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In late 20th-century England, inequality was rocketing, yet some have suggested that the politics of class was declining in significance. This text addresses this claim, showing that class remained important to 'ordinary' people's narratives about social change and their own identities throughout the period 1968-2000, but in changing ways.

AbstractDifferent groups on the left have invested a variety of cultural meanings in the image of the British miner and the mining community. Tracing these over time, this article suggests that mythologised images of the solidaristic miner and the 'traditional' mining community flatten and simplify our understanding of the past, and of change over time in Britain's coalfields in the era of deindustrialisation since the mid‐1950s. Oral history interviews conducted in the coalfields suggest that while much has been lost—most importantly, decent jobs, strong local economies and certain community ties—there have also been gains, such as growing egalitarianism in gender roles. Finally, the article suggests that an industrial strategy, but more importantly, a raft of policies such as community wealth building and Foundational Economy strategies are needed to bring back some of what has been lost while also working with the grain of more positive social changes.

The decline of deference in the UK may have given rise to greater individualism and class‐dealignment at the ballot box. But for the left, argues Florence Sutcliffe‐Braithwaite, it also holds the promise of a new politics of localism and democratised policymaking – provided that the Labour party is able to grasp the opportunity.

Examines the stories of more than 100 women and their varied experiences during the miners' strike of 1984-1985 to shed new light on working-class women's relationship to the 'political' and the 'ordinary', and demonstrate the ways in which gender roles, working-class lifestyles, and coalfield communities changed across post-war Britain.

Why did women's roles change so dramatically in the West in the period after 1945? These years saw major changes in women's roles, and in dominant understandings of female selfhood, from a model based on self-abnegation to one based on self-fulfilment. The roots of this shift have often been located in the post-1968 feminist movement and in economic change. Examining this question through the lens of Great Britain, this article, however, centres working-class women as drivers of these changes, drawing on oral history interviews with over 100 women from coalfield communities. In the decades after 1950, these women constructed a new vernacular discourse of gender equality which had profound implications for the position of women in society. This vernacular discourse of gender equality shared some similarities with post-1968 feminism, but rather than focusing on the division of domestic and paid labour, or sexual violence, it emphasised women's autonomy, individuality and voice. In constructing it, working-class women drew on pervasive post-war ideas about equality and democracy, discourses of individualism and individual fulfilment, and discourses of 'companionate' marriage and 'child-centred' parenting, in order to make claims for women's rights. Through doing so, they constructed women as not only wives and mothers, but also as free and equal individuals.

Blog article. Renewal co-hosted an event with The Corbyn Effect at Momentum's conference, The World Transformed, in Brighton. One of the speakers, Monique Charles, recently completed a PhD on grime music. In The Corbyn Effect she looks at the phenomenon of Grime for Corbyn.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of 'neoliberalism' in which individualism, competition, free markets, and privatisation came to dominate Britain's politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven to be highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political/public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics. According to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks, and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic. Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too. Where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the corporate world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book shows other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century. The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain, and that 'neoliberal' cannot be the only descriptor used to categorise Britain in the past 50 years. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.

This book explores the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure in 'left-behind places'. Such places, typically once flourishing industrial communities that have been excluded from recent economic growth, now attract academic and policy attention as sites of a political backlash against globalisation and liberal democracy. The book focuses on the role of social infrastructure as a key component of this story.

Seeking to move beyond a narrowly economistic of reading 'left behind places', the book addresses the understudied affective dimensions of 'left-behindness'. It develops an analytical framework that emphasises the importance of place attachments and the consequences of their disruption; considers 'left behind places' as 'moral communities' and the making of social infrastructure as an expression of this; views the unmaking of social infrastructure through the lens of 'root shock'; and explains efforts at remaking it in terms of the articulation of 'radical hope'.

The analysis builds upon a case study of a former mining community in County Durham, North East England. Using mixed methods, it offers a 'deep place study' of a single village to understand more fully the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure. It shows how a place once richly endowed with social infrastructure, saw this endowment wither and the effects this had on the community. However, it also records efforts of the local people to rebuild social infrastructure, typically drawing the lessons of the past. Although the story of one village, the methods, results and policy recommendation have much wider applicability.

The book will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and others concerned with the fate of 'left behind places'.