*A Guardian Book of the Day*The defeat of socialist firebrand Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Leader in 2019 confirmed Tony Benn’s famous retort 'the Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it.'For over a hundred years, the British Labour Party has been a bastion for working class organisation and struggle. However, has it ever truly been on the side of the workers? Where do its interests really lie? And can we rely on i...

Seventy percent of the oil America uses each year goes to transportation. That means that the national oil addiction and all its consequences, from climate change to disastrous spills to dependence on foreign markets, can be greatly reduced by changing the way we move. In Transport Beyond Oil, leading experts in transportation, planning, development, and policy show how to achieve this fundamental shift.The authors demonstrate that smarter development and land-use decision...

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...

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...

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...

Each of these chapters in this book of political counterfactuals describes a premiership that never happened, but might easily have done had the chips fallen slightly differently. The contributors, each of them experts in political history, have asked themselves questions like: what shape would the welfare state and the cold war have taken if the Prime Minister had been Herbert Morrison instead of Clement Attlee? What would have been consequences for Northern Ireland had Norman Tebbit succ...

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...

As a vigorous interpretation of political and social developments in Britain since the late-Victorian era, State and Society is one of the most respected and widely-read introductions to modern British history. Martin Pugh explores as his central theme the relationship between the British state and its citizens with characteristic skill and insight.In this new fifth edition, Pugh brings his final chapter on Crisis and Coalition right up to the result of the May 2015 genera...

'One of the most relentlessly brilliant studies of twentieth-century Britain ... these young historians have found a marvellous theme and stuck to it. Theirs is the glory!' Professor Arthur Marwick, HistoryThe 1930s - remembered as the decade of dole queues and hunger marches, mass unemployment, the means test, and the rise of fascism - also saw the development of new industries, the growth of comfortable suburbia, and rising standards of ...

The People's Peace: Britain since 1945 is the first comprehensive study by a professional historian of British history from 1945 to the present day. It examines the transformation of post-war Britain from the planning enthusiasm of 1945 to the rise of New Labour. Its themes include the troubles of the British economy; public criticism of the legitimacy of the state and its instruments of authority; the co-existence of growing personal prosperity with widespread social inequality; ...

This new edition of the classic biography of Tony Benn captures the essence of Benn's formidable impact on the British Labour Party and British politics. Written at the apogee of his career, immediately after the Labour Party's 1981 Deputy Leadership campaign under Harold Wilson, it charts the evolution of Benn's ideas and the underlying reasons both for their resonance with the British public, and their root-and-branch rejection by the British political elite.The rise and persiste...