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Based on in-depth interviews conducted with British politicians, this book analyses the different impacts of leaving political office. Representative democracy depends on politicians exiting office, and yet while there is considerable interest in who stands for and gains office, there is curiously little discussed about this process. Jane Roberts seeks to address this gap by asking: What is the experience like? What happens to politicians as they make the transition from office? What is the impact on their partners and family? Does it matter to anyone other than those immediately affected? Are there any wider implications for our democratic system? This book will appeal to academics in the fields of leadership, political science, public management and administration and psychology. It will also be of interest to elected politicians in central, devolved and local government (current and former), policy makers and political commentators, and more widely, the interested general reader.
Liz Davies provides an insider's account of the annihilation of the Labour Party's internal democracy. She reveals in detail the extent to which cynical doublethink has come to permeate the party's leadership.
After 1979, Labour lost eight of the next eleven general elections. Working-class voters deserted, starting in 1970 when widespread abstention began, and the Conservatives won a majority of the working-class vote in 2019. Brexit was a consequence, and not the cause, of these massive changes.The number of manual workers, Labour's heartland vote, has collapsed and Britain is now a nation where the biggest occupational groups are shopworkers, education and NHS staff. Demographics have challenged Labour's ability to win.But that's not all. Labour's Parliamentary Party is now overwhelmingly middle class, and Labour has left the working class as the working class has left Labour. It is now a Party...
Available in paperback for the first time, his book demonstrates how the personal became political in post-war Britain, and argues that attention to gay activism can help us to fundamentally rethink the nature of post-war politics. While the Left were fighting among themselves and the reformists were struggling with the limits of law reform, gay men started organising for themselves, first individually within existing organisations and later rejecting formal political structures altogether. Culture, performance and identity took over from economics and class struggle, as gay men worked to change the world through the politics of sexuality. Throughout the post-war years, the new cult of the t...
To Labour's first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, socialism meant not only 'satisfactory figures of death rates and .improved houses' but also the 'mental cleanliness, the moral robustness of our people.' This book explores the neglected theme of individual character and 'mental qualities' in British social democratic thought and Labour Party history. How important was it for the centre-left that citizens be 'good people'? What was the relationship between socialism and psychology in the 1930s? Did Labour's technocratic, statist socialism of the 1950s and 1960s downgrade moral and mental progress? Why was the party often more concerned to produce a 'rationally planned' economy that rational, independent-minded citizens? Does New Labour represent a sidelining of ethical socialism or a re-birth of the pre-war left's belief in improvement through education and self-control.
An analysis of left politics in Great Britain in the run-up to the 2010 general election
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Overhauls the history of 'modernisation' and the British Left and recasts our understanding of New Labour.
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An in-depth look at the diverse group of men who comprised Britain’s first Labour Party in 1924. In January of 1924, the cabinet of the first Labour government consisted of twenty white, middle-aged men, as it had for generations. But the election also represented a radical departure from government by the ruling class. Most members of the administration had left school by the age of fifteen. Five of them had started work by the time they were twelve years old. Three were working down the mines before they entered their teens. Two were illegitimate, one was abandoned at birth, and three were of Irish immigrant descent. For the first time in Britain’s history, the cabinet could truly be said to represent all of Britain’s social classes. This unheralded revolution in representation is the subject of Peter Clark’s fascinating new book, The Men of 1924. Who were these men? Clark’s vivid portrayal is full of evocative portraits of a new breed of politician, the forerunners of all those who, later in the last century and this one, overcame a system from which they had been excluded for too long.