The issue of electoral reform has divided the Labour Party since its inception, but only for a brief period in the early 20th century has the Party been committed to reforming first-past-the-post (FPTP). Now, having suffered four successive general election defeats, the Labour Party will have to reconsider its electoral strategy if it is, once again, to become a party of government. For some, a commitment to electoral reform is an indispensable step to widen support, transform the Party, a...

In November 1980, James Callaghan retired as leader of the Labour Party. He had been on the front line of British politics for many years and was the only person to hold all of the four great offices of state. However, his premiership is seen as a failure, the last gasp of Keynesian social democracy being smothered by the oncoming advent of Thatcherism. This book offers a timely reappraisal of Jim Callaghan's premiership and time as Leader of the Opposition in 1979–80.

Peter Shore worked under Hugh Gaitskell, serving in successive Labour Cabinets under first Harold Wilson and subsequently James Callaghan. He wrote the 1964, 1966 and 1970 general election manifestos for the party and stood in both the 1980 and the 1983 party leadership elections. He would go on to be known as one of the Labour Party's most important thinkers.He had a long political career at the upper levels of the Labour Party and was close to successive leaders. Despite this, he...

The history of Britain in the last thirty years, under both Conservative and Labour governments, has been dominated by one figure - Margaret Thatcher. Her election marked a decisive break with the past and her premiership transformed not just her country, but the nature of democratic leadership. In his 'argued history' Simon Jenkins analyses this revolution from its beginnings in the turmoil of the 1970s through the social and economic changes of the 1980s. Was Thatcherism a mere medicine ...

This year marks the centenary of Harold Wilson's birth, the fiftieth anniversary of his most impressive general election victory and forty years since his dramatic resignation as Prime Minister. He was one of the longest-serving premiers of the twentieth century, having won a staggering four general elections, yet, despite this monumental record, his place in Labour's history remains somewhat ambiguous.By the end of his two periods in power, both the left and right of the party were...

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the most momentous general elections this country has ever seen. John Major's defeat in 1997 ended a record eighteen years of Tory government, prompting accusations of failure and ignominy.A controversial leader, Major oversaw numerous crises in international and domestic policy. Between 1990 and 1997, he presided over Britain's participations in the Gulf War, the start of the Northern Ireland peace process, the Maastricht Treaty ...

Spanning four politically and socially tumultuous decades, Stephen Maxwell's writings explore the origins and development of the modern Scottish Nationalist movement. As an instrumental member of the SNP and a life-long socialist, Maxwell's work provides an engaging contemporary insight into the debate over Scottish independence, setting out a clear ideological and practical arguments for a socially just Scotland. The Case for Left Wing Nationalism - Maxwell's seminal 1981 pamphlet - consi...

On 18 September 2014, Scots will decide their future: should the country quit the United Kingdom and take control of its own destiny, or should it remain part of what advocates call the most successful political and economic union of modern times? Everyone in the country has a stake in this decision. Now, in this fascinating and insightful new book, David Torrance charts the countdown to the big day, weaving his way through a minefield of claim and counterclaim, and knocking down fictions ...

Synthesizing a vast body of scholarly work, Henry Patterson offers a compelling narrative of contemporary Ireland as a place poised between the divisiveness of deep-seated conflict and the modernizing - but perhaps no less divisive - pull of ever-greater material prosperity.Although the two states of Ireland have strikingly divergent histories, Patterson shows more clearly than any previous historian how interdependent those histories - and the mirroring ideologies that have fuelle...

On 5 June 1975, voters went to the polls in Britain's first national referendum to decide whether the UK should remain in the European Community. As in 2016, the campaign shattered old political allegiances and triggered a far-reaching debate on Britain's place in the world. The campaign to stay in stretched from the Conservative Party - under its new leader, Margaret Thatcher - to the Labour government, the farming unions and the Confederation of British Industry. Those fighting to 'Get B...

Over Britain's first century of mass democracy, politics lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of broken consensus and political agony illuminate our current age of upheaval? Historians usually focus on the dawn of a new consensus--postwar Keynesianism, or Thatcherite neoliberalism. Yet journalist Phil Tinline argues that we should be more interested in the periods of turmoil and misery in between. How did the Great Depression's specters of fascism, bombing and mass unemploy...

This history of Britain since 1945 confronts two themes that have dominated British consciousness during the post-war era: the myth of decline and the pervasiveness of American influence. The political narrative is about the struggle to maintain a power that was illusory and, from 1960 on, to reverse an economic decline that was nearly as illusory. The British economy had its problems, which are fully analyzed; however, they were counterbalanced by an unparalleled prosperity. At the same t...