the Poplar Board of Guardians, the very board that had given him shelter during his challenging early years. Crooks was a member of the Coopers' Union for fifty-five years, and a leading pioneer of the trade union and Labour movement for over thirty. This significant and sometimes controversial figure has been overlooked by modern historians. Here Paul Tyler presents a pioneering political biography of a significant Labour figure at both a local and national level and an important reinterpretation of the early trade union and labour movement from the 1880s to the 1920s.

Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England

Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England
Author: Mark Seddon
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 178590423X

Post-war Labour England wasn't a bad place to live, but after Labour's 2015 election defeat, the prospect of a healthier, happier and fairer country seemed more remote than ever. Who would have predicted that career backbencher and serial rebel Jeremy Corbyn would be the one to breathe new life into a near moribund Labour Party? Defying all odds, and most commentators and pollsters, Labour staged a remarkable comeback at the 2017 election. Love him or loathe him – and most people feel one way or the other – Corbyn represents a new hope, which everyone believed had been extinguished by the bitter hostility of the Thatcher era and the grubby triangulations of the Blair years. Almost uniquely amongst European social democratic parties, Corbyn's party has rallied. It has turned its back on New Labour, membership is thriving and, at long last, the party is appealing to the young. Labour England wasn't dead – it had merely been sleeping. In Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England, Francis Beckett and Mark Seddon offer an alternative and refreshing take on the sad fate of Labour England over the past four decades. They then turn their attention to the extraordinary reversal of fortunes of the Corbyn years, and to what a new Labour England might look like – with or without Corbyn.

A History of the British Labour Party

A History of the British Labour Party
Author: Andrew Thorpe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2017-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137409843

After 13 years in power, Labour suddenly returned to being the party of opposition in 2010. This new edition of A History of the British Labour Party brings us up-to-date, examining Gordon Brown's period in office and the Labour Party under the leadership of Ed Miliband. Andrew Thorpe's study has been the leading single-volume text on the Labour Party since its first edition in 1997 and has now been thoroughly revised throughout to include new approaches. This new edition: - Covers the entirety of the party's history, from 1900 to 2014. - Examines the reasons for the party's formation, and its aims. - Analyses the party's successes and failures, including its rise to second party status and remarkable recovery from its problems in the 1980s. - Discusses the main events and personalities of the Labour Party, such as MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Blair and Brown. With his approachable style and authoritative manner, Thorpe has created essential reading for students of political history, and anyone wishing to familiarise themselves with the history and development of one of Britain's major political parties.

Militant

Militant
Author: Michael Crick
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2016-03-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1785900749

When it was originally published in 1984, Michael Crick's treatise on the Militant tendency was widely acclaimed as a masterly work of investigative journalism, and although the rise of Jeremy Corbyn can be attributed more to the phenomenon of 'Corbynmania' than to hard-left entrism, to some within the party, Crick's ground-breaking book must seem like a lesson from history. Updated and expanded, Crick explores the origins, organisation and aims of Militant, the secret Trotskyite organisation that operated clandestinely within the Labour Party, edging out adversaries at grass-roots level and recruiting people to its own ranks, which, at its peak in the mid-1980s, swelled to around 8,000 members. Whilst eventually most of its leaders were expelled, it caused damaging rifts within the party and closed the door to Downing Street for almost a generation.

Rethinking Labour's Past

Rethinking Labour's Past
Author: Nathan Yeowell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2022-01-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0755640187

The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn is charting a new direction. Here, Nathan Yeowell has brought together a remarkable array of contributors to provide expert insight into twentieth-century British history and Labour politics – and how they might shape thinking about Labour's future. Reframing the span of Labour history and its effects on contemporary British politics, the book provides fresh thinking and analysis of various traditions, themes and individuals. These include the shifting significance of 1945, the need for more grounded interpretations of Tony Blair's legacy, and the enduring importance of place, identity and aspiration to the evolution of the party. Contributions from leading historians such as Patrick Diamond, Steven Fielding, Ben Jackson, Glen O' Hara and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite are supplemented by those with experience of Labour electoral politics, such as Rachel Reeves and Nick Thomas-Symonds. The result is an intellectually rich and politically relevant roadmap for Labour's future.