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Many commentators tell us that, in today's world, everyday life has become selfish and atomised-that individuals live only to consume. But are they wrong?In Me, Me, Me, Jon Lawrence re-tells the story of England since the Second World War through the eyes of ordinary people-including his own parents- to argue that, in fact, friendship, family, and place all remain central to our daily lives, and whilst community has changed, it is far from dead.He shows how, in the years after the Second World War, people came increasingly to question custom and tradition as the pressure to conform to societal standards became intolerable. And as soon as they could, millions escaped the closed, face-to-face communities of Victorian Britain, where everyone knew your business. But this was not a rejection of community per se, but an attempt to find another, new way of living which was better suited to the modern world.Community has become personal and voluntary, based on genuine affection rather than proximity or need. We have never been better connected or able to sustain the relationships that matter to us. Me, Me, Me makes that case that it's time we valued and nurtured these new groups, rather than lamenting the loss of more 'real' forms of community-it is all too easy to hold on to a nostalgic view of the past

An engaging history of electioneering in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present, highlighting how the television age has altered the interaction of politicians and public and asking what the media must now do to reinvigorate public politics. - ;In this engagingly written history of electioneering in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present, Jon Lawrence explores the changing relationship between politicians and public. Throughout this period, he argues, British politics has been characterized by bruising public rituals intended to bestow legitimacy on politicians by oblig

An engaging history of electioneering in Britain from the 18th century to the present, this book highlights how the television age has altered the interaction of politicians and public and asks what the media must now do to reinvigorate public politics

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures and tables -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part I Rethinking popular politics -- 1 From the rise of 'demos' to the 'rise of class' -- 2 Working-class homogeneity reconsidered -- 3 Relocating popular politics -- Part II A local study: Wolverhampton, c. 1860-1914 -- 4 Liberal hegemony and its critics -- 5 Popular Toryism and the origins of Labour politics -- 6 Labour and the working class, 1890-1914 -- Part III Party games, 1885-1914 -- 7 Popular politics and the limitations of party -- 8 The fall and rise of popular Liberalism, 1886-1906 -- 9 Labour roots, Labour voices, Labour myths -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index

Speaking for the People, first published in 1998, draws our attention to the problematic nature of politicians' claims to represent others, and in doing so it challenges conventional ideas about both the rise of class politics, and the triumph of party between 1867 and 1914. The book emphasises the strongly gendered nature of party politics before the First World War, and suggests that historians have greatly underestimated the continuing importance of the 'politics of place'. Most importantly, however, Speaking for the People argues that we must break away from teleological notions such as the 'modernisation' of politics, the taming of the 'popular', or the rise of class. Only then will we understand the shifting currents of popular politics. Speaking for the People represents a major challenge to the ways in which historians and political scientists have studied the interaction between party politics and popular political cultures

AbstractAnyone who attempts to understand and reverse the major defeat suffered by Labour in the December 2019 general election needs first to appreciate why comparisons with the defeats of the 1980s are so unhelpful. In 1983 Labour was all but wiped out across southern England, but held on comfortably across the 'red wall'. By contrast, in 2019 Labour did well in cities and university towns across the south, and appears to have solved its historic problem with the southern, educated middle class. However, this has been at the expense of alienating working class voters across the country, not just in its former industrial heartlands. But this is not inevitable. A reanalysis of testimony from hundreds of interviews with working people across England from the 1940s onwards allows insights into attitudes and values that are often obscured by survey techniques. Crucially, it points to a broad‐based vernacular liberalism at odds with the culture wars model of a terminal crisis for social democracy.

The discussion that follows uses interview transcripts from Goldthorpe and Lockwood's classic "Affluent Worker" study to explore a range of issues that can shed light on similarities and differences in the lives of white- and blue-collar workers in 1960s Britain. Although the original study stressed the fundamental differences in the life experiences of manual and non-manual (male) workers, it did concede that processes of "normative convergence" might be reducing those differences, especially outside work. Returning to workers' original testimony, and particularly to the under-used non-manual sample, allows us to explore the issue of "convergence" more fully than was attempted in the original study. Many non-manual workers possessed strong family and life-course connections to (manual) working-class life, indeed many saw themselves as working class. Most embraced a very similar understanding of class and class hierarchy to shop-floor workers, identifying themselves as part of a large mass of "ordinary workers" who constituted the great bulk of the population. Clerical workers in the lowest paid occupations were especially likely to see class in these terms. It is suggested that the tendency to highlight differences rather than similarities in class experience subsequently weakened the scope for a broad-based politics organized around "workingclass" interests, especially given the sharp deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s.

On its 50th anniversary, Jon Lawrence looks back at EP Tompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class and asks what potential there is today for a 'new politics for working people' that doesn't fall into the trap of trying to remake working‐class politics.