Nostalgia and the post-war Labour Party PDF Download

Author: Richard Jobson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526113333
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book examines the impact that nostalgia has had on the Labour Party’s political development since 1951. It argues that nostalgia has defined Labour’s identity and determined the party’s trajectory. Nostalgia has hindered policy discussion, determined the form and parameters of party modernisation, shaped internal conflict and cohesion and made it difficult for the party to adjust to socioeconomic changes. It has frequently left the party out of touch with the modern world. In this way, this study offers an assessment of Labour’s failures to adapt to the changing nature of post-war Britain and will be of interest to both students and academics and to those with a more general interest in Labour’s history and politics.

Author: Richard Jobson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation examines the impact of nostalgia on the political development of the Labour Party between 1951 and 1983. In particular, it looks at the way that nostalgia for a heroic male traditional industrial working class shaped the party's trajectory in these years. New Labour argued that Old Labour was nostalgic but the nature and function of that nostalgia was poorly conceptualised. More generally, the political significance of nostalgia has hitherto been neglected and undervalued by Labour Party historians. I suggest that the idea of the 'nostalgia-identity' - the way in which nostalgia shapes identity and, simultaneously, identity shapes nostalgic memory - offers a useful theoretical lens through which to analyse the history of the Labour Party. In contrast to traditional narratives concerning the political development of the party, I argue that the intraparty conflict over Hugh Gaitskell's attempt to revise Clause IV of the party constitution between 1959 and 1960 should be seen less as a battle over ideology and policy and more as a dispute over the party's nostalgia-identity. I suggest that nostalgia dictated the Labour Party's response to Harold Wilson's modernising 'White Heat' policies between 1963 and 1970 and shaped the parameters within which these policies could be pursued. Nostalgia influenced both the political development and the form of Labour's Alternative Economic Strategy between 1970 and 1983 to such an extent that the strategy itself gained restorative nostalgic dimensions. I conclude that, in a number of ways, nostalgia fundamentally shaped the political development of the Labour Party between 1951 and 1983.

Author: Eric R. Shaw
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631196556
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book provides a critical overview of the changing Labour Party in postwar Britain. Adopting a thematic approach within a structured, chronological framework, the book revolves around one central question: what has the Party been about and what specific objectives has it striven to realize? The author examines the so-called transformation from "Old Labour" to "New Labour", and not only identifies the key stages in its evolution, bur highlights, too, the major determinants of the change.

Author: Owen Hatherley
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Why should we have to “Keep Calm and Carry On”? In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a “make do and mend” aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose—with subjects ranging from Ken Loach’s documentaries, Turner Prize–shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver’s cooking—Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

Author: Richard Tuck
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509542299
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Liberal left orthodoxy holds that Brexit is a disastrous coup, orchestrated by the hard right and fuelled by xenophobia, which will break up the Union and turn what’s left of Britain into a neoliberal dystopia. Richard Tuck’s ongoing commentary on the Brexit crisis demolishes this narrative. He argues that by opposing Brexit and throwing its lot in with a liberal constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalists, the Left has made a major error. It has tied itself into a framework designed to frustrate its own radical policies. Brexit therefore actually represents a golden opportunity for socialists to implement the kind of economic agenda they have long since advocated. Sadly, however, many of them have lost faith in the kind of popular revolution that the majoritarian British constitution is peculiarly well-placed to deliver and have succumbed instead to defeatism and the cultural politics of virtue-signalling. Another approach is, however, still possible. Combining brilliant contemporary political insights with a profound grasp of the ironies of modern history, this book is essential for anyone who wants a clear-sighted assessment of the momentous underlying issues brought to the surface by Brexit.

Author: Paul Spoonley
Publisher: Palmerston North, N.Z. : Dunmore Press
ISBN:
Category : Fascism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
""The politics of nostalgia" looks at the history of political racism in New Zealand. From the early 1970s, extreme right-wing groups began to proliferate in this country and to present their ideas more forcefully. The author describes the growth of extremism in the 1970s and 1980s, examines the arguments, style and support for such groups and offers reasons for their appearance. Extreme right-wing and neo-fascist groups are one part of the New Right, and a move towards conservatism. They represent one response to the growing concern about raical and gender issues, a discontent with economic developments and a nostalgia for the untroubled days of the immediate post-war period. Here is an extensive analysis of the new politics of the late 1980s, including a comparison between the experiences of New Zealand, Australia, UK and Canada."--Back cover.

Author: David Cowan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009340298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The inter-war period (1918–1939) is still remembered as a period of mass deprivation – the 'hungry thirties'. But how did this impression emerge? Thousands of conversations about life in the inter-war period – between parents and children around the dinner table; among workmates at the pub – shaped these understandings. In turn, these fed into popular politics. Stories about the embryonic welfare system in the early-twentieth century informed how people felt towards the National Health Service; memories of the Great Depression shaped arguments about state intervention in the economy. Challenging accounts of widespread political disengagement in the twentieth century, Politics of the Past shows how re-telling family stories about the inter-war period offered ordinary people an accessible way of engaging in politics. Drawing on six local case studies across Scotland and England, this book explains how stories about the inter-war working-class experience in industrial areas came to appear commonplace nationwide.

Author: Jon Cruddas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509540806
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
Does work give our lives purpose, meaning and status? Or is it a tedious necessity that will soon be abolished by automation, leaving humans free to enjoy a life of leisure and basic income? In this erudite and highly readable book, Jon Cruddas MP argues that it is imperative that the Left rejects the siren call of technological determinism and roots it politics firmly in the workplace. Drawing from his experience of his own Dagenham and Rainham constituency, he examines the history of Marxist and social democratic thinking about work in order to critique the fatalism of both Blairism and radical left techno-utopianism, which, he contends, have more in common than either would like to admit. He argues that, especially in the context of COVID-19, socialists must embrace an ethical socialist politics based on the dignity and agency of the labour interest. This timely book is a brilliant intervention in the highly contentious debate on the future of work, as well as an ambitious account of how the left must rediscover its animating purpose or risk irrelevance.

Author: Blai Guarné
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785339605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.

Author: Nathan Yeowell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755640187
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
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.